Why Mahatma Gandhi's experiment with fasting was integral to his search for truth
[Book Extract] It is my best and only creation. The world will judge me by its results.
On November 23, 1925, after two days of agony MK Gandhi decided to go on a fast for seven days. There was a “moral lapse” among the young boys and some girls at the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati. This fast was to commence on November 24 and last up to the 30th.
On the day of the decision, Gandhi had a talk with the boys and girls of the ashram and had told them, rather ominously, “Do not become the cause of my death.” This had led to a series of confessions — not private but public confessions. Two of the principal ashramites, Mahadev Desai and Kishorelal Mashruwala, objected to the public nature of these confessions and argued that they and by extension none of the other ashramites, with the exception of the founder of the ashramic community, Gandhi, had a right and more crucially the necessary spiritual attainment to hear the confessions. Gandhi argued and demonstrated the inherent beauty in the act of confession, but did not insist upon the public admission of wrongdoing and attendant guilt, nor did he share with anyone that which was shared with him. Gandhi, even if he wanted, could not have fasted for more than seven days. Maganlal Gandhi, the person who held the ashramic routine and organisation together during Gandhi’s long absences —sometimes enforced by a prison sentence — from the ashram at Sabarmati, had bound Gandhi to a promise that in the event of a fast he would not undertake one that exceeded seven days.
This decision was taken neither in haste nor without the awareness of its consequences, both on his body and on the boys and girls whose moral lapse had prompted it. It would have reminded Gandhi and many of his associates from South Africa of a similar incident. In July 1913, a moral lapse involving his son Manilal and Jaykuvar doctor, the daughter of his close associate Dr Pranjivandas Mehta, had prompted Gandhi to go on a fast for seven days and a vow to have one meal a day for a period of four and a half months. Gandhi later said that he was moved by “the purest pity for them”. And yet, there was a reoccurrence of the lapse that had forced him to undertake a fourteen-day fast and continue with one meal a day vow till June 1914. In effect, Gandhi had fasted from July 12, 1913 till June 26, 1914, which involved both complete fast and the one-meal-a-day observance. This prolonged fast and his ignorance about the method of resting the body during and immediately after the fast broke his general health, otherwise described as “excellent”. He recalled this at the conclusion of the 1926 fast. “It was as a result of the strain I ignorantly put upon my body that I had to suffer from a violent attack of pleurisy which permanently injured a constitution that was fairly sound.
The Phoenix settlement in South Africa had an “ashramic character” especially after the advent of Satyagraha in 1906. The community at Sabarmati was ashramic, in the full sense. That is, each member was aware of the ashram observances and the ideal conduct that they were expected to strive towards, if not attain in every instance.
What was it about this community that its moral lapse prompted Gandhi on several occasions to undertake a purificatory penance? In his account of the lapse at the Phoenix settlement, Gandhi said, “news of an apparent failure in the great atyagraha struggle never shocked me, but this incident came upon me like a thunderbolt. I was wounded”.
The ashram and its community were Gandhi’s greatest experiment and also the site for his experiments. It was a community that had its foundations in truth. Truth is not merely that which we are expected to speak and follow. It is that which alone is, it is that of which all things are made, it is that which subsists by its own power, which alone is eternal. Gandhi’s intense yearning was that such truth should illuminate his heart. In the absence of truth, or even in case of violation of it, the ashram could not be. It was simultaneously a community that aspired to ahimsa, not only as a negation, as non-violence, but as an active working of love. This community sought to lead a life of “non-stealing”, which included in its understanding “bread-labour” and non-acquisition. This community sought to cultivate equability or “samabhava”, with regard to religion and on the practice of untouchability. “Samabhava”, Gandhi knew, is possible only when the sense of “mamabhava”, of “mine-ness”, of possession, disappears. Gandhi had hoped that his ashram would be like the “sthitaprajna”, a person of “equi-poise”, a person whose intellect is “secure” — both lodged firmly and unwavering in its processes — as described in the Bhagvad Gita. “When it is night for all other beings, the disciplined soul is awake! When all other beings are awake it is the night for the seeing ascetic.” Such an ashram Gandhi believed was his only creation, the only measure by which he would be judged and would like to be judged. Writing at the conclusion of the 1925 fast he said of the ashram, “It is my best and only creation. The world will judge me by its results.”
For Gandhi, the purity or the impurity of the principal worker affected the community. If he were free from fault, the atmosphere would be affected by his innocence. Thus, untruth in the ashram was a symptom of a deep failing, a failing which could only be attributed to himself. It was a sign that the light with which he aspired to lead his life still eluded him. What he was required to do was to reach deep within and seek to dispel the darkness. Reaching deep within himself necessitated for Gandhi a combination of a set of self-practices, silence, prayer, self-search, fidelity to truth and brahmacharya. These are also the ashram observances. The mode by which Gandhi sought to reach within himself and the observances that made him an ashramite are the same. To be an ashramite is to acquire the capacity for self-search and only by acquiring this capacity could he be an ashramite. This he hoped and believed would purify himself and those around him. He wrote on the steps to be taken on the emergence of untruth: “the first thing attended to was the purity of the principal workers in charge, the idea being that if they were free from fault, the atmosphere about them was bound to be affected by their innocence.” The second mode was confession by the wrongdoer. This confession had to be judiciously adopted. The confession should not be tainted by force and the confession should not lead to the person confessing taking leave of shame. It would also require the community to not castigate the wrongdoer as unworthy of being part of the ashramic community. The third measure was a fast, both by the principal worker of the ashram and by the wrongdoer. For the latter, as it was a matter of self-violation, s/he was free to decide if such a fast should be undertaken. Such bodily penance had, according to Gandhi, a threefold influence: “First over the penitent, secondly over the wrongdoer and thirdly over the congregation. The penitent becomes more alert, examines the innermost recesses of his own heart and takes steps to deal with any personal weakness that he may discover. If the wrongdoer has any pity, he becomes conscious of his own faults, is ashamed of it and resolves never to sin any more in the future. The congregation takes a course of self introspection.”
This moral lapse and the attendant fast came to Gandhi at a time when he had begun to write his autobiography. The awareness that there was darkness and untruth within and around him at the very instance of commencement of the narrative devoted to the search for truth could only have made Gandhi more alert and humble about both the endeavours — that of being an ashramite and a seeker after truth about to narrate the journey of his striving.
Gandhi commenced his fast on November 24, 1925 and the first chapter of his autobiography, Satya Na Prayogo (My experiments with truth), was published in Navajivan on November 25. The coming together of the autobiographical act and fasting might suggest serendipity to some but to Gandhi it would have appeared as a sign — not from above, not from without and beyond but from within, from a voice which he described as “a small, still voice” — that he was ready to lay bare what was hitherto known only to him and his God, Satyanarayan, God as truth.
If the autobiography required him to dwell within himself, fasting was upvas, to dwell closer to him, to be closer to truth. Both the autobiographical act and the upvas were modes by which Gandhi dwelled closer to truth. This in-dwelling had a physicality, not grossly in his body but within the ashram and with the ashram community.
The ashram or “a community of men of religion” is central to Gandhi’s striving. He was to later claim, “Ashram was a necessity of life for me”. The ashram is a community of co-religionists, co-practitioners, bound together by a shared quest and a set of obligatory observances. The ashram, therefore, is where the ashramites are. Thus the Yeravada prison — mandir, or temple, as he called it— the Agakhan Palace prison were as much an ashram as the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati and Sevagram at Wardha. But the ashram for Gandhi, more than anything else, eventually came to signify the ashramic observances. In his need and quest to inhabit the ashram, the ashram found a space within him. The ashram went with him on his lonely pilgrimage to Noakhali and to Bihar that was his Karbala.
Before establishing the Satyagraha Ashram first at Kochrab and later at Sabarmati, Gandhi had established two ashram-like communities in South Africa. Ashram-like, as he steadfastly refused to describe them as an ashram. One was merely a settlement, at Phoenix, and the other a farm, the Tolstoy Farm. The Phoenix settlement was established in 1904 under the “Magic spell” of John Ruskin’s Unto This Las, but acquired an ashram-like character only after 1906. It was in 1906 that Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya, initially in the limited sense of chastity and celibacy. Gandhi says, “From this time onward I looked upon Phoenix deliberately as a religious institution.” The observance of a vrata, often inadequately translated as a vow, too, was a defining characteristic of the ashram. It was only through these observances that a community became a congregation of co-religionists and a settlement, a place for experiments with truth.
The year 1906 was also the year of the advent of Satyagraha. Its origin was in a pledge, a pledge that was different from a normal, deliberate oath; as the pledge was taken in the name of God and with God as witness, it was based on religion and implied an unshakeable faith in Satyanarayan. Such a pledge was not externally administered. Phoenix and later Tolstoy Farm, established in 1911, became places where personal spiritual quest and the community’s search for dignity and self-respect were combined in and through Satyagraha. When Gandhi established the ashram at a hired bungalow at Kochrab village, Ahmedabad, he was conscious of setting it up as an ashram, Satyagraha Ashram.
Satyagraha was to be the chosen mode of experiments with truth. Satyagraha is not only a method based on the moral superiority of self-suffering and the recognition of the humanity of others —especially those we seek to oppose — but is a mode of conduct that leads to self-knowledge. Without self-knowledge, satyagraha is not possible as it is based upon an inviolable relationship between the means and ends, and its essence is in the purity of means. Pure means are not only non-violent means but means adopted by a pure person — a person who through a constant process of self-examination cleanses and purifies the self; whose only aim is to be a seeker after truth. Gandhi posits an immutable relationship between satyagraha, pure means and the purity of the practitioner. In the absence of the latter, true satyagraha is not possible. Satyagraha is fundamentally an experiment with truth in the sense that it allows those who practise it to know themselves.
Satyagraha as a mode of self-recognition is directly linked to swaraj. “It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves.” This idea of ruling the self was fundamentally different from self-rule or Home Rule. To rule ourselves means to be devoted to truth, to be moral and to have control over our senses. His idea of civilisation is based on this possibility of rule over the self. He says, “Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves.”
In this, we have an understanding of Gandhi’s quest. His quest is to know himself, to attain moksha, that is, to see God (truth) face-to-face. In order to fulfil this quest, he must be an ashramite, a satyagrahi and a seeker after swaraj.
This quest is made possible by ashram observances. Satyagraha and swaraj as modes of self-knowledge are based on truth because without truth there can be no knowledge. That is why the term chit, or knowledge, is associated with sat, that is, truth. Hence, truth becomes a primary observance; it constitutes the root of the ashram. What can be known by truth is knowledge. What is excluded from it is not truth, not true knowledge. Steadfastness to truth, even unto death, requires immense and inexhaustible faith in God as truth. Yet, Gandhi would confess that such perfect knowledge, realisation of perfect truth, might not be possible so long as we are imprisoned in a mortal body.
This impossibility leads the seeker to ahimsa, or love. Violence and the quest for truth cannot exist together. Gandhi said, “Hence, the more he took to violence, the more he receded from truth.” If violence makes a person recede from truth, it also makes a person recede from the self. Violence leads to self-forgetfulness, and amnesia about the self makes both satyagraha and swaraj impossible, as they are based on the capacity for self-realisation. Thus, truth is the end and ahimsa, the means to it.
A person whose only object is truth, his method satyagraha, cannot be faithful to anything but truth. “The man, who is wedded to truth and worships faith alone, proves unfaithful to her if he applies his talents to anything else”. This leads him and us to brahmacharya. For Gandhi, the realisation of truth and self-gratification appear a contradiction in terms. From this emanates not only brahmacharya, but also three other observances: control of the palate, aparigraha (non-possession) and asteya (non-stealing).
Brahmacharya came to Gandhi as a necessary observance at the time he organised an ambulance corps during the Zulu rebellion in South Africa. He realised that service of the community was not possible without celibacy. At the age of thirty-seven, in 1906 Gandhi took the vow of brahmachary.
He had begun to experiment with food and diet as a student in Rajkot and later in England. It was much later that he was to comprehend the relationship between brahmacharya and the control of the palate. Brahmacharya is not possible when other senses are allowed free play. It requires not the suppression of one sense and the unbridled expression of all the others. Brahmacharya is a mode by which the sense organs are withdrawn from the objects of the senses. A brahmachari, like the sthitaprajna of the Gita is one who puts away “all the cravings that arise in the mind and finds comfort for himself only from the Atman” and one “whose senses are reined in on all sides from their objects” (verse 68) so that the mind is “untroubled in sorrows and longeth not for joys, who is free from passion, fear and wrath; who knows attachment nowhere” (verse 56); only such a brahmachari can be in the world, “moving among sense objects with the senses weaned from likes and dislikes and brought under the control of the Atman” (verse 64).
For Gandhi, the twin concepts of non-possession and non-stealing were suggestive of a mental state as the body itself is a possession and the effort to sustain it brings other possessions in its train. Non-stealing is not only a prohibition against theft, of taking something that belongs to someone else, but to take something that someone else might need, to take, possess and consume more than the minimum necessary as “God never creates more than what is strictly needed for the moment”.
The twin concepts, with deep ecological significance, are linked to the idea of “trusteeship”, so that we act not only as trustees of our wealth, but that of the earth and the futures to come. Non-stealing and non-possession, for Gandhi, inculcate a spirit of detachment in the ashramites and prepares them to give up all possessions, including the body.
These observances and strivings, Gandhi was later to feel, were “secretly preparing” him for satyagraha. It would take him several decades, but through his observances, his experiments, Gandhi developed insights into the interrelatedness of truth, ahimsa and brahmacharya. This understanding allowed him to expand the idea of brahmacharya itself. He began with a popular and limited notion of chastity and celibacy, including celibacy in marriage. He expanded this to mean observance in thought, word and deed. However, it is only when he began to recognise the deeper and fundamental relationship that brahmacharya shared with satyagraha, ahimsa and swaraj that Gandhi could go to the root of the term "brahmacharya". Charya, or conduct, adopted in search of Brahma, that is truth, is brahmacharya. In this sense, brahmacharya is not denial or control over one sense, but an attempt to bring all senses in harmony with each other. Brahmacharya so conceived and practised becomes the mode of conduct that leads to truth, knowledge and hence moksha. An experiment in truth is an experiment in brahmacharya. An experiment with truth cannot have any possibility of secrecy. As an experiment, it was important and imperative, Gandhi felt, to record the unusual, uncontrolled occurrences. It was essential to speak of the darkness within. To speak of the darkness within required a sense of detachment and equanimity with regard to the self. This sense occupies a ground philosophically different from objectivity or distance. In objectivity and distance, a divide of the observer and the observed is implied; it is the objectivity that a scientist cultivates. The equanimity of a seeker is with regard to the self, where the observer and the observed is the self. Gandhi used two terms from the Gita to describe such a philosophical disposition with regard to the self: sthitaprajna and nonattachment, or nishkama. A sthitaprajna is a yogi who acts without attachment either to the action or the fruits thereof. Nishkama does not imply absence of purpose or action; as the supreme purpose, moksha remains even in a state of renunciation. It is for the purpose of self-realisation that the fruits of all action and the desire for action itself have to be abandoned. It is, therefore, not surprising that Gandhi sought to cultivate the state of equipoise, of sthitaprajna.
As Gandhi found himself face-to-face with the autobiographical act and the penitent, purificatory fast that had come upon him, he must have reflected on the necessity of two other kinds of observances, two kinds of in-dwelling that were required for him to attempt the story of his soul in the quest for truth and brahmacharya.
These were the necessity of being an ashramite and the other to reflect deeply on the meaning of the Bhagvad Gita.
(Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House.)