orwell essay on gandhi

George Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi : Summary and Analysis

Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi is one of his most important essays probing the popular saint’s personality, perspective and works from various angles. The author has tried his best to be impartial on Gandhi since even his adversaries were unable to remain uninfluenced by him.  The question that whether Gandhi was a saint, a politician or both has haunted scholars. Answering it definitively would require a vast amount of research and reasoning. One notable fact about Gandhi’s life was abstinence and George Orwell highlights it in his essay at various stages in order to answer questions on Mahatma’s character. Orwell has also reflected upon Gandhi and his teachings and techniques in the context of the atomic war which was one of the darkest questions requiring answer following the dropping of the atom bomb.  The author also judges the appeal of Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence and if it had a universal appeal and could be practiced worldwide.

One great fact about Orwell’s essay is that you will find a stunningly clear picture of Gandhi in it – a picture that  looks vastly different from the one media or the other sources paint. Orwell has analysed Mahatma’s personality with great care and still he himself does not look satisfied. Orwell was an investigator who would probe any topic till he reached the right conclusion. Despite having drawn from second hand resources mainly, he has painted a large and clear picture of Mahatma. If any ordinary author tries to weigh and evaluate Mahatma Gandhi’s personae, it would take him a lot of reasoning with his own conscience. Gandhi had the power to bend others’ will in his favour. Orwell assesses Gandhi’s character and soul in his own honest manner.

Gandhi’s attitude and appearance could give rise to some distaste as Orwell openly accepts in his essay. His actions and thoughts have not escaped criticism either and were considered anti-human and reactionary by many.  However, while there were several things impractical about Gandhi and still an impartial evaluation shows his ideals and ideology as a potent tool against violence and mass destruction. Orwell successfully highlights the strengths of Gandhi’s philosophy and how one simple man and his simple philosophy had the potential to change the world. However, at an inner level, Gandhi was not as simple as he looked. His personality was complex  because of the mixed traits, the existence of which in the same person is unimaginable for most of us. Many of us trying to understand Gandhi’s personae would not be able to see beyond the first few layers. His stubbornness and courage are some important traits that can not be overlooked. Without putting things in the right context, one cannot have a clear picture of Gandhi. Orwell is not trying to defend Gandhi or his character in his essay. Instead he is trying to present a clearer picture that helps you see past the Mahatma’s personality and outer appearance. For most people, it was impossible to peep into Gandhi’s soul. The aura of simplicity around Gandhi was tough as a turtle’s shell.

Orwell’s approach to understanding Gandhi is more candid than others. He starts his essay by asking questions about Gandhi’s sainthood and the extent to which he was a saint or a politician. He asks if Gandhi was moved by vanity and if his ability to shake empires by sheer spiritual power had corrupted his conscience. If he was a saint, then to what extent did politics corrupt him or did he compromise his principles by entering politics. A definite answer to these questions is impossible without having studied the saint’s life in detail and without considering every large and small act in his life which was a pilgrimage in itself.  Orwell had studied his autobiography which was only partial because it continues only into the 1920s and still provides some strong evidence into those parts of his life which prove that he was a shrewd man who would have become a successful lawyer, administrator, or business man but chose otherwise, shunning all the worldly pleasures and wealth.

Orwell raises such questions right at the outset because he cannot agree with the normal picture of the Mahatma presented to the world but subjects the ordinary photograph drawn by media to his own litmus test. One important strength of the Gandhian philosophy that comes to light from Orwell’s discussion is that rejecting a few small things is essential to reach the bigger things in his life. Slavery is for those who are weakened by their personal biases and when your personal bias stops weakening you, you find strength against the biggest monster that can dominate you – your ego. Gandhi’s personality is complex and to see under its layers impossible. This complexity can hinder judgement and one may end up being over-influenced or unclear in his view of the Mahatma. The personality that looked simple and frictionless could exert pressure that even Hitler did not.

While Gandhi in person did not make a great impression on Orwell, his autobiography did, whose first few pages he got to read in a low quality Indian newspaper. The things that were most commonly associated with Gandhi like home-spun cloth, ‘soul forces’ and vegetarianism did not hold any special appeal in the eyes of the Western masses. The British believed they were using him as he had the ability to prevent violence. In private, the English would admit that he was a man with real influence. However, as his nonviolent methods grew more targeted at the British, it had left the conservatives angry.

Orwell had noted that even the officials that talked of him with amusement and disapproval had developed a genuine liking for him later. Such was the influence of the Mahatma that it was difficult to hate him for long. No one could find vulgarity or malice in him or fear or even cowardice. However, when you are judging a person like Gandhi you instinctively apply the very highest standards as you apply in case of saints. This can make people ignore some of his most important and finest virtues.  Orwell highlights his courage as an example. It was one of the most neglected of his virtues. Any man of stature in politics who valued his life would have hundreds of guards surround him. Gandhi was not well guarded at the time he was murdered. It proved either he did not fear death by an enemy or did not suspect having one. His simplicity kept other things about him hidden.

He was free from other vices too like he did not have that suspicion of a  maniac which most orientals can be accused of and which Forster highlighted in his ‘A Passage to India’. Neither was he a hypocrite like the British. While he was quite shrewd at detecting dishonesty, he never tried to press his personal values upon others and could connect with their better side easily. Moreover, he was not afflicted by envy or inferiority despite being from a poor family or lacking physical appeal. He was surprised by racism when he first saw it in South Africa in its worst form. Orwell highlights his virtues and his innocence because these virtues cannot be found in a person without innocence. While fighting against racism in South Africa, he never thought of people based on their color or race. To him, everyone from governor of a province to a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie or a British private soldier were all similar.  For such a person, it was difficult to be without friends and even when he was unpopular for fighting for Indians, he had some European friends.

Orwell explains how the Mahatma’s career went through stages before he started being known as the saint. His autobiography despite not being a literary masterpiece was impressive. It showed that while Gandhi might have been more content in some other field, he was forced to join politics and adopt his extremist opinions in stages and at times unwillingly. Gandhi did not happen by chance or by accident. He himself did not draw the path he followed. His character was shaped by circumstances and created through demand. He even made attempts to adopt a Westernized lifestyle as Orwell notes from Gandhi’s autobiography. “ He wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin ” (Source : Orwellfoundation). He was not a saint since childhood as usually happens in the case of most. Neither was he of the type that shun sensational debaucheries after once having drowned themselves in them. While Gandhi has confessed in his autobiography he did not have many sins to hide, there are really too few to confess. All his worldly possessions he had at the time of his death did not cost any more than Five Pounds. The same can be said about his sins or what he gladly accepts as mistakes in his autobiography. If they were to be heaped together, they would weigh less than those committed by a ten years old kid. His sins could be counted on fingers.

Apart from a few cigarettes, consumption of meat once or twice and a few annas stolen and two fruitless visits to a brothel, he had hardly committed any worldly sins. This is not possible without personal character. Hardly ever did he lose his temper or judgment except one or two times. Orwell does not miss to highlight the highest degree of self control which Mahatma demonstrated and which could otherwise be found only in Buddhist monks. Since his childhood, he possessed a strong sense of ethics, even stronger than religion but remained directionless till he turned thirty. So, his first entry into something that could really be called life of public activity was made by way of vegetarianism. His ancestors were solid middle class businessmen and in his personality those strengths could be felt clearly. So, for the sake of social service, he abandoned his ambitions but even then remained as Orwell notes “ resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions ” (Source: Orwellfoundation).

Exploring so many facets of Gandhi’s personality is not possible without feeling confused but Orwell has given an impartial touch to his analysis. He touches on Gandhi from several angles and while he is mostly appreciating Gandhi’s contributions he also explains what different people or groups have felt about him. He tries to reach the core of the topic that what made Mahatma a Mahatma (a saint) – as he was later called in his life. However, his teachings are based on his religious beliefs and so whether they can be accepted by everyone is not certain. Several people had also felt Gandhi to be touched by Orthodoxy. Despite those mixed traits in his character, there was hardly one that could be called sinful and for that even his worst critics have admitted him to be a wonderful man whose life was a gift to this world. While Orwell’s analysis is the most penetrating of all, it is so because he touches more on the real side of the Mahatma than the more glamorous side publicised by media. For many, Gandhi was like an enlightened monk but Orwell portrays him more as  a real person who wrestled India away from the British by virtue of his simplicity.

Gandhi’s teachings cannot be approached in the same manner as every piece of knowledge. They must be interpreted in the right context otherwise a tendency had grown to talk of him as if he were an integral part of the western left-wing movement. His opposition to state violence and centralism has made anarchists and pacifists claim him for their own herd. Orwell notes there is also an alien like and anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines that the anarchists and pacifists might have ignored. Gandhi’s teachings can mainly be interpreted in the Hindu context where only God is the truth and the material world an illusion.  To see it in a different context can lead people to varying conclusions. 

Apart from shunning all kind of animal food, he shunned alcohol, tobacco and spices. Sex was not a sin but must be practiced within restrictions and for the purpose of bearing kids only. In his mid thirties, Gandhi took oath of complete Brahmacharya that does not just mean complete chastity but also elimination of sexual desire. For an average man such high level of discipline must be very difficult to practice. He did not take milk either since it would arouse sexual desire. After it, the most important point – the person pursuing goodness must lose the personal and be impersonal. While trying to reflect on Gandhian perspective, Orwell also compares it with the common-sensical. Several of his actions and views do not look like based upon common sense and still he handled some of the most difficult questions in politics with skill and responsibility. It is why Orwell refers to the presence of a shrewd man inside Gandhi who was not a genius like Einstein but still had strong foresight. His shrewdness was also justified in the light of the problems he fought against.

There are no close friendships or exclusive loves. The way you like ‘A’ is the way you like ‘B’. He found close friendships dangerous and misleading because the personal bias born of it could lead you into moral wrongdoing. Orwell also finds it true because to love God or the humanity in its entirety, one must not give any one person a particular preference. To cultivate a bias for someone is not like loving him. However, to an average person it would mean being inconsiderate. You love your family means you love them more than others. This is where the humanistic and the religious do not match. His autobiography does not talk much about how he treated his kids and wife but gives a certain account where he was not ready to administer them animal food and instead was willing to let them die.  Any average man would consider it inhuman and would find it impractical because letting your kid die for want of animal food when he is ill is not less than cruelty. While such sacrifice on Gandhi’s part may look noble, for an average man it is inhuman.

Orwell while trying to evaluate Gandhian values in the light of their relevance for average human, sheds light on why they must not  be adopted by a common man. The essence of humanity is not perfectionism and one must not chase asceticism to an extent making friendly communication impossible. Detachment or non attachment is most often seen as a method to deliver oneself from worldly pain. This is where humanistic and religious ideal seem incompatible. Detachment or non attachment cannot become every human being’s reason who has to find reason in his worldly connections. Moreover detachment also means shunning responsibilities. While most people do not have a genuine desire to be saints, those who possess such desire are not much tempted to be common humans. The difference is similar to that between drama and reality. However, Orwell is not trying to ridicule Gandhi because if Gandhian lifestyle became everyone’s lifestyle, the originality and genuineness related with Gandhi’s personality will fail. He is trying to clarify the logic behind Gandhi’s perspective and if there was anything ridiculous behind it.

To sketch a complete picture of Gandhi is a difficult task but Orwell does try it and for it he studied many facets of Gandhi’s lifestyle, ideals, personal values and teachings. One cannot talk of him without mentioning Satyagraha which as per Orwell was a method of nonviolent warfare that was used to defeat the enemy without kindling any kind of fear, hatred or need for retaliation. It includes the use of tactics like civil disobedience, strikes, and similar more without being aggressive. However, Gandhi objected to passive resistance being understood as Satyagraha. Satyagraha is active resistance and active protests against oppression and evil – it denotes a firm stance in the favour of truth. Gandhi even served as a stretcher bearer in the Boer war and was ready to serve again in the World War I.

Even after having accepted nonviolence completely he believed that war had logic and you had to choose your side during a war. In this regard, he did not abstain from accepting the logic and did not pretend that you could be neutral in war and that both sides were exactly the same and which one won did not really matter. Gandhi remained honest even while answering such difficult and awkward questions. While the Western Pacifists evaded questions related to Jewish extermination, Gandhi answered that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which will rouse the world to Hitler’s violence. This answer could have shaken people as was Mr Fischer. The later events justified his response and Jews died in large numbers. While urging a non violent resistance against Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might lead to several million deaths.

Orwell questions the strength of Gandhian beliefs and if the person was able to think beyond his own struggle and if he even understood totalitarianism. He was able to generate publicity and arouse the world when right to free assembly and free press were limited by the government. There was no Gandhi in Russia and Russians could implement such movements only when the idea occurred to all of them. In Orwell’s view applying non violence to international politics was difficult and it was proved by the conflicting statements that Gandhi gave about the world war. The nature of pacifism changes when applied to international politics. Moreover the assumption that people have a better side and can be approached generously was not true in all contexts. If you were dealing with lunatics you will not necessarily find them approachable.

Gandhi might have been unaware of several facts but never felt afraid of answering a question and always handled them honestly. The Second World War had happened and the globe was on the brink of another. This had left George Orwell concerned that it would not be able to bear the effects of another world war. He could not see another way out of it than world-wide adoption of non violence. When Gandhi died, India was engaged in a bitter civil war. No one would have predicted the event till one year before the British fled India. It happened at the hands of a labor government and had Churchill been in control, things might have taken a different turn. However, by the time Gandhi died he had attained his biggest dream of India’s liberation from the British rule. Orwell asks a few questions before the conclusion. Was it Gandhi’s influence that so much support had gathered in favour of India by 1945? Had Gandhi been able to decontaminate the political environment with his non violent struggle? If such questions are raised about Gandhi, it is not difficult to imagine his mammoth stature. Questions can be raised about his sainthood and one can deny his ideals or feel a strong distaste for him but compare him to the other political figures of his time and his mere existence was a blessing for this world. Gandhi remained a misunderstood or less understood mystery and perhaps this was the reason that rather than being rewarded for his sacrifices and leadership, he was murdered brutally by a Hindu fanatic. However, even in his death he remained a picture of outstanding physical courage.

Orwell’s work illustrates Mahatma’s personality in detail. To avoid being partial, Orwell does not base it on first hand meetings or interviews and instead proposes to bring to light what can be uncovered only through reasoning. He peels the cover off Mahatma’s personality like an orange to show the pulpier side of him. He shows there is no stink underneath and Mahatma has preserved his soul from degeneration through sheer spiritual power and faith in basic principles like truth and non-violence. In politics, this will be seen as a great sacrifice and not as mere leadership.

Reflections on Gandhi

Orwell’s 5 greatest essays: No. 2, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’

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Gandhi’s towering moral reputation tends to blind us today to the role he played in the minds of is contemporaries in the British Empire -- that of a political activist.

This raised issues Orwell grappled with in this penetrating examination of Gandhi’s career , published in the Partisan Review in January 1949, a year after Gandhi’s assassination.

Orwell struggles to balance his natural skepticism of those held up as saints (“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent”) with his admiration for Gandhi the man, leavening it all with recognition that Gandhi’s principles and activities sometimes served the interests of his adversaries.

The British governors of India made use of Gandhi, he wrote, “or thought they were making use of him.... Since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever -- he could be regarded as ‘our man.’ ...The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away.”

One finds here some of Orwell’s most fascinating musings on political action in all its forms, especially nonviolence. Orwell is often portrayed as a critic of Gandhi, and there certainly is criticism in this essay, but the author’s ultimate judgment is the one that should stay with us, even more so for being pronounced at a time when memories of Gandhi the man and the politician were still very much alive:

“His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive.”

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Orwell and Gandhi

A reader writes:

I think you and Hitchens are both overly enamored of the provocative opening line of Orwell's "Reflections on Gandhi," which reads: "Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent..."

Go back and read the entire essay, which I treasure. To say, in the end, that Orwell dismissed Gandhi's "pacifism" as "idiotic" is simply wrong.

Written on the occasion of Gandhi's murder, it is the intersection of two of the towering figures of decency of the 20th century. Their mutual intellectual honesty always cheers me up.

For one, Orwell clearly acknowledges Gandhi himself utterly rejected the concept of "pacifism" and advocated something much closer to aggressive "non-violent warfare."

And in response to your dissent of the day, let me quote Orwell himself from the actual essay:

"At the same time, there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity...It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment (1949)? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?"

60 years on, what were the answers to those questions? It's not just a question of publicity. It's a matter of engaging over time the individual consciences of the human beings who must always be the instruments of power. Without question, that takes time and sacrifice and absorption of defeat. But do you think the unspeakable bravery of the  monks in Burma have had no effect? There will be a next time and a next. And there will be more death. But one day, faced with the pressure of their own corruption and doubt, the instruments of power won't function if the mirror itself doesn't crack.

Orwell writes: "One should, I think, realize that Gandhi"s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things.."

The immediate pleasure of experiencing social and political freedom or in seeing someone like Saddam get what's coming to him fall squarely within those things man measures. Gandhi was most concerned that men not live as slaves to their fear or anger or impatience. In that sense, he was deeply, classicly conservative. He knew that culture would change government given enough time. He knew that men can't control events, but they can control themselves.

Most of us don't want to believe that. We don't want to wait and suffer. We want to see and enjoy what we've done. Violence is faster. It's the easiest way to feel the fruits of our wills. It's also the only way to make monsters suffer, which, is a petty and meaningless impulse if we think, as Gandhi did, of any individual lifetime on earth as a passing moment in relation to eternity.

Finally, in assessing Orwell's opinion of Gandhi and his philosophy, consider this line from the same essay: "It seems doubtful whether civilization can survive another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi's virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised."

Not sure I can think of greater Orwellian compliment.

Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

The Mahatma and the Policeman: how did George Orwell view Gandhi?

Orwell and Empire

• By Douglas Kerr
• October 24 th 2022

In the mid-1920s, in Burma, a young officer of the Imperial Police was reading in an Indian newspaper an instalment of the autobiography of the most famous man in India. Years later, he remembered the moment and his mixed feelings:

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself, at that time, did not.

It is no surprise that Gandhi himself was not popular with British officials in the Raj. He, and the Congress Party with which he was associated, had for years been a thorn in the side of the imperial authorities, and were in the vanguard of the movement to force the British to quit India. In British Burma, nationalists looked to India for inspiration and sometimes support in their own struggle. Every imperial policeman in Burma was aware of Gandhi as the figurehead of this rebellious spirit, as well as a wily political operator who kept finding new ways to get under the skin of the government of British India and its disciplinary forces. If Gandhi did not make a good impression on the young policeman, whose name was Eric Blair, that hostile perception was maintained, for the most part, throughout the subsequent career of George Orwell, the writer he became. Yet on the face of it, this was surprising. 

Gandhi and Orwell were implacable enemies of the injustice of imperial rule and worked to change the minds of those who sustained it. This campaign came to a climax with the end of British rule in India in 1947, which both lived to see. So what was it that prevented Orwell from seeing in Gandhi a kind of ally, a comrade in arms, even a hero? Through his career, in which he wrote a good deal about Gandhi, he expresses suspicion, hostility, irritation, “a sort of aesthetic distaste,” and at best a grudging respect for the older man. Why?

The socialist anti-imperialist George Orwell did not cease (though he tried) to be an Anglo-Indian in many of his instincts and responses. Particularly when war came in 1939, he rediscovered in himself what he called “the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues.” Later, in 1942, when Britain and its empire were beleaguered, with victorious Japanese forces sweeping through Burma to the gates of India, he was exasperated that Gandhi and his allies would not co-operate in the defence of the country, instead demanding that the British quit India without delay. Orwell believed this would be tantamount to handing India over to the Emperor of Japan. The British immediately locked up Gandhi and the Congress leaders, setting back by several years the possibility of co-operation over India’s future. 

Orwell also thought that, in the 1940s, a pacifism like Gandhi’s was culpably naïve. Civil disobedience was all very well against the British in India, “an old-fashioned and rather shaky despotism,” but would be a hopeless tactic against a ruthless dictator. What action would Gandhi have recommended for the European Jews? The answer was on the record. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” This, in Gandhi’s view, would have aroused the world to the evils of Hitler’s violence.

Orwell said he remembered that, during his time in the Indian police, many Englishmen thought Gandhi was actually useful to the Raj. His advocacy of non-violence, they argued, always worked against translating anti-British resistance into any effective action, and meanwhile he “alienated the British public by his extremism and aided the British Government by his moderation.” Besides, Orwell found his religious views suspect, and in the end coercive. Gandhi was like Tolstoy, he grumbled, a utopianist whose basic aims were anti-human and reactionary.

Yet at the end of the day, he had to admit Gandhi was more responsible than anyone else for bringing about the end of British rule in India, the first and crucial step in the relatively peaceful dismantling of the empire. Orwell the anti-imperialist had desired this above all, and knew it could only be brought about by the action of imperial subjects, while Orwell the Anglo-Indian had never quite believed that the subject peoples themselves could ever make it happen. Even after the death of the Mahatma in 1948, Orwell couldn’t really make up his mind. In his last essay on Gandhi, written just a year before his own death in January 1950, he was still confessing that Gandhi inspired in him “a sort of aesthetic distaste”—and yet, “compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

Douglas Kerr is Honorary Professor of English at University of Hong Kong and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.

His first book was about the war poet Wilfred Owen and much of his later work studies English literature about the East in colonial and postcolonial times. His most recent book is  Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (OUP, 2013) and he is general editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Conan Doyle.

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Recent Comments

The last comment reminds me of a lovely book on Orwell by John Sutherland, Orwell’s Nose. Orwell could perhaps not overcome an instinctive dislike of Gandhi.

It’s worth remembering that until 1937 Burma was a province of British india, so Burmese nationalists and British officials probably regarded Gandhi as a direst exemplar.

Whoops! I mean “Burmese nationalists and British officials probably regarded Gandhi as a direct exemplar.”

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University of Birmingham

• Listen to the recording of Professor Kerr's lecture

Douglas Kerr is a former Professor of English and Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of Hong Kong, where he taught for more than thirty years. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of many books, including Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Oxford UP) and Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession and Practice (Oxford UP), but is especially important as an Orwell scholar. His work on Orwell includes multiple essays in journals and edited volumes of essays, alongside George Orwell (Writers and their Works series), Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong UP), and, most recently, Orwell and Empire (Oxford UP).

In 1926, a young officer of the Indian Imperial Police in colonial Burma read ‘in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper’ the opening chapters of Gandhi’s autobiography. ‘They made a good impression on me’, George Orwell recalled years later, ‘which Gandhi himself, at that time, did not.’ They were never to meet, but this was the beginning of the relationship between two men who became not only leading political thinkers and actors, but iconic national figures in the years that saw the beginning of the end of the British Empire around the world. In their beliefs and political aims, Gandhi and Orwell had a good deal in common. They were both born into different kinds of allegiance to Britain and what it stood for. Orwell belonged not only to the governing class, but specifically to the Anglo-Indian imperial service class. The young Gandhi was, by his own description, a most amenable colonial subject. But in the light of experience and of growing intellectual conviction, both men in due course became implacable enemies of the injustice of imperial rule, and worked to change the minds of those who sustained it. This campaign came to a climax with the end of British rule in India, which both lived to see. Both embraced a practical socialism, and worked in different ways to improve the conditions of the poor. So what was it that prevented Orwell from seeing in Gandhi a kind of ally, a comrade in arms, even a hero? Through his career, in which he wrote a good deal about Gandhi, he expresses suspicion, hostility, irritation, ‘a sort of aesthetic distaste,’ and at best a grudging respect for the older man. Why? Professor Kerr’s talk looked for answers to these questions.

This event was supported by the Centre for Modernist Cultures (CMC), in the School of English, Drama, and Creative Studies. CMC is a hub for world-leading research on literary and artistic modernism. Its members and invited speakers work at the forefront of the discipline, opening up modernist and early twentieth-century scholarship to innovative lines of inquiry and to new interdisciplinary and international contexts for the study of cultural modernity.

George Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi

In his essay, Reflections on Gandhi, Orwell tries to examine Gandhi’s principle of Satyagraha and how he applied this principle during his political struggle against the British. Let’s take a closer look.

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent,” says George Orwell in the opening lines of his essay Reflections on Gandhi . He wrote it a year after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi on 30 January, 1948.

Note: Click here to listen to the complete essay.

In his essay, Orwell tries to examine Gandhi’s principle of Satyagraha (holding on to truth) and how he applied this principle during his political struggle against the British. Orwell goes on to explain Gandhi’s personality, and what role it played in his political ideology. Let’s take a closer look.

As clear from the opening lines, Orwell sees Gandhi as some kind of saint, or at least someone who is pretending to be one. Orwell is being too harsh, you could say; and you are probably right. Further, he confesses that Gandhi did not make a good impression on him, at least initially. The things that one associated with Gandhi – home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism – he found unappealing. He found Gandhi’s whole agenda medievalist in nature as it ignored the modern reality. But, perhaps his most surprising criticism of Gandhi was with regard to the latter’s role within the British colonial structure. “They (the British) were making use of him,” argued Orwell. “Since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence – which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever – he could be regarded as our man. ”

The above critique is scathing and – quite naturally – raises a lot of eyebrows. The essay, however, tries to evaluate Gandhi in the entirety of his works. Orwell admits that the British officials genuinely admired and liked him. That no one could ever suggest that Gandhi was corrupt, or had any malice in him. In fact, Orwell made a concession that no commentator today ever makes: that we should not judge Gandhi by those impossible high standards which instinctively come to mind because of his personality. Instead we must see him as he was; for his virtues and vices. When we do that, we find that he was a man of courage. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavourably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or inferiority. He could approach everyone in the same way, which helped him make friends wherever he went. And all these people – including his worst enemies – would agree that Gandhi was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive.

Orwell reflects on the personal and political life of Gandhi, and one can see it as some kind of clash of two value systems. Gandhi supported vegetarianism, Orwell did not; Gandhi preferred brahmacharya (celibacy), Orwell did not; after all, Gandhi was religious and Orwell was not. Because there are fundamental differences in two value systems, there arise a number of points of disagreement. What bothered Orwell the most, as it’s apparent from the essay, was Gandhi’s superstitious behaviour which often brought misery to him and people around him.

Gandhi’s pacifism has often been criticised by people – and so is the case in this essay. As mentioned earlier, Orwell saw him as a stretch-bearer on the British side on multiple occasions. He says, by pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins, Gandhi made it hard for himself to be on the right side.

This appears problematic when you read Gandhi’s views on Auschwitz in Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin . According to Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. Clearly, this was nothing short of inhumane on Gandhi’s part. Similar accusations were made against him during Hindu-Muslim riots when he requested Hindus to practice non-violence, no matter what? – that fuelled a lot of anger and hatred, and perhaps was one of the causes behind his assassination. Orwell makes an interesting point that Gandhi’s non-violence as political tool could only work as long as the regimes were kind to him. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? he asks. And if there is, what is he accomplishing?

Despite all the virtues-vices, agreements-disagreements, and praises-criticisms, Orwell ends the essay on a much more positive note. He says: One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s aims were anti-human and reactionary; but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

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Huxley and Orwell on Gandhi

October 24, 2019 The Beacon That’s Life!! 0

Prologue to Huxley’s “A Note on Gandhi”

“This most practical of men…”

What tribute could have been as apposite as Aldous Huxley’s, just a  year after the leader had fallen prey to his assassin’s bullets? R ight at the outset the author of Brave New World locates India’s problematic in Gandhian terms: freedom for Indians meant the appropriation of the trappings of power, of the chains of the Nation-state. Drawing on Hind Swaraj, Huxley finds India rejecting the tiger of colonialism but adopting its tigerish nature. As Mithi Mukherjee reminded us in her book, India in the Shadows of Empire, India had embraced the colonial discourse and apparatus it had fought against; only Gandhi had opposed the adoption of the Nation-State by his followers because he sensed that it would turn them into the very ‘tigers’ they had been ‘oppressed by.

  Huxley finds that weaponising inevitable “in a world organized for war.” For an author who had seen dystopia creeping over the horizon and savaged it in Brave New World, Huxley was looking at the smoke signals on the horizon, heralding a permanent state of war and military tension since the end of the hot World War II and the immediate ascension of the grey mists of the Cold War. Nation-States had become metonyms for armaments and war. Like it or not, the “ ex-prisoners and ex-pacifists ” found themselves inheriting “ the instruments of violent coercion ” and turned into “ Jailers and generals .” Frames of reference matter, contexts define one’s actions and nationalist “ postulates ” that underlined the freedom struggles all around the world foretold “ armaments, war and an increasing centralization of political and economic power .”

  Huxley remained pessimistic about the capacity of future generations to change this nationalist discourse. But then he remembers Gandhi who had given us a vision of another world; the author of the most dystopic novel finds a redemptive ideal in his own time, in the lifeless figure of Gandhi gunned down by nationalist bullets. And why wouldn’t he? The fiction of Brave New World held up the truth of a dawning reality. Its exposure of hegemonic power based not on muscle power, the boot on the human face, as Orwell had described in his own dystopian novel 1984, but on a frightening use of science and technology by State apparatuses to promote a heedless satiation, was a cautionary that no one would heed. And why would they? Capitalism and market driven consumerism was the answer to the deprivations of world wars, the Depression; its promise lay in its nascence. By the end of the Second World War, in fact thanks to it, capitalism’s wheels were gathering speed; the age of consumption based prosperity was already tinting the sky roseate. In our neck of the woods, the promise of freedom for desire-satiation would allow few Indians to lend an ear to Gandhi’s misgivings of the nation-state and self-indulgence.

Huxley foresaw the future in the budding state of free India; in it’s incipience he saw Gandhi’s failure to “ modify the essentially tigerish nature of nationalism as such .”

  Pessimist he may have been but not despairing. The author of a savagely dystopic novel with no redemptive endings, views Gandhi a “ dreamer ” with his “ feet firmly planted on the ground ”; Huxley still pins his hopes on a time when society will find that this “ most practical of men ” had got a measure of man’s place in the world–a creature of “ no great size ” and for the most part of “ modest abilities ” yet imbued with an “ infinite capacity for spiritual progress .” Most nationalist leaders would have agreed about man’s limited qualities but would have tended to the view that technology and centralized statist power could turn that creature into a superhuman being. For such power brokers and seekers eager to mould India in the image of a dubious secularized modernity the “ infinities of a spiritual realization ” were orthodoxies best discounted, denied.

Did Huxley find in Gandhi then the antidote to the dystopic world he had imagined and created, a brave  new world in which people love servitude, where self-indulgence keeps the wheels of industry turning and “ soma ” is “ Christianity without tears. ” The dystopia he had painted so presciently was an artistic leap into the future, into the way we were destined to live and are living. Did he find in Gandhi’s philosophy, in the utopia he was painting for an India of his dreams, the wisdom for that future he would create with words on the pages of his masterful work?

The vectors of the new nation-state Huxley foresaw on the eve of India’s tryst with destiny were the foundations for the Brave New World: a muscular, armed nation-State; centralized economic and political power, heavy industrialization, prosperity “ and also, no doubt (as in all other highly industrialized states) a ris­ing incidence of neuroses and incapacitating psychoso­matic disorders”

In Gandhi’s answer to the violence of the nation-state pivoting on technology and centralized economic/political power and the consequent alienation of the individual from those qualities that make her human, Huxley found an empathic resonance. “ Democracy must mean decentralization in which localized groups can have say in self-governing, in finding love and personal relationships and Charity, in the “Pauline sense of the word .” Not almsgiving, that Gandhi decried and condemned but the generosity of agape, ‘disinterested’ love.

  Like other critics of Gandhian economic decentalization Huxley demurs from an endorsement of what he thinks Gandhi condemned: all forms of power-driven machinery. Perhaps Gandhi’s emphasis on the charkha ought to be considered a way of emphasizing the individual’s autonomy and agency from the alienating power of the machine. Who can deny that the robot represents the logical extension, the end of the alienation process that began in the nineteenth century, rendering humans redundant?

After likening some of the ideas of Gandhi to Thomas Jefferson’s visions for America as a decntralzied federation, Huxley gets to the heart of the most unique worldview in history that would also make history across the globe even if it was to be forgotten in the land of its birth: Gandhi’s insistence on the political as ethical and moral praxis. The Beacon

“ A NOTE ON GANDHI”

Aldous Huxley

andhi’s body was borne to the pyre on a weapons carrier. There were tanks and armoured cars in the funeral procession, and detachments of soldiers and police. Circling overhead were fighter planes of the Indian Air Force. All these instruments of violent coercion were paraded in honor of the apostle of non-violence and soul force. It is an inevitable irony; for, by definition, a nation is a sovereign community possessing the means to make war other sovereign communities. Consequently, a national tribute to any individual—even if that individual be a Gandhi—must always and necessarily take the form of a play of military and coercive might.

Nearly forty years ago, in his Hind Swaraj, Gandhi asked his compatriots what they meant by such phrases as “Self-Government” and “Home Rule.” Did they merely want a social organization of the kind then prevailing, but in the hands, not of English, but of Indian politicians and administrators? If so, their wish was merely to get rid of the tiger, while carefully preserving for themselves its tigerish nature. Or were they prepared to mean by “swaraj” what Gandhi himself meant by it—the realization of the highest potentialities of Indian civilization by persons who had learnt to govern themselves individually and to under­take collective action in the spirit and by the methods of satyagraha?

In a world organized for war it was hard, it was all but impossible, for India to choose any other nations. The men and women who had led the non-violent struggle against the foreign oppressor suddenly found themselves in con­trol of a sovereign state equipped with the instruments of violent coercion. The ex-prisoners and ex-pacifists were transformed overnight, whether they liked it or not, into jailers and generals.

The historical precedents offer little ground for opti­mism. When the Spanish colonies achieved their liberty as independent nations, what happened? Their new rulers raised armies and went to war with one another. In Eu­rope, Mazzini preached a nationalism that was idealistic and humanitarian.  But when the victims of oppression won their freedom, they soon become aggressors and im­perialists on their own account. It could scarcely have been otherwise. For the frame of reference within which one does one’s thinking, determines the nature of the con­clusions, theoretical and practical, at which one arrives.  Starting from Euclidean postulates, one cannot fail to reach the conclusion that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. And starting from nationalistic postu­lates, one cannot fail to arrive at armaments, war and an increasing centralization of political and economic power.

Basic patterns of thought and feeling cannot be quickly changed. It will probably be a long time before the na­tionalistic frame of reference is replaced by a set of terms in which men can do their political thinking non-national­istically. But meanwhile, technology advances with undi­minished rapidity. It would normally take two generations, perhaps even two centuries, to overcome the mental iner­tia created by the ingrained habit of thinking nationalisti­cally. Thanks to the application of scientific discoveries to the arts of war, we have only about two years in which to perform this herculean task. That it actually will be ac­complished in so short a time seems, to say the least, ex­ceedingly improbable.

Gandhi found himself involved in a struggle for na­tional independence; but he always hoped to be able to transform the nationalism in whose name he was fighting— to transform it first by the substitution of satyagraha for violence and second, by the application to social and eco­nomic life of the principles of decentralization. Up to the present, his hopes have not been realized. The new nation resembles other nations inasmuch as it is equipped with the instruments of violent coercion. Moreover, the plans for its economic development aim at the creation of a highly industrialized state, complete with great factories under capitalistic or governmental control, increasing cen­tralization of power, a rising standard of living and also, no doubt (as in all other highly industrialized states) a ris­ing incidence of neuroses and incapacitating psychoso­matic disorders. Gandhi succeeded in ridding his country of the alien tiger; but he failed in his attempts to modify the essentially tigerish nature of nationalism as such.

Must we therefore despair? I think not. The pressure of fact is painful and, we may hope, finally irresistible. Sooner or later it will be realized, that this dreamer had his feet firmly planted on the ground, that this idealist was the most practical of men. For Gandhi’s social and economic ideas are based upon a realistic appraisal of man’s nature and the nature of his position in the universe. He knew, on the one hand, that the cumulative triumphs of advancing organization and progressive technology cannot alter the basic fact that man is an animal of no great size and, in most cases, of very modest abilities. And, on the other hand, he knew that these physical and intellectual limita­tions are compatible with a practically infinite capacity for spiritual progress. The mistake of most of Gandhiji’s contemporaries was to suppose that technology and organiza­tion could turn the petty human animal into a superhuman being and could provide a substitute for the infinities of a spiritual realization, whose very existence it had become orthodox to deny.

For this amphibious being on the borderline between the animal and the spiritual, what sort of social, political and economic arrangements are the most appropriate? To this question, Gandhi gave a simple and eminently sen­sible answer. Men, he said, should do their actual living and working in communities of a size commensurate with their bodily and mental stature, communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. The larger a democracy grows, the less real becomes the rule of the people and the smaller the say of individuals and localized groups in deciding their own destinies. Moreover love, and affection are essentially personal relationships. Consequently, it is only in small groups that Charity, in the Pauline sense of the word, can manifest itself.  Needless to say, the smallness of the group in no way guarantees the emergence of Charity between its members; but it does, at least, create the possibi1ity of Charity. In a large, undifferentiated group, the possibility does not even exist, for the simple reason that most of its members cannot, in the nature of things, have personal re­lations with one another. “He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” Charity is at once the means and the end of spirituality. A social organization, so contrived that, over a large field of human activity, it makes the manifestation of Charity impossible, is obviously a bad or­ganization.

Decentralization in economics must go hand in hand with decentralization in politics. Individuals, families and small co-operative groups should own the land and instru­ments necessary for their own subsistence and for supply­ing a local market. Among these necessary instruments of production, Gandhi wished to include only hand tools. Other decentralists—and I for one would agree with them—can see no objection to power-driven machinery provided it be on a scale commensurate with individuals and small co-operative groups. The making of these power-driven machines would, of course, require to be carried out in large, highly specialized factories. To provide individuals and small groups with the mechanical means of creating abundance, perhaps one-third of all production would have to be carried out in such factories. This does not seem too high a price to pay for combining decentraliza­tion with mechanical efficiency. Too much mechanical effi­ciency is the enemy of liberty because it leads to regimen­tation and the loss of spontaneity. Too little efficiency is also the enemy of liberty, because it results in chronic pov­erty and anarchy. Between the two extremes, there is a happy mean, a point at which we can enjoy the most im­portant advantages of modem technology at a social and psychological price which is not excessive.

It is interesting to recall that, if the great apostle of Western democracy had had his way, America would now be a federation, not merely of forty-eight states, but of many thousands of self-governing wards. To the end of a long life, Jefferson tried to persuade his compatriots to de­centralize their government to the limit.  “As Cato con­cluded every speech with the words, Carthago delenda est, so do I every opinion with the injunction, ‘Divide the counties into wards.’” His aim, in the words of Professor John Dewey, “was to make the wards ‘little republics, with a warden at the head of each, for all those concerns which being under their eye, they could better manage than the larger republics of the county or State’… In short, they were to exercise directly, with respect to their own affairs, all the functions of government, civil and military. In addi­tion, when any important wider matter came up for deci­sion, all wards would be called into meeting on the same day, so that the collective sense of the whole people would be produced. The plan was not adopted. But it was an es­sential part of Jefferson’s political philosophy.” And it was an essential part of his political philosophy, because that philosophy, like Gandhi’s philosophy, was essentially ethi­cal and religious.  In his view, all human beings are born equal, inasmuch as all are the children of God. Being the children of God, they have certain Tights and certain responsibilities — rights and responsibilities which can be ex­ercised most effectively within a hierarchy of self-govern­ing republics, rising from the ward through the State to the Federation.

“Other days,” writes Professor Dewey, “bring other words and other opinions behind the words that are used. The terms in which Jefferson expressed his belief in the moral criterion for judging all political arrangements and his belief that republican institutions are the only ones that are legitimate, are not now current. It is doubtful, how­ever, whether defence of democracy against the attacks to which it is subjected does not depend upon taking, once more, the position Jefferson took about its moral basis and purpose, even though we have to find another set of words in which to formulate the moral ideal served by democ­racy. A renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general and in its power in particular, to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than in demonstration of material success or devout worship of special legal and political forms.”

Gandhi, like Jefferson, thought of politics in moral and religious terms. That is why his proposed solutions bear so close a resemblance to those proposed by the great American. That he went further than Jefferson — for ex­ample, in recommending economic as well as political de­centralization and in advocating the use of satyagraha in place of the ward’s “elementary exercises of militia”—is due to the fact that his ethic was more radical and his reli­gion more profoundly realistic than Jefferson’s. Jefferson’s plan was not adopted; nor was Gandhi’s. So much the worse for us and our descendants.

First published January 30 2018

Title: Reflections on Gandhi

Prologu e to Orwell’s “Reflections…”

In January 1949, a year after Gandhi was shot, George Orwell wrote an essay for The Partisan Review on Gandhi in which he assesses the man and his work in the context of a devastating world war, the Holocaust, India’s independence and the retreat of British colonialism from south Asia. Reflections on Gandhi is significant for what it seems to tell us about the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984” rather than Gandhi.

We have learnt, thanks to Francis Stoner Saunders compelling work. “The Cultural Cold War” that the The Partisan Review was part of a campaign by the CIA to penetrate and denigrate the Soviet Union and communism. But the author of the epic novel about totalitarianism, wherever it might attempt to crush the individual spirit, could not have known that. But he could have known, or at least should have known, that India’s freedom struggle was closely tied to the “saint” he finds “aesthetically” distasteful.

We get an ‘Orientalist’ reading of  “a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat” fantasizing about “shaking empires by sheer spiritual power” faced with the choice of stepping onto the hurly-burly of politics with their “coercion and fraud.” Orwell’s “naked old man” analogy sounds fairly reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s thundering sneer at the “fakir” “…striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace…”

Orwell sees Gandhi with western eyes saintliness and sainthood as anti-human. He admits that Gandhi himself never claimed to be a saint yet he draws a distinction between saintliness and humanism to tell us that Gandhi’s “aims were anti-human and reactionary.” Gandhi’s autobiography, (My Experiments with Truth) that Orwell talks about makes an impression on him; the man does not. Orwell himself lived rather ascetically partly out of necessity but also, when he came into money, as an indictment of bourgeois values. In the homespun cloth he sniffs at, he cannot see the elements of a civilizational struggle for alternate and collective lifestyles—he sees authoritarianism of saintliness…

Gandhi represents to Orwell the renunciate/saint condemning human foibles and weaknesses. But Orwell himself was contemptuous of the middle classes; the Socialists among them came in for some drubbing. “The worst advertisement for Socialism” he said, “is its adherents…”He called W.H. Auden a “gutless Kipling” In The Road to Wigan Pier, he savages the “fruit juice-drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac…’Nature-Cure’  quack, pacifist, feminist in England” who are drawn to Socialism and Communism. Fruit-drinker, sandal-wearer, vegetarian…is that why he had an “aesthetic distaste” for Gandhi?

Orwell has little patience for non-violent struggles, Satyagraha as a form of mass resistance to oppression; if it worked in India it was thanks to the British who were more accommodating than say, the Soviet state would have been. Perhaps Orwell had expended all his intellectual and emotional fury and even helplessness about totalitarianism onto the pages of 1984 . Close to death himself on the Isle of Jura he took a more pessimistic view of human potential and agency; and in any case Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement were some two decades away.

 So Orwell personalizes his subject. Gandhi’s “phenomenal piety”, his personal courage, his lack of color prejudice draws grudging admiration from a writer/public intellectual who has just admitted disdain for Gandhi’s aims; but he distances these qualities from their bearing on and rootedness in India’s mass movements however tenuous they might have been.

 For Orwell, freedom came to India on account of a Labour government in power; had Churchill still been in power things would have been different. The Orientalist discourse cannot help dismiss the uniqueness of a freedom struggle grounded in any other terms than the western one of power-politics expediency. For Orwell, Gandhi’s uniqueness remains a personalized one also evident in his immense courage to confront awkward questions that even pacifists and socialists tiptoed around. And all that Orwell is willing to admit is that as a politician, Gandhi left behind a “clean smell.”  The Beacon

“ Reflections on Gandhi ”

George Orwell

aints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him — home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism — were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever — he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.

But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded.

Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority.

Color feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European friends.

ritten in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin — all this was the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess. As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi’s possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be purchased for about 5 pounds, and Gandhi’s sins, at least his fleshly sins, would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without “doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper — that is about the whole collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense of direction. His first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions.

His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive. Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from .

It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one’s strength. Secondly, if possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally — this is the cardinal point — for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

However, Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in the truth”. In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18.

Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not — indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not — take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions .

In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

t the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.

Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly . It seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence.

It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles.

One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure .

It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another. On the other hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air?

That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

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"The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. [. . .] The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom of the mind which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own." , George Orwell, As I Please, 28 April 1944

Work : Essays : Reflections on Gandhi

Reflections on Gandhi

By george orwell, reflections on gandhi irony, the irony of saintliness.

There’s a prominent irony in Orwell’s opening sentence of the essay that “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” and in the broader critique of saintliness that plays out through the essay (209). The idea that a saint is not inherently or automatically “innocent” is the obvious irony; but beyond this, the qualities that may potentially exempt the “saint” from their humanness are the very qualities deserving of suspicion.

The irony of Satyagraha

Satyagraha as a form of civil disobedience contains apparent irony; at least there seems a logical contradiction in the idea of facing violence with non-violence; it seems that this may be a way of simply acquiescing to violence. The opposing logic of the principle also holds, however: the absence of physical resistance to violence may indeed quell the original aggression. This was essentially the principle that Gandhi tested out.

The irony of Gandhi's assassination

For a man who lived by a principle of non-violence, Gandhi’s death by assassination seems cruelly ironic. Yet perhaps such a death was inevitable, considering that he placed his body, undefended or protected, in the center of the extreme violence of partition. Perhaps it was only a matter of time that someone took the life of the man who offered his life.

The irony of partition

Near the end of the essay, Orwell refers to a point that he says many critics consider to be a tragic irony of Gandhi’s non-violent struggle: namely that when he died, India had reached the height of its worst period of violence in modern Indian history, during partition. While this indeed seems a striking irony, Orwell argues that it remains a separate matter from the main political mission of Gandhi’s life, and it doesn’t negate the success of that mission. Indeed Gandhi lived to see the non-violent decolonization of India. Partition, Orwell suggests, marks another period in Indian history distinct from decolonization. While the massive bloodshed that came with partition was certainly tragic, it may not in fact have been an 'ironic' aspect of Gandhi’s political struggles, as many presume it to be.

Reflections on Gandhi Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Reflections on Gandhi is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Why Gandhi sing "God save the king"?

I see no evidence of this in Orwell's, Reflections on Gandhi. One can infer, that Gandhi may have sung this in response to the fact India was a British colony, but he would have done this as a sign of respect.... not belief.

Describe George Orwell's narrative of Gandhi

One of Orwell’s central arguments is that Gandhi’s Satyagraha was only effective as a political leveraging tool due to the particular circumstances of his struggle: one such relevant circumstance was the Indian struggle for national...

What according to Orwell, is the popular image of Gandhi?

Orwell points out, home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism are popular images of Gandhi. He also calls him a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power.

Study Guide for Reflections on Gandhi

Reflections on Gandhi study guide contains a biography of George Orwell, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Reflections on Gandhi
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Essays for Reflections on Gandhi

Reflections on Gandhi essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Reflections on Gandhi by George Orwell.

• Orwell on Gandhi: Probing an Icon