I am quite fortunate that Gandhi’s daughter-in-law returns during my visit, for she lives here only part time. Mahatma Gandhi had four sons. The wife of his third son, Ramdas, is the only one who remains alive from that generation. In the afternoon, Mr. Rai takes me over and introduces us. A tiny woman, with gray hair rolled in a bun, Nirmala is antimated and smiling, truly a little ray of sunshine with no pretensions whatsoever. She does not speak English, however, but starts rolling out a story that sends her and Mr. Rai into peals of laughter.

“Just because she’s eighty does not mean she doesn’t remember things; she remembers too much,” he turns to me and comments with a smile.

As they banter back and forth, it becomes apparent that she is speaking of the early days at the ashram. She too had been a student of Gandhi, wide-eyed and idealistic. But Gandhi insisted that all of his young followers remain unmarried, for their lives were to be dedicated to the upliftment of rural India. Although this attitude had some practicality, since the needs of one’s own family could cause conflicts of interest for the worker, it has no sanction whatsoever in the Hindu tradition of the four stages of life. The ancient sages had spouses who were their indispensable helpmates. Even the Hindu gods have their feminine counterparts! Of course, Gandhi contributed his personal example— he certainly never gave his family any special consideration.

When Nirmala and Ramdas fell in love, Gandhi simply decreed “No,” they were not to be married. The “Father of India’s freedom” would not allow his own sons to choose their paths in life. They must have been confused observing their own father’s sexual behavior. He did choose celibacy, but it was after having pumped out four sons and experiencing such a lusty nature that he was forever ashamed of it. It was no secret that he slept nude with young women (no sex—it was to test his celibacy) right up until the last years of his life. In addition, there were the two hour long baths when he was closed up in his private bath room with a teenage girl rubbing him down with polishing stones. Yet he expected his sons to eliminate women from their lives.

All of his sons defied him, chose a wife and got married. He stuck to his edict and he banished them from his life. None of them had it easy. Since Gandhi had refused them access to a standard education, they were ill prepared for a life in the world—they resented that too. The second son, Manilal, suffered the least repercussions because he was exiled to South Africa to manage the ashram there—as punishment for loaning his brother, Harilal, some money to help him out.

Harilal, the elder, was the real rebel of the family. He seemed to hold the most resentment for not having had a father; Gandhi was in England during Harilal’s younger years. In any event, he led a difficult life and died young.

In Ramdas’s case, using his father’s numerous connections with India’s wealthy industrialists, he was able to find a job. So he and Nirmala were able to live their own lives. Nirmala says that before Gandhi died there was some reconciliation between he and Ramdas. The youngest son, Devadas, also chose to live a life independent from his father. To pour salt on his own sons’ wounds, Gandhi provided his favorite nephew with a London education, allowed him to marry, and called him “closer than a son.” His biographer, Louis Fischer, sympathetically opined that he simply must not have wanted to have children.


Then my conversation with Nirmala and Mr. Rai turns to the subject of the other students at that time. I am informed that they had also married, but they were allowed to carry on the social programs anyway. “So you actually lived on the job. You raised your families in those isolated villages?” I question Mr. Rai.

“Oh, yes. Our children lived right with us. We all lived in the same huts and ate the same food as the villagers. Our children participated in whatever way they could.”

“Where are all the workers’ children today? They must be adults now?” I question him further.

“Oh, they are all in America.”

“In America?”

“Yes, they are only interested in making money and having a comfortable life. They want to make up for all the deprivation they suffered as children. All of them figure that they have had enough of India and its poverty.”

“Well, I somehow find that surprising.”

“There is one exception, the daughter of Devendra Kumar. She is the only one of all our children who has remained a dedicated worker. She works with her father at the village research center near here. You must go to meet them.”

We all fell silent, as if in prayer. Is it a prayer for the demise of Gandhi’s dreams, or is it a prayer for the plight of human kind? I cannot say.

“Caw. Caw.” The call of a nearby crow pierces our pensive mood.

“Let’s have a cup of tea. It must be ready now,” Nirmala pipes up.

Our silence touches a place in our hearts where humans fear to tread. The laughter about the “good ole days” was over for the moment.

That evening after the meditation service, I set out for a leisurely stroll through the grounds, comparatively small for the number of people who once lived here. I think of Gandhi on three fronts, his personal life, his ideas on education and economy, and his involvement in politics. Gandhi named his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. His truth were his experiments with swaraj, self-mastery, and satyagraha, moral force, and have universal application. Gandhi’s experiments in his personal life with women, diet, family were his personal affairs and little can be gained from them. The truth of the world is constantly in a flux due to changing situations and circumstances, so it’s hard to judge another from another time, place and culture. I think we have to admire him for his conscious attempt, even though we may not agree with some of his actions. His treatment of his wife and sons was not befitting a saint, and cannot be rationalized in light of any cultural or moral system—certainly not Hinduism. While traveling through rural India, I am always observing villages that have not changed in centuries. I have said to myself at least one hundred times, What would India be like today if it had followed Gandhi’s economic plan: the small, independent village unit as the base of the economy? The village economy was most important to Gandhi. Both Mr. Rai and Mr. Panday have described to me how he spent a lot of his personal time in the little nearby village when he was able to spend several years at a time in this ashram.

Gandhi knew that the foundation of India’s independence had to be a decent economy. How could a country drained of its natural resources and held back in industrialization become a viable entity?

When I mention that I have lived in India to anyone in the U.S., the response is always the same: “How could you stand the poverty?” Everyone knows of India’s poverty, yet to this day I have never found one American who has bothered to investigate why India is in such poverty. It would not take a lot of thought to figure there is some glitch on the historical road map. America was “discovered” because Europeans were seeking trade with India. At that time, India represented the ultimate in wealth in spices and gold. When the first Europeans traders, led by the Portuguese Vasco de Gama, reached India in 1497, they found an international community of Jewish, Armenian, Arabian Moslems traders, all peacefully living under a Hindu king in an area call Malabar. What was the need for greed, when there was enough for everyone?

So from 1492 to the present date, what has happened to render India the epitome of “poverty”? Of course, I am more than happy to enlighten anyone on the subject, but I still wonder why people do not think for themselves. Of course, the question about India’s poverty is always followed by the wise remark: “If they are so hungry, why don’t they eat their sacred cows?” Again, how much thought does it take to calculate that if you have a cow it will provide milk, butter and yogurt to a family for some ten years. That's the female cows, the male cows are used for plowing the fields. Anyway, if you kill a cow to eat it, how long will it last—and in a tropical country? Truly, my concern is the poverty of the American intelligence. I wonder how long people are going to continue to settle for an education that systematically extracts their power to think for themselves?

With the different stories I am hearing, I am just plain puzzled: Who is this man Gandhi? I am impelled to figure out what he was all about. Was he in fact just a convenient hero for the uneducated peasants and idealistic students? Even today the Indian peasants’ need for heroes—or kings—or movie stars is overwhelming. I know the phenomenon exists elsewhere, but not to the degree it does here.

So I take advantage of the time while I am in Sevagram to immerse myself in the various booklets and pamphlets available here on Gandhi’s ideas. In reading some of the literature, I find that Gandhi’s economic ideas were not original. He had arrived in London in the late 1890’s at a time called the New Age. The proponents emphasized a philosophy of self-reliance both economically and physically, through Nature Cure (natural medicine) and vegetarianism. However, their principal objective was a life of non-violence. Gandhi was particularly influenced by Ruskin, Carpenter, Thoreau and Tolstoy. Gandhi even corresponded with Tolstoy, who in turn had been influenced by Rousseau. Now I have a new list of authors to read, although I had recently read Rousseau’s biography. That’s the advantage of my being a self-taught person—learning never ends.

The European New Agers were very interested in Gandhi’s work. Although they had established their back-to-earth communities in England and Switzerland, the settlements were very small. India seemed to hold the only hope for a true New Age. The lack of industrialization could be an advantage; for, in the West, the movement had to remove a lot of unwanted elements that still did not exist in India. Several of the New Agers lived with Gandhi at his Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, while many visited his ashrams in both South Africa and India. However, they did not feel his definition of non-violent was the same as theirs. They particularly found fault with his recruitment of soldiers for the British in World War I and his defiant act of the burning of European clothes, so they parted ways. However, Gandhi had learned the foundation of his social ideology from them.

Gandhi was proposing a complete social system based on a self-sufficient village unit. He felt that economy had to be a means to an end: the true goal of life being the spiritual evolution and freedom of the individuals. A sound economy that provided for everyone “according to their needs” was essential for the progress of mankind. Gandhi would point out that while it is true a hungry man cannot pray, neither can one who has stuffed himself.

The British had changed the agricultural focus throughout their empire. Instead of the basic growing food crops for use in the home and for farm animals, the villagers had to grow commercial crops, dependent on an outside market, to raise cash for taxes. This change was a key factor in the demise of the traditional culture and economy. Gandhi insisted the villager grow enough food to feed everyone a healthy diet, as well as sufficient cotton for clothing. Thread was to be spun in the homes, then woven in cooperatives.

When the Europeans arrived, every village—and many individual cottages—had their own spinning wheels. The oldest piece of cotton cloth extant on the planet was found in the Indu Valley ruins, dated before 3,000 BC. These cottage industries were ruined with the importation of foreign cloth. The destruction of their wonderful native textiles was well calculated. One caste of weavers produced the finest of silks. I have seen some one-hundred-year old silk saris with beautiful intricate designs. Since the British could not compete with their work, they cut the weavers’ fingers off to prevent the competition. I surmise that it must have been their fingernails that were snipped off because one can picture that they could be using long fingernails for fine weaving. However, I have heard this story a half-dozen times and the Indians do believe that the tips of their fingers were chopped off. Even if it was not true, the common belief that their native artisans were treated in such a manner is in itself significant.

Gandhi planned homes constructed with community effort from available native materials—not really a big change in most villages even today. Direct exchange of goods, services and facilities between villages would eliminate the middlemen who necessitated the use of money in trade. Any excess produce would be traded for goods with a network of surrounding villages and used for the paying of the inevitable taxes. His intent was to distribute the wealth equitably. The principle was that if no one owned anything, there would be no obsession to overwork for the sake of accumulating.

Many of his ideas were not new to India. The communal use of land and goods, with distribution of labor according to skill, talent and caste was their traditional system. Karl Marx used the ancient Indian communities as a model in his Das Capital [published 1867]. I have not been able to verify it, but he may have visited Indian villages. Among the specialists he cataloged, such as the headman, judge, priest, astrologer, potter, he included an oddity that I only have heard of here: the person who was assigned to protect any travelers through the village and to escort them to the next village. In spite of foreign incursions, things change very slowly in rural India. Some of these villages still existed early in this century, but were doomed to demise as the British extended their revenue network. Inevitably the villagers were forced to produce the crops that could be sold for cash money to pay taxes.

I have often noticed that the 1850’s were crucial in Indian, therefore, world history. In 1857, while the British were busy bringing civilization to the dark heathens by hanging entire populations of villages on trees to rot and by blowing away “mutinous” soldiers strapped to cannons, Karl Marx was studying the traditions of these very villages. At the time, when Lord Macaulay was making his ultimatum to destroy the traditional Indian education system, Thoreau, Emerson and Tolstoy were enthralled by the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita.

Again Gandhi’s economic plan was practical. The third world countries that had been kept down economically by the Empire powers were far behind in the world arena. If rural Indians were going to have a decent life, the village economy was the only solution that seemed feasible. Firsthand lessons had clearly demonstrated to Gandhi why the capitalists’ system simply would not work in India. The laborers were too easily exploited.

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, after 20 years in South Africa, he was aware of the economic system and its ramifications, for it was exactly like the one he had been fighting there. I find it interesting that within two years in India, he found three specific causes to assist the exploited laborers.

First was the indigo crisis: Germany had invented synthetic dyes. Suddenly, the peasants who had been required to grow indigo on 3/20th of their leased property had a useless commodity on their hands—but they did not know it. To take advantage of the situation and make up for their own losses, the deceitful European landlords tried to collect illegal fees to “release” the grwoers from their indigo obligations. Even before then, the British landholders in Bihar had a reputation for extracting illegal dues from the peasants. I am sorry to report that the phenomenon continues today in the area even though the British have left.

A Bihari peasant who knew of Gandhi’s work in South Africa dogged him until he got Gandhi to come look at the situation for himself. Gandhi remained in Bihar for six months, painstakingly noting all the complaints of the laborers one by one. An episode from this conflict appeared in the movie, Gandhi. In spite of harassment and even imprisonment, Gandhi stayed at the task until he won British government cooperation for the laborer’s cause. His victory for the indigo planters in Bihar was crucial in elevating the attitude of the peasants; Gandhi became their savior.

The second incident was in Gandhi’s home state of Gujurat. There the peasants protested that, although 25 percent of their harvest was lost to drought, their unreasonably high taxes to the Government were not renegotiated. In the past days of the kings, they would have had to pay only a percentage of their crop for taxes; so when the yield was low, the tax was adjusted automatically. Under pressure led by Gandhi, the taxex were finally reduced.

However, his most interesting campaign was against an Indian, specifically, a wealthy mill owner in Gujurat. So in his home state, Gandhi directed a successful strike among the laborers, who lived the equivalent of Dickens’ London, or U.S's Pittsburgh. He used these protests as a forum for the development of his ideas, gradually fine-tuning his technique of satyagraha, that is, moral force obtained by adherence to the truth. Not only the truth of the issue for oneself, but for the opponent too, who was never considered an enemy. If we reform ourselves, the rulers will automatically follow suit was his theme. In the end, although Gandhi was the savior to the “dumb millions,” it is clear that he did not reach the mind of the peasants. They live from day to day with little or no interest in improving their lot. They are satisfied when someone does a project for them, but they continually show little interest in initiating improvements for themselves. The example here at Sevagram is typical. Even after fifty years of assistance, which was oriented toward teaching and training them, somehow the villagers never learned to do anything to improve their own lot. It is certain that Gandhi and his followers even had to educate the peasants to understand that the British Raj was responsible for their local grievances and exploitation. They were capable of comprehending this political reality, but his ideological concepts of swaraj and satyagraha were beyond their capacity.

In my opinion, the fact that he had a following of millions of peasants created interest in Gandhi in the rest of the world. This fame gave him leverage for his political success, which came from a more sophisticated audience—Americans and Europeans. President Roosevelt personally put pressure on the British in favor of India’s independence. From the time of his Salt March in 1930, his actions were international news. Dozens of foreign reporters were at the sea when Gandhi picked up those few grains of salt. That year, he was named “Man of the Year” by Life Magazine. Right through the second world war, Gandhi captivated the war-worn nations with his method of politics. In a world that needed heroes, Gandhi fit the mandate.