GANDHI

B Y- A B H I N A V R A J
MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI
1869-1948
• He got access to Indian philosophical and religious books, which he
read avidly. He read the Bible and found the New Testament more
interesting than the old and Christ‟s Sermon on the Mount went
straight to his heart. He read with deep interest the Song Celestial
and Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold. He came to look upon the
Bhagavad Gita as his spiritual dictionary. After his contact with men
of different faiths and studying various religious books, Gandhi said
that he had crossed the „Sahara of Atheism‟. He sailed back to India
in 1891
CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAMME

• Gandhi now emphasized on the constructive programme

he had formulated which included spinning and weaving
khadi, prohibition, working for eradication of untouchability
and uniting the Hindus and Muslims.
CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAMME

• Gandhi now emphasized on the constructive programme

he had formulated which included spinning and weaving
khadi, prohibition, working for eradication of untouchability
and uniting the Hindus and Muslims.
THOUGHTS AND IDEA

Swadeshi
Ends and Non-
Satyagraha Religion
Means Violence Morality Swaraj
THOUGHTS AND IDEA

State, Concept of
On Communal Non- Spirit of
Society and Economic Trusteeship
Civilisation Issue Possession Humanity
Sarvodaya Order
THOUGHTS AND IDEA

New Social Status of

Self-discipline On Education Untouchability Prohibition International
Order Women
Peace
• Gandhi and the Indian National Congress
• Gandhi and the Indian Constitution
• Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose
• Gandhi and Nehru
• Relevance of Gandhi Today
THOUGHTS AND IDEA

• “What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written.” So wrote Gandhi, and, indeed,
there is no single repository of his thoughts and ideas, no radical or systematic philosophy as
such that he offered. We have to glean his ideas and thoughts from his letters, articles and
random writings, and, above all, from the way he lived his life and motivated people in the
national struggle for freedom.
TRUTH IS GOD TO GANDHI AND THE WAY
TO THAT GOD IS THROUGH AHIMSA OR
NON-VIOLENCE, FOR GOD IS ALSO LOVE
AND AHIMSA IS THE MANIFESTATION OF
THE LOVE FOR ALL.
• Prayer‟ is meant to evoke the divinity within ourselves.
Facing truth and following ahimsa is no easy task; it involves
a fearless courage. Fear implies the absence of love or
ahimsa towards the object of our fear.
Non-violence as an ethical norm is generally considered
basic to Gandhi‟s philosophy, a kind of „foundation
stone‟.

He himself, however, says several times that truth as a

goal precedes non-violence. The end has greater value
than the means used to reach it. But in any case non-
violence is a necessary part of Gandhi‟s philosophy.
Gandhi says that if we take care of the means, then we shall
inevitably reach the goal sooner or later.

To the question whether the means are more important than the
end or whether the end is more essential than the means that
lead to it, Gandhi replies that they are interdependent and
equally necessary.

If the means are wrong, the right goal will not be reached, or if it
is reached, a disvalue will in addition be realised. If the means
are right, the right goal will be reached without any negative side
effects. Nonviolence is a norm concerning the relationship
between the means and the end.
“Means may be compared with the seed, ends with
the tree; the same unbreakable connection exists
between means and ends as that between the seed
and the tree”.

“If India takes up arms, she may achieve a

rapid victory. In such a case, India would lose
her place as the pride of my heart”.
SATYAGRAHA

• “Ahimsa or non-violence is the highest duty” is a well

known saying from the Mahobharata. Its practical
application in life is satyagraha or soul-force. According to
Gandhi it is based on the assumption that “the world rests
on the bedrock of satya or truth.”
• In Indian Opinion, Gandhi described satyagraha as “firmness in a
good cause”. In Young India, he pointed out that satyagraha was just
a new name for “the law of selfsuffering”. And in Hind Swaraj, he
proclaimed that “sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of
others,” and that a self-sufferer does not make others suffer for his
mistakes.
“SELFISHNESS AND SATYAGRAHA CAN
NEVER GO TOGETHER”
• Hijarat—migration in protest—may be adopted by those who,
suffering loss of self-respect, yet lack either the courage to practise
full satyagraha or the ability to defend themselves by force. Fasting
is also a method of satyagraha, but its purpose is self-purification
and a means of gaining moral strength, not a means of coercion. It is
only to be used as a last resort, and it implies not merely the
physical capacity to withstand hunger but a spiritual strength of
purpose and faith in God.
MORALITY

• Gandhi is a moral idealist. But he does not present impossible practical norms. He announces
that morality has an unconditional character in the form of ethical ideals, but that nevertheless
it is not only for rishis or saints; it is meant for ordinary people as well.
• Gandhi severely criticises moral propagandists who do not themselves live up to their
teachings.
• Gandhi does not seem to separate the concepts “duty” and “virtue”; for him they mean the
same thing.
MORALITY
Gandhi speaks of several moral duties of which the most
cardinal are

• (i) truthfulness (Satya),

• (ii) non-violence (Ahimsa),
• (iii) selfcontrol (Brahmacharya)
• (iv) non-stealing (Asteya), and
• (v) non-possession (Aparigraha).
RELIGION AS LIFE IN GOD

• We have to climb the mountain by different paths, from the points where we happen to be,
but that which we seek is the same. “The Allah of Islam is the same as the God of the
Christians and the Isvara of the Hindus. Even as there are numerous names of god in
Hinduism, there are many names of God in Islam.

• Gandhi says, “It is not the Hindu religion which I certainly prize above all other religions, but
the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one‟s very nature, which binds one
indissolubly, to the truth within, and which ever purifies.”
CHARITY
HINDUISM

• Gandhi distinguished between philosophical and practical

or popular Hinduism, the two extremes into which in his
view it had become polarised, and contended that they
had failed in their own different ways to develop a
satisfactory theory of morality.
SWARAJ

• The term „Swaraj‟ appeared in Gandhi‟s writings for the first time on November 3, 1905.
Gandhi gave serious thought to the question of Swaraj in 1903 and during his return voyage
from London to South Africa, in answer to the Indian school of violence and its prototype in
South Africa, he wrote for the columns of the Indian Opinion, a series of articles on Swaraj that
subsequently appeared in book form with the title Hind Swaraj.
• In Hind Swaraj was expressed for the first time Gandhi‟s comprehensive view about the nature
and picture of Swaraj.The spirit of Swaraj expounded in this booklet remained almost the
same throughout Gandhi‟s life with only slight modifications in matter of details.
SWARAJ

• The Gandhian concept of Swaraj has a far broader and deeper

significance than English terms like freedom or independence.
Swaraj for Gandhi had both a negative and a positive implication.
Negatively speaking Swaraj meant freedom from alien rule and its
influence on civilisation. Positively Swaraj meant freedom for the
whole people, the peasants, the workers, the women, everyone
included.
SWARAJ

The people‟s Swaraj of Gandhi is four dimensional: the four dimensions being provided by the
political, social, economic, and the moral facets.

Gandhi considered them as constituting the “square of Swaraj. ”

• Gandhi‟s Swaraj is a state of existence where all social distinctions wither away. He said, “Every
community would be on a par with every other, under the Swaraj constitution”.

• Gandhi‟s economic Swaraj “is full economic freedom for the toiling millions”. In the economic
aspect of Swaraj he had primarily in his mind the removal of the misery of the „Daridranarayan‟.
SWARAJ

Gandhi treated Swaraj as a synonym of Rama Rajya. Profoundly

nondoctrinaire in his approach to religion and as much a Christian, a
Muslim and a Jew as a Hindu in respect of his religious belief, he did
not consider Rama Rajya in any Hindu‟ doctrinaire sense of the term.
He said, “By Rama Rajya, I do not mean Hindu Rajya. I mean by Rama
Rajya Divine Rajya, the Kingdom of God.”
SWADESHI

• Swadeshi, a complex Hindu concept with a long history, had

been revived and widely used since at least the partition of
Bengal in 1905.
 SWADESHI

Gandhi used the term Swadeshi to refer to the unity, swa meaning one‟s own
and desh, the total cultural and natural environment of which one was an
inseparable part. Desh was both a cultural and an ecological unit and
signified the traditional way of life obtaining within a specific territorial unit.
 IDEAL STATE AND SARVODAYA
The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine,
it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very
existence,” and violence was evil.
Violence includes not only physical coercion but also economic
and social coercion.
THE COMMUNAL ISSUE

• The Khilafat and non-cooperation movements became two sides of

the same coin. And Khilafat became a part of the Congress party‟s
programme. The idea was to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity. In this
regard he said, “If I had not joined the Khilafat movement, I think I
would have lost everything. In joining it I have followed what I
specially regard as my dharma.”
• Gandhi felt that the press always plays a dominant role in
the society for maintenance of communal harmony. It
exercises a powerful influence over the mind of the people.
He always wished that communal hatred should be
stopped through writings by responsible persons including
the editors and correspondents of newspapers and
journals.
IDEAS ON SOCIALISM
• Gandhi was not a doctrinaire socialist advocating state ownership
of the means of production. He himself used to say that he was not
a socialist in the strict contemporary meaning of the term but that
his type of socialism was village socialism. It was his firm view that it
is the fundamental law of Nature, without exception, that Nature
produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only
everybody took enough for himself and nothing more, there would
be no pauperism in this world and there would be no man dying of
starvation.
If Gandhi was a socialist at all, his socialism was entirely his own.
Socialism did not represent itself to him as a necessary and logical
stage in social evolution growing out of production relations of
capitalism. It was not out of any theoretical study or critical
intellectual analysis of the social development of history that Gandhi
arrived at his form of socialism. He developed his concept when he
was confronted with the growing influence of scientific socialism and
when the whole country was surcharged with socialist slogans.
“I CALL MYSELF A SOCIALIST, I LOVE THE
VERY WORD BUT I WILL NOT PREACH THE
SAME SOCIALISM AS MOST SOCIALISTS
DO.”
CONCEPT OF ECONOMIC ORDER

Gandhi said, “My ideal is equal distribution, but so far as I can see, it is
not to be realised. I therefore work for equitable distribution.”
According to him, love and exclusive possession can never go
together. Theoretically when there is perfect love, there must be
perfect non possession.
TRUSTEESHIP

• Concerning the form of ownership of property, Gandhi proposed

his well-known theory of trusteeship, an economic extension of his
philosophical concept of man as a trustee of all he had, including his
powers, capacities, energy and time.
• The theory was intended to avoid the evils and
combine the advantages of both capitalism and
communism, and to socialise property without
nationalising it.
•Both the owner and the workers were to
regard themselves as trustees of the
consumers, and to take care not to produce
shoddy goods or charge exorbitant prices.
STATUS OF WOMEN
• Gandhi decried any kind of discrimination against women as an
anachronism. Commenting on some of the ancient scriptures, he
opined that the saying attributed to Manu that „for woman there
can be no freedom‟ is not sacrosanct. He propagated perfect
equality between a son and a daughter in a family. He said, “I fail to
see any reason for jubilation over the birth of a son and for
mourning over that of a daughter. Both are God‟s gifts. They have an
equal right to live, and are equally necessary to keep the world
going.”