In his own time Gandhi was held in contrast to the bloody-mindedness of Hitler and Stalin, and the era of world wars. Who do we look to today to counter Putin’s brutal militarism? Gandhi’s was a message of truth, of non-violence, of the power of self-sacrifice, and his influence can be found in the American civil rights movement, in anti-apartheid South Africa, and among the student protestors at Tiananmen Square.[1]
Gandhi can
be described as a kind of Nietzschean superman, who transcended all values –
including Nietzsche himself – to become a global icon.[2]
He found joy through an ascetic “secret
of service” and is now regarded as “Father of the Nation”, so it should come
as no surprise that his face adorns the Indian rupee.[3] It is also possible that his is the only bespectacled
visage on the official currency of any country.
Perhaps the
closest equivalent we have to Gandhi today are our nurses and doctors who have
worked unenviable hours over days, weeks and months, for more than two
years of the pandemic. Gandhi himself
had fallen seriously ill from the Spanish Influenza of 1918-19, but long before
that he found that he had “an aptitude for nursing” which “gradually developed
into a passion”.[4]
Here is an
extended quotation from Gandhi’s Autobiography
where he deals with an early plague, in India, of an unknown date, but likely
around 1897, before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.[5] Note his singular respect for the
untouchables, and the varying reactions to his service of toilet cleaning by
the different castes.
Plague broke out in Bombay about this
time, and there was panic all around.
There was fear of an outbreak at Rajkot.
As I felt that I could be of some help in the sanitation department, I
offered my services to the State. They were accepted, and I was put on the
committee which was appointed to look into the question. I laid especial emphasis on the cleanliness
of latrines, and the committee decided to inspect these in every street. The poor people had no objection to their
latrines being inspected, and what is more, they carried out the improvements
suggested to them. But when we went to
inspect the houses of the upper ten, some of them even refused us admission,
not to talk of listening to or suggestions. It was our common experience that
the latrines of the rich were more unclean.
They were dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms. The improvements we suggested were quite
simple, e.g., to have buckets for excrement instead of allowing it to drop on
the ground; to see that urine also was collected in buckets, instead of
allowing it to soak into the ground and to demolish the partitions between the
outer walls and the latrines, so as to give the latrines more light and air and
enable the scavenger to clean them properly.
The upper classes raised numerous objections to this last improvement,
and in most cases it was not carried out.
The committee had to inspect the untouchables’
quarters also. Only one member of the
committee was ready to accompany me there.
To the rest it was something preposterous to visit these quarters, still
more to inspect their latrines. But for
me those quarters were an agreeable surprise.
That was the first visit in my life to such a locality. The men and women there were surprised to see
us. I asked them to let us inspect their
latrines.
‘Latrines for us!’ they exclaimed in astonishment.
‘We go and perform our functions out in the open. Latrines are for you big people.’
‘Well, then, you won’t mind if we inspect your
houses?’ I asked.
‘You are perfectly welcome, sir. You may see every nook and corer of our houses. Ours are no houses, they are holes.’
I went in and was delighted to see that the
insides were as clean as the outsides. The
entrances were well swept, the floors were beautifully smeared with cow-dung,
and the few pots and pans were clean and shining. There was no fear of an outbreak in these
quarters.
In the upper class quarters we came across
which I cannot help describing in some detail.
Every room had its gutter, which was used both for water and urine,
which meant that the whole house would stink.
But one of the houses had a storeyed bedroom with a gutter which was
being used both as a urinal and a latrine.
The gutter had a pipe descending to the ground floor. It was not possible to stand the foul smell
in this room. How the occupants could
sleep there I leave the readers to imagine.[6]
Gandhi, Autobiography, c. 1897.
[1] Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 135.
[2] Ibid, p.
143.
[3]
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The
Story of My Experiments with Truth, tr. Mahadev Desai (New York: Dover,
1983), p. 196.
[4] Ibid., p.
153. See also p. 213.
[5] Ibid., p.
151.
[6] Ibid., pp. 149,150.
