George Orwell
REFLECTIONS ON GANDHI
Saints 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 con–
sciousness 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 into 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 nine–
teen-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, and administrator or perhaps even a business man.
At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remem–
ber 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
~ere
mak–
ing 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
*
The Story of my Experiments with Truth.
By M.
K.
Gandhi. Translated
from the Gujarati by Mahadex Desai. Public Affairs Press. $5.00.
85
