In Pursuit of Gandhi: Ruminations on the Quest for Truth

[Jake Horowitz]

2008 Stanford Overseas Seminar in India

Before departing for India, my expectations for an overseas seminar experience in Delhi and Gujarat ran high: living, breathing, and seeing the world in which Gandhi led the most powerful and influential nonviolent resistance struggle against oppression in the 20th century, I felt certain that I would have a transformative internal experience, a remarkable emotional, physical, and spiritual journey in which I would come to better understand the context in which Gandhi flourished, answer some of the difficult internal questions lodged deep within my consciousness, and perhaps most excitingly, find an inspirational world in which Gandhi’s legacy continues to live on through the lives and work of India’s new generation. For my entire life, India had been deeply intriguing and exciting, a new and different Eastern world filled with fresh scents and sounds and a diverse outpouring of people and culture. India was always the shimmering icon of the Orient: the land where ancient history was made and Eastern religions were born; the land of tandooris and curry, Bollywood and Bhangra; the land of elephants and camels, snake charmers and Hindu gods. From the moment I had seen images of the vibrant and majestic Taj Mahal while learning about ancient world civilizations in elementary school, India had peaked my interest. Finally getting the chance to satisfy my life-long fascinations, coupled with the unique opportunity to walk and live in the footsteps of the great Mohandas Gandhi, this trip would be the transformative experience of a lifetime. I would be continuing my quest to experiment with truth by immersing myself in Gandhi’s world.

And yet almost immediately after arriving in Delhi, I was forced to confront a profoundly different world, a drastically altered reality from the India I had worked up in my imagination. I was initially struck by the hustle and bustle of Delhi’s downtown streets, the sheer chaos and confusion of living in a city with over 15 million people. But what I saw ran much deeper, and what I felt hit harder. Less the land of Oriental pleasure, this was a country overcome with dire poverty and shocking socioeconomic despair. This was not the country that I had been conditioned to see from Western-biased media reports. This was not the “Shining India,” the country in which unparalleled material development, economic growth, and a dynamic workforce was working to uplift over one billion people out of poverty, at the expense of the developed world. What I found was a tale of two cities, a story in which high-reaching skyrises overshadowed the desperate forgotten masses, and IT sector growth enshrouded the conditions of the poverty-stricken people. Inundated with child beggars, nakedness, disease, and homelessness, I was overwhelmed and scared. I had never had to confront poverty on this large of a scale, and I was deeply moved, troubled, and concerned.

I saw a country still struggling with the legacy of colonialism, a place where religious, ethnic, and socio-political struggles linger on. I saw deep religious strife, Hindus and Muslims living side-by-side, and yet evermore distant from one another. Racism and discrimination, hatred and cultural misunderstandings. I saw a clear disconnect between politics and the people, a stark rift between the glamorous buildings forming India’s parliament and the millions of people walking the streets. How could the majority of Indians simply have been ignored, just left out of the reports detailing India’s shimmering development? And how could the Indian people have been left out of the political equation, unrepresented by their political leaders? Was this truly a democracy, the representation of all of India’s citizens?

Most importantly, where was Gandhi and who was doing Gandhi’s work? Although I was constantly bombarded with images of India’s greatest political and social leader, I couldn’t help but feel that Gandhi was somehow missing. Gandhi’s name and face most certainly live on in the hearts and minds of the Indian people. But beneath the myriad of statues and shrines, museums and buildings, street names and pictures, the essence of Gandhi was nowhere to be found. In many ways, the tourist shops filled with souvenirs, stuffed animals, posters and miniatures of the great Mahatama said it all. Wasn’t this Gandhi’s greatest fear, that he would become an “ism” at the expense of goodness, love, and justice? Everyone seemed to know of the greatness of Gandhiji, and yet nobody really knew Gandhiji. I searched relentlessly for positive signs that Gandhi’s work lives on. Yet the more I searched, the more that seemed missing. Of course there were people doing good work and striving for justice. Yet where were the people who had internalized Gandhi’s message and let Gandhi seep into their souls? Where were those inspirational leaders, the children of Gandhi that I so desperately wanted to find?

Even the life-long Gandhians, those who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of Gandhi’s truth, seemed to have strayed from the ultimate goal. To be sure, these activists were spinning khadi and had given up eating meat, but in doing so, they somehow didn’t feel any more like Gandhi than I. An ashram’s doors open to the public, and yet metaphorically closed to the outside community. A community driven by the mantra “Be the Change” in a city that had been torn-up by violent, religiously-driven massacres just several years before. A group of people advocating religious harmony, and yet failing to enact the essence of that message. And a community focused on peace and non-violence in a country torn apart by riots, suicide bombings, lootings, and massacres. Had Gandhi’s advocacy of communal harmony, nonviolence, ahimsa and satyagraha, humility and honesty escaped the nation? If these were people supposedly doing Gandhi’s work, then maybe it was time to find a new inspirational leader.

And yet as the trip progressed, I began to learn several valuable lessons, lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my life. In my relentlessly critical evaluation of the world around me, my quest to find Gandhi’s work and my rejection of everything “un-Gandhian,” I, too, had lost the essence of Gandhi’s message. As I began to look deep within myself, and ask myself whether I, in fact, was doing Gandhi’s work, I also came up searching, left with more questions than answers. I had failed to internalize Gandhi’s message of humility, by putting myself on some sort of higher plane from which I was judging the Indian people. Did I really have the right to critique India? Before criticizing the Indian people, maybe I should really have been critiquing myself: Was I really being the change in the world, was I actively working to solve the problems that I care so passionately about? In evaluating the extent to which the Indian people had ‘lost’ Gandhi’s message, I had selfishly taken a sort of moral high ground, unquestioningly assuming that I was in a place to judge. I learned that before judging the actions of people around us, it is first important to both understand and to look inward, to find the troubling aspects within ourselves that could also be put up to close scrutiny.

Perhaps equally importantly, I began to question the basic assumptions with which I had entered the trip and challenge the premise of my quest to find those doing Gandhi’s work. Since I had started seriously studying the words, writings, and actions of Gandhi last winter, I operated with a basic fundamental assumption that the ultimate goal of my intellectual pursuit was to be more like Gandhi, putting Gandhi on a higher pedestal that I was constantly seeking to reach. In doing so, I, too, started experimenting with nonviolence, vegetarianism, and cleanliness, thinking that by doing so, I would be able to become more like Gandhi and therefore become a better person. And yet over the course of my trip to India, I gradually realized that Gandhi is not the ultimate goal, and a study of Gandhi, in itself, might not get me to the desired end. Studying Gandhi, by contrast, represents a means to the greater end of goodness, a method to help affect positive change in the community and the world at large. Rather than striving to be more like Gandhi, I realized, I should be striving merely to do good, to start by doing small acts of goodness toward the greater goal of changing the world around me. Gandhi represents one of many different inspirational leaders and figures that can use in our pursuit of truth. We can most certainly use Gandhi as a source of inspiration, and studying Gandhi’s experiments with truth can help us to better ourselves as people. But ultimately, Gandhi is a figure of history, one amongst many other sources of inspiration, including Martin Luther King Jr., from which we can learn. Rather than immortalizing Gandhi and treating him like a God or saint, we should treat Gandhi as just one of many different tools for trying to attain good.

And thus, I realized that the premise of my initial observations, that the Indian people should be doing Gandhi’s work, was fundamentally flawed. I realized that I should have been using goodness as a more effective and appropriate metric of evaluation, that I should have been asking who is doing good work in India. Striving to be more like Gandhi, I realized, has become incapacitating, creating undue pressure to live up to, and compare with, an exceptional figure in history. And in the process, the more important goal of doing good works gets lost.
India, it seems, constantly struggles to deal with the very complex legacy of Gandhi. Although he represents an inspirational champion of nonviolence, Gandhi also marks a potential burden that every person must carry. Rather than expecting the Indian people, society, or ourselves, to perform like Gandhi and live up, in some way, to his legacy, we should hold ourselves to the more rational and realistic standard of merely doing good. And in doing so, we can free ourselves from the struggle of trying to attain Gandhi’s grandeur and greatness, and instead be judged by the good that we do on our own terms.

Gandhi was not a saint or a God, and there were some very problematic and troubling aspects of his personality and actions that we must grapple with. Less than a universal figure of goodness, many Indians view Gandhi as helping to create many of the modern problems associated with India as a nation-state.
I have realized that I will not devote my life to studying Gandhi and I will certainly no longer place Gandhi on a higher moral pedestal after which I will strive. Instead, I will treat Gandhi in the same way as any other great figure of history, a continual source of inspiration in my lifelong quest for truth. Gandhi will help me to think about doing good and being a better person, but ultimately, the responsibility for affecting positive change lies only within me.

[Gyanesh Mathur]

This essay makes one realize that one does not have to live like Mahatma Gandhi to be a "Gandhian". Dr. King and Nelson Madela had very personalities from Gandhi-Ji, yet they used the principles of non-violent struggles just as successfully. I wonder if Jake would consider people involved in projects like Anotodaya, Micro-credit schemes and attempts to improve the lot of small scale farmers, are doing Gandhi's work.

Gyanesh

[Clayborne Carson]

Thanks Jake for your thoughtful essay, which reflected many of my own feelings regarding the India seminar and "the very complex legacy of Gandhi." I look forward to further conversations with you about how each of us can bring about positive change.
Clay