Skip to main content

What makes Gandhi a Mahatma



The 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi is round the corner. Gandhi was undoubtedly one of the greatest souls that ever walked on the earth. Albert Einstein was of the opinion that “Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time.” Indeed Gandhi was an enlightened man.
What made Gandhi an enlightened soul, a Mahatma, was the universalism of his vision. His vision embraced everyone and everything. It was not restricted by language, religion, nationality, or any such narrow human constructs.
Gandhi would never accept the kind of narrow nationalism that is being peddled in India today by the dominant political party that has vowed to rewrite the country’s history. In its narrow meaning, nationalism seeks to glorify one’s nation at the cost of certain sections of population. Gandhi would not accept such nationalism though he wouldn’t deny the need of self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Self-sacrifice, not sacrifice of other people. The individual may have to sacrifice himself for his family. The individual may have to die for his nation too. Gandhi died for his nation. But he would not sacrifice others for the sake of the nation. “It is not nationalism that is evil,” Gandhi wrote in Young India on 18 June 1925, “it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil.”
Inclusiveness was an integral part of Gandhi’s vision. That is why the partition of India into two countries in the name of religion agonised him interminably. He would have nothing to do with any kind of exclusivism.
Gandhi’s words, “The chief value of Hinduism lies in holding the actual belief that all life is one, i.e., all life coming from one universal source, call it Allah, God or Parameshwara” (Harijan, Dec 1936), reveal his concept of religion. Religion is a means of connecting the individual soul with the cosmic soul. Religion is a means of discovering the divine within you and in other creatures. Everyone, irrespective of which god he prays to or whether he doesn’t pray at all, everyone is a spark of the divine, according to Gandhi. You can’t be religious and hateful of some people at the same time. If your religion makes you hate anyone, it’s not religion.
Gandhi would never impose anything like religion, language, culture, or food habits on anyone. Instead he would inspire people with his vision, his life.
The question today is whether anyone is looking for inspiration.


Comments

  1. Jacob MatheckenSeptember 30, 2019 at 7:22 PM

    Very well put it..Relevant all the more todsy

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 30, 2019 at 7:27 PM

      Thank you. Yes, more relevant today than ever in Indian history.

      Delete
  2. JaiSeptember 30, 2019 at 7:55 PM

    The current regime plans to homogenize the country by crushing people's human rights underfoot and create a totalitarian state. This is happening in the land of one of the greatest champions of inclusivity. We need some leader, perhaps another Gandhi to awaken people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 30, 2019 at 8:17 PM

      Leaders like Gandhi are born once in a century or even more rarely.

      Delete
    2. Pradeep NairOctober 5, 2019 at 1:19 AM

      Like all human beings, like all leaders, Gandhi too had his weaknesses and failings.

      But when seen in totality, when we look at some of his beliefs and the way he practised them, one has to accept the greatness of that human being.

      However, I feel really sad that after all that he did, he could not see his dream come true. India became free, but not in the way Gandhi wanted.

      Do read my post on 'Gandhian thoughts'.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 5, 2019 at 9:45 AM

      I read your piece on Gandhi and liked it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart
13 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more