For Global Peace with Social Justice in a Sustainable Environment

Poland and Mahatma Gandhi

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229

E-mail- dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net;

dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com

Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India

Poland and Mahatma Gandhi

It pleases me to find that you have benefited by my writings. You are at liberty to translate any of the writings of Young India. There are German and French translations to be had in Europe and there is also an English edition published by Messrs S. Ganesan, Pycrofts Road, Triplicane, and Madras. 1 In fairness, however, to Europeans, let me say that in the venomous abuse of khaddar, The Times of India writer by no means represents the general European opinion. I know several Europeans in India who believe in the message of khaddar and some who use it themselves. Its message has even reached Europe. Here is a letter from a professor from far-off Poland regarding khaddar: Do you not think it would be a good thing if an attempt were made to sell Indian tissues in Europe to friends of India? I might try on a small scale here if you send me tissues of your cloth with indication of prices in English currency and an English address to which the money could be sent. I think that even if the amount of sales would not be very great, it would be useful for propaganda and I hope that many people at least in Poland would be proud and happy to wear Indian cloth in order to show their sympathy with your work. . . This is perhaps the most efficient way to gain universal sympathy for the emancipation of India. I could not easily undertake to spin myself but I can undertake to go from house to house and encourage the buying of Indian cloth even if it is more expensive than our own products. 2

You will now see my reply to your questions in Young India, and if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask. I like your three rules about preservation of health. The two I understand thoroughly. For, I myself don’t believe in worry and always try to snatch moments for sleep and possess a fair capacity for going off to sleep almost at will. Fasting too I understand. But I do not as you seem to have been doing. You say you fast for 10 or 15 days before each voyage. This requires explanation 10 or 15 days before each voyage. This requires explanation. 10 or 15 is a very vague number. For, 10 days or 15 days make a great difference for a fasting man; at least such is my experience. And what is this fasting? Do you take nothing during the fast except water, not fruit, not milk? Have you record of your weight before and after fast? How often have you taken these fasts? What is your weight now, and what is the meaning of each voyage? What is its duration? Do you fast, for instance, if you have to be at sea for one day only? You say you take one meal about midday at a time of intense activity. What does that meal consist of? And, do you take no fruit, no milk, and no other drink except water either in the morning or in the evening? Then, again you say you fast only when you have too much weight. Do you then say that you have always too much weight before each voyage? And why do you ever have too much weight if you are a spare eater as you evidently seem to be? When you are not intensely active, how many meals do you take? Then you say that you use at least 20 quarts of water to clear your bowels every day, until the water is returned clean and transparent and this you do when you have too much weight. What do you mean by use of water? Is it enema, or do you drink 20 quarts, even whilst you are taking your one meal per day? If you drink it, do you work it out through the kidneys or through the bowels? The experience of me and all my friends who have fasted for long lengths of time is that when we have fasted for long lengths of time is that when we have fasted the water has to pass through the kidneys, never through the bowels unless we have taken the enema. As you may know I am deeply interested in all experiments in fasting and dietetics whether merely for health or spiritual growth. 3

The first number of the English edition of the bulletin of the Organizing Committee of the International Juridical Conference has been on my file for the past three or four months. The bulletin is edited by a Board of Directors drawn from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, Germany, Holland, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and Venezuela. The Organizing Secretary is Dr. Alfred Apfel of Berlin where the bulletin is issued. The editorial notice says that the bulletin is only a temporary publication. The opening article is headed the ‘Duty of Lawyers’ from which I take the following two interesting sections as being not irrelevant in the present times in India. 4 This book-cover is made by our women”, said the lady from Poland. Thanking them Gandhiji asked: Is it only the women who spin and weave there, and do the men do nothing? Spinning is done exclusively by women. But men are not idlers either. They are engaged in other crafts. For instance this wooden casket is made by our men Is this a recent revival, or has the movement been on for some time? Has it touched the intellectual classes, or is there a gulf between them and the masses? No; the intellectuals have taken keenly to it and we have had the movement now for some time and it is daily growing. And how do you happen to work together who must be as poles asunder, Poland an agricultural country and France a highly industrialized country? We have been working together for several years. There is a village industries movement in France too, and we thought we should go together to India to study things first-hand. We must say we have had much to learn. They were contemplating writing a book on India and wanted to know whether they could serve India by doing so. You could, if you write for Poland and France or say Europe, but not if you write for India. They paused for a moment wondering what Gandhiji meant. I shall explain.

If you have really learnt something from our villages, you can only give the benefit of that learning to your own people. What I learn from the West I give to my country. Fallen though we seem today, our villages have still to teach something to the world. And if what you say to your people appeals to them, that will have its reaction on us. What I say holds well only if you have really learnt something worthy from our villages. Perhaps the Exhibition has opened your eyes to many possibilities. I should like to spend weeks there and fill my soul with the atmosphere of the past. You find there workmen actually at work from Orissa and Kashmir working with their crudest possible tools, if you please, and yet conjuring up with their aid some of the most gorgeous articles in silver and wool. The things you have brought for me are no patch on similar things you will find in the Exhibition. Look at the men from Patan working at their sari of exquisite pattern and design. The work is now confined to only four families whereas hundreds of families used to get their living in the past out of the work. They are so conservative that they would not let their nearest neighbour know the cunning of their craft. But we have drawn some of them out into light. Some of this work can be revived, in all its glory, if we are prepared to pay for it adequately, pay enough to feed them and to keep them in health and comfort. Now that is a nearly perfect Exhibition, i. e., as perfect as it could be looking to the limited time at the disposal of the organizers and to the numerous handicaps they had to contend against. And yet it is nothing compared to what it could be, if we could have brought all the representative men and we men engaged in many other crafts. 5

All those in Poland who believe that only truth and love can be foundations of better days for humanit and who are doing their best to serve those ideals with their life I send my good wishes and blessing. 6 This is the letter a Polish sister wrote from Bombay harbour. I have known her for some years. She has become as much Indian as she is Polish. She had decided to work at Maganwadi in the Magan Museum. But the rumours of war upset her. She has an aged mother in Poland whom she could not bring out owing to passport difficulties. When the war actually broke out, she calmed down so far as her mother was concerned. But her highly strung nature would not let her rest whilst her nearest and dearest were in peril of their lives for no offence of theirs. She is herself a believer through and through in non-violence. But her very non-violence made her restless. Her whole soul has rebelled against the wrong, as she thinks, that is being perpetrated against her motherland. So she has gone to find the Poland of her imagination fighting to the last ditch, not for merely preserving her own freedom but for the freedom of all those nations who have lost it. And in this she naturally includes her second love, India. May her dream prove true? If Poland has that measure of uttermost bravery and an equal measure of selflessness, history will forget that she defended herself with violence. Her violence will be counted almost as non-violence. 7

The British Government has stated that the war is for the preservation of democracy, but their policy in India militates against this profession. While this Assembly has the fullest sympathy for the cause of democracy and freedom, and condemns the aggression of the Nazi Government on Poland, it cannot offer co-operation in the war, unless the principles of democracy are applied to India and her policy is guided by her people. The Assembly invites the British Government to make a clear declaration that they have decided to regard India as an independent nation entitled to frame her own Charter of Freedom, and to accompany this declaration by suitable action, in so far as this is possible, even in the prevailing war conditions. The Assembly is further of opinion that no war measure or other activity should be undertaken in this Province except with the consent and through the medium of the Provincial Government. 8

I must wholly, though respectfully, dissent from the view that India is a military country. And I thank God that it is not. It may be that the Commander-in-Chief has a special meaning for the term which I do not know. Or is it that his India is composed of only the Defence Forces under his command? For me the Defence Forces are of the least importance in the make-up of the nation. I need not be reminded that life would be in constant peril if the forces were withdrawn. The forces notwithstanding, life is not free from peril. There are riots, there are murders, there are dacoities, and there are raids. The Defence Forces avail little in all these perils. They generally act after the mischief is done. But the gallant Commander-in-Chief looks at things as a soldier. I and, with me the millions are untouched by the military spirit. From ages past India has had a military caste in numbers wholly insignificant. That caste has had little to do with the millions. This, however, is not the occasion for examining its contribution to the making of India. All I want to state, with the utmost emphasis at my command, is that the description of India as a military country is wrong. Of all the countries in the world India is the least military. Though I have failed with the Working Committee in persuading them, at this supreme moment, to declare their undying faith in non-violence as the only sovereign remedy for saving mankind from destruction, I have not lost the hope that the masses will refuse to bow to the Moloch of war but will rely upon their capacity for suffering to save the country’s honour.

How has the undoubted military valour of Poland served her against the superior forces of Germany and Russia? Would Poland unarmed have fared worse if she had met the challenge of these combined forces with the resolution to face death without retaliation? Would the invading forces have taken a heavier toll from an infinitely more valorous Poland? It is highly probable that their essential nature would have made them desist from a wholesale slaughter of innocents. 9

You must not take what I say so terribly literally. If ten soldiers resist a force of a thousand soldiers armed cap-a-pie, the former are almost non-violent, because there is no capacity for anything like proportionate violence in them. But the instance I have taken of the girl is more appropriate. A girl, who attacks her assailant with her nails, if she has grown them, or with her teeth, if she has them, is almost non-violent, because there is no premeditated violence in her. Her violence is the violence of the mouse against the cat. Yes, God alone is the final judge. It is likely that what we believe to be an act of ahimsa is an act of himsa in the eyes of God. But for us the path is chalked out. And then you must know that a true practice of ahimsa means also in one who practises it the keenest intelligence and wide-awake conscience. It is difficult for him to err. When I used those words for Poland, and when I suggested to a girl believing herself to be helpless that she might use her nails and teeth without being guilty of violence, you must understand the meaning at the back of my mind. There is the refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death. The Poles knew that they would be crushed to atoms, and yet they resisted the German hordes. That was why I called it almost non-violence. 10

I hope you will have the time and desire to know how a good portion of humanity who has view living under the influence of that doctrine of universal friendship view your action. We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents. But your own writings and pronouncements and those of your friends and admirers leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity, especially in the estimation of men like me who believe in universal friendliness. Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity. Hence we cannot possibly wish success to your arms. 11 All I can say about the affliction through which Poland is passing is that no small nation of Europe is to expect any real help from the Allied Powers in spite of their professions to the contrary. You know I proposed a solution. It was summarily rejected. Let us rely upon God, the Rock of Ages. 12

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