The Gandhi Project by Nashid Fareed-Ma’at

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Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 337.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 458.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 85, excerpt from Young India,

April 30, 1931.

181

listening to me was a pleasure, when I did not bore them by failure

to make my subject interesting. And from the questions that my

talks prompted them to put, I had a measure of their power of

understanding.”

Note that Gandhi, as a teacher, acknowledged not only the responsibility to impart teaching, but

to do so in an interesting manner. One measure of the success of fulfilling this responsibility

was the questions the students posed in relation to the talk. For some students it may be

questions, for others it may be comments: but effective teaching will engage some form of

student interaction.

I’ll end this section with a parable Gandhi shared that, although not written in relation to

education, is very relevant to the Satyagraha approach to education. He wrote:

“But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep; no effort that

you may make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely

pretending sleep.”

I’ll leave the readers to ponder the meaning of this parable in relation to the Satyagraha approach

to education.

GIVE ME LIBERTY OR KEEP YOUR (FOREIGN) EDUCATION

“A [human] without a pledge or a code of conduct is like a ship

without a rudder.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 201.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 202.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 142, excerpt from Young India,

August 11, 1920.

182

In his autobiography, Gandhi discussed the impact of not putting his children in the

modern European education system to instead “experiment” (his word) with teaching his

children in the Satyagraha approach. In sharing his thoughts, he wrote:

“Had I been without a sense of self-respect and satisfied myself

with having for my children the education that other children could

not get, I should have deprived them of the object-lesson in liberty

and self-respect that I gave them at the cost of the literary training.

And where a choice has to be made between liberty and learning,

who will not say that the former has to be preferred a thousand

times to the latter?”

He went on to say: “it was far better to remain unlettered and break stones for the sake of liberty

than to go in for a literary education in the chains of slaves.”

It is this line of thinking that

moved Gandhi to declare that a people must control their own education and the education of

their children.

The situation in colonial India highlighted to Gandhi how much of a role government

plays education. He explained:

“I venture, however, to claim some method about my madness. It

does not require much reflection to see that it is through Courts

that a Government establishes its authority and it is through

schools that it manufactures clerks and other employees. They are

both healthy institutions when the Government in charge of them

is on the whole just. They are death-traps when the Government is

unjust.”

As discussed in earlier chapters, Gandhi clearly held the colonial government in India to be

unjust. Therefore, he held the government-run education system in low regard. But his response

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 143, excerpt from Young India,

August 11, 1920.

183

wasn’t to seek better schools from a government that was unjust -- which many school reform

efforts seek to do today. His response included two main efforts: non-cooperation with the

unjust government, which was addressed in Chapter 4 (on Swaraj); and having the Indian people

provide their own Indian-centered education to themselves and children.

In his Satyagraha work in India, Gandhi was blunt in saying Indians should pull their

children out of the government-run schools and set up their own schooling. He declared:

“I contend that there is no sacrifice involved in emptying the

[government] schools. We must be specially unfit for non-co-

operation if we are so helpless as to be unable to manage our own

education in total independence of the Government. Every village

should manage the education of its own children. I would not

depend upon Government aid.”

This may seem extreme to some, and perhaps it is, but it is completely aligned with the tenets of

Satyagraha and Swaraj. And the principles of this approach are relevant even in dealing with a

just government. Remember, Gandhi held that just governments must be run by and respect the

will of the people. So within a just government, the people can manage their own education

through the existing government structures. But where such structures are absent or corrupted,

the people should create their own means to provide and manage their own education. Gandhi

acknowledged, as with other components of Swaraj, there may be periods of advancement and

regression. This dynamic also exists in government-run education systems. Any careful study

of education will reveal many periods of regression under these systems -- even by standards

they deem relevant, let alone as measured by the Satyagraha approach to education. The point

is: the potential of regression should not be used as an excuse for people to postpone or delay in

managing and providing their own education to themselves and their children. With a just

government, the opportunities to fulfill this goal exist within the government. But where such

government does not exist, the people should fulfill this responsibility on their own.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 383 - 384, excerpt from The

Nation’s Voice, 1947, p. 109 - 110, Part II.

184

There are many things that can serve as resistance among people in embracing the above

approach, but one thing is particularly relevant to this chapter on education: the mindset

necessary to accept and live Satyagraha. Gandhi wrote:

“It takes a fairly strenuous course of training to attain to a mental

state of non-violence. In daily life it has to be a course of

discipline though one may not like it, like for instance, the life of a

soldier. But I agree that, unless there is a hearty co-operation of

the mind, the mere outward observance will be simply a mask,

harmful both to the man himself and to others. The perfect state is

reached only when mind and body and speech are in proper co-

ordination.”

Attaining the mental state of Satyagraha (non-violence) is a goal of the Satyagraha approach to

education. And Gandhi was blunt in stating that it takes a fairly strenuous course: not only in the

course work of learning, but also in providing such education to others. It requires a consistent

discipline and the willingness to commit and endure through hardship. Pursuit of this mental

development is accompanied by pursuit of spiritual / moral development (as discussed earlier).

And, as the above mentioned, it should include development of the body to achieve the perfect

state Gandhi referred to.

THE EDUCATION (OR CARE) OF THE BODY

As should be no surprise at this point in the book, Gandhi’s approach to educating the

physical body was very much predicated upon restraint. He was mindful of the abundance of

destruction people wreaked on their own bodies merely by a lack of restraint. In today’s age,

where destructive diets and physical practices are not only acceptable but heavily promoted (by

corporations, governments, the medical field), many may deem it extreme to say that a single

destructive act can destroy (and kill) one’s body. In the midst of performing countless

destructive acts on a daily basis, many today minimize and (sometimes) justify a single harmful

act -- for example, it’s just one cigarette or just one hamburger. But for Gandhi, this type of

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 273.

185

thinking is delusional -- and on that basis alone, he would reject it in his pursuit of Truth.

Chapter 5 examined how cycles of mass violence emanate from a single act of violence: that in

the performance of a single violent act is the potential that this act will evolve into a cycle of

countless acts of violence that fuel other future acts of violence. Just as Satyagrahis seek to

reduce and eliminate violence in the world while working to establish, sustain, and expand

beneficence; in the realm of physical health, a Satyagrahi must work to reduce and eliminate all

harm one does to one’s self and establish, sustain, and expand beneficence in the form of

physical health. In some regards, the perfection of beneficent physical health may be easier to

attain than eliminating violence from the world: because the realm of this work involves to a

much lesser extent others who may be opposed to this goal; the realm of this work revolves very

much around you alone.

Gandhi held self-restraint as a key premise in educating the body. He explained:

“I shall content myself with merely declaring my firm conviction

that, for the seeker who would live in fear of God {Truth} and who

would see Him {It} face to face, restraint in diet both as to quantity

and quality is as essential as restraint in thought and speech.”

[**NOTE: The use of the word fear above most likely refers to an old English

meaning of reverence and awe; not the common contemporary meaning of

something to be viewed with dread or be afraid of.]

He clearly placed one’s diet in the context of Truth -- so if nothing else is gained from the above

quote, he would discourage people from dealing with diet from a place of delusion. But the

mention of quantity and quality is also very important, and these informed many of his

experiments with his own diet. Gandhi engaged in countless experiments to find the appropriate

minimal amount of food necessary to sustain his body in a healthy manner. This was

accompanied by experiments that examined the quality of his dietetic ingestion: that what he

took into his body contributed to creating, sustaining, and expanding beneficence as opposed to

not contributing or destroying the well-being of the body. Informed by ancient Hindu religious

teachings, he was a vegetarian (which included consumption of animal milk). At periods, he

experimented with the removal of all animal products from his diet: “I also had the feeling that,

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 356.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 272.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 320.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 327 - 328.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 321.

186

just as meat was not man’s food, even so animal’s milk could not be man’s food.”

He had

periods of being a vegan (eating no animal products), a fruitarian (eating only fruits and nuts),

and various configurations within these approaches to food. But he was clearly not a meat-eater,

in part, because he refused to sustain his diet through practices that included violence -- and

almost all meat is acquired by killing animals. Gandhi would never impose his dietetic practices

on others -- compulsion is clearly outside the bounds of Satyagraha. And he did work with

people who ate meat. But for Satyagrahis, his approach to diet indicates the need to consider the

quantity and quality of food we ingest and how our food is attained (by violence or by

beneficence). In today’s age of commercial agriculture, Gandhi may have saw the need to refuse

all food produced by mass agriculture corporations because of the violent and exploitative

practices many of these corporations employ. He referred to an Indian proverb that stated “as a

man eats, so shall he become.”

And Gandhi is an example of someone whose values dictated

what he ate.

In pursuing purity, Gandhi discovered the need for even further restraint upon his diet

than what was addressed above. He explained:

“I was anxious to observe brahmacharya in thought, word and

deed, and equally anxious to devote the maximum of time to the

Satyagraha struggle and fit myself for it by cultivating purity. I

was therefore led to make further changes and to impose greater

restraints upon myself in the matter of food.”

In pursuing such purity, Gandhi realized: “The diet of a man of self-restraint must be different

from that of a man of pleasure, just as their ways of life must be different.”

To this aim, he

engaged in a series of dietetic restrictions: such as using no spices, not eating after a certain hour,

and engaging in regular fasts. He rejected all indulgence, instead embracing the approach of

eating “not in order to please the palate, but just to keep the body going.”

He refrained from all

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 366, excerpt from Harijan, June 3,

1939.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 270.

187

intoxicants (alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, opium, etc.) since “all intoxicants warp or cloud a

man’s intellect, and he who allows his intellect to be warped or clouded cannot offer

Satyagraha.”

He even severely limited what medications he took, as he explained:

“Though I have had two serious illnesses in my life, I believe that

man has little need to drug himself. 999 cases out of a thousand

can be brought round by means of a well-regulated diet, water and

earth treatment and similar household remedies. He who runs to

the doctor, vaidya or hakim for every little ailment, and swallows

all kinds of vegetable and mineral drugs, not only curtails his life,

but, by becoming the slave of his body instead of remaining its

master, loses self-control, and ceases to be a man.”

Let me take a moment to focus on Gandhi’s point about him refraining from medicine

almost completely. This stance laid in larger criticism of modern European medicine, criticisms

shared by even some Europeans. But Gandhi explained how doctors become enablers to their

patients’ destructive habits:

“Let us consider: the business of a doctor is to take care of the

body, or, properly speaking, not even that. Their business is really

to rid the body of diseases that may afflict it. How do these

diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat,

I have indigestion. I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am

cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the

pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishments

deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor

intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby

certainly felt more at ease; but my mind became weakened. A

continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss

of control over the mind.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), 1938 reprint from original publication in 1909,

p. 43, Chapter XII: The condition of India: Doctors.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), 1938 reprint from original publication in 1909,

p. 44, Chapter XII: The condition of India: Doctors.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), 1938 reprint from original publication in 1909,

p. 44, Chapter XII: The condition of India: Doctors.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1957, p. 233.

188

“I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me,

the odds are that I shall repeat the vice. Had the doctor not

intervened, nature would have done its work, and I would have

acquired mastery over myself, would have been freed from vice

and would have become happy.”

Gandhi goes on to say that “doctors induce us to indulge, and the result is that we have

become deprived of self-control.”

In today’s age, doctors have been joined by a larger matrix

of medical, pharmaceutical, food, and health insurance industries that make billions of dollars of

profit annually in America alone. So-called medical conditions that could be completely

prevented by an ahimsa (no harm) approach to diet are made tolerable daily dietetic practices by

the use of all kinds of drugs and medical procedures. Gandhi did not rule out all use of

medicine, since there are incidents to be treated that are not the result of personal indulgence and

negligence. But he was so disturbed by the misuse of medicine in India that he wrote: “To study

European medicine is to deepen our slavery.”

He also stated the true aim of most doctors is the

pursuit of wealth, not the service of humanity.

In addition to a restrained diet, Gandhi saw physical exercise as an absolute necessity of

every Satyagrahi. He firmly declared:

“I believed then and I believe even now, that, no matter what

amount of work one has, one should always find some time for

exercise, just as one does for one’s meals. It is my humble opinion

that, far from taking away from one’s capacity for work, it adds to

it.”

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 248, excerpt from Young India,

April 3, 1930.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 94, excerpt from Harijan, October

13, 1940.

189

He observed: “The modern generation is delicate, weak and much pampered. If they will take

part in national [Satyagraha] work, they must take ample exercise and become hardy.”

This

was a serious concern for Gandhi, as he explained: “If the Satyagrahi is not healthy in mind and

body, he may perhaps fail in mustering complete fearlessness.”

Thus, Gandhi engaged in a

regular practice of exercise. He was particularly known for his brisk, fast-paced walks as well as

his practice of yoga. Exercise need not be extreme, and should be suited to the health of the

person engaging in it: it is counter to the ahimsa aspect of Satyagraha to engage in physical

exercises that harm or destroy the body. But as suited to the individual, every Satyagrahi must

engage in a regular exercise practice. Having too much work to do or not enough time would not

suffice as justifiable excuses in Gandhi’s eyes of why someone does not exercise.

CLOSING WORDS

There is certainly more than can be examined in regards to the full scope of the

Satyagraha approach to education, but this chapter has covered plenty for Satyagrahis to consider

in their individual and collective pursuits of Truth. I strongly encourage the readers to not only

study (or further your study of) what has been covered, but to act on and incorporate what has

been addressed in this chapter into your daily approach to life. With such application, you will

be better prepared to understand (in the Satyagraha context) Gandhi’s approach to what the next

chapters cover: civil disobedience.

˜ ˜ ˜

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 383, excerpt from The Nation’s

Voice, 1947, p. 109 - 110, Part II.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha), 1961, p. 173, excerpt from Young India,

January 5, 1922.

190

CHAPTER NINE

The Temperament of Civil Resistance

“I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction and,

therefore, there must be a higher law than that of

destruction. Only under that law would a well-ordered society

be intelligible and life worth living. And if that is the law of

life, we have to work it out in daily life. Wherever there are

jars, wherever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer

him with love.”

(emphasis mine)

“The use of civil disobedience will be healthy, necessary, and

effective only if we otherwise conform to the laws of all growth.

We must therefore, give its full and therefore greater value to

the adjective ‘civil’ than to ‘disobedience.’ Disobedience

without civility, discipline, discrimination, non-violence is

certain destruction. Disobedience combined with love is the

living water of life.”

Much of the education and preparation work used to develop Satyagrahis to offer civil

disobedience was designed to cultivate them to embody the temperament of civil resistance. As

stated in the second quote above, Gandhi saw the need to place more emphasis on being “civil”

than on the “resistance” or “disobedience.” There can be plenty of things to root our civility in,

such as adherence to moral / religious codes or social customs of good manners. But a surer,

almost guaranteed virtue to root civility in, as both quotes above mentioned, is love. Love was

addressed in Chapter 3 (on ahimsa), so I won’t repeat points already covered. Instead, this