GANDHI'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

General Editor: John Hick
formerly H. G. Wood Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham
This series ofbooks explores contemporary religious understandings of man and the
universe. The books contribute to various aspects of the continuing dialogues
between religion and philosophy, between scepticism and faith, and between the
different religions and ideologies. The authors represent a correspondingly wide
range of viewpoints. Some of the books in the series are written for the general
educated public and others for a more specialised philosophical or theological
readership.
Already published
William H. Austin THE RELEVANCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE
TO THEOLOGY
Paul Badham CHRISTIAN BELIEFS ABOUT LIFE AFTER
DEATH
Paul and Linda Badham IMMORTALITY OR EXTINCTION?
Patrick Burke THE FRAGILE UNIVERSE
Margaret Chatterjee GANDHI'S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
William Lane Craig THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FROM
PLATO TO LEIBNIZ
Stephen T. Davis LOGIC AND THE NATURE OF GOD
Lynn A. de Silva THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF IN
BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Padmasiri de Silva AN INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHIST
PSYCHOLOGY
Ramchandra Gandhi THE AVAILABILITY OF RELIGIOUS
IDEAS
J. C. A. Gaskin HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
H. A. Hodges GOD BEYOND KNOWLEDGE
Hywel D. Lewis PERSONS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Eric Lott VEDANTIC APPROACHES TO GOD
Geddes MacGregor REINCARNATION AS A CHRISTIAN HOPE
Hugo A. Meynell AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
PHILOSOPHY OF BERNARD LONERGAN
F. C. T. Moore THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF
MORALITY
Dennis Nineham THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE BIBLE
Bernard M. G. Reardon HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
John J. Shepherd EXPERIENCE, INFERENCE AND GOD
Patrick Sherry RELIGION, TRUTH AND LANGUAGE
GAMES
SPIRIT, SAINTS AND IMMORTALITY
Wilfred Cantwell Smith TOWARDS A WORLD THEOLOGY
Shivesh Chandra Thakur RELIGION AND RATIONAL CHOICE
Robert Young FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND GOD
Further titles in preparation
GANDHI'S RELIGIOUS
THOUGHT
Margaret Chatterjee
Foreword by
John Hick
 © Margaret Chatterjee 1983
So ftc over reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05365-0
'Personally, I think the world as a whole will never have, and need
not have, a single religion.'
The Collected Works qf Mahatma Gandhi, vol. xn
Publications Division, Government of India, Delhi,
30 May 1913, p. 94

'True religion ... is faith in God, and living in the presence of God,
it means faith in a future life, in truth and Ahimsa.'
roung India, 30 Aug. 1928, p. 291

' ... if we are imperfect ourselves, religion as conceived by us must

also be imperfect. ... Religion of our conception, being thus
imperfect, is always subject to a process of evolution and re-
interpretation'.
reravda Mandir, Navajivan Press, Ahmedabad, 1930, chs X & XI

' . . . I can clearly see the time coming when people belonging to
different faiths will have the same regard for other faiths that they
have for their own'.
Harijan, 2 Feb. 1934, p. 8

'For me all the principal religions are equal in the sense that they are
all true. They are supplying a felt want in the spiritual progress of
humanity.'
Hari.Jan, 6 Apr. 1934, p. 59

'Every living faith must have within itself the power of rejuvenation
if it is to live.'
Harijan, 28 Sept. 1935, p. 260
Contents
Foreword by John Hick ix
Preface Xlll

1 Introduction 1
2 Gandhi's Religious Thought and Indian Traditions 14
3 The Impact of Christianity on Gandhi 41
4 Experiments with Truth 58
5 The Non-Violent Weapon of Suffering 75
6 Waiting On God 94
7 Diversities of Gifts 114

8 The Vision Splendid 136

9 Mo~a Rethought 155
10 Epilogue 174

Notes 182
Select Bibliography 1 go
Index 191

vii
Foreword
The figure of Gandhi is being increasingly recognised as a
significant source oflight and hope in a world threatened by many
kinds of violence, by the erosion of the human environment, and by
widespread despair of the future.
There are innumerable biographies of Gandhi: indeed his is
possibly the most minutely recorded and scrutinised life that has
ever been lived. There are also numerous books on his political,
economic and moral teachings. But, surprisingly, whilst there are
studies of Gandhi's relationship to Christianity, there are none
(known to me) devoted to his religious thought as a whole. Here
Margaret Chatterjee presents to the west, in a splendidly balanced
way, Gandhi's religious message. Not that his life and thought can
ever be separated; for what made Gandhi the centre ofso powerful a
field of spiritual force was the fact that his ideas were always
incarnated in his actions. And so although Professor Chatterjee does
not retell the familiar story of Gandhi's life, she does constantly
relate his ideas to the Indian culture and the world history of which
he was a part.
What we witness above all in the phenomenon of Gandhi is
religion becoming creative in human life. The function of religion,
as man's response to ultimate Reality, is to transform human
existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. We see this
transformation in Gandhi with a clarity which both uplifts and
challenges us. His life was a continuous growth in which he became
increasingly dedicated to the service of the higher Reality which he
thought of as Truth or God. In response to the claim of Reality upon
him he renounced the interests of his private ego and became a
servant of mankind, transparent to Truth. He loved Truth, or God,
with all his heart and mind and soul, and his neighbour as himself;
and he did so amidst the pressures, disturbances, ambiguities and
confusions of historic liberation struggles, first in South Africa and
then in India.
There are at least four areas in which this phenomenon of Gandhi
lX
X Foreword

is importantly relevant today, more than thirty years after his death.
One is religious pluralism. Christian theologians are much
concerned today with the relationship between Christianity and
other religions, with their apparently competing gospels. In this
context Gandhi poses a challenge: how could one who lived and
died a Hindu have taught so many people, including the great
Christian missionary to India, E. Stanley Jones, 'more of the spirit of
Christ than perhaps any other man in East or West'. (E. Stanley
Jones, Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation, Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 1948, p. 76). It has often been assumed that Gandhi
learned of non-violence and self-giving love from Christianity. But
in fact he responded so positively to the teachings ofJ esus because he
found in them a confirmation of what he had already received from
his own tradition. He often quoted the verse of a Hindu poet, 'The
truly noble know all men as one, and return with gladness good for
evil done' (p. 91 ), and he cherished the traditional Gujarati saying,
'If a man gives you a drink of water and you give him a drink in
return, that is nothing. Real beauty consists in doing good against
evil' (p. 74). Indeed the Hinduism which provided the supporting
framework ofGandhi's life of service affirmed the underlying unity
of all mankind, as all being individuations of the same atman or soul;
from which Gandhi derived the call to renounce egoism and to act
in the interests of the whole human community.
Gandhi's own solution to the problem of religious pluralism was
learned from the ancient Jain tradition of his native Gujarat. This
held that all religious awareness is inevitably partial and
incomplete, so that different traditions can complement and enrich
one another rather than being mutually exclusive rivals. This
world-ecumenical outlook is more widespread today than it was
fifty years ago, and we can now proceed with the complex task of
working out its epistemological, metaphysical and doctrinal
implications.
A second relevance of Gandhi today is to the liberation
movements in Southern Mrica, South America and elsewhere.
Gandhi was perhaps the first practitioner ofliberation theology. For
he heard the voice of God, which was to him the insistent voice of
Truth, calling him to fight, non-violently, for the liberation of the
oppressed- in his case, Asians in South Mrica, outcastes and the
poor in India, and the Indian people as a whole in their struggle for
political freedom. This revolutionary activity, rather than any cult
 Foreword Xl

or creed, was to him true religion. He said, 'To a people famishing

and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare to appear
is work and promise offood as wages' (p. 229). Gandhi's challenge
to the liberation movements of today lies in his profound belief in the
ultimate unity of all human beings, including the oppressors, and his
consequent absolute commitment to non-violence. A study of
Gandhi's life shows that ahimsa is not mere passivity but a living
organism of intense educational activity (or as we say today,
conscientisation), highly organised economic and political pressure,
and moving symbolic acts. His life and thought should be studied
afresh by all who seek to work for human liberation in our
contemporary world.
A third area of relevance is the deepening ecological crisis.
Although Gandhi was no doubt mistaken in opposing the inevitable
industrialisation of India, he was surely right in advocating the
production of basic food and clothing rather than wasteful luxuries,
and in stressing the dignity of physical labour, th beauty of
smallness, the importance of self-sufficiency, and the values of
village life. He was not an economist, but he saw the dangers of the
modern self-consuming consumer society, with its violent rape of
planet earth, with a clarity at which others have only recently
arrived. We can profit again today from the human values by which
Gandhi lived and the thoughts on human living which he expressed.
And a fourth area of relevance lies in Gandhi's exhibiting-
without consciously intending to- a viable style of contemporary
sainthood. He was a saint, and indeed a Mahatma, because he was
so transparent to the Truth that through his life the claim of Truth
was felt and responded to by others. And the Truth that shines
through him is both demanding and attractive. For example, in the
ashrams and the journeys through India which were among his
'experiments with Truth' Gandhi and his followers lived in freely
accepted poverty and constructive hard work. People rose early
(prayers at 4.20 a.m.) and worked late. In a land where dirt
abounds Gandhi stressed, almost fanatically, cleanliness and
sanitation. In a culture in which time is only half real he insisted on
punctuality and the stewardship of time. In a society fragmented by
caste he deliberately broke all the rules, bringing brahmins,
'untouchables', Muslims, Christians, Sikhs together in the common
service of their country. The Truth which grasped him grasped
others through him, making great demands on their lives. And yet
xu Foreword

at the same time everyone who worked with Gandhi has attested
that he was full of fun, bubbling over with humour and the joy of
living, even in the dark periods of his career.
The pattern of sainthood which we see in him, then, was powered
by a complete acceptance of all human beings as ultimately one,
and a deep practical love of neighbour which made sacrifice and
suffering acceptable. This relationship to the neighbour created a
structure of tough political commitment involving careful
research, accurate information and prolonged thought. And it
overflowed in a continuous delight in human fellowship which won
for Gandhi more friends, of more varied kinds, than perhaps anyone
else of whom we know. Although he experienced tragic setbacks,
hardships and sorrows, and finally met a violent death, Gandhi was
a most fortunate person. For his life was a series of experiments with
Truth, and the Truth made him free- free from selfishness; free to
love and to be loved; free to live creatively, deeply involved in the
struggles ofhis own time and place. Hence he is also a great witness
to Truth for other times and place.
Margaret Chatterjee is Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Delhi. Born in England and trained at Oxford, she has made
India her home since 1946 and has been teaching philosophy there
since 1956. She is therefore uniquely equipped, among interpreters
of Gandhi to the west, to appreciate the Indian context of his
thought and its deep roots in Indian history and religious life. She
has succeeded admirably in her aim to discuss 'Gandhi's religious
thought in his own idiom so as to present him as a very exceptional
personality whose thinking stretches back into the traditional life of
India and reaches forward to times which are yet to come' (p. 265).

JOHN HICK
Preface
The following study can only claim to be an introduction to a very
vast subject. The source material available on Gandhi is
voluminous and no present-day researcher can profess to have been
through it all. Students of modern Indian history and political
thought have been largely concerned with Gandhi's role in a
sequence of events which amounts in fact to the story of the making
of modern India. But there is an inner story which has yet to be
explored. Having said that, something else must also be admitted.
Gandhi himself made no such distinction. He never looked on
social, political, economic and religious issues as if they were in
watertight compartments. He saw them as a complicated fabric,
spun by the hands of millions, to use the idiom of spinning and
weaving that he so loved. To try to isolate his religious thought is in
a sense to do violence to this most non-violent of men. A full-length
study would require constant reference to the socio-economic and
political implications of the religious component in his thought. I
could not do more, in a book of this size, than indicate from time to
time the context in which particular facets of his thought were
worked out. The reader will need to fill this out from other sources.
I have tried to keep in mind Gandhi's contribution to religious
thought against the broad canvas of India's many -faceted
traditions. Where it seemed of interest I have made passing
references to matters engaging those concerned with philosophy of
religion and theology in the west and elsewhere. My own impression
is that Gandhi takes us beyond the language of encounter, and even
the language ofdialogue, to an approach which I try to characterise
at the end of the book. In this respect I believe him to be the man of
tomorrow.
I am grateful to a number of people in the writing of this book:
first of all to John Hick for his encouraging thought that there may
well be an audience for some of Gandhi's ideas about religion in the
west and for his recommending this project to the publishers; to the
seminarians at 'Vidya Jyoti', Delhi, and successive audiences of
Xlll
XIV Preface

American friends in India and university audiences in England who

stimulated me by their questions; to Judith M. Brown for
encouragement; to Stephen N. Hay for lively discussions about soul-
force many years ago; to Manoranjan Guha and B. N. Ray for
patient answers to persistent questions; to Krishna Kripalani for
help on the relation between Gandhi and Tagore, useful suggestions
for reading and for allowing me to try out some of my wilder
hypotheses on him before committing them to print. I owe most,
however, to Nirmal Kumar Bose, 1 anthropologist, and secretary to
Mahatma Gandhi during a critical period in his life, the source of
most of the personal anecdotes in this book and my first teacher in
Gandhian thought.

December 1g8o MARGARET CHATTERJEE