Gandhi's Dharma: Itineraries of a Religious Life

Prayer meeting at Bangalore railway staion 1927

Vinay Lal

he subject of Gandhi’s “religion” has never been more important than at present when Hindu nationalism is sharply ascendant and Hindu pride is being championed as a necessary form of the reawakening of a long subjugated people. The contemporary Hindu nationalist narrative also feeds on other propositions, among them the conceit that Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion, the view that Hinduism is uniquely tolerant, the apprehension that Hinduism’s tolerance has historically rendered it vulnerable to more aggressive faiths, and the twin conviction that Indian civilization is fundamentally Hindu in its roots and that secularism is alien to India.

Gandhi would not have abided by much of this worldview. Indeed, he would have been sharply critical of what is represented by Hindu nationalism, and therefore it becomes imperative to assess what he understood by Hinduism, what it meant for him to be a Hindu, the relationships that he forged with Muslims and Christians, and the centrality of Hindu-Muslim unity in his thinking. It is well to remember that Gandhi’s assassin felt justified in killing him partly on the grounds that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindu community.

The more secular-minded have thought it fit, with some justification, to characterize his religion as manavta (humanity), manav seva (the service of humankind), or sarvodaya (the welfare of all). But the fact remains that Gandhi often declared his belief in varnasrama dharma and he remained a devout Hindu. He described himself on more than one occasion as a “Sanatani Hindu”, and, had he been communicating only with his fellow Indians, would most likely have forgone the use of the word “religion” altogether.

Though Gandhi was not a scholar as such, he made a careful study of the religious texts of most of the world’s faiths, and had come to understand that the very idea of “religion” was crafted in the mold of Protestant Christianity.

No “Hindu” characterized herself or himself as such before the late 18^th century: the “Hindu” was born around that time, and what would become Hinduism, more particularly in its middle-class variants, was largely shaped by the Protestant understanding of what constitutes a “religion”.

The roots of Gandhi’s religious worldview and conduct must be located in the religious milieu from which he emerged and in which he was raised. Gandhi’s predilection for the Vaishnavism of his household and the region was reflected later in his life, one might say, by his fondness for Narsi Mehta’s bhajans, most famously “Vaishnava Janato”, and Tulsidas’s Ramacaritmanas. His mother belonged to the Pranami sect, which, if centered on Krishna worship, showed a remarkable ecumenism in also drawing upon the Quran and the Bible and multiple linguistic traditions. But Jainism also left a deep impress upon Gandhi from the outset, and Gandhi drew upon all three traditions in his thinking about ahimsa and what Jains call anekanantavada, “the many-sidedness of perspective”. The subject of how Jainism came to inform many of his views is critically important, and many of the central tenets of his religious practices, such as his insistence on vows, were derived not only from Hinduism but perhaps even more so from Jainism. Gandhi was much more likely moved by the example of Jain lay persons who, as they transition to the state of being a monk, hold themselves to ever more demanding and stringent vows.

Gandhi has himself said that it is in England that he acquired an understanding of textbook Hinduism. He first became familiar with the Gita, a work which would in time become his life-companion, in the English rendering of it by Edwin Arnold called “The Song Celestial.” The world of Christianity, on the other hand, really opened itself up to him in South Africa: if the Old Testament begat nothing but sleep within him,portions of the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, moved him deeply.

And it is in South Africa that he encountered a great many missionaries, who all came to the conclusion that it was impossible to convert Gandhi to Christianity since he was a much better Christian than any they had ever encountered.

Whatever other great contemporary Hindus—using this term, for the sake of expediency, as an umbrella term to designate the major exponents of sanatan dharma, leaders of the Arya Samaj, advaitins such as Ramana Maharishi, or intellectuals and scholars such as S. Radhakrishnan—thought of Gandhi, he was throughout his life championed by a wide array of Christian theologians, preachers, and activists. Some of them even learned from his insight that Christianity and the teachings of Jesus were not at all the same thing.

Gandhi had known Indian Muslims in South Africa and he addressed the question of Hindu-Muslim unity in Hind Swaraj (1909). Nevertheless, it is only his return to India in 1915, and his subsequent immersion into Indian public life, that made him gravitate to the view that the question of Hindu-Muslim unity was pivotal; and thereafter nothing, one might say not even the struggle for Indian independence, preoccupied him as much as this question. Indians, and most historians, have gravely misunderstood his advocacy of the Khilafat as an ill-conceived attempt by him to curry the favor of Muslims in the hope that he would extract from them a pledge to support the ban on cow-slaughter.

It would not be sufficient to say, though this is no mean consideration, that the instrumentalization of politics in this fashion was sheer anathema to him.

Rather, he had by this time, circa 1920, come around to the position, as radical then as it is now, that both the Hindu and the Muslim are incomplete without each other. This would remain one of the cornerstones of his religious belief.

In reflecting upon what endures from Gandhi’s lifelong and extremely rich understanding of the religious life, some principles stand out.

First, in moving from the proposition that ‘God is Truth’ to ‘Truth is God’, Gandhi sought to signal a certain inclusiveness and suggest that the core of ethical life is the quest for Truth. A confirmed non-believer such as the social reformer Gora, who wrote a fascinating little book called An Atheist with Gandhi, could partake of Gandhi’s religious universe. It would not be too much to say that the worldview of the atheist was not alien to Gandhi, but he would have found modern-day secularism incomprehensible even alienating.

Those, such as the likes of Amartya Sen, who suppose that in Ashoka or Akbar we have preeminent examples of the secularist in pre-modern India, have failed to see that Gandhi saw in them not the figure of secularist but the devout Buddhist and the practicing Muslim, respectively.

There was nothing in the soil of India that was hospitable to the ideology of secularism; however, Gandhi also firmly adhered to the view that the state was to make absolutely no distinction between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and adherents of other faiths.

Secondly, he stood by the idea that no religious outlook was acceptable, no matter how venerable a text, until it passed the litmus test of one’s individual conscience. He unequivocally rejected passages from the Ramacaritmanas and the Quran that he found unacceptable. Gandhi would have nothing of the idea that a text was infallible; similarly, what had been passed down as “tradition” had to be rejected if it militated against “the spirit” of the scripture and could not meet the test of satya and ahimsa. Thus, as an illustration, Gandhi held it as his view that “the story of a shudra having been punished by Ramachandra for daring to learn the Vedas” has to be rejected as an “interpolation” (Young India, 27 August 1925). Though I have adverted to the exalted place of the Gita in his thinking, ultimately Gandhi did not stand by texts.

Thirdly, Gandhi firmly rejected the idea that there is any kind of hierarchy to religions. This is one among several reasons why he was not sympathetic to the idea of conversion, even as he recognized the absolute right of an individual to her religion. The individual who seeks to convert has an inadequate comprehension of his faith, and there is practically nothing that one religion has to offer which is not to be found in other religions. His biting remarks on the Arya Samaj, which had “copied the Christians in planning its propaganda” and acquired Christianity’s appetite for proselytism are telling:

“The Arya Samaj preacher is never so happy as when he is reviling other religions. My Hindu instinct tells me that all religions are more or less true. . . . The real shuddhi movement should consist in each one trying to arrive at perfection in his or her own faith. In such a plan character would be the only test. What is the use of crossing from one compartment to another, if it does not mean a moral rise?” (Young India, 29 May 1924)

Fourthly, Gandhi believed strongly that the practitioner of a religion has a moral obligation to understand other faiths. The Muslim does not become less of a Muslim by reading the Bible, the Gita, and the Torah—and so with the Hindu, Christian, or Jew. He was a strong advocate of the fellowship of religions, and he pioneered the prayer-meeting as a new form of intercommunal and intercultural samvad.

Indeed, Gandhi’s public prayer-meeting, a detailed study of which has never been undertaken, was a momentous step in religious interculturality which had no precedent in history and remains wholly unique down to our times.

From its modest beginnings in South Africa and subsequent evolution at Sabarmati Ashram to the form it had taken in the last few years, by which time Gandhi had added to Sanskrit verses, the recitation of the Ramdhun, verses from the Gita, and some Christian hymns, passages from the Quran and the Zoroastrian Avesta, the prayer-meeting became equally the anchor sheet of his religious practice and his distinct manifesto to a war-torn world. The Hindu should pray, Gandhi was also to write, that he should become a better Hindu, that the Muslim and Christian should become a better Muslim and Christian, respectively; similarly, a Muslim should pray not that the Hindu should convert, but that the Hindu should be a better Hindu, the Muslim a better Muslim; and so on.

Finally, and most critically, Hinduism to Gandhi was a religion of mythos not of history. He couldn’t care an iota whether Krishna had been a historical person and arguments about the historicity of Krishna or Ram not only left him wholly unimpressed, but he found them singularly unproductive and antithetical to everything that he understood by Hinduism.

When we consider that the entire Ramjanma bhoomi movement has been predicated on demonstrating the historicity of Ram, we can see how far modern-day Hindu nationalists have drifted from the spirit of Hinduism. They claim to be freeing the Anglicized and deracinated Hindus from the stranglehold of Western interpretations but nowhere is the colonized Hindu to be seen more clearly than in the figure of the Hindu nationalist.

Their Hinduism and Gandhi’s Hinduism have almost nothing in common.

Author Notes

Much shorter versions of this piece appeared earlier as "Gandhi's Religion" on the author's blog,  vinaylal.wordpress.com, and as "Gandhi Preached the Unity of All Religions", Daily Mail, 2 October 2019.

Vinay Lal is Professor, History at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States. A sample of his extensive writings: Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.India and the Unthinkable:  The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics.  Co-edited with Roby Rajan.  Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. A Passionate Life:  Writings By and On Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.  Co-edited with Ellen C. DuBois.  Delhi:  Zubaan Books, 2017.