Mahatma Gandhi and his apostles

280 Pages·2012·10.6 MB·English

by  Ved Mehta

MahatmaGandhi
and His Apostles
—
It long seemed that Mahatma Gandhi could
not be comprehended by the Western mind.
Having arisen in a culture that had so little in
common with our own, and being an anomaly
even within that culture, he was a shining but
enigmatic figure. Millions of words were writ-
ten about Gandhi, millions of his own words
were recorded by his disciples, some fourhun-
dred biographies of him were published, and
—
he wrote an autobiography yet he eluded us.
He loomed large, and we knew that he was
regarded variously as a great political leader,
a great spiritual leader, a sage, a visionary, a
—
prophet, a saint, Christ, a god yet he re-
mained an abstraction. The man himself,
though he lived in our time, was lost to us.
Ved Mehta, born in India, educated in England
and America, an author equally at home with
Eastern and Western thought, whose intellec-
tual and moral interests span the two cultures
and who has written brilliantly about both,
was almost inevitably drawn to the task of
recovering for us Gandhi as a human being, of
making the unintelligible intelligible.
With a devotion and a literary seriousness
worthy of this transcendent subject, Mr.
Mehta has set down a clear, enthralling ac-
count of Gandhi's life, separating fact from
myth and casting light on Gandhi's principles
and his purposes, his ideas and, most impor-
tant, his actions: as Mr. Mehta says, the way
to holiness, for Gandhi, "lay not in withdraw-
al from the world but in immersion in the
—
world" in action. He did not merely formu-
late principles; he embodied them. In Gandhi's
mind, political and religious aims became iden-
tical, and means and ends virtually identical.
He dedicated himself to truth, to nonviolence,
to celibacy, to control of the palate, to pov-
erty, to scripture-reading, to humility, to hon-
esty, to fearlessness: truth and nonviolence
became the forces governing his civil-disobe-
dience campaigns against injustice, against op-
pression, against conflict between Hindu and
Muslim. In order, while it was still possible, to
talk with relatives and disciples of Gandhi
because, as Mr. Mehta says, "it is in the mem-
ories of his closest followers that the pictures
(Continuedon backflap)
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Mahatma
GANDHI
and His Apostles
Books by Vcd Mehta
Face to Face
Walking the Indian Streets
Fly and the Fly-Bottle
The New Theologian
Delinquent Chacha
Portrait of India
John Is Easy to Please
Daddyji
Mahatma
GANDHI
4o
ft and His Apostles
VED MEHTA
THE VIKING PRESS
NEW YORK
6
©
Copyright 1976 by Ved Mehta
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in anyform
First published in 1977 by The Viking Press
625 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canada by
The Macmillan Company ofCanada Limited
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGINGINPUBLICATIONDATA
Mehta, Ved Parkash.
Mahatma Gandhi and his apostles.
Includes index.
1. Gandhi, Moh—andas —Karamchand, 1869-1948.
2. Statesmen India Biography I. Title.
DS481.G3M43 954-03'5'0924 [B] 76-2773
ISBN 0-670-45087-1
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
The text of this book originated in The New Yorker.
—
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the more than five years that this book was in the making, I
relied for support on theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda-
tion, which appointed me a Fellow (1971-1972), and on the Ford
Foundation, which awarded me an extended Travel and Study Grant
(1971-1976); presumed upon the good will of hundreds ofGandhi's
disciples and followers, all ofwhom contributed to my knowledge but
only a few of whom could be directly introduced in the text (some
Rajagopalachari, M. A. Abdullah, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Sucheta
—
Kripalani, RaihanaTyabji have since died); enlisted the aid ofa pha-
lanx of readers, amanuenses, typists, and editorial assistants, notably
Doreen Beck, who helped me revise and distill the week's work every
Saturday; benefitted from the comments of, among others,Judith M.
Brown, of the University of Manchester, and Hugh Tinker, of the
University of London, each of whom read sections of this book in
proofs; and freely/called upon the grammatical expertise of Eleanor
— —
Gould Packard and for want of a better phrase the editorial guid-
ance of William Shawn. To all of them:
I thank you for your voices, thank you,
Your most sweet voices.
Ved Mehta
New York City