Gandhi's Religion: A Homespun Shawl

"First, a small factual correction: the author, J T F Jordens, is more accurately described as a lapsed Belgian Jesuit. He started as a Jesuit, came to India, joined a church and then left the church. He got interested in Gandhi, became a scholar and ended up a professor in Australia. This is partly accidental, but if you look at the three books by foreigners on my list, one is by an American who lived in Russia, which is Fischer. The second is by an American who studied in England, which is Dalton. The third is by a Belgian who ended up teaching in Australia. I wanted people with a non-parochial, non-xenophobic understanding of the world. They’re all very unusual people who provided very interesting perspectives on Gandhi and have written, in my view, three first-rate books. Coming to Jordens and Gandhi’s Religion : Gandhi was a person of faith, but he had a highly idiosyncratic, individual, eccentric attitude to faith. He called himself a Sanatanist Hindu—which means a devout or orthodox Hindu—but didn’t go into temples. He did once enter a famous temple in south India, when they admitted Untouchables for the first time. Other than that, he was a Hindu who never entered temples. He was a Hindu, but he radically challenged some of the prejudices of the Hindu tradition, particularly the practice of untouchability. He was a Hindu whose closest friend was an English Christian priest, CF Andrews. He was a Hindu whose political program was that Hindus should not oppress Muslims and Muslims must have equal rights in an independent India. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Gandhi’s views on religion are very distinct. You’re talking about a person who is growing up in the late 19th century, a time when there is a burst of rationalistic atheism, particularly following the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species . Hardy writes his poem God’s Funeral because intellectuals and scientists have turned their back on God. But it’s also a time of aggressive proselytization, with Christian missionaries going to India, Muslim missionaries working in Africa and so on and so forth. Now, too, we live in a time of intellectuals disparaging religion, with an arrogant atheism on one side and religious fundamentalism on the other. Gandhi gives us a way out of this false choice. Gandhi tells us that you can be religious, that there is a wonder and mystery to life which cold-blooded rationality and science can’t completely explain. But, at the same time, there is no one true path to God. Gandhi says, Accept your fate. You’re born a Hindu, fine. Your parents, your grandparents were Hindus for many generations. But think about what you can learn from other faiths. Cultivate friendships with Christians and Muslims and Jews and Parsis. If you see your faith in the mirror of another, you may find out its imperfections. It’s a very interesting, heterodox approach to religion. But religion was central to Gandhi’s life. I don’t talk about his in my biography, but when I was very young, in my early 20s, I went through a phase where I wanted to secularize Gandhi. I was brought up an atheist. My father and grandfather were scientists and I’d never went to temples. When I got interested in Gandhi, I thought, This religious business is all a distraction. What is really relevant about Gandhi, is equal rights for the low castes, equality for women, nonviolence, democracy and economic self-reliance. Let me try and have Gandhi without faith. But ultimately I realized that was futile and wouldn’t give me a ready window into understanding Gandhi, because Gandhi was a person of faith. He’s someone to whom religion matters a great deal, but though he calls himself a Hindu he’s a rebel against orthodoxy. There’s a wonderful passage where a Christian disciple of his was thrown out by the church (Verrier Elvin, about whom I wrote a book many years ago). He writes to Gandhi saying that his bishop has excommunicated him. Gandhi writes back saying that it doesn’t matter, that his altar is the sky, and his pulpit the ground beneath him. You can still communicate with Jesus without being in a church. In this, Gandhi is influenced of course by Tolstoy and his writing, Tolstoy’s sense, as he puts it, that the kingdom of God is within you. I think Jordens’s book is the most scrupulous, fair-minded and persuasive account of why faith is so central to Gandhi and what makes Gandhi’s faith so distinctive. That is why it is on my list. Absolutely. Celibacy, or the struggle to conquer your sexual desires, is prevalent in several religious traditions: Catholicism, Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, and it’s totally absent in some other religious traditions: Islam, Protestant Christianity and Judaism. The idea that you must eschew sexual pleasures and that would bring you closer to God, is part of Buddhism and Catholicism and Hinduism, but it’s totally antithetical or alien to Islam, Judaism and the modern world. Let me tell you a story. Some years ago an American scholar called Joseph Lelyveld wrote a book suggesting Gandhi was gay. Gandhi had a close Jewish friend called Hermann Kallenbach, with whom he lived in South Africa. Both were followers of Tolstoy and both wanted to be celibate. Lelyveld couldn’t understand two people living together wishing to be celibate so he concluded they were gay. His clinching piece of evidence was a letter that Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach when Gandhi was in London, temporarily separated from his friend and housemate. He wrote to Kallenbach saying, There is a bottle of Vaseline on my mantelpiece and it reminds me of you. The American scholar jumped to a very quick conclusion, but the bottle of Vaseline was actually there because both Gandhi and Kallenbach had taken a Tolstoyan vow not to wear shoes. They walked barefoot or in slippers and in London he was getting corns under his feet. A modern man like Joseph Lelyveld, a 21st-century writer living in New York, attending the gay pride parades every year, can’t understand men wanting to be celibate voluntarily, rather than because it’s imposed on them. But this was not, as is the case in many countries around the world, an eight-year-old child being shipped off to a seminary and told to become a priest. Kallenbach was a successful architect, Gandhi was a successful lawyer. They were both inspired by Tolstoy, the successful novelist, to give up everything and live the simple life. I had a great deal of fun in my first volume, Gandhi Before India , writing a two-page footnote addressing Joseph Lelyveld’s misunderstanding. But the point is that celibacy is there in Hinduism and also in Jainism, an allied religion to which Gandhi was pretty close, because as a native Gujarati he had many close Jain friends. Jain monks are absolutely committed to this kind of sexual abstinence. So it was a core part of his religious beliefs. It comes from his faith and it is something which modern men and women just can’t comprehend. Yes, but that was for pragmatic political reasons. He was working in a very conservative society, where he was getting Hindus and Muslims together on a political platform for the first time. If there had been intermarriage it would have derailed the political movement, because the Islamic preachers would have accused his son of capturing a Muslim girl and so on. This was in the 1920s, so a hundred years ago. I’m sure today he would have no objection."