What Gandhi Left
Jack, Homer A.
What Gandhi Left Mahatma Gandhi: peaceful revolutionary, i>y Haridas T. Mu-zumdar. Scribner's. 127 pp. $2. A Quest For Gandhi, by Reginald Reynolds. Doubleday. 215 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by...
...His five volumes published in the past three decades have been significant contributions to our understanding of Gandhi...
...Some of the best parts of this book are Reynolds' estimates of Gandhi...
...Muzumdar explains these Gandhian contributions in some detail...
...The author rightly concludes that "before the searchlight of history and the microscope of biography this man stood unafraid, asking no mercy, exposing every weakness in himself to pitiless publicity...
...Whereas he felt that the struggle for freedom in 1929 brought out the best in people, he now concludes that its achievement by 1949 is bringing out the worst...
...For a few months he saw a good deal of "the old man" and was even entrusted to carry an important letter to the Viceroy when the inveterate dramatist preferred "an English courier instead of a postage stamp...
...Muzumdar has spent much of his life interpreting the Gandhi of his native India to his adopted West...
...His latest book, though slim, answers a good many questions which Americans keep asking about the Mahatma...
...He suggests therefore that Gandhi may share the fate of other prophets whose ultimate effect has been most deeply felt outside their own land...
...It is here where Gandhi's method—Satyagraha—and some of his achievements—notably basic education—must be applied as it was here where, between 1893 and 1914, this method and some of these achievements were born...
...Gandhi was never especially concerned with consistency and therefore never followed his pacifism to its logical conclusion in every facet of group action...
...II Reginald Reynolds is an Englishman who, in 1929 at the age of 24, impulsively visited Gandhi in his ashram...
...He finds that the erstwhile jailbirds had been elevated from the dock to the bench...
...There is poignancy in Reynolds' second pilgrimage to a free India...
...Was Gandhi really a pacifist...
...Reynolds and Muzumdar are less ambitious but important additions to the growing Gandhiana, coming as they do from two longtime disciples of the Indian saint...
...This book is not meant to be a biography, but rather a "psychograph" and "sociograph"—an analysis of what Gandhi thought and why...
...His object in returning was to find out what Gandhi really left behind for India—and for the world...
...Indeed, he denies that Gandhi succeeded in India because he worked on "peculiarly favorable soil...
...In the past five years since the Mahatma's death, almost a hundred books have been published about Gandhi in America, India, and around the world, culminating in the eight-volume biography, Mahatma...
...He reveals the seldom told tale of how he and his associates tried to ask for clemency for Gandhi's assassin and how their efforts to apply "a little Gandhism in Gandhi's own country" were rebuffed by some of those who were closest to Gandhi...
...He insists that the future of India belongs to those to whom independence was not an end but a beginning...
...Reynolds corresponded with Gandhi fitfully in the following two decades and revisited India in 1949—unhappily after Gandhi's death—as a delegate to the World Pacifist Congress...
...The tragedy, Reynolds feels, is that those who accepted pacifism to win freedom were unable to believe that the same methods could preserve that freedom once it was achieved...
...He believes the roots of nonviolence were shallow in India and that some Western countries may offer more favorable opportunties for the development of certain Gandhian methods...
...Muzumdar presents a brief but brisk defense of Satyagraha—the tool of "soul force" or non-violent direct action which is the most important result of Gandhi's many experiments with truth...
...We witness a Gandhi who is a slave to his watch and one who deliberately sets out "not to impress people...
...Finally, the author answers two questions which constantly reappear: Was Gandhi consistent...
...The recent volumes of Messrs...
...Throughout the book Reynolds implies that Africa is the next continent for "the same old crowd" (who aided every good cause for freedom and justice in the 20th Century) now to be watching and now to be helping...
...Reviewed by Homer A. Jack IT IS one of the ironies of publishing that although people are not buying books by and about Gandhi, new volumes continue to come off the presses in profusion...
...The result is a fascinating volume for anybody who would be an informed citizen of the world...
...He explains the origin of this religious method, telling how Gandhi argued that "self-invited suffering" would call forth the response of common-human kinship from those who persecute and exploit and thus deny justice and freedom...
...Reginald Reynolds has given us an anecdotal biography of himself as much as of Gandhi...
...Although the world thinks of Gandhi as a saint and a politician, or a mixture of both, few realize his important experiments in the fields of economics and pedagogy...
...Reynolds concludes that India is no more pacifist than any other country...
Vol. 17 • January 1953 • No. 1
