GANDHI’S TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITIONAL HINDU CONCEPTS

Chapter I; Part IV

Important Western Influences

Jesus

First of all, how can Jesus be classified as a Western influence on Gandhi?

Christianity was mediated to Gandhi and India through institutions

that carried the values of Western civilization. The English Raj itself

proudly and consciously proclaimed its Christian roots and values. The

Christian missionaries who went to India from the United States proud

set up many of their Western values, such as thrift, cleanliness, and hard

work, as virtues that India should emulate.

In many of the hundred volumes that comprise the collected works of

Gandhi, there are dozens and dozens of transcripts of talks that he was

constantly asked to give to Christian gatherings, especially Christian missionary

gatherings. The missionaries objected to Gandhi’s negative stance

toward religious conversion and asked him again and again how they could

best serve India. Gandhi always answered them straight on that they

should first stop denigrating the culture that they had entered and begin to

appreciate it instead. He then counseled them to live their faith instead of

preaching it.

Chapter I; Part II

Gandhi’s Years in England

Gandhi arrived in England in 1988 at age nineteen to study law. Leaving India was determined by his caste to be grounds for excommunication. His family allowed him to go only after his mother had secured an oath from him to refrain from wine, women, and meat. He kept the vow but, in his first months in england, went every hungry. His search for a decent vegetarian meal led him into the company of Vegetarian Society, where he met an interesting array of mavericks who launched him, through their beliefs and the readings they gave him, on a spiritual quest. Reading Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism, for example, gave him a fresh understanding of and appreciation for his country’s tradition of vegetarianism.

            During his second year in England he met two Theosophists, bachelor brothers, who were reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of Bhagavad Gita, and they invited him to read it with them. Certain verses in the second chapter struck him strongly:

MOHANDAS GANDHI: A HINDU AND MORE

Chapter I; Part I

Mohandas Gandhi was a Hindu who throughout all of his life associated with, learned from, and showed deep respect for people  who embraced the diverse religions of India, including Islam, Jainism, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Moreover, through his education in England and his association with the British who occupied his countrry, he came into contact with many currents of Western thought and practice. He had an experimental cast of mind: weighing, testing, trying ideas in practice. He ahd an experimental cast of mid: weighing, testing, trying ideas in practice, and judging them simply in terms of whether they imrpved the life of humanity. Consequently, he devoloped for himself a constantly evolving but passionately held set of beliefs and principles that guided his behaviour as he took  on structures of domination and oppression. It was his own personal synthesis rooted in what he found to be universal. Nonetheless, his belief system and mindset were predominantly Hindu. As put it: