Gandhi: In his own words

Gandhi has become a symbol

and a myth. Yet none has taken
the measure of the 20th
Century's most enigmatic and
remarkable
personality.
Interpreters continue to see him
as a spiritual paragon, a wily politician, the inventor
of civil disobedience or as a critic of modernity. A
clue to understanding Gandhi is to be found in his
writings. His text is the work of a man who saw
himself neither as simply a political leader nor as a
uniquely spiritual teacher
SUNIL KHILNANI in his Introduction to the
Penguin Classics edition of Mahatma Gandhi's
autobiography The Story of My Experiments With
Truth.
Introduction: An Experimental Life
GANDHI'S presence in the 20th Century, a century
that perfected the arts of extermination, is weirdly
arresting. His life seems peculiarly unhoused in the

violent landscape of his times. How, by what twist of

historical fate, did this frail, ungainly man with
teapot ears, whose figure wrapped in handspun cloth
evoked a faded, archetypal memory of saintliness,
wander into the modern world; and how, for a time,
did he electrify it? What was he doing there, and
what can the trace of his presence mean to us today?
More than 50 years after his assassination in 1948,
Gandhi has become a symbol, a myth, even a
commodity. Yet we are still far from taking the
measure of the 20th Century's most enigmatic and
remarkable personality. Confronted by the vast
corpus of his writings and speeches (the Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi make-up a hundred
volume monument), interpreters continue to quarrel,
seeing him variously as a spiritual paragon, a wily
politician, a psychological and anthropological
curiosity, an inventor of political techniques of nonviolence and civil disobedience, or as a critic of
modernity.
But perhaps a safer clue to understanding Gandhi is
to be found in his famous plea: "My writings should
be cremated with my body. What I have done will
endure, not what I have said or written". Gandhi was

an artful choreographer of his doings - he seemed to

know from an early age that he wanted to organise
the haphazard trivia of his daily actions into formal
order, to give them a shape and meaning. George
Orwell, otherwise temperamentally distant from
Gandhi, saw exactly the tensed, pageant-like
character of Gandhi's life, its status as a theatrical
parable, when he observed of Gandhi that "his whole
life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was
significant". What gave every act its significance
was its place in a larger story. Indeed, the most
subversive skill of this famously unarmed rebel was
his ability to tell stories - stories that came entirely to
redefine how people perceived themselves, and what
they believed they could and could not do.
Nowhere did Gandhi deploy this skill to more
powerful effect than when it came to his own life: it
enabled him not merely to turn his life into a story,
but to live it as a story. That skill is clearly manifest
in Gandhi's An Autobiography or The Story of My
Experiments with Truth: a magnificent, puzzling,
strenuous act of self-creation, which describes - as it
enacts - the metamorphosis of a fearful, unsuccessful
provincial lawyer into a leader who dominated
India's politics for almost four decades and who took

on and successfully defeated the British imperial

state.
What drove this transformation was Gandhi's
capacity for self- creation, or, as he termed it, his
fascination with "experiments" in living. He
developed and refined this taste for experiment
across the three distinct arenas in which he lived his
life - England (where he disembarked at
Southampton on a grey September day in 1888, a
naive and aspirant 19-year-old got-up in what he
believed were fashionable white flannels); South
Africa, his home between 1893 and 1914, where he
discovered his capacities to organise and protest, as
well as his ability to invent for himself both a
personality and a community; and of course India
itself, where he returned in 1915 to become the
moral dynamo and canny political brain of the vast
Congress movement that took India to independence
and (to his despair) Partition, in 1947.
If An Autobiography exemplifies Gandhi's
extraordinary talent for self-creation, it is also a
testimony to the contradictions and insecurities, the
isolation and inwardly-directed violence of this very
public man. Gandhi achieved in it a language and

expression of such directness and clarity that the

reader who comes to it for the first time may find
themselves gliding over it all-too easily. Its
simplicity can play tricks: it is a work of studied
thought and artifice, and it is useful to recall
something of the historical and cultural moment of
its creation.
We know how to read political autobiographies - to
check, suspiciously, self-projection against fact,
subjective perception against objective structure and we are perhaps familiar too with reading the
testaments of religious leaders and saints. Gandhi's
text, though, is different. It is the work of man who
saw himself neither as simply a political leader nor
as uniquely a spiritual teacher, and it represents an
effort to redefine each of these categories and ways
of living. Both in the narrative voice it achieves, and
in the distinctive interference it generates between
the pursuit of a personal ethics and the claims of a
public, political life, An Autobiography is a
challenge to our settled views. The idea of religion it
expresses, and its conception of politics and public
action, are profoundly original.

Gandhi had first contemplated writing an

autobiography in 1921, but he did not actually begin
work on it until 1925, at the age of 56. It initially
took the form of a series of articles, the first of
which Gandhi published in December 1925 in his
own newspaper, Navajivan (Young India). Published
under the title "The Story of My Experiments with
Truth", the articles continued to appear until early
1929; collected together in book form, they were
published in two volumes, the first appearing in
1927, the second in 1929, and carried the additional
title, An Autobiography.
In his "Introduction", Gandhi describes in diffident
terms how he came to write it, acceding finally to
the urgings of his colleagues, and finding his
parsimonious instincts satisfied by the fact that he
could use these chapters to fill column inches in his
newspaper. That he could turn to this task in the
mid- 1920s was in large part due to the Indian
political situation. These were slack years in the
Congress's political campaign, when the movement
seemed to be losing its way. Gandhi decided to
remove himself from the main lines of Indian
politics, shunting himself to the siding of his ashram
at Sabarmati. This retreat followed what had been a

period of remarkable personal success for Gandhi.

He had arrived in India from South Africa with a
reputation for integrity and hard work, but he was in
fact virtually unknown beyond a narrow, elite circle.
Yet, without any power base of his own, he had through deft timing and manoeuvre - seized control
of the Indian National Congress, gave it a new
Constitution and structure, and had managed to
successfully draw together antagonistic groups,
particularly Muslims and Hindus. By the mid-1920s,
though, this was unravelling. His own physical
health had also weakened, his body ravaged by his
early experiments with fasting and dietary regimes
(he had first used a fast for public ends in 1924) and
by his imprisonment at Yeravda Jail between 1922
and 1924. At Sabarmati, he studied, and he wrote: he
kept up his side of a vast personal correspondence,
wrote hundreds of articles for his newspaper,
completed his great history of his South African
years, satyagraha in South Africa (which he always
considered the crucial twin to his more personal
autobiography), and began "The Story of My
Experiments with Truth".
In his mid-50s, Gandhi had embarked on a period of
reflection, which he hoped would give him new

bearings. He wished to formulate his ideas, his ethics

and his politics - hitherto worked out in the heat of
the moment as responses to specific events and
campaigns - into a more universal form, and to
revise the inner content as well as the outer image of
his own self. Even so, the narrative unfolded in a
somewhat erratic way, as Gandhi described to his
American publisher, the Christian priest John
Haynes Holmes: "I have to write from day to day. I
have mapped out no fixed plan. I write every week
as the past events develop in my mind on the day
allotted for writing the weekly chapter" ("Gandhi to
Holmes, 8/5/27", Collected Works Vol. 33, p. 299).
He allowed the chapters to be freely reprinted in
other Indian newspapers, but he decided to reserve
the copyright to publish them in book form - the first
occasion on which he had reserved copyright in
anything he had written (unsurprisingly, it was his
American publisher, worried about how many copies
he might sell, who advised him to do so). As they
appeared week by week, the chapters generated
enormous debate among his readers, and prompted
hundreds of letters, many of them questioning his
decision to put on display the details of his personal
life.

Gandhi's decision to present his personal

"experiments" in this way perturbed all conventions
of Indian autobiographical writing - which
invariably focused on the public exploits of the
authorial hero. To appreciate the significance of this
decision, a more specific sense of Gandhi's historical
circumstances is helpful: one that lies somewhere
between seeing him, narrowly, as the spokesman of
Indian nationalist politics, and a more stratospheric
view of him as a universal spiritual pilgrim. Gandhi's
life encompassed one of the great transformations in
Indian history - the arrival of modernity, impelled by
colonialism, with its host of pressing intellectual and
practical questions. For Gandhi, as for his fellow
intellectuals - Aurobindo, Tagore, Nehru, before
them, Vivekananda - an insistent challenge was that
of how to translate this alien world into one which
was comprehensible, a world where it was possible
to find one's moral bearings, and over which Indians,
collectively and individually, might gain some
control and even mastery.
Gandhi chose to address such questions through the
practicalities of his life - his bodily comportment - as
well as through constant commentary on his life and
practice. His Autobiography stated, in a way that

was to become massively influential for Indians, a

new possibility. It made clear to his compatriots that
they ought not to limit themselves to a simple,
monolithic choice - between on the one hand,
accepting the world inherited from their
predecessors, one of traditional religion and caste
practice, or, on the other hand, embracing the
modern world, dressing, speaking, eating and
thinking like Englishmen. Neither inheritance nor
emulation were necessary; rather, the task for
Indians was to chose their selves, to construct a life
of their own.
The method Gandhi devised in order to fashion such
a life and self was that of "experiment". Experiment
is the operative mode of An Autobiography, the
narrative cause and impulse. In his quest for an
ethical life, we find Gandhi conducting experiments
in dancing and in householding, in education,
washing and laundry, in healing and medicine, in
hygiene, politics, and dietetics, in fasting, and in
earth and water treatment, in friendship, in
communal living, and of course in truth. "I wore out
my body experimenting," Gandhi confessed of his
strenuous devotion to the task, and still he kept at it,

insisting that "any number of experiments is too

small".
Through experiment, Gandhi came to confront and
finally face down his "fear and trembling" - a
condition that runs like a leitmotif through the entire
text. In so much of the Autobiography, Gandhi's
sense of physical fear is palpable: at the prospect of
speaking - at school, on board ship, before the courts
of law, even when, already a political personage, he
was called to address the Congress. We feel too his
fear at nightfall and darkness; when he has to mix
with the Indian elite; when trying to make his career
as lawyer; and perhaps most painfully, in the trivial
everyday routines of life. Buying a train ticket,
travelling, puzzling over how to dress himself, even
when walking down a street - all are liable to induce
terror in Gandhi. Gandhi's narrative voice sometimes
seems to affect a jaunty, almost Pollyanna-ish tone.
Yet this is deceptive. For Gandhi's experience is that
of a man cast into a world in which he has to wage a
constant battle to steady himself: a world where both
the traditional, with its superstitions and rituals, and
the modern, with its choices framed by colonial
power, appear intimidating.

Gandhi mastered his fears through a discovery. By

blurring the lines and shifting the barriers between
the public and private realms - the core distinction of
liberal theory and practice, and of the modern state
and its law - he could generate unprecedented
powers, and so undermine his opponents. As he saw
it, modern politics - which, in his vivid image,
encircled everything like the coil of snake - had
constricted and separated the domains of private
ethics and public action. The means to reunite the
two, as well as to draw the poison of modern
politics, was to turn his own life inside out. The
details of his life were thus constantly witnessed and
recorded - befitting, perhaps, for a barrister whose
language, manners and theatrical sense of
confrontation were all shaped by his encounter with
British law. Gandhi extended an open invitation to
fellow Indians (both elite and poor), to the British,
and to the world at large, to eavesdrop on him at any
and every moment. Paradoxically - and in a supreme
subversion of the principle of the Benthamite
panopticon - by exposing himself to constant public
surveillance, he was able to shake free of both the
stifling superstitions of his own society as well as
the oppressive conformities of the modern world,

and to move into an arena of freedom that lay

beyond the reach of the imperial state and the grip of
tradition. His every action, however intimate, was
thus infused with a political charge. His dietary
"crankisms" (as he called them), his sexual anxieties
and habits, his bowel rhythms, fevers and black
moods, his prayers, spinning and walks, the drinking
of a glass of orange juice to break a fast, gathering
up a handful of dusty salt, even his silences
themselves became sources of rumour, legend and
inspiration. In such ways, he made of his physical
frame a barometer's needle: by its swings, all could
judge for themselves the British Empire's moral
health. And the British imperial state, faced with this
artful politics of the mundane, found the wind taken
from its sails.
To write an autobiography, Gandhi confessed to his
readers, was to indulge in something of an unnatural
practice, one that was "peculiar to the West". Yet his
use of the form marks a landmark in non-Western,
and specifically Indian, literary invention. He used it
to create, in the Indian imagination, the domains of
public and private: he reminds his readers that for a
"history" of his public work and life, they should
turn to satyagraha in South Africa; here, in the

autobiography, they will find only the details of his

personal and private life. Yet no sooner were these
spheres demarcated than Gandhi was busily blurring
and commingling them. His use of the genre of
autobiography was itself an instance of his ability to
seize upon categories from the Western repertoire,
and to translate them and bend them to his own
purposes, so allowing him to live and recount his
own, non-Western - and distinctively modern Indian life.
The modernity of the life he created lay most
fundamentally in the sense that it was a chosen life
(even if often stumblingly so) and also one whose
past meaning was revisable in the light of future
choices. It was in no sense foreclosed or predestined - as, traditionally, a Hindu might have
conceived his or her life. Nor was it directed by
spiritual masters or gurus. Gandhi speaks of his
disappointments in his search for a guide, and dwells
on the influence upon him of the Jain teacher,
Raychandbhai, only to acknowledge that even in his
late 50s, "the throne remains vacant" in his spiritual
heart. Equally, he did not see his life as simply
formed - and deformed - by the pressures and
seductions of the modern world. By conducting his

life as an experiment, he saw himself as akin to a

scientist controlling a laboratory session, who "never
claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps
an open mind regarding them".
The sense of choice expresses itself across the
defining areas of Gandhi's life: family, community,
religion, God, the pursuit of truth. He refused to
accept the conventional images or content ascribed
to any of these, and strove instead to create his own
sense of each. Thus, he transplanted his family into
unfamiliar situations, became a teacher to his wife,
and worried over their clothes, their food, and over
how their children should be brought up (in these
tasks, he turned often to one of his favourite
resources: self-help manuals). He cut his links with
the community into which he was born (he was
actually expelled from his caste group for having
polluted himself by travelling overseas), and found
ways to create for himself communities of choice,
drawn from all religions. These communities
included his fellow workers in South Africa, the
motley individuals he assembled in the ashrams that
he established, and most importantly, the Congress
movement - which he hoped could stand for his

vision of an Indian nation undivided by religion or

caste.
In the sphere of religion and God, Gandhi writes of
how, by opening himself up to the competing claims
of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, he experienced
a "mental churning", which led him to a spiritual
crisis. "I do not know where I am, and what is and
what should be my belief," he recalls telling one
religious interlocutor. His search led him in and out
of spiritual "Seeker's Clubs", and finally towards a
desire for a direct and personal relation to God,
unmediated by tradition or priests, and not bound by
the dogma of any one religious faith. He had to face
directly, in his spiritual commitments as in his daily
practice, the question of choice. His vegetarianism,
for instance, was the product of an active and
reasoned choice and one made, as he insisted,
"independently of religious texts". So too, in his
religious philosophy, the necessity of choice led him
to create a unique religious blend, that drew upon
legends and stories from India's popular religious
traditions, and wove these together with strands of
Christian teaching. "Saints and seers," he wrote,
"have left their experiences for us, but they have
given us no infallible and universal prescription. For

perfection or freedom from error comes only from

grace". That sense of grace, of a personal and
potentially wrathful God, was clearly borrowed from
Gandhi's reading of Christian writings. The presence
of such borrowings underlines how misleading it can
be to think of Gandhi as a purely Hindu spiritual
thinker: his religious views were far more complex
and elusive. Significantly, he described the object of
his faith loosely, and by negation: "I have made the
world's faith in God my own, and as my faith is
ineffaceable, I regard that faith as amounting to
experience ... I have no word for characterising my
belief in God".
One could read such a statement as an instance of a
characteristic Gandhian strategy. He affected
plainness and clarity, while also cultivating a
deliberate ambiguity in his terminology, so allowing
others to read into his words their own hopes and
fears - a crucial ploy for one who had to address and
appeal to so many diverse audiences: India's
peasants and educated elites, British politicians and
people, and world public opinion. But to see his
allusive gesture at his sense of divinity merely as an
example of cunningly elastic rhetoric is to miss how
Gandhi, both in his own life and in the kind of

universal ethics he wished to create, held fast to an

idea of psychological and ethical metamorphosis.
Human personality was, for him, not pre- given and
static. It was not decisively shaped either by nature
or culture: instinctual fear or social prejudice, each
was conquerable. Because human personality was
susceptible to influence and infinitely revisable, so
too definitions - of values and ideals - had to keep an
open-ended character: meanings were not
stipulative, but needed to be worked out in the
crucible of practice.
In his own life, and in his recounting of it, he bore
witness to this. The persona adopted in the
Autobiography is not that of a saintly, prophetic
individual preaching his message; rather, it is that of
a kind of Everyman (one Gandhi's favourite books
was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress), stumbling
painfully out from darkness and error towards the
light of truth. Gandhi charts out an artisanal picture
of the moral self - one that enables the crafting of an
ethics at once personal and universal, in the midst of
a bewildering world.
That ethics was far removed from any Hindu view of
a spiritual life as one that required renunciation of

the world. Gandhi, at the close of his Autobiography,

explained the relationship between his spiritual
quest, his pursuit of truth by means of Ahimsa or
non-violence, and his involvement in public life:
"To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of
Truth face to face one must be able to love the
meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who
aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any
field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has
drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say
without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all
humility, that those who say that religion has nothing
to do with politics do not know what religion
means."
It is an important formulation, and one which makes
no sense if read either solely in terms of the
grammar of traditional Hinduism, or the lexicon of
modern politics. By putting it this way, Gandhi
steers
our
attention
to
the
profound
unconventionality of his ethical sense: its existence
as a product of radical, original, and deeply personal
choice. The necessity of choice, and the discovery by the means of experience and constant experiment
- of the capacity of judgment that allows right

choices to be made: that is the core drama of

Gandhi's Autobiography. As such, it is a very
modern drama; and Gandhi's was a very modern life
- perhaps most of all in its judgement that there was
more to life than just being modern.
Gandhi wrote the chapters in Gujarati. The
translation was the mainly the work of Gandhi's then
personal secretary, Mahadev Desai, who translated
the first 28 chapters before political duties called
him away; the remaining 14 chapters were translated
by Pyarelal Nayar. The English version was read and
corrected by Miraben (Madelaine Slade). The
current translation was revised in 1940 by Mahadev
Desai, with the assistance of the British
anthropologist, Verrier Elwin, who insisted on
anonymity - on this point, see Ramachandra Guha,
Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his Tribals,
and India (Chicago, 1999), p.143-44.
Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India,
teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.