The Essential Gandhi (35 page)

To me God is Truth and Love, God is ethics and morality, God is fearlessness.… He is all things to all men … He is ever forgiving for He always gives us the chance to repent. He is the greatest democrat the world knows for He leaves us “unfettered” to make our own choice between evil and good.…
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I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. The rays of the sun are many through refraction. But they have the same source. I cannot, therefore, detach myself from the wickedest soul nor may I be denied identity with the most virtuous.
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I am endeavoring to see God through service of humanity, for I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone.
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 … If we could all give our own definitions of God there would be as many definitions as there are men and women. But behind all
that variety … there would be also a certain sameness.… For the root is one. God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know.… He is all things to all men.…
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 … We have one thousand names to denote God, and if I did not feel the presence of God within me, I see so much of misery and disappointment every day that I would be a raving maniac.…
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 … Religion is the service of the helpless.…

 … The Brahman [Priest] who has understood the religion of today will certainly give Vedic [Scriptural] learning a secondary place and propagate the religion of the spinning wheel, relieve the hunger of the millions of his starving countrymen, and only then … lose himself in Vedic studies.

 … If I have to make the choice between counting beads or turning the wheel, I would certainly decide in favor of the wheel, making it my rosary, so long as I found poverty and starvation stalking the land.…
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Some time ago, I was taken to a magnificent mansion called the “Marble Palace” in Calcutta.… The owners feed … in front of the palace, all the beggars who choose to go there.… [The] incongruity of this ragged humanity feeding whilst the majestic palace is … mocking at their wretched condition does not seem to strike the donors at all.… In Suri … the motor car that drove me … was slowly taken through the line of the beggars as they were eating. I felt humiliated, more so to think this was all done in my honor, because … I was “a friend of the poor.” My friendship for them must be a sorry affair if I could be satisfied with a large part of humanity being reduced to beggary. Little did my friends know that my friendship for the paupers of India has made me hardhearted enough to contemplate their utter starvation with equanimity in preference to their utter reduction to beggary.… [If] I had the power I would stop every Sadavrata [Donation] where free meals are given. It has degraded the nation and it has encouraged laziness, idleness, hypocrisy and even crime. Such misplaced charity adds nothing to the wealth of the country … and gives a false sense of meritoriousness to the donor. How nice and wise it would
be if the donor were to open institutions where they would give meals under healthy, clean surroundings to men and women who would work for them.… [The] rule should be “No labor, no meal.” … I know it is easier to fling free meals in the faces of idlers, but much more difficult to organize an institution where honest work has to be done. [In] the initial stages … the cost of feeding people after taking work from them will be more than the cost of the present free kitchens. But … it will be cheaper in the long run, if we do not want to increase … the race of loafers which is fast overrunning this land.
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 … It is the duty of society to support the blind and the infirm, but everyone may not take the task upon himself. The head of Society—the State—should undertake the task and the philanthropically inclined should subscribe funds.…
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If each retained possession of only what he needed, no one would be in want and all would live in contentment.
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I cannot picture to myself a time when no man shall be richer than another. But I do picture to myself a time when the rich will spurn to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and the poor will cease to envy the rich. Even in a most perfect world we shall fail to avoid inequalities but we can and must avoid strife and bitterness.…
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[The] economic constitution of India and for that matter of the world should be such that no one under it should suffer from want of food and clothing.… [Everybody] should be able to get sufficient work to enable him to make the two ends meet. And this ideal can be universally realized only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses. These should be freely available to all as God’s air and water are or ought to be, they should not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others. Their monopolization by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust. The neglect of this simple principle is the cause of the destitution we witness
today not only in this unhappy land but in other parts of the world too.
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 … I pride myself on calling myself a scavenger, weaver, spinner, farmer … and do not feel ashamed that some of these things I know but indifferently. It is a pleasure to me to identify myself with the laboring classes, because without labor we can do nothing.… “He who eats without labor eats sin, is verily a thief” … is the literal meaning of a verse in the Bhagavad Gita.…

 … But none of my activities are one-sided, and as my religion begins and ends with Truth and non-violence, my identification with labor does not conflict with my friendship with capital.…

Capital … and labor should supplement and help each other. They should be a great family living in unity and harmony, capital not only looking to the material welfare of the laborers but their moral welfare also, capitalists being trustees for the welfare of the laboring classes under them.
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 … Throughout thirty-five years’ unbroken experience of public service in several parts of the world, I have not yet understood that there is anything like spiritual or moral value apart from work and action.…

Come with me to Orissa, in November, to Puri, a holy place and a sanatorium, where you will find soldiers and the Governor’s residence during the summer months. Within ten miles’ radius … you will see skin and bone.… Talk to them of modern progress. Insult them by taking the name of God before them in vain. They will call you and me fiends if we talk about God to them. They know, if they know any God at all, a God of terror, vengeance, a pitiless tyrant. They do not know what love is.… They have not lost all sense of decency, but I assure you we have. We are naked in spite of our clothing, and they are clothed in spite of their nakedness. It is because of these that I wander about from place to place, I humor my people. I humor my American friends. I humored two stripling youths from Harvard. When they wanted my autograph, I said, “No autographs for Americans.” We struck a bargain. “I give you my autograph and you take to khadi.” …

But I cannot be satisfied, not till every man and woman in India is working at his or her wheel.… This is the one and only work which can supply the needs of the millions without disturbing them from their homes. It is a mighty task and I know that I cannot do it.… But I shall not lose faith in you.…
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 … The world knows little of how much my so-called greatness depends upon the incessant drudgery and toil of silent, devoted, able and pure workers, men as well as women.…
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 … You come in daily touch with me by doing my work as if it was your own. And this can, must and will outlast the existence of this physical body of mine.…
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 … We really live through and in our work. We perish through our perishable bodies, if instead of using them as temporary instruments, we identify ourselves with them.
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 … Let us not seek to prop virtue by imagining hellish torture after death for vice and houris hereafter as a reward for virtue in this life. If virtue has no attraction in itself, it must be a poor thing.… Both heaven and hell are within us. Life after Death there is, but it is not so unlike our present experiences as either to terrify us or make us delirious with joy. “He is steadfast who rises above joy and sorrow,” says the Gita. The wise are unaffected either by death or life. These are but faces of the same coin.
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[Gandhi appealed for aid to the masses from everyone. Several times he addressed Christian missionary groups working in India.]

It is better to allow our lives to speak for us than our words.… Faith does not admit of telling. It has to be lived and then it becomes self-propagating.
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[All] are judged not according to their labels or [what they profess] but according to their actions irrespective of their professions.…
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 … The founding of leper asylums, etc. is only one of the ways, and perhaps not the best, of serving humanity. But even such noble service loses much of its nobility when conversion is the motive behind it. That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake. But … the missionaries that selflessly work away in such asylums command my respect. I am ashamed to have to confess that Hindus have become so callous as to care little for the waifs and strays of India, let alone the world.
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If you give me statistics that so many orphans have been reclaimed and brought to the Christian faith, I would accept them, but I do not feel convinced thereby that it is your mission. In my opinion your mission is infinitely superior to that. [Go] to the lowly cottages, not to give them something [but] to take something from them.…

 … One of the greatest Christian Divines, Bishop Heber, wrote the two lines which have always left a sting with me: “Where every prospect please, and Man alone is vile.” … I have gone from one end of the country to the other, without any prejudice, in a relentless search after truth, and I am not able to say that here in this fair land, watered by the great Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Jumna, man is vile. He is not vile. He is as much a seeker after truth as you and I are, possibly more so.… You are here to find out the distress of the people of India and remove it. But I hope you are here also in a receptive mood and if there is anything that India has to give, you will not stop your ears, you will not close your eyes and steel your hearts but open up your ears, eyes and most of all, your hearts, to receive all that may be good in this land. I give you my assurance that there is a great deal of good in India.… I know many men who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ or have even rejected the official interpretation of Christianity
would
probably, if Jesus came in our midst today … be owned by him more than many of us.…

[If] you will refuse to see the other side, if you will refuse to understand what India is thinking, then you will deny yourselves the real privilege of service.
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[An American clergyman once asked Gandhi what caused him most concern.] The hardness of heart of the educated [Gandhi replied].
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 … If you [students] spend your next vacation in some far-off village in the interior you … will find the people cheerless and fear-stricken. You will find houses in ruins. You will look in vain for any sanitary or hygienic conditions. You will find the cattle in a miserable way, and yet you will see idleness stalking there. The people will tell you of the spinning wheel’s having been in their homes long ago.… They have no hope left in them. They live, for they cannot die at will. They will spin only if
you
spin. Even if a hundred out of a population of three hundred in a village spin, you assure them of an additional income of 1,800 rupees [$360] a year. You can lay the foundation of solid reform on this income in every village.… “I am alone, how can I reach seven hundred thousand villages?” This is the argument pride whispers to us. Start with the faith that if you fix yourself up in one single village and succeed, the rest will follow.…

 … The education is not “national” that takes no count of the starving millions of India, and that devises no means for their relief.…
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 … Students have to react upon the dumb millions. They have to learn to think not in terms of a province or a town or a class or a caste, but in terms of a continent and of the millions who include untouchables, drunkards, hooligans and even prostitutes, for whose existence in our midst every one of us is responsible.…
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Our self-sacrifice must … be in terms of the requirements of the country.…

 … We dare not support able-bodied members of the family—men or women—who will not work. We may not contribute a single pice towards the expenses of conforming to meaningless or superstitious customs, such as caste-dinners or towards forming expensive marriage connections. Every marriage and every death brings an unnecessary cruel burden upon the head of the family.…