IS GANDHI CRAFTY?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 140, 27 February 1942, Page 4

IS GANDHI CRAFTY?

Sir,-Is Gandhi ‘crafty as well as courageous? I would add to that, for feasons that I hope will become apparent, "Can a leopard change his spots?" You suggest that those who deny Gandhi’s craftiness to-day are either simple or, like Nelson at Copenhagen I presume, deliberately blind. Books on Gandhi and the East are popular at the moment, so though I have searched library shelves I can’t find the book presented to the Mahatma on his 70th birthday, containing Essays and Reflections from the pens of 70 or more celebrities, concerning the meaning and message of his life to them. Not all are complimentary, but I fancy they would swell The Listener’s list of Simpletons or Nelsons to the number of about 70 souls, which. include General Smuts, Romain Rolland, Sir Herbert Samuel, Stephen Hobhouse, Rabindranath Tagore, Edward Thompson, and C. F. Andrews. Maude Royden’s Essay is almost after the nature of a prayer to India and to Gandhi not to fail in their ideals. C. E. M. Joad’s short tribute is perhaps the most impressive in the book. Those writers who are least sympathetic towards Gandhi’s ideas acknowledge most directly his transparent sincerity, if I remember rightly. It may be argued that these people might change their opinion in the light of present-day happenings. But I have already asked "Can the eer change his spots?" John Gunther, telling of "Inside Hee admits that Gandhi is a "slippery fellow." But then so is a bhby in its bath. It shares that quality with the serpent, and somewhere we have been told to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves." The words of this analogy are mine, because I can’t find a

Gunther left on the shelves either, but I think the spirit of it is in keeping with the slipperiness implied by him. Finally, as a sort of consolation prize for the books I couldn’t find, I came quite by accident upon Count Keyserling’s Creative Understanding, and as if a Voice from Heaven spoke I copied out these words: "It is only with inferior persons that idealism and Machiavelliasm are incompatible. In the case of the superior man they are interdependent." That leaves us with a third question. Is Gandhi a-superior man, or is Mahatma, The Great Soul, applied to him, merely a spurious title? I don’t know. I am among those not qualified to judge, because I have to acknowledge that love may be blind like Nelson. Some people believe it makes the world go

round ali the same.

E. P.

DAWSON

_ (Wellington).

(If our correspondent means that these "70 or more celebrities’? would not have contributed to the birthday tribute if ‘they had thought Gandhi "crafty as well as courageous," she has a poor opinion of celebrities. If she does not mean that, we can’t imagine why she throws them at us.-Ed.)