E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi – His Life & TimesThe Congress was organized to channel popular protest into legal moderation.But into the channel flowed the fresh water of national revivalism, spurred, inthe second half of the nineteenth century, by the Tagore family, Sri Aurobindo,Swami Vivekananda, a dynamic, eloquent disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna,Dadabhai Naoroji and Raja Rammohan Roy, the first translator of theUpanishads into English. The world theosophist movement, which paidpermanent tribute to the ancient religious and cultural wealth of India, likewisefed that pride in the past which constituted the foundation of the movementfor national regeneration.Thanks in part to the unification and orderly administration of the country bythe British, Indian industrialists, Hindus and Parsis in particular, grew rich andbegan to buy out their British partners. The emergence of Indian capitalism andof a new Indian middle class gave a powerful impetus to the rule for selfgovernment.Under these multiple influences, the Congress slowly utgrew its collaborationistboyhood and became a demanding youth. The 'prayers' to British governorswere couched in firmer terms, though as late as 1921, Tagore complained oftheir 'correct grammatical whine'. Polite irritations supplanted olite invitationsto high imperial officials to attend Congress functions. Some speeches andresolutions pressed for ultimate Home-Rule. But only a few 'extremists' dreamtof converting the Congress into an active agent that would win Indianindependence by mass action.Gandhi too was a collaborationist when he returned to India in 1915. Yet therewas a revolutionary, anti-collaborationist potential in his yearning for an Indiathat was Indian instead of a replica of the West in clothing, language, modesand politics. Gandhi craved for his .country a cultural regeneration and spiritualrenaissance which would give it inner freedom and hence, inevitably, outerfreedom, for if the people acquired individual and collective dignity they wouldinsist on their rights and then nobody could hold them in bondage.The national metamorphosis Gandhi envisaged could not be the achievement ofa small upper class or the gift of a foreign power. This made him conscious andwww.mkgandhi.org Page 148