Gandhi as military recruiter:

...At the same time, of course, Gandhi was determined to use these Western vir-tues against the West itself...

...Gandhi was - as he often said - an experimental mind, who brought together quite heterogeneous beliefs, and was ready to try almost any tactic...

...And three days later he wrote to Maganlal Gandhi, about Vaish-nava dharma (the sense of duty or righteousness cultivated by the followers of Vishnu, the cult to which his family belonged...

...The French fought among themselves with a sav-age ferocity hardly excelled during modern times...

...And it shows that sometimes this flexibil-ity and experimentalism led Gandhi into irreconcilable self-conflict...

...The Eng-lish carried on internecine warfare for twenty-one years before they settled down to peaceful work...

...It is one of Gandhi's most striking characteristics that, while identifying himself as a man of a special type, an abnormal and extreme phenomenon, he addressed the whole range of human types and invoked the criteria of cultural normality in doing so, the criteria of rea-son and tradition and culture...

...His movement's prime aim is self-purification, or the re-vival of the Kshattriya spirit, he says...

...The recruiting work was always done by British agents, and among the "martial races...

...He had a clear enough for-mula, that a man must be capable of violent resistance before he was capable of non-violence...

...One of his arguments was partnership: if Indians wanted to have the benefits of being treated as equals in the Empire, they must take a part in its defense com-parable with the part the English took...

...He said that Swami Shajanand (1781 -1833, founder of a Vai-shnava sect), and Vallabhacharaya (who spread Vaish-nava devotion in Gujarat) had robbed Vaishnavis of their manli-ness, because the kind of love they taught was sentimentality...

...modern Orientalists show the exact opposite...

...the lessons of history are not in accord with the gos-pel of peace...

...Will he, in his youth, be a for-giving or a timid man...

...he believed he owed sup-port to the army which defended him...

...He hated all confusions of the spiritual with the animal, the sacred with the sacrilegious - everything Tantric...

...It shows his exper-imental interest in venturing out into be-havior that may get him into trouble, and may puzzle and annoy his natural allies...

...I begin to perceive a deep meaning behind the Japanese reluctance to listen to the message of a Prophet from a defeated nation...

...If a Pathan were to come here and start hitting out with the lathi, we would all run away...

...Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph have pointed out in their book, The Modernity of Tradition, how much of Benjamin Franklin's moral-ity is reflected in Gandhi's...

...This was work which no Indian nationalist had touched, and for which there was no national con-stituency...

...One cannot climb the Himalayas in a straight line...

...It puts Gandhi and non-violence in the spot-light, and sees everything else in dark contrast - whether cowardly com-promise or ugly racism...

...This new aspect of non-violence which has re-vealed itself to me has enmeshed me in no end of problems . . . Shall we teach our boys to return two blows for one, or tolerate a blow from anyone weaker than themselves but to fight back, should a stronger one attack them...

...There his immediate circle contained intellectual Jews, en-gaged in life-experiment, and his general environment was people who were be-ginning again and proud of new energies...

...and ahimsa are for individuals to attain...

...The film (using mainly British actors) wisely concentrates upon the British fig-ures in Gandhi's story, especially after the scene shifts to India...

...He was not the first or the only politician to do this - one could point to both the parliamentarians like Bipin Chandra Pal, and the re-volutionaries like the Indian Communist party...

...No wonder he wrote to his friend Dr...

...Hence I have the fewest co-workers from among fellow-Banias...

...Tagore had gone to Japan, preaching pacifism, and had been coolly received.] War will always be with us...

...no interest in the other political and moral ideas around...

...Let us not hug our unmanliness for fear of fighting among ourselves...

...Gandhi had to say the things the British said - to complain, for instance, that though 400,000 men from the Pun-jab joined the army during the Great War, only seventy of them came from among the ten thousand university stu-dents...

...I must allow it to a certain extent to be even at-tached to the body . . . What is the meaning of having a vigorous body...

...When Gandhi arrived back in India, in January 1915, one of the things he did was to introduce Western styles and ac-tion and Western traits of character into Indian politics...

...Till now, we used to teach them not to fight back if anyone beat them...

...This is an example of Gandhi citing the lessons of history, which he usually re-pudiated...

...That the whole of India will ever accept satyag-raha is beyond my imagination...

...An overbearing Kabuli, entering a com-partment already crowded, will get the people to vacate the seats . . . and occupy the room for four...

...He had to praise martial loyalty and valor and to blame the educated mid-dle class - those who agitated for Home Rule for India - because they refused to defend their country or to respect those who did...

...His cleanliness symbolized a zeal to keep those things separate, to exalt the one and debase the other...

...Erik Erikson makes a similar point, saying that Gandhi tried to erect a bulwark, based on punctuality, responsibility and factuality, in the flux of Indian life, which is characterized by fluid move-ments of fusion and separation...

...It is clear that, before I can give a child an idea of moksha, I must let it grow into full manhood...

...believed that the West had taken a fundamentally wrong turning, and in that sense he was an Orientalist...

...And in some ways this internal debate shows us Gandhi at his most impressive...

...His ac-tivity, from then on, always had an in-secure foundation in theory...

...Thus Gandhiism begins on its manifest destiny, and any shocks and pauses it suffers seem the result of external opposi-tion or betrayal...

...he could not describe God or prescribe his teaching...

...That is why he changed his creed from "God is Truth" to' 'Truth is God...

...Satyag-raha is a soldierly instinct, and Banias are largely associated with money-making rather than with fighting for a cause...

...And perhaps his most striking formula-tion of the idea occurs in a letter to his English friend, Andrews: "You cannot teach ahimsa to a man who cannot kill.'' THIS IDEA involved Gandhi in debate and doubt of himself, much more than did his ideas of sex, for on this issue he was strongly drawn in opposite di-rections...

...Can it be that, in like fashion, the path of non-violence, too, is difficult...

...Use yours...

...But this meant that the mouse and the ant must change, as well as the cat and the elephant...

...Probably the crucial experience of Gandhi's life, after his original calling, was the frontier ex-perience he got in South Africa, far from the old rigidities of India, and the new pomps of England...

...It is also an example of why he had finally to repudiate them...

...There were times when he con-sidered redefining that concept, to in-clude what the rest of us would call vio-lence...

...This fluctuation, and others, earned him suspicion and contempt from his political rivals, but, properly under-stood, it should make him more understandable and likable to us...

...But this time he was persuading men to fight as soldiers...

...Brahmacharya consists in refraining from sexual indulgence, but we do not bring up our children to be impo-tent Non-violence was taught by a Kshattriya to a Kshattriya...

...It will not be a new phenomenon if we fought ourselves into sanity...

...On the same day he wrote to Andrews: I must indulge myself again...

...But theory was not, of course, what he had built his life on...

...We commit violence on a large scale in the name of non-violence...

...Full prac-tice of ahimsa is inconsistent with possession of wealth, land, or rearing of children...

...At the Battle of Plassey (where Clive and a small English army defeated a vastly larger numflfer of Indians...

...It is a weakness in the film that it reduces the complex South African situation to the single issue of anti-Indian prejudice, eliminating that circle of intel-lectual Jews, Gandhi's Robinson Crusoe enthusiasm (he himself names that book) for simplifying his life, and the native population, so much worse treated than the Indians...

...Of all my activities, I regard this as the most difficult and the most important...

...This came to a head in 1918, when he began recruiting in his native province on behalf of the British army...

...Mehta on July 2: "You must be watching my work of recruitment...

...This is the big change which had come about...

...As two last examples of his power of imaginative projection at this time, we might take a letter of July 22, 1918, to Punjabhai: "What we have taken as dharma [duty] is not dharma...

...Another way in which Gandhi de-fended his consistency was by saying that military training was appropriate for those who did not believe in satyagraha [non-violent resistance...

...Twelve days later he wrote to Mas-hruwala (another ashramite): In what manner should the children learn to use their strength...

...The film takes no interest in Gandhi's radically different sense of values and self-formation...

...Can we go on doing so now...

...The Americans did nothing better before they evolved their commonwealth...

...he himself, though serious, was a playful thinker...

...PUBLIC CLEANLINESS was another modern value as important to Gandhi as to Westerners, and with the same Prot-estant resonance...

...But it involved him in many difficult questions of application which tormented him in the summer of 1918...

...this was a very Western and Protestant zeal...

...Non-violence comes into play mainly in men's relations with each other, and these two teachers gave no hint of that...

...There can be no partnership," he said, "between the cat and the mouse, between the ant and the elephant...

...the rishis of old stipulated that their religious practices were to be pro-tected by the Kshattriyas . . . Total disregard of death in a Mohammedan lad is a wonderful possession...

...My powers of thinking fail me...

...It shows his imagina-tive flexibility and willingness to imag-ine points of view and modes of being quite unlike his own...

...Any stout fellow can successfully intimidate us...

...That is hardly surprising, when it pays no atten-tion to that dialectic in Gandhi himself...

...In his writings he asso-ciates the need to cleanse particularly with temples, because of their combination of gold (and jewels) with filth (and blood...

...There seems to be no possibil-ity of the whole human nature becom-ing transformed...

...We see that paradoxi-cal character - though it quickly became the reverse of playful - in this matter of his attitude toward violence...

...Truth was his God, the Truth he discovered only in action here and now...

...On the July 17, 1918 he wrote to Hanumantrao, one of his disciples, at the ashram: I do believe that we shall have to teach our children the art of self-defense...

...I have come to see, what I did not so clearly before, that there is non-violence in violence...

...Like Franklin, he went over his accounts daily, and was determined that nothing should be thrown away...

...In all these traits Gandhi can remind us of an artist - say Tolstoy...

...I see more and more clearly that we shall be unfit for swaraj for generations to come if we do not re-gain the power of self-defense...

...the only revelation was existential...

...I had not fully realized the duty of restrain-ing a drunkard from doing evil, of killing a dog in agony or one infected with rabies...

...If I suc-ceed in it, genuine swaraj [self-rule] is assured...

...and in South Africa he had organized Indians into hospital units to help the British in the Boer war...

...Moksha...

...What should one do if assaulted by a Government official...

...The film had of course to simplify...

...And the work involved him in endless explanations of how he recon-ciled this work with his opposition to violence...

...In Young India on October 20, 1921 we find: .. . the sooner we are left free to fight, the better for our manhood, our re-spective religions, and our country...

...A Bania can never practice non-violence...

...Buddha and Mahavir.] Raendra Prasad tells us in his Au-tobiography that Gandhi was full of in-decision and self-doubt after his recruit-ing campaign, and often wept and said, "I do not know what God's will is...

...we were a cowardly mob . . . And so we have remained more or less - more rather than less-up to today...

...He often, in this period, said that he was ceasing to be a Bania (the merchant caste into which he was born) and becoming a Kshattriya (the warrior caste...

...In all these instances, vio-lence is in fact non-violence...

...Most im-portantly, he was concerned about men of violence, and wanted to define their place in society, and their virtues...

...It is a dif-ficult thing to teach them to defend themselves and yet not be overbear-ing...

...This was politically realistic but morally confus-ing, for it left his listeners free to assign themselves to their section, or to invent a new one...

...He fell ill, nearly died, and when he recovered en-gaged in the nationalist agitation which won him the national leadership...

...There were 800,000 Indians in the army, but they came from areas and social groups which had nothing to do with Congress, the center of nationalist politics...

...It begins with his first (appa-rent) encounter with racial prejudice in South Africa, and we see him distinguish himself from other Indians simply by his stubborn courage...

...Gandhi brought to India the work ethic and its interest in economy of time and effort...

...It does not seem, moreover, that Gandhi ever resolved the problem...

...He had him-self before then volunteered to serve in the war (as a non-combatant...

...Vio-lence is a function of the body...

...The only Indian who is given much attention is Nehru, the most anglicized of them all, and there is no attempt to trace in him the dialectic of Indian versus English elements...

...He had a strong sense, which he frankly admitted, that he and those like him were mice and ants...

...Thus he had one message for one sec-tiop of his audience, the peace-makers, and another for the war-makers...

...This sense of gleeful paradox is not imported into Gandhi's thinking...

...He does what they would do if they dared - what we would do...

...But Gandhi spoke to all of them...

...What will be the effect of such teaching on a child...

...He set himself the goal of getting twenty men from each of the six hundred villages in Kheda, a part of his native Gujarat...

...He himself had twice volunteered for service in this war, once in France and once in Mesopotamia...

...But in fact Gandhi's tactics and even his beliefs varied strik-ingly, even in matters so basic to his movement as his teaching of non-violence...

...But the traits Gandhi embodied were peculiarly proper to, and co-original with, Western ideology...

...because, however pas-sively, he was accepting the military pro-tection of the Empire...

...If we are sometimes struck by the gulf of differences that separate Gandhi from his great precursor and mentor, this is one of the times when we see them as profoundly alike.es when we see them as profoundly alike...

...He had asked the gov-ernment to make him its chief recruiting agent on April 30, 1918...

...but this simplification reduces the painful and complicated interest of Gandhi's triumph to a sentimental liberal-saint's legend - which means that it will be taken less seriously...

...He reflects on the ignominy of Indian history and the need for vitality in the future...

...Fearing to shed blood, we torment people every day and dry up their blood...

...How far should India have to go in for a training in armsbearing...

...He also said, as in Nadiad on June 17, that swaraj without military power would be useless, and joining the army was the way for Indians to learn military skills...

...This means for me a rearrangement of so many ideas about self-development and India's development...