the life of mahatma gandhi by louis fischer

This is what Gandhi saw, and no one purely of India could have seen it. Sanitation was linked to caste, caste to callousness, inefficiency and a hopelessly divided country, division to weakness, weakness to foreign rule. It is possible, starting from that casual defecation in a veranda at an important assembly, to analyse the whole diseased society. It is a correct emphasis, for more than a problem of sanitation is involved. Why, for instance, was Gandhi so obsessed with human waste? He sees the Indian callousness, the Indian refusal to see. He sees the beggars and the shameless pundits and the filth of Banaras he sees the atrocious sanitary habits of doctors, lawyers and journalists. He sees exactly what the visitor sees he does not ignore the obvious. He looked at India as no Indian was able to his vision was direct, and this directness was, and is, revolutionary. he is nevertheless the least Indian of Indian leaders. Mohandas Gandhi: Mahatma, great-souled, father of the nation, deified, his name given to streets and parks and squares, honoured everywhere by statues, his portrait garlanded in every pan-shop, hung in hundreds of offices, bare-chested, bespectacled, radiating light and goodness, his likeness so familiar that, simplified to caricature and picked out in electric lights, it is now an accepted part of the decorations of a wedding house. He questioned things that were taken for granted, things that were assimilated into our Idea of India. And this is what made his vision of India so revolutionary. Naipaul says that Gandhi saw India like no other, he observed critically, with an impartial, almost colonial eye. My favourite description of Gandhiji’s uniqueness of vision comes from Naipaul. Real change cannot be imagined otherwise.

It requires you to set aside your love for the thing and be objective. To change something you love is the hardest.

The life of mahatma gandhi by louis fischer