GANDHI THE ASCETIC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 629, 20 July 1951, Page 12

GANDHI THE ASCETIC

SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAHATMA GANDHI, edited by Ronald Duncan; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6.

(Reviewed by

W. B.

Sutch

N Accra on the Gold Coast there is a picture of Gandhi in the headquarters of the Convention People’s Party. Party members honoured by political imprisonment have on their white caps the letters P.G., meaning Prison Graduate. Thus Gandhi. like Lenin, still lives. But when they reach Dominion status will the Gold Coast go the way of India?

Putting the question in another form, do the teachings of Gandhi lead to permanent social revolution? In 1937 Gandhi said that the sovereignty of the people should be based on pure moral authority. In 1947, after India had be-

come a Dominion, he said, "There was a time when India listened to me. Today I am a back number." Was it because his preaching and practices were no longer necessary? Perhaps it was because in 1922 he stopped a successful all-India civil disobedience campaign and told the people to go develop home spinning, for he insisted that spiritual values should be the basis for all action. There were other things, too. Gandhi disliked the materialism, spiritual poverty and cultural decadence of the West. In writing to Tagore he once said that Government schools had made Indians into clerks and interpreters, and that\in any case "literary training by itself adds not an inch to one’s moral height." Similarly, if better wages and shorter hours did not give "clean houses, clean bodies, clean minds, and a clean soul," it would be a sin to attempt to agitate for them. Gandhi also preached birth control. His experiences in his early teens had given him a strong sense of guilt about sexual activity, and in later years he advocated absolute chastity in and out of mar‘Tiage. "All attachment to the senses is death" is the Hindu doctrine, \ and Gandhi extended it; he saw sin in every sensual pleasure. At the same time he distinguished between his own means to an everlasting life and the conduct of the Puritan which was a mere negation of life. The Bhagavad Gita says that "renunciation means forgoing an action which springs from desire, and relinquishing means the surrender of its fruit." This last phrase-the surrender of its fruit-was the key to Gandhi’s philosophy. He could not bring permanent social revolution for he had "no concern for the fruit." In our twentieth century dark ages, "the darkness of the neon light," Gandhi will be unacceptable, but he should become a saint. He wanted Christians to be good Christians, and so he said, "to cultivate humility is tantamount to cultivating hypocrisy." And, while advocating tolerance, he did not like the word, for "tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one’s own." The author of this selection of Gandhi’s’ writings has chosen to stress

Gandhi the ascetic rather than Gandhi the revolutionary, and if we are concerned with the future, he is probably right. Readers concerned mainly with the past should, however, supplement this with material on Gandhi’s life and political influence.