Summery of On gandhi by louis fischer
Answers
Men like Gandhi do not happen very often—no oftener perhaps than men like Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Unhappily, the lives of such great spiritual leaders are too often shrouded in the aura of sanctity created by their followers, and the clouds of piety are already closing around Gandhi. Now that he is dead, his life and teachings are rapidly taking on the irrelevance of a saint’s.
To this tendency Louis Fischer’s straightforward biography is a welcome and necessary antidote. The author deliberately limits himself to the record of Gandhi’s life, with a minimum of analysis and interpretation. The book follows Gandhi through his childhood in a little state in western India, his marriage at the age of thirteen, his training for the bar in England, his residence in South Africa where his “experiments with truth” began in earnest, the first civil disobedience movement in South Africa, his return to India, and his emergence as the greatest leader of India and one of the truly universal men of history.
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Fischer’s book rights some misplaced emphases and corrects some misapprehensions about Gandhi. Many Westerners think of Gandhi solely as the leader of India’s independence movement, but much of his work had little direct (albeit enormous indirect) application to the achievement of independence. He fought untouchability. He labored mightily for Hindu-Moslem unity. He advocated spinning and cottage industries. To him, independence was not an end but one of the means by which India could contribute to the world. He had no use for an independent India without spiritual content. On August 14, 1947, India’s first day of freedom, Gandhi was conspicuously absent from the public ceremonies. He was deeply troubled, for independence had brought with it the partition of India and terrible Hindu-Moslem riots. Much of his life’s work seemed to lie in ashes. Yet ahead of these days of tragedy lay his pilgrimage of reconciliation to the blood-soaked riot areas and his fasting for communal harmony.
Gandhi’s fasts, too, have been widely misunderstood in the West. They are often thought of as a kind of political blackmail, whereas they were first of all a method of self-purification, an essential part of his spiritual growth. But they were more than this. Gandhi’s fasts made a continent stop and consider: they provided a kind of cooling-off period. During the fasts, people were not simply worried about what would happen to the Mahatma. They worried also about what had happened to them and they searched their consciences. A new set of forces was released and from this creative process flowed political consequences.
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One of the most troubling aspects of Gandhi’s life was his relations with his family, with which Fischer deals frankly. When a man considers all humanity as his family (Indians call Gandhi Bapu—“Father”) what becomes of the people who actually happen to be his wife and children? Gandhi’s wife Kasturbai must have been for years the most miserable woman in India. She was constantly in the position of having to carry out orders and adapt herself to situations that were completely outrageous to her most fundamental prejudices. Though an illiterate woman, she was certainly not a simple one, and she remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. In Fischer’s book, she comes most clearly to life in a pathetic letter to her son Harilal, who was an alcoholic. Gandhi’s sons, too, suffered from alternate suffocating supervision and what seems to have been almost indifference. Gandhi did not allow himself many reticences, but he seems to have been less frank than usual about his family.
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Fischer has not said the last word on Gandhi; in a sense, he has said only the first. Gandhi’s life raises many questions which need further exploration.
Among these questions are: What were the psychological factors which helped to produce Gandhi? Does his technique of non-violence have a more universal validity? Can it be recreated for use in the Western world? What can we learn from Gandhi’s unique experience in seeking equality for religious and racial minorities? (He had the extraordinary experience of being the leader of an oppressed minority in South Africa and an often oppressive majority vis-à-vis the untouchables and Moslems in India.)
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GANDHI - HIS LIFE AND MESSAGE FOR THE WORLD by Louis Fischer is a biography of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, known throughout the world as the Father of India. The narrative chronicles his story from his birth as the fourth and last son of his father, a government official, and his beloved mother who was illiterate but a devout follower of Hinduism. His mother, who he referred to as a saint, died when he was away in London at law school. He was not notified of her passing since the family knew he would be distraught.
Gandhi's life took a huge turn from which it never returned when he is offered a position as a lawyer in South Africa. He had not been successful as a lawyer in Bombay because he was too shy to speak up in court. After experiencing discrimination first-hand, he found his voice. He spoke before a large gathering of Indians and Moslems working as indentured laborers in South Africa. His intent was to lift these people up and encourage them to stand up against discrimination. Gandhi's view was that discrimination could be overcome by a two-fold approach: exalting the individual who is being discriminated against while appealing to the fairness of the discriminator.