— by Punya Upadhyaya, HfHR cofounder

— by Punya Upadhyaya, HfHR cofounder

How do you know the Mahatma? Most of us know him the way we know the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon – amazing, distant, inscrutable. We have our third and fourth had versions, coming from movies (Hurrah Attenborough) and stamps and bite size items in textbooks and scandalous conversations in the media. I have always seen him as an Indian genius, and today, I see him as an exemplary Hindu – one who capaciously embraces the possibilities and fragilities of our traditions and this informs his greatness. Let us count the ways –

• Lived faith – With a strange mix of parental care, early marriage, education and the trauma of his father’s death, Mohandas Karamchand lived a version of Hinduism that was uniquely his with moral strictures, freedom, guilt and shame. This is a deep truth in our Indic ways – we each construct a Hindu reality that is uniquely ours, one that may be incomprehensible in some ways to our intimate others – and we accept that this is how we are.

• Thirst for transformational learning – In the Rig Ved, the poets say, “What will you do with the Vedic hymn if you do not know the Truth- and if you know the Truth, you will be perfect” (RV 1, 64). The point here is that mere recitation is useless without experience – and Mohandas became the Mahatma as he continuously “experimented with truth”. He focused on transformation for himself and all those in his world. He failed often – and won amazing victories.

• Intimate ambivalence – It is a fact in our traditions that we valorize women and behave atrociously, worship cows and the Ganga and treat them terribly, and in many ways act in diametric opposition to our most cherished beliefs. This is the nature of incompleteness in tradition, offering spaces to be real and free. Mohandas Gandhi has been very open with his struggles with sexual desire – and his behavior with women has often been colored and controversial.

  These issues are quite complex to say the least. Manuben Gandhi was Gandhiji’s grandniece, and one of the two girls he slept with naked in order to “test” himself — something that is clearly unacceptable and disturbing. Manuben came to the family at 14 when her mother died. She went to jail to take care of Gandhiji’s wife Kasturba. And she was with the family when Kasturba died. Manubehn describes Gandhiji’s diatribes against makeup, “this craze for false things has affected the purity of our inner self,” and it is his his detailed care for her in the midst of all his work in the freedom struggle that led her to call her book, “Bapu, My Mother.”

• Deep fearlessness – “May we be free from fear in the night or day, or in any direction” Atharva Veda 19-15-6. In many texts the enlightened one is described as free from fear. And the Mahatma showed this is in word and deed. He never hesitated to speak – even when he was unpopular. And he led from the front – facing guns, and lathis, and violence of all stripes. On the 14th of August 1947 he was confronted by young Hindu men calling him “an enemy of the Hindus” (sound familiar?). He said – “why can’t you realize that I, a Hindu by birth, a Hindu by action, can never be an enemy of the Hindus? … I am a servant of both Hindus and Muslims.” On that day, the young men believed him – later, there were cowards and assassins.

• Deep flaws – As a happy Hindu I am all too aware of our follies. The ridiculous and invidious stench of the caste system is shameful for all of us who let this continue. Gandhiji struggled with this issue and failed – he could not accept the depth of the cruelty and vileness in this part of Hinduism and failed to support Balasaheb Ambedkar to drive radical change. Similar to the persistence of structural racism in multiple societies (USA, Israel, South Africa) or implications from pogroms (Poland, Hungary, Russia), or slavery (Gabon, Ghana) India continues to suffer from failures of our values.

• Learning widely – The only guide for the seeker is truth – there is little credence given to artificial boundaries of sect or sampradaya. For householders there can be structures, but there is a clear desire to engage generously with the world. Gandhiji engaged widely with Tolstoy, Ruskin, Morris and others to create new versions of Indic truth. He clearly connected with a life force in their writing, one that a profound scholar like Ananda Coomaraswamy can give us context for – Gandhiji focused on application and scale, to help create new worlds. He embraced all types of realities and ways of truth and put a focus on the people as a whole that transformed society and people at immense scale.

• Caught in blind spots – Even with a holistic, generous, and capacious tradition our own experiences are always a limitation. When Mohandas was becoming the Mahatma in South Africa he struggled with his colonial identity. Like other ethnic groups he focused on the welfare of Indians, ignoring or exacerbating the plight of Africans (Ndebele, Xhosa, Zulu and others, not just “Africans”). This has led to contemporary condemnation of his racism – and leads to a broader discussion on how the oppressor tends to divide us to keep their hegemony intact.

• Adjusting tradition – The only real tradition is one that is given new life in the worlds of today. India has always been happy to reinvent and recreate - listening to local teachers they will often say “it has always been this way” for ideas they have literally invented in front of you. To paraphrase Ashis Nandy, “Adjust” is an Indian word that was accidentally invented in English! The give and take, the incompleteness, the compromise, the fitting of the 7th person on the 4 seater bench, the pulling up of the yet another train passenger into an overfull carriage – this generosity is Indian – and the Mahatma made full use of this. His innovations include ahimsa, satyagraha – and the most Hindu one – the valorization of “sevadharma”. You can see the re-inscription of karma yoga as derived from “work” rather than the historic sense of “ceremony” as a lasting contribution that even his critics have adopted unknowingly.

Finally, I want to close on a personal note – I did not plan to study the Mahatma – I was happy with him being far away. And yet, as I have been lucky to visit the Taj and walk on the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I have been lucky to keep meeting him. In my pilgrimages across India, spending time where saints and enlightened teachers have spent time has been a real gift. Sitting in rooms where Anandmayi Ma, Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Neem Karoli Baba have lived has been a sensory delight. Imagine my surprise when my wife and I visited a house where the Mahatma often lived on Marine Drive in Bombay. As we stepped up to the glass enclosed space, I was struck in my senses by the keen awareness of his spirit. This is a similar feeling to those of the other saints I mentioned. It is possible that Viswakavi Rabindranath Tagore knew what he was doing when he named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma. It is a real title, one that he cultivated and came to live fully (even as he joked that it is counterfeit). And this experience of expressing divinity with no hesitation is the core of the Hindu reality, one he lives fully even today.