“ GANDHI A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY”
WRITTEN BY M. V. KAMATH
PUBLISHER: INDUS SOURCE BOOKS
PRICE: RS 195.00
NO OF PAGES: 205

Type “Books on Gandhi” on an internet search engine and the response throws up no less than 1, 500, 000 sites! It’s anybody’s guess how many books there might be on offer at each site. Does the world need yet another book on a subject done to death? Surprising as this might sound, the answer is yes. This book might well occupy pride of place on my bookcase for a long time to come. While the book cover, the paper quality, the friendly font, the price and the presentation are all attractive, the selection of Gandhi’s own writings on the subject of spirituality is formidable and a treasure. Kamath’s simple style of expression demystifies the colossus that was Gandhi and brings him across as a flesh-and-blood human being attempting to go beyond the flesh and its desires.


M.V.Kamath’s study is in a tone that is neither obsequious nor harsh. He takes turns to deliver his blows with gentleness and his appreciation with restraint. His study is made all the more significant --as his contemporary, he saw history unfold right before his eyes. In fact, as a young newspaper reporter, Kamath was present in the courtroom to cover the trial of Nathuram Godse and heard both sides present their case.


Hitler and Gandhi were the two most important political powers in the twentieth century. Our fascination with them may be, in great part, because they represent two extreme positions in their approaches to life. The great scientist, Einstein, however, threw in his lot with Gandhi, and his words say it all: “Generations to come will scarcely believe that a man such as Gandhi could have walked upon this earth.” While one tried to eliminate Jews, the other tried to uplift the untouchables; while one divided people based on race, the other attempted to destroy all divisions and unite people by spiritualizing them. We are naturally curious to understand what went wrong with the one and what went right with the other.


This book explores and proves, through various excerpts and quotes, how Gandhi’s spirituality lay at the base of his every thought, word and deed. Kamath observes in the Preface that, “It is a validation of Gandhi’s philosophy that across the world social activists and leaders have chosen to follow his principle of militant non-violence. Martin Luther King Jr. was greatly influenced by Gandhi’s ideology of non-violent social protest. The Dalai Lama has acknowledged the inspiration he has received from Gandhi’s teachings. Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi have fought oppressive regimes drawing upon Gandhi’s legacy.”


The author deals with the subject that prudes find embarrassing— Gandhi’s sexuality and he has neither tried to push it under the carpet nor tried to justify it by giving it an acceptable spin. Kamath cannot fathom why Gandhi needed to go to such extremes: “Can spiritualism be attained through a total separation of woman from man? Our gods have their consorts and even many of our saints and prophets were married or had women disciples. There is no reason why that should be considered a sin or an impediment to spiritualism. But Gandhi apparently had his qualms, which distract from his committed desire for spiritualism.” He further reveals Gandhi’s relationship with Saraladevi Chaudharani, a married woman whom he wanted as his “spiritual wife” and who paid the price of going with Gandhi. She admitted later in writing, “(I) had put in one pan all the joys and pleasures of this world, and in the other Bapu and his laws and committed the folly of choosing the latter.”


Gandhi’s spirituality left no room for untouchability; Kamath comments that he was “so strongly against untouchability that he said that if untouchability lives, Hinduism must die and that he would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived. He did not believe in caste. As he saw it, caste had nothing to do with religion…his understanding of God and untouchability sometimes went to unacceptable lengths. When there was a terrible earthquake in Bihar, Gandhi made a statement that even elicited a strong censure from Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi said, “Visitations like droughts, floods, earthquakes, and the like, though they seem to have only physical origins, are, for me, somehow connected with man’s morals. Therefore, I instinctively felt that the earthquake was a visitation for the sin of untouchability.” Oftentimes, Gandhi is shown going into extremes. Undoubtedly, his passion for leading a righteous life took him further than was warranted.


Having said that, Gandhi, “was transparency personified.” While spirituality underpinned his every activity, he was rational first; “every ideology had to submit to the acid test of reason before being accepted.” How did Gandhi become spiritual, what were the influences in his life that shaped him and made him the colossus he later was to become? One learns that his early influences were Shravana as a devoted son, Harishchandra as the ideal truthful human being; Kamath reveals that, “every fresh reading of their stories moved him to tears.” Later Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” and Tolstoy all came to influence the mind of the already spiritually awakened lad. Then came the maid Rambha who instilled in young Mohan the faith in the “ramanama” or “Rama’s name” to ward off his fear of ghosts. Gandhi wrote, “The good seed sown in childhood was not sown in vain. I think it is due to the seed sown by that good woman Rambha that today Ramanama is an infallible remedy for me.”


As he grew up, he cultivated a distaste for conversion. He wrote, “Suppose a Christian came to me and said he was captivated by reading the Bhagavat and so wanted to declare himself a Hindu, I should say to him, “ No, what the Bhagavat offers, the Bible also offers. You have not made the attempt to find out. Make the attempt and be a good Christian.” … To him, religion meant, “adhering to values, not to a brand name.”


Kamath shares with us a story that brings out Gandhi’s spiritual depth right from the time he was in Johannesburg and plague had broken out in the Indian ghetto. Then, the sick and dying were taken to a quarantined building where a heroic English nurse was tending to them. “One evening, at the height of the epidemic, she saw a small figure standing at the door.”Get out, this is plague!” shouted the nurse. But the man standing there was Gandhi whom the nurse recognized as a leader of the Indian community. He was not about to leave. He told the nurse, “It’s alright; I’ve come to help you.” And he went straight to the sick. One man was literally covered with vermin and the nurse again shouted a warning. She told Gandhi, “Leave him.” But Gandhi would not. He merely told the nurse, “He is my brother.” And he stayed all night long until relief came.”


Selfless service became Gandhi’s credo so much so that “Everywhere he began to see two paths open to him; to live for himself alone or to live for others. He chose the second option.” Following selfless service came satyagraha, where “sat” stands for truth and “agraha” stands for firmness, which made the author observe, “The Buddha may have demanded eschewal of violence. So did Mahavira, but Gandhi took the principle to new and greater heights of excellence.” Gandhi’s non-violent, non-cooperation had its roots in his spiritual dimension and because that was where it was rooted, it succeeded politically and gained India its independence.


Kamath explores various aspects of Gandhi’s life from prayer, to silence, from brahmacharya to self-discipline; from what he felt about temples, animal sacrifice, to vegetarianism and even birth control. Not always was Gandhi in the right; but when he was right, which was often, he rose in stature.


One would have liked the English translation of the prayer, “Vaisnava jana to tene kahiye” printed on the back cover of the book followed by a note sharing with the non-Hindi reading public both in India and abroad, what the prayer signified for Gandhi and why it was important enough for it to get its prominence. One is grateful for Gandhi who says, “I know the limits of my strength. I am but a particle of dust. Even such a particle has a place in God’s creation, provided it submits to being trodden on. Everything is done by the Supreme Power. He may use me as He wills.”
A treasure of a book about an incredible man.

TITLE: THE BURDEN OF REFUGE by RITA KOTHARI
PUBLISHERS: ORIENT LONGMAN
NO. OF PAGES: 206
PRICE: RS. 675
“The Burden of Refuge” written by Rita Kothari, an English lecturer at a college in Ahmedabad, is a study of great academic interest for those interested in the Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. The slim hard-bound book has a sober cover. The main body of Kothari’s book is found in seven chapters, including the preface.

When the Sindhi Hindus arrived into parts of India, including Gujarat, they came away from Sindh, their homeland, because they were Hindus by faith, but it was sadly ironic that when they arrived into post-Partition India, Indians here saw that very Hinduness with suspicion. Because they were non-vegetarians and dressed often in salwar-kurtas and duppatas, they were often seen as “Muslim-like” rather than as a displaced community of Hindus, homeless and stateless because of their faith. Their simultaneous worship of Hindu Gods along with Sufi saints, and Sikh gurus, bewildered the simple Hindus of Gujarat and made them at the same time wary and contemptuous of them.

The immediate fallout of this was that the Sindhi Hindu found it expedient to wear his Hinduism on his sleeve, and discard Sufism and Sikhism, which had become part of his Hindu ethos while in Sindh. However, even after this, the sense of shame persisted with several of Kothari’s own Sindhi Hindu students at college filling out forms, putting down “Hindi” instead of Sindhi as their mother tongue. The Sindhi stereotype of being fat, unhygienic and illiterate lent a great deal to the unnecessary shame the forced evacuee Sindhis felt in their new homes in Indian states.
The book really takes off in the fourth chapter, “Leaving Sindh” where Rita Kothari interviews Sindhis from both sides of the divide. It is the account of Amar Jaleel, a columnist of “Dawn” the Karachi newspaper, that stands out. Kothari prefaces the interview with her own valid observation, “While listening to him in his house at Clifton in Karachi, I could not help feeling the futility of dividing nations and along with it, tearing people away from each other.” Jaleel’s frank anger is reflected in his words, “The Muslims cannot build a democratic nation, they live with water-tight compartments. They can’t co-exit with differences.” He later adds, “What had the Hindus not given to Sindh? Hospitals, reading rooms, libraries. I used to live in Shikarpur and it was like New York. There was not a thing you could not find in its Dhakka bazaar. How enterprising that community was, and see how all they left has gone to seed. We have not even been able to create anything, nor preserve what they left. The greatest loss of Pakistan was Sindh.” After many such observations, Jaleel asks in agony, “It is as if a part of me has been amputated.” Then Khalique Jonejo, a Pakistani, shares with us how some Sindhi Muslims see events: “We carry a burden of guilt—of having collaborated with the new powers to cause the migration. I don’t think that guilt can be washed away.” When Salam Dharejo criticizes Hindus for considering Muslims as untouchables, Jonejo’s response is pristine in its fairness: “The so-called hierarchies between the Hindus and Muslims were differences of class and demography rather than religion. The Hindu shopkeeper would give respect to the wadero (roughly, Muslim landlords) of a village, talk to him and lend him money. Yes, his rate of interest may have been high, but the relationship was not without human concern. The discrimination your grandfather experienced would be the same as any poor person visiting a rich one, regardless of religion.”

When G.M.Syed moved a Resolution in the Sindh Legislative Assembly to support the formation of Pakistan, which was later adopted, the Congress’s Dr Choithram Gidwani criticized G.M.Syed, “Syed Sahib may be laughing today but the time will come when Syed Sahib and I will weep together if Pakistan is formed.” Dr Gidwani was right, since later, G.M.Syed did a volte-face and said, “Pakistan must die if Sindh is to live.” In 1970, when G.M.Syed was visiting India, the writer, Kirat Babani, invited Baldev Gajra, a Congress freedom fighter, to meet him. There, Kothari reports, Gajra refused to shake hands with Syed. He told Syed, and I quote Kothari, “Your hands are covered with the blood of Hindu Sindhis.” Syed’s reply to this was, “If twenty-five years are enough for capital punishment, I have suffered for twenty-five years. Do I still not deserve forgiveness?” End of quote.

The question is both serious and important. Was Gajra wrong? What can the Sindhi Hindu do about his loss of land, loss of culture, loss of language, loss of identity, loss of respect, loss of dignity? Some would say that twenty-five years of verbal regrets cannot suffice for an entire community living in shame, scattered across the globe, on the verge of being erased from people’s memories. They might feel as Gajra did, that mere words from Mr Syed do nothing for a teenaged Sindhi Hindu in Mumbai who squirms when movies deride Sindhis and their way of life. Punit Padnani says in the book, “Media shows Sindhis in a very bad light. Why can’t they show a decent-looking Sindhi professional?” To my mind, when Gajra felt that Syed’s hands were soiled in “ the blood of Sindhi Hindus,” he spoke as a person who could see the never-ending downward spiral of the tragic permanent damage to Sindhi Hindu youngsters who try desperately to fit in everywhere, and are forced, thanks to the community’s ouster from Sindh, (often in a penniless condition,) to deny their own real cultural identities. Syed’s question was unfair; Gajra, not an RSS functionary but a staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi, had virtually bared his chest to gun-wielding Pathans. When such a freedom fighter adopts a stern view of G.M.Syed’s role in the loss of homeland it is not to be taken lightly, since he was no fanatic or fundamentalist.

Kothari (a Sindhi married to a Gujarati) admits to her own sense of shame in the chapter entitled, “Stigma in

Gujarat” that, “As a Sindh growing up in Gujarat in the 1970s and 1980s, I had an acute feeling of being in the wrong community, one that did not value education, or respect women.” From the tone of the book, one has an uneasy feeling that, perhaps, the shame hasn’t entirely left her. Additionally, Kothari appears to have a similar discomfort with pure Hinduism, sans the Sufi and Nanak ingredients, seeing it as “narrow” when Hinduism is at least as deep in spiritual terms as the next religion, if not more, and therefore, as complete as Sufism and Sikhism are without Hinduism.

There are a few errors such as the celibate Sadhu T.L.Vaswani having a son called Hari Vaswani, in “Stigma in Gujarat” and the erroneous assertion that Naroda Patiya is a constituency dominated by Sindhi Hindus when, we are told by The Hindu (October 2, 2003) that both Naroda-Patiya and Naroda Gam, have majority Muslim populations. If Kothari had retained objectivity and been even-handed when dealing with both communities, the book would have gained much in credibility. All in all, chapters 4-6 make the book a serious work of history, a must for researchers attempting to put together the scattered pieces of the jigsaw of the Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India.