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Rajeev Srinivasan

Gandhi's dilemma was the same as Yudhishtira's: what and where was the sanatana dharma he claimed to follow?

As always, January 30 will come and go this year. In India, it will be Martyr's Day, to mark the anniversary of the day when Mahatma Gandhi was shot down in Delhi -- and schoolchildren all over will stand in silence for one minute at 11 am. That was exactly 50 years ago. Although almost nothing of the Mahatma's legacy remains in India today -- other than ritual lip-service in windy speeches -- it is worth looking at how his spirituality enabled this one man to transform a 'nation of slaves'.

The Mahatma was not a perfect human being, but he was perhaps the greatest Indian since Emperor Ashoka the Great. Columnist George Will, with typical American hyperbole, called Thomas Jefferson the 'Man of the Millennium', but the Mahatma probably deserves that epithet (even if it is rather meaningless) a lot more than old slave-owner Jefferson. Albert Einstein said something like, 'Generations to come will find it hard to believe that such a man as this walked this earth'; he was quite right -- even the current generation in India finds it hard to believe!

Professor R C Zaehner's little book, Hinduism (Oxford University Press) is one of the best introductions to the subject, relatively easily accessible to the lay reader. In eight short chapters, Professor Zaehner brings to life with sympathy and understanding the seemingly intractable complexities of Hinduism. The last chapter, 'Yudhishtira Returns', speaks movingly about the Mahatma.

Says Zaehner: 'In his frail person the ancient ideas of... ahimsa (non-violence) and truth met. He described himself as a sanatani Hindu, one who follows the sanatana dharma, the 'eternal law' once embodied in the dharma-raja, Yudhishtira. And Gandhi's dilemma was the same as Yudhishtira's: what and where was the sanatana dharma he claimed to follow? Was it in his heart or was it in what the Brahmans proclaimed?'

Gandhi's answer was always to follow his conscience; for his God was the God of Righteousness, just as it was Yudhishtira's. Said he: "To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness; God is the source of Light and Life, and yet he is above and beyond all these. God is conscience."

This perhaps leads to an answer to the difficult question that has plagued modern Hindus: If one is to follow one's dharma, as per the word of God in the Bhagavad Gita, what exactly is one's dharma? As Zaehner says of Yudhishtira, is it '... the dharma preached by Brahmans..., or the dharma by virtue of which he was the ''King of dharma''... because the conscience of a truthful man cannot lead astray?'

The answer then, to a modern Hindu, may be that s/he must look deep inside, and follow that which their heart of hearts tells them is right, moral and good. It is not necessarily any more the dharma of the kshatriya or of the vaishya or whatever, it is the dharma of your own soul that matters. Gandhi's answer was 'ahimsa, truth, renunciation, passionlessness and an equal love for all God's creatures.' Your and my dharma we alone can recognise and realise.

Although he was a devout Hindu, Gandhi recognised there were indeed ills in Hinduism, which needed to be removed. Continues Zaehner: '...though claiming to be an orthodox Hindu, he was yet the greatest reformer Hinduism had ever seen... [H]e saw himself as, and was, a sannyasin for whom ''liberation'' meant rather liberation from the bondage of sin -- desire, anger, avarice, sloth and so on -- than liberation from the British.'

'... Through his fearlessness and through his faith, ... not only were Hindu temples thrown open to the untouchables... but in the end the British Raj too abdicated.' As much as Yudhishtira was the soul of dharma, says Zaehner, who never committed an injustice out of desire or yielding to impetuosity, out of fear, or to promote his own interests, so was Mahatma Gandhi. He was the conscience of Hinduism that 'hungers for righteousness in defiance of the letter of the law of gods and men.'

Yet, Gandhi did not wish to destroy Hinduism, merely to reform it. Zaehner suggests that Gandhi would surely have agreed with Annie Besant who said: 'Make no mistake. Without Hinduism India has no future. Hinduism is the soil into which India's roots are struck, and torn out of that she will inevitably wither, as a tree torn out from its place... Let Hinduism go, Hinduism that was India's cradle, and in that passing would be India's grave.'

Although Gandhi's failings were many -- for example his somewhat ambivalent attitude (despite what Zaehner states above) towards temple entry for the 'lower castes' made some in Travancore doubt his sincerity -- he was still a giant amongst pygmies. Even if one were to, unfairly, discount all his spiritual inclinations, he was an absolute marketing genius, the first Indian to utilise the media well. The loincloth, non-violent non-co-operation and the spinning-wheel were all master-strokes.

The other thing that truly sets him apart from many of his chattering-class fellow-countrymen was his bias for action: He was, in the tradition of Swami Vivekananda, a karma yogi. I would like to believe -- a man of action. Like, say, Sri Narayana Guru or Sunderlal Bahuguna, he was able to inspire others with his vision of what was right, and to then galvanise them into action.

In truth, Gandhi was an idealist, who believed that ordinary mortals could rise to the same levels of self-sacrifice and spirituality as he could -- after all, he only preached what he himself practised, and he did not consider himself a saint. That led to his greatest failure, which he never reconciled himself to: His inability to prevent Partition and the bloodshed that went with it. Perhaps he died an embittered man, who had seen his dreams about his fellow-Indians go up in smoke.

But I would like to think otherwise. I am reminded of the recent words of Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate, who is dying of cancer. Said Paz: 'I don't know how much time I have. But I know there are clouds and in those clouds are many things, there is sun too.' I think the Mahatma saw the sunshine behind the clouds. And I wish we all could, too.

Rajeev Srinivasan