by Lloyd I. Rudolph

My title is figurative, not literal; Gandhi never set foot on American soil. His presence is the result of American responses to his person, ideas, and practice. For most Americans, they were exotic, often alien, fascinating for some, threatening or subversive to others. This chapter analyses America’s reception and understanding of Gandhi by pursuing two questions: Is he credible’? Is he intelligible?

For a person to be credible, it must be possible to believe that this seemingly quixotic person is someone like ‘us’: someone who makes sense in terms of America’s cultural paradigms and historical experience. From the beginning many thought that Gandhi was putting ‘us’ on, that he was fooling us while fooling around. Was he for real or was he a fraud?

Even if ‘we’ are prepared to accept an alien ‘other’ like Gandhi as believable and authentic, the problem of intelligibility remains. What language, what images, what metaphors, what myths can be used to talk about him? How can we think about and talk about an alien ‘other’? In thinking and talking about Gandhi in America we are faced with an epistemological as well as ontological problem.

Americans have been conscious of Gandhi since about 1920, when his first non-cooperation campaign almost toppled British rule in India. He has been revered and reviled since then. In 1921, John Haynes Holmes told his Community Church congregation in New York that Gandhi was ‘the greatest man in the world’, greater even than Lenin and Woodrow Wilson. ‘When I think of Mahatma Gandhi, I think of Jesus Christ.’ In 1930, the year of Gandhi’s second great non-cooperation campaign against the British Empire in India, Winston Churchill, the Empire’s great exponent, coined the epithet ‘the half-naked fakir’, a phrase that spoke for Americans and Britons who identified Gandhi with what they believed was India’s self-inflicted poverty and with fraudulent spirituality.

Gandhi’s presence in American consciousness has varied with historical circumstance and his public image. There is the anti-imperialist, a nationalist leader who challenged the British Empire in India; the guru, a world historical teacher whose ethic of nonviolent collective action in pursuit of truth and justice offer a new way to think, believe, and live; the mahatma, the great soul, saint, and homo religious, whose meaning is translated in terms commensurable with or found in America’s religious perceptions and beliefs; and the fraud, an oriental ‘other’ whose alien and subversive ideas and practices threaten American religion, morality, and politics. Each of these Gandhis, the anti-imperialist, the guru, the mahatma and the fraud, provide text and context for a roughly chronological examination of Gandhi’s meaning in and for America.

The Anti-Imperialist

Gandhi’s first public career in South Africa (1893–1915), although not visible in the US became an important part of the Gandhi myth.[1] A failure in India as an England-returned barrister-at-law, he left at 24 to try again in a distant, alien country whose oppressed and exploited Indian minority of indentured laborers and poor cultivators needed him. In time, he found an answer to his search for himself and for their needs in a method of collective action, satyagraha, non-violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience. By the time he returned to India in 1915, ‘the story of my experiments with truth’ (the title of his 1927 autobiography) had preceded him. Rabindranath Tagore, Noble laureate in 1913, welcomed him as a ‘mahatma’ and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, leader of Indian nationalism, as his political heir. Four years later, in 1919 at 46, he assumed the leadership of the national movement against British rule. The stage was set for Gandhi’s reception in America.

In his invaluable The Americanization of Gandhi: Images of the Mahatma, Charles Chatfield identifies four periods when national attention to Gandhi was most intense: 1919–24, the period of Gandhi’s first and most momentous non-cooperation campaign against British rule; 1929–34, when Gandhi led a march to the sea to make salt, launched the second non-cooperation campaign and traveled to London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress at the second Round Table Conference; 1939–44, the era of World War II when Gandhi attempted to secure Indian independence while not opposing the war against fascism; and 1947, the year of Partition, communal violence and Independence.[2]

Chatfield describes Gandhi as ‘our lens on India’. What Americans saw was his ‘enigmatic personality, his ideas on religious and economic questions, and the tactical and philosophic meaning of nonviolence’.[3] He first appears on the American horizon in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The war had dealt a devastating blow to the promise of technological and moral progress in the Western world. American consciousness was radically transformed. The fervid patriotism and lofty idealism (that led millions to offer their lives for their country) faded from view. For a time, war was discredited as a test of national greatness and as an instrument of policy. In the new anti-war climate, pacifism achieved a greater measure of credibility and public standing, a circumstance that helped to open the way to Gandhi’s ideas and practice.

The transformations that followed World War I helped to focus attention on Gandhi. In Europe, where Romain Rolland’s ‘critical attitude toward the great butchery of 1914–18 had elevated him to the status of keeper of the conscience of the world, in the manner of Tolstoi’, his 1923 volume, Mahatma Gandhi, linked Europe’s eager tilt toward pacifism to Gandhi’s project: “There was nothing to expect from the triumphant Western imperialisms who were intent on enjoying the spoils and, in their stupid state of bloated satisfaction were not even cautions enough to properly keep watch on those spoils. I thought I had found [the] rampart [of sovereign reason] …in the little Saint Frances of India, Gandhi. Did he bring, in the folds of his sackcloth, the word, which would free us of the murders to come, the heroic non-violence which does not flee but resists, ‘Ahimsa’? …I believed in it passionately for many years.”[4]

His success in using non-violent collective action to challenge the world’s mightiest empire in India intersected with political and ideological currents in the US. Gandhi’s successful use of non-violence justified pacifists, some of whom opposed the Great War. Woodrow Wilson, a broken man after his paralytic stroke on 2 October 1919, had failed to convince the Senate to ratify the League of Nations treaty. His vision of the US’ allies and of idealistic internationalism lay shattered. Warren Harding’s election in 1920 purported to return the country to ‘normalcy’.

Three varieties of pro- and anti-imperialism now shaped American notions of national interest, preparing the ground for negative and positive receptions of Gandhi in America. One variety of American imperialism enthusiastically and unselfconsciously assumed the white man’s civilizing burden and world order politics. Another, viewing Britain as a rival imperial power, opposed British imperialism.

Enthusiastic, unselfconscious US imperialism dates from the 1890s. By 1890 Americans had conquered the continent, closed the frontier, and begun to build a navy. It was the year in which the last armed conflict between Indians and whites took place at Wounded Knee, the Census Bureau declared there was no longer a land frontier, and Congress authorized the building of the US’ first three battleships that would provide the global military reach of a world power. It was in 1890 too that Alfred Thayer Mahan launched his career as the pre-eminent theorist of US imperialism with the publication of his immensely influential The Influence of Sea Power on History. He told his fellow Americans that ‘whether they will or no Americans must begin to look outward’, a theme that Rudyard Kipling embellished for America’s reading public with his poetic call to ‘Take up the White Man’s burden/Send forth the best ye breed/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need….’ By 1898, the US had joined the competition for empire, going to war with Spain, seizing and annexing the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, ‘liberating’ Cuba, and, in 1900, sending 5,000 troops to China, ostensibly to help put down the Boxer rebellion.

Admirers of British imperialism in the US accepted the mission of the white races, Britain and America, to bring order and civilization to the benighted. Among the admirers were Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. In 1908, Roosevelt was concerned with Britain’s ability to deal with Indian unrest and ‘hold down any revolt’,[5] and in 1909 he described the British role in India as ‘the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the break-up of the Roman empire… [and] one of the most notable and the most admirable achievements of the white race during the past centuries’.[6] Echoing Roosevelt’s sentiments, Taft in 1914 told the Toronto Empire Club that ‘…the debt the world owes England ought to be acknowledged in no grudging manner’. And President Woodrow Wilson, an admirer and emulator of the English form of government as well as advocate of self-determination, resisted the demands of Indian nationalists that the Government of India be represented in the League of Nations. ‘Under no circumstances,’ he told Colonel House, ‘would he consent to the admission of a delegate from India because it was not self-governing.’[7]  This American imperialism did not respond to Gandhi.

The second perspective on American imperialism included proponents of it who were also arch-enemies of British imperialism, such as press baron William Randolph Hearst. By 1922, Hearst had become an early advocate of Gandhi’s cause. Seizing the opportunity to twist the lion’s tail that Gandhi’s challenge to the British Empire offered, he authored a signed article in the Washington Times that inveighed against British rule in Indian. ‘On what basis of justice, or general good will, or public benefit, or individual advantage, or liberty, or democracy, or self-determination, or anything that is recognized as right, is India kept in bondage by England?’ The principle of self-determination should be applied to India. How could the United States, he asked, ‘support England in her domination of India against the will of her three hundred million people?’ America should scrap the ‘unnatural alliance’ with England that ‘stultifies all our principles of liberty and nullifies the whole inspiring spirit of our history’.[8]

Ironically, it was the jingoist voice of the US’ ‘manifest destiny’, a voice that supported expansion of US power across the North American continent and into South America, the Pacific, and Asia, that brought Gandhi to the attention of US public opinion. Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, joined Hearst in publicizing Gandhi’s challenge to British rule in India. It suited both publishers’ purposes to use Gandhi’s challenge to British rule in India to discredit and attack those who benefited from and admired Britain and its empire. Hearst and McCormick spoke for US nationalism and expansionist imperialism that had taken shape in the generations preceding the Great War.

Those opposed to imperialism, American as well as British, and who identified with those oppressed by colonial masters, also contributed to Gandhi’s positive reception in the US after World War I. Their first manifestation was the Anti-Imperialist League. Founded in Boston at Faneuil Hall in June 1898, it was led by Harvard luminaries Charles Eliot Norton and William James, ex-president Grover Cleveland, president Jordan of Stanford and Angell of Michigan, Andrew Carnegie for capital and Samuel Gompers for labor, and spoken for by E.L. Godkin’s Evening Post and Nation, and Mark Twain. The League tried but failed to ensure that the Spanish-American war would result in liberation, not conquest.

William Jennings Bryan, the standard-bearer of populism and progressivism, and three-time presidential candidate, very nearly succeeded in 1896.[9] From the great plains of America’s West, he spoke for the farmer and working man in an era dominated by Eastern industrial and financial capital. He vehemently opposed war, including the war against Spain and the war against Germany. After visiting India in 1905–6, Bryan became a forceful opponent of imperialism and the standing armies, big navies, and European entanglements it seemed to entail. ‘Let no one,’ Bryan wrote after his visit to India, ‘cite India as an argument in defense of colonialism’. The Briton ‘…has conferred some benefits upon India, but he has extorted a tremendous price for them…. [He] has demonstrated, as many before, man’s inability to exercise with wisdom and justice, irresponsible power over the helpless people’.[10] When Woodrow Wilson broke his campaign pledge to keep the US out of Europe’s war, Bryan resigned his post as Secretary of State in Wilson’s Cabinet. In challenging apologists of imperialism, war and British rule in India such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Bryan contributed to the post-World War I anti-imperialism and pacifism that helped make Gandhi credible and intelligible in the US.

The sea change that occurred after World War I in the US’ outlook toward war, imperialism and orientalism helped make the dhoti-clad, bare-chested Gandhi a hero of pacifists whose opposition to the war now seemed justified. It also made him a hero of those opposed to British imperialism in India and to the US’ special relationship with England. American opinion was ready to celebrate a nationalist leader who was Asian, nonviolent, and ‘spiritual’ if he was capable of challenging the British Empire. In the early 1920s, Gandhi became a celebrity in American consciousness. What manner of person was he? Were Americans to admire, learn from, even believe in him, or had they let a spiritual and political Trojan horse into their midst?

The Guru

Although it is a Hindi word, I use guru rather than ‘teacher’ to discuss Gandhi’s influence on important public figures in the US. The English word ‘teacher’ strongly suggests the Hindi word, adhyapak, a teacher in a school or college, and only weakly, if at all, guru. A guru is a mentor or a master with respect to knowledge or skill, and a spiritual guide, often but not always in a religious sense. A guru is not only at a higher plane of accomplishment but also at a higher plane of being than those who recognize or learn from him or her.

Gandhi was a guru for two prominent Americans, John Haynes Holmes and Martin Luther King, Jr., for most of their adult lives. He was a guru too for a third prominent American, Reinhold Niebuhr, but only for a short but important period (1930–2) when, in the face of economic collapse, rising fascism, and aggressive war, he was seeking moral, nonviolent forms of collective action to realize ‘equal justice’.

Culturally, the ground for Gandhi in the US was prepared by the US version of an ‘oriental renaissance’. Reading Indian texts led Emerson to his transcendentalist essays such as ‘The Oversoul’ and ‘Brahma’. Emerson’s essays and his own reading of the Bhagavad Gita help shape Whitman’s orientalism, most evident in his poem ‘Passage to India’. Emerson’s lavish praise for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass when it first appeared in 1855 helped Whitman on his way to becoming America’s greatest poet. The orientalism of Emerson’s Concord friend, Henry David Thoreau, took several forms. For a time he shared with Emerson the editorship of the transcendentalist magazine, The Dial. His meditative withdrawal to Walden Pond and subsequent defacto renunciation of society and celebration of nature and solitude owed much to familiarity with the Bhagavad Gita and the ideas and practices of Indian ascetics.[11] Conversely, Gandhi’s positive reception in the US owes something to his multifaceted occidentalism; of the twenty books that shaped Gandhi’s thinking in his seminal 1909 text, Hind Swaraj, eighteen were written by occidental authors, including sex by Tolstoy, two by Ruskin and Thoreau, one of which was On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.[12]

Later, from an entirely different quarter of America’s cultural landscape and without benefit of oriental text, the outspokenly anti-imperialist Mark Twain helped to translate India to the US. After visiting that distant and exotic land in 1893, he wrote the widely read and frequently reprinted Following the Equator; A Journey Around the World (1897). Twenty four chapters were devoted to ‘the most extraordinary country on earth’. The master of fantastic realism, ‘the tall tales’ about fabulous doings and beings, and the satirist and critic of middle class pieties and conventions, found India a land to his liking. ‘In the sixth decade of Victoria’s reign,’ Justin Kaplan writes of Twain, ‘he had completed an equatorial tour of empire and imperialism, had seen the white man’s secure dominion over alien races, black, brown, and yellow, and the accompanying victory of what he would soon be calling, as his indignation boiled to the surface, the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust”.’[13]

It was on ground prepared by these oriental themes that Holmes, King, and Niebuhr receive Gandhi’s words and political morality.

John Haynes Holmes

John Haynes Holmes was the earliest, longest serving, and arguably the most loyal and zealous of Gandhi’s followers in the US. Minister of the Community Church of New York from 1919 until 1949, editor of Unity, which spoke for a liberal Christianity that was pacifist, internationally and socially concerned, and politically radical, Holmes announced his ‘discovery’ of Gandhi in 1921, and remained, until his death in 1964, his most ardent admirer and advocate in the US.[14] Between the wars particularly, Holmes’ voice from the pulpit, the press (he wrote frequently for the New York Herald Tribune) and his and other journals of opinion was heard in New York, the East Coast, and beyond in support of radical reform at home, and peace and anti-colonialism abroad.

When, in 1927, Gandhi became correspondent from India for Holmes’ journal, Unity, it published his autobiography (The Story of My Experiments With Truth) in the serial form in which it had recently appeared in India. This was the autobiography’s first publication abroad. Holmes corresponded with Gandhi over many years and met him twice, once in England when Gandhi traveled to London to attend the second Round Table Conference in 1931, and a second time, more briefly, soon after Indian independence on 15 August 1947, when Holmes and his son Roger Holmes traveled to India by air to meet Gandhi in Delhi.[15] Gandhi was 78 and would be assassinated a few months later, on 30 January 1948.

Holmes announced in April 1921 that he would deliver a sermon on ‘Who is the Greatest Man in the World?’ By his own retrospective account, ‘I climbed tremulously into my pulpit on Sunday morning to answer my own question’. The answer he gave was M.K. Gandhi. ‘In the light of what was known, and not known, at that time about Gandhi here in our Western world,’ the audacity of his declaration, Holmes tells us 32 years later in My Gandhi, ‘seems now incredible’.[16]

Holmes found Gandhi credible as a ‘mahatma’ (translated to his attentive congregation not as ‘great soul’ but as ‘the Saint’) and intelligible in Christian terms. ‘When I think of Lenin, I think of Napoleon. But when I think of Gandhi,’ Holmes told his congregation, ‘I think of Jesus Christ. He lives his life; he speaks his word; he suffers, strives, and will some day nobly die, for his kingdom upon earth.’[17] Holmes had prepared his audience for this encomium by considering but rejecting several other contemporary great men and by telling what he knew of Gandhi’s life and views. (‘I wonder how many of you.. know the story of his life. Listen while I tell this story, and see if I am right in calling its hero the greatest man in the world today!’) It was a novel assertion but one to which Holmes remained committed for the rest of his life.

‘The drama of this experience of discovery’, Holmes wrote, looking back to 1921 from 1953, ‘was terrific. Here was our world rent to ruin by mad resort to force and violence. Out of this vast convulsion (following World War I) there emerged this single man who put all his trust in truth and love. While the world gave itself over to self-destruction, Gandhi found the way of life and triumphantly walked therein. History has known nothing like it since Christ and Caesar’.[18]

Holmes’ sermon in April 1921 seems to have affected the formation of public opinion. Until mid-1921, news about India in US papers relied on Reuters, the British-owned news service whose imperial bias was evident from its failure to provide copy to the US about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar in 1919 and Gandhi’s first non-cooperation campaign. It did provide extensive coverage of the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1921 without mention of the hostility, boycotts, and violence with which it was met. Soon after Holmes’ sermon, by mid-1921, news about India and Gandhi independent of British sources and views improved markedly. On 13 March 1922, when Holmes gave a second sermon about Gandhi, ‘Gandhi, His World Significance’, it was reported in the New York Times. So too was a luncheon meeting a day earlier of the Foreign Press Association that discussed Gandhi’s arrest on 10 March 1922. These were the first news reports about Gandhi that originated in the US. The shift was no doubt determined by the huge extent and newsworthiness of the mass satyagraha of 1922. By the spring of 1922, Gandhi had become news inside as well as outside the US.

A decade after Holmes had declared Gandhi ‘the greatest man in the world today’, Time featured him on its cover as ‘Man of the Year’ for 1930. It was the year of the Salt March, Gandhi’s most effective challenge to the legitimacy of British rule in India. World attention and concern had moved from the prospect of prosperity and peace in 1921 to deepening depression and intimations of war in 1931. Gandhi’s ingenious strategy and dramatic execution of the Salt March in March and April of 1930 had revitalized Indian nationalism and led Britain’s new Labour government to call negotiations at a second Round Table Conference in London in September 1931. Gandhi was to be the sole representative of the Indian National Congress.

The prospect of Gandhi, now the Mahatma for some and for many a world historical figure, leaving for London stirred Holmes and Niebuhr to dash to London in the hope of a meeting with the man who both believed held the key to Christian conduct on behalf of social justice. Holmes was then a leading figure in the East Coast liberal reform establishment, Niebuhr on the verge of becoming one.[19] Despite the resemblance between their careers and their commitments and their ostensible friendship, by 1931 the younger, ambitious Niebuhr had come to regard the more senior and established Holmes not only as the faithful publicist for Gandhi in the US but also as the ‘ultimate symbol of the sentimental liberal pacifist’,[20] who failed to recognize that, ‘the human capacity for love is always tainted by the inclination to be self-serving and even destructive’.[21] Nevertheless, in late August 1931, Holmes and Niebuhr embarked on competitive missions to meet, learn from, and speak for Gandhi in the US.

Holmes, of course, had every advantage, not least a personal invitation from Gandhi to meet him in London should he attend a conference there. Nevertheless, twenty-two years later, in his 1953 book, My Gandhi, Holmes adopts a tone of great humility and self-effacement; he tells the story of his encounter with Gandhi as if he was nobody who became somebody by virtue of Gandhi’s grace.

As Holmes tells the story, he was touring in Switzerland when he happened to see a newspaper with a dispatch from Bombay telling of Gandhi’s embarkation for the Round Table Conference: “I was appalled at the spectacle of my own audacity in seeking intrusion upon so important, even historic [an] occasion …would not [the Mahatma] …be troubled by my unheralded appearance and my insistent expectation of an interview? …When I reached London, the first thing I did was to hunt out Miss Lester [Muriel Lester, head of Kingsley Hall, the East End settlement house at which Gandhi would stay] and state my case. ‘I will be a busboy,’ I said, ‘a dishwasher, a garbage man, if only you let me in to see and talk with Gandhi.’ She not only gave me entrance, but managed, in kind and clever ways, to bring the Mahatma and me together. So I hoped was not over-reaching myself, nor exacting attention to which I was not entitled.”[22]

Gandhi, of course, expected to see Holmes; he had corresponded with him for a decade and on 30 July 1931 wrote to Holmes from the Sabarmati ashram that ‘if I do succeed in going to London we must meet’.[23] Gandhi was not surprised to find Holmes among those who greeted him at Folkestone when his boat-train arrived from Boulogne on 12 September 1931. They met on four subsequent occasions over the next five days, the last time being Thursday, 17 September, when Holmes advised Gandhi not to accept any of the several invitations he had to visit the US.

This proved to be the most significant aspect of Holmes’ encounter with Gandhi. Holmes was determined to prevent Gandhi from being exposed to what he believed would be an exploitative and uncomprehending America. The preliminary to one of the invitations was to be an interview with Jimmy Walker, the Mayor of New York, who was then in London. Webb Miller, a well-known correspondent who had covered Gandhi’s Salt March and was currently representing the United Press, tried to arrange the interview. According to Holmes’ account of his five days in London, he not only prevented W. Miller from arranging an interview between Gandhi and the charming but corrupt Mayor of New York but also dissuaded him from accepting any invitations to visit the US.

Miller’s report of Gandhi’s Salt March (12 March to 6 April) had caught world attention at the time, subsequently became a classical account of the practice of non-violent resistance, and was seen by millions in 1982 and 1983 as recreated in the film, Gandhi.[24] Miller apparently wanted to capitalize on the world personality that he thought he had had a land in creating.[25] Holmes was ‘disgusted, even frightened’, by ‘such tricks for making news’ and by ‘a deliberate attempt to exploit [Gandhi] for cheap and vulgar ends’. Later, when Gandhi asked Holmes, ‘Do you know Mayor Walker?’ Holmes told him that ‘I am acquainted with [his] …record because I helped to write it…. Mr. Walker is… now under serious charges of misconduct in office, and is pretty certain to be removed. His administration had become a municipal scandal. I should hate to see you in company with the Mayor, and my sober judgment is that you should not receive him.’ The meeting did not take place, nor did Gandhi, after consultation with Holmes, accept any of several invitations to visit the US.

Invitations for Gandhi to visit the US at the conclusion of the Round Table Conference were at hand when he arrived in London. Many of them, according to Holmes, were from ‘more or less designing persons’ who ‘counted shrewdly on the prestige which he would bring to movements or interests they represented’. At least one, Holmes conceded, was signed by more or less influential names [Holmes did not give them but they included Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, Alfred P. Sloan, chairman of General Motors Corporation, Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, John Dewey, the philosopher, Jane Addams, the social worker, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise], and showed some appreciation…of the problems involved.’ On 9 October 1931, under a two-column headline on Page 1 that read ‘Gandhi to visit US if we take him seriously; Holmes’ warning of ridicule deters him’, the New York Times quotes Gandhi as saying, ‘If [the invitors] can convince Holmes I ought to go to America I shall be glad to reconsider my decision’. But Holmes was not satisfied; he could see no real ‘evidence of preparation for Gandhi’s coming’. A reception committee, itinerary, speaking engagements, care for the Mahatma’s comfort and safety, an informed and sympathetic press, and interviews with the President and other leading citizens were all required yet, ‘so far as I could see, no responsible organization was at hand or in prospect to take over as difficult and important a piece of business as the people of this country have ever attempted’.

Holmes’ objections, it turned out, were more fundamental than the inadequacy of preparations for the visit. From the beginning, Holmes writes, ‘I was opposed to the whole proposition’. Gandhi’s place after the conference was India ‘in this hour of continuing crisis’. Besides, Holmes wrote in 1953, America in 1931 ‘was by no means that international center which in recent years it has become’. Holmes confesses, ‘there was the question …as to whether the American people as a whole were ready [in 1931] to receive the Mahatma in true appreciation of his character and work. He had not yet won independence for India from Britain nor world recognition and reverence…His policies were still regarded as fantastic, and his personality as queer…What I dreaded in 1931 …was a vast explosion of vulgar curiosity and ribald jesting.’

Having said this much, Holmes admitted: ‘I was perhaps ignoring Gandhi’s supreme power and influence over men. His simplicity and grace, to say nothing of his courage, were passports to human favour.’ Had not Gandhi been ‘rapturously received and applauded’ by the Lancashire weavers who had been all but ruined by his non-cooperation boycott in India of cotton goods imported from England? Holmes remained unsure of Gandhi’s reception in the US, ‘especially when time was so short and preparations so scant. I think now [in 1953],’ Holmes concludes, ‘as I thought then, that I was right in disfavouring the whole American proposal.’[26]

Before rushing to judgment about Holmes’ advice to Gandhi, we should bear in mind the circumstances surrounding Gandhi’s reception in Britain. London in September 1931 was at the epicenter of a worldwide economic earthquake that began with the October 1929 stock market crash in the US: the world and domestic economies were collapsing. In retrospect it seems that the British lion, ‘hegemon’ of world trade, finance, and security, was a dying beast.[27]

Ramsay MacDonald’s first national coalition government, formed on 25 August 1931 to deal with the ‘national emergency’ just two weeks before the Round Table Conference opened, was already on its last legs, and in no position to bargain about independence for India, the issue that Gandhi insisted had to be settled before the problem of India’s minorities could be tackled. A hostile British press mocked and belittled him When Gandhi made his opening remarks at the Round Table Conference, a speech Chicago Tribune correspondent William L. Shirer considered ‘the greatest of his long political life,’ the conference secretariat refused to make a verbatim record, the popular press largely ignored it, and The Times buried it. Most papers reveled in the prospect that the Conference would fail and Gandhi with it.[28]

The mood of uncertainty and fear generated by Britain’s economic and political disintegration deepened Holmes’ doubts. Unsettled by Miller’s scheme to link Gandhi with the corrupt and failing Mayor of New York, and worried that Americans would find Gandhi’s ideas ‘fantastic’ and his personality ‘queer’, Holmes may have asked himself if a reception similar to the British establishment’s hostile and uncomprehending one awaited Gandhi on the other side of the Atlantic. On balance, Gandhi’s most ardent admirer and most forceful advocate in the US seemed to fear that, once on American soil, Gandhi would lose credibility and find it difficult to explain himself in terms that Americans would understand. Did Holmes, Gandhi’s self-appointed vicar in the US, underestimate the Mahatma and misread American opinion? Niebuhr’s response to Gandhi suggested that he may have.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Holmes, when faced with the prospect of an earthly Gandhi on American soil, was overcome by doubts about Gandhi’s credibility and intelligibility. Reinhold Niebuhr seems to have come to opposite conclusions. True, he did not have to advise Gandhi about a trip to the US. But his account of ‘seeing’ Gandhi in London suggests a different conclusion than Holmes’. Gandhi’s ‘innate dignity’ did not allow the charge of being a ‘ridiculous figure’. By declaring Gandhi a ‘prophet’ and ‘statesman’, Niebuhr seemed to reveal that Gandhi in 1931 may have been what he, Niebuhr, hoped to become in the US, ‘the prophet to Politicians,’ ‘father of us all’ [liberal cold warriors, neo-realists and, perhaps, neo-conservatives], ‘establishment theologian’, and aspiring politician.[29]

When Niebuhr sailed for England in August 1931, his head was full of questions he wanted to put to Gandhi. They were the key questions for his book on social change: What was the difference between violent and non-violent resistance to evil, and between non-resistance and any form of resistance? But interrogating Gandhi was not the only thing on Niebuhr’s mind. True to his realist commitment to mixed motives, he eagerly looked forward to being with Ursula Keppel-Compton, an intelligent, religious, and stunningly attractive English postgraduate student at the Union Theological Seminary in 1930–1, to whom Niebuhr, a 38-year-old bachelor professor living with his widowed mother, became engaged in June and married in December.

Niebuhr at this time was still in his pacifist and socialist phase. He had helped to establish the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, supported in 1928 the non-Marxist Socialist Party led by ex-Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas, and had visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1930. Niebuhr spoke of the centrality of ‘social intelligence’[30] for social action. In an article on ‘The Religion of Communism’ in The Atlantic [April 1931] he linked ‘social intelligence’ to ‘some kind of religion’ which is ‘the basis of every potent social program. Those who fear too much fanaticism, which is the inevitable by-product of religiously created energy, are consigned to social impotence by the multitude of their scruples’. Religiously created energy was dangerous—it bordered on fanaticism—but essential. These were Niebuhr’s expectations as he hastened to London to meet Gandhi, a man who seemed to be providing the religious energy needed for national and social liberation.

Unlike Holmes, Niebuhr did not meet and talk to Gandhi in London. Along with a bevy of reporters, he was left standing outside Kingsley Hall, the East End settlement house where Gandhi was staying, while Holmes, Niebuhr’s ‘ultimate symbol of the sentimental liberal pacifist…, went inside for a personal appointment’.[31] Niebuhr, the budding political realist, did not find Gandhi bizarre or absurd: ‘Since it is Gandhi’s day of silence, the crowd outside and several dozen of us inside the hall who hope for an interview get no more than a smile from him. It is a very engaging and charming smile and one begins to regret the charges of sentimentality one has brought against friends [could Niebuhr have John Haynes Holmes in mind?] who have insisted that the homeliness of the man is soon forgotten, once he reveals his personality. Nor is there anything ridiculous about him, in spite of the loincloth [that article of apparel looks like what boys call track pants] and the homespun Indian shawl. There is too much innate dignity about the man to allow the impression of a ridiculous figure, which London newspapers try to assiduously to cultivate, to remain’.[32]

In the key chapter of Moral Man and Immoral Society, ‘The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics’, Niebuhr elaborates and refines his interpretations of Gandhi in ‘What Chance Has Gandhi?’, the article he wrote soon after his return from London. The 1931 article and the 1932 chapter constitute Niebuhr’s considered estimate of Gandhi. It was of a world historical, even transcendent, figure. In the decaying and desperate world of failed capitalism and failing democracy, Gandhi’s ideas and practices as Niebuhr interpreted them provided a religiously meaningful and politically effective way to pursue ‘equal justice, the most rational ultimate objective of society’. He wondered ‘whether there has ever been a more historic moment in the centuries than this visit of Gandhi to London’.[33]

After this almost hagiographic estimate of December 1931, Niebuhr became more ambivalent about Gandhi. As he proceeded to write Moral Man and Immoral Society, he made ‘a conscious declaration of independence from the pacifistic circle—liberal and Socialist—in which (he) had worked in the previous decade’.[34] In his December 1931 article, Gandhi, the unique ‘prophet’ and ‘statesman’, combined ‘translucent honesty’ and ‘spiritual self-discipline’ with ‘necessary opportunism’ and patient application of general principles to detailed situations’.[35]

In Moral Man Niebuhr arrived at the view that the responsible Christian should accept the use of force and that the use of force implied the use of violence in certain situations. He came to this position in part through an at best superficial and at worst perverse interpretation of Gandhi’s use of satyagraha [truth-force], militant non-violent collective action or resistance. Gandhi, according to Niebuhr, used non-violence as a pragmatist; he was not committed to non-violence absolutely. ‘Beginning with the idea that social justice could be resisted by …truth force and soul force…[Gandhi] came finally to realize the necessity of some type of physical coercion upon the foes of his people’s freedom, as every political leader must.’[36] For weak collectives such as Indian nationalists or weak minorities such as American Negroes, non-violence was the best tactic. Having made Gandhi intelligible in realist terms, Niebuhr held that he, not Gandhi’s self-appointed champion in the United States, John Haynes Holmes, was ‘a true Gandhian.’[37]

Niebuhr broke with his liberal Protestant and political reformist past in Moral Man by arguing that coercion, even violent coercion, that liberates ‘oppressed nationalities’ or the ‘working classes’ in the name of equal justice in ‘placed in a different moral category from the use of power for the perpetuation of imperial rule or class dominance’. Conflicts involving oppressed nationalities and classes could not, as Gandhi thought they could, be resolved through non-violent collective action that made mutual understanding and accommodation possible. They had to be resolved by force in struggles that eventuated in victory for one side and defeat for the other. By 1932, Niebuhr had come to believe that victory over imperialists, capitalists, and fascists required physical force, not truth force.

But Niebuhr could not so easily repudiate his past self, a self which he found Gandhi’s satyagraha exemplified, a homo religioso as prophet and statesman, a self to which, in modified form, he gradually returned. Towards the end of Chapter IX of Moral Man, ‘The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics’, he presented another Gandhi, one more in keeping with the Gandhi both Niebuhr and Holmes saw in London at Kingsley Hall.

‘The advantage of non-violence as a method of expressing goodwill,’ he wrote, ‘lies in the fact that it protects the agent against the resentments which violent conflict always creates in both parties to a conflict, and that it proves this freedom of resentment and ill-will to the contending party in the dispute by enduring more suffering then it causes’. Again affirming Gandhi’s view of conflict resolution based on non-violence and the mutual pursuit of truth, he observed, ‘One of the most important results of a spiritual discipline against resentment in a social dispute is that it leads to an effort to discriminate between the evils of a social system and situation and the individuals who are involved in it…Mr. Gandhi never tires of making a distinction between individual Englishmen and the system of imperialism which they maintain’.

Niebuhr concludes his ‘Gandhi chapter’ in Moral Man with a powerful endorsement of Gandhi’s perspective, ‘There is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can make a larger contribution than this problem of developing non-violent resistance. The discovery of elements of common human frailty in the foe and, concomitantly, the appreciation of all human life as possessing transcendent worth, creates attitudes which transcend social conflict and thus mitigate its cruelties…These attitudes…require a sublime madness which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities’.

So, can Gandhi’s ‘sublime madness’ be made available to the Western world? Niebuhr turns orientalism on its head to explain why, in his view, Gandhi’s way can’t be made available to the crisis-ridden Western world: ‘it is no accident of history that the spirit of non-violence has been introduced into contemporary politics by a religious leader of the orient’. Because occidental man lacks the spirit of non-violence he is ‘incapable of engaging in non-violent social conflict’. Western man’s spiritual bankruptcy is the result of being ‘deprived of religion.’ Lacking a meaningful religious life, ‘the white Man’ has become a ‘beast of prey’. Niebuhr is particularly concerned about the disappearance of the religious inheritance of the disinherited for whom the spirit required for non-violent resistance is most important. The religious heritage of the disinherited white man ‘…has been dissipated by the mechanical character of his civilization’ and by the sentimentality and moral confusions introduced by the ‘comfortable and privileged classes’ into the Christian religion. Because the insights of Christianity ‘are not immediately available for the social struggle in the Western world….Western civilization …will suffer form cruelties and be harassed by animosities which destroy the beauty of human life’. ‘Even if,’ he concludes, ‘justice should be achieved by social conflicts which lack the spiritual elements of non-violence, something will be lacking in the character of the society so constructed.’[38]

In the final paragraph of ‘The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics’, Niebuhr attempts to resuscitate his ‘realistic’ account of ‘moral man and immoral society’ by denying the Gandhi he has just so eloquently affirmed. The perennial tragedy of human history,’ he alleges, ‘is that those who cultivate the spiritual elements usually do so by divorcing themselves from or misunderstanding the problem of collective man where the brutal elements are most obvious….’ With Gandhi now standing accused of ‘divorcing [himself] from or misunderstanding the problem of collective man,’ Niebuhr feels free to sweepingly conclude that ‘to the end of history the peace of the world, as Augustine observed, must be gained by strife.’[39]

Niebuhr’s pacifist, [both secular and Christian], and Socialist friends and allies felt shocked, dismayed, and some betrayed, by Moral Man’s ‘cynicism’ and ‘unrelieved pessimism.’ Niebuhr answered his critics who included Norman Thomas and John Haynes Holmes by charging them with being ‘immersed in the sentimentalities of a dying culture.’[40] Addressing his critics from the columns of his own World Tomorrow, Niebuhr ‘…for the first lime labeled himself ‘a “Marxian” as well as a “Christian”’—the better to distinguish himself from the likes of Holmes, with whom he had now come to verbal blows and who was ‘now his chief nemesis on the religious left.’[41]

If Niebuhr lost friends and allies he gained recognition and fame as a ‘Christian realist. Moral Man and Immoral Society’s ‘uncommon brilliance,’ Fox argues, vaulted Niebuhr into the front ranks of the US’ public intellectuals. Its ‘historic significance…lay in Niebuhr’ biting repudiation…of the historic liberal Protestant quest for the Kingdom of God’. Ignoring Niebuhr’s affirmation of Gandhi in his chapter on ‘The Preservation of Moral Values in Politics,’ Fox reads Moral Man to say that Niebuhr ‘dismissed with utter derision the deepest hope that animated thousands of radical and liberal Christians….: the hope that human history would eventually see the inauguration of a community of live.’ It was an ideal that was central to the heritage of American social thought. Most American thinkers between 1880 and 1930 ‘yearned for a future cooperative commonwealth that would transcend the brutal confines of industrial society.’[42] Niebuhr’s German Lutheran roots distanced him from an Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition that placed a quest for the Kingdom of God and a cooperative commonwealth rather than original sin at the center of its concerns. It was the legacy of Puritan America, of those who, in the face of persecution and intolerance, fled to a wilderness where they pledged to establish a community of Christian brothers.

Yet, as Richard Fox concludes, Niebuhr was trying to have it both ways: idealism and realism. On the one hand, coercion, even force, had to be used, to oppose and defeat immoral ‘collectives’ in the domestic and international arenas. Unlike his theologian brother, Richard, Reinhold’s faith did not involve abandoning himself to God’s will. On the other, ‘he held to the old liberal dream of transforming human society….’ Despite his fulminations against sentimental liberalism, against complacent faith in the redemptive character of human goodwill, Reinhold remained a thoroughgoing liberal.[43] It was the liberal Niebuhr, the Niebuhr who glimpsed the redemptive power of non-violence and sought greater equality and justice in society, who allowed himself to admire, even to identify with Gandhi the prophet and statesman who could command a nation and humble an empire.[44]

Martin Luther King

Gandhi’s greatest and most enduring success as a guru in America was the influence he had on Martin Luther King, Jr. Through King, Gandhi affected the conduct of the civil rights movement that began in the mid-1950s and crested in the mid-1960s. King discovered Gandhi early in his career, made Gandhi’s ideas and practice his own, and remained faithful to them when, in what turned out to be the last years of his life, many of those whom he had previously influenced and lied abandoned satyagraha and non-violence.

King, the pre-eminent leader of the civil rights movement in the US, played a central role in moving the country toward a resolution of what Gunnar Myrdal called ‘An American Dilemma,’ the contradiction between the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence and the reality of inequality found in slavery, segregation, discrimination, and poverty. In 1950, King had heard Dr Mordecai Johnson, then president of Howard University, speak about Gandhi. Johnson, who admired Gandhi, had just returned from India. King found Johnson’s account of Gandhi ‘so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.’[45]

King began reading about ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (collective action in pursuit of truth), terms that have been subject to extensive interpretation in American and Indian scholarly, intellectual, and religious circles.[46]

King wrote, “I came to see that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom…. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships,…Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.”[47]

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, which launched the civil rights movement that culminated in the desegregation of public facilities in the Southern US, was precipitated in part by an unlikely early experiment in globalization. Rosa Parks, the black teacher and NAACP activist who decided on 1 December 1995, not to move from the “white” portion of a local bus when ordered to do so,[48] had participated some years earlier in a workshop on non-violent resistance held in Tennessee under the guidance of Ram Manohar Lohia, a prominent and charismatic socialist Gandhian who provided the intellectual and moral inspiration for much of Indian socialism Independence. Lohia provides a startlingly concrete transnational thread back to Gandhi. Rosa Park’s commonplace act of resistance to a humiliation, experienced everyday by Southern Blacks, revealed what Gandhi stressed tirelessly, that most forms of oppression are rooted in the compliance of the oppressed. The act embodied so aptly the aspirations of the Blacks of Montgomery, resonated so exactly with human aspirations they daily repressed, that an entire community immediately joined the resistance.

But what would be the tactics, what the relationship to the community that enforced segregation? The rationale came to be articulated by the twenty-six year old minister of the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church. Addressing a mass meeting to endorse the bus boycott five days after Rosa Parks’ arrest and $14 fine, Martin Luther King said: “There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation. Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principle of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies’…we must no become bitter and end by hating our white brothers. As Booker T. Washington said, ‘Let no man pull you so low as to make you hate him.’”[49]

King and Gandhi diverged in their paths as men of faith. American Baptism did not require or even recommend a holistic self-dedication to the life of the homo religious. Its preachers did not walk the narrow road of the ascetic nor were they likely to become the spiritual leaders of a dedicated commune that combined cultivation of the moral self with worldly activity. The cultures of Vaishnavite Hinduism and of American Southern Baptism provided different models of religiously toned leadership. More worldly than Gandhi, King was a Baptist preacher guiding at first a congregation on how to transform the difficult political and social world of Alabama and then mobilizing large parts of an entire nation, both black and white, both the segregated and the community of the segregators, to reject a deeply entrenched institution of humiliation. King and Gandhi not only shared political skill and the intuition to identify strategies that would mobilize political voice and participation. They shared the gospel of love and non-violence found in both Christian and Hindu, especially Bhakti, traditions.

In the dozen years between King’s launching the civil rights movement in 1956 and his murder in 1968, the mood and vocabulary of the country changed. Negroes became ‘Blacks’ and blacks called for black power. Some advocated violent means to achieve liberation and ethnic identity. Frantz Fanon replaced Jesus and Gandhi as the teacher of black power extremists. King objected less to the idea of black power than he did to two ideas frequently associated with it: retaliatory violence and separatism. Both violated his Gandhian values.[50]

Other disappointments and failures followed. Like Gandhi, who near the end of his life faced the carnage of Partition riots, King towards the end of his life faced the violence of city race riots and escalation of the war in Vietnam. King and Gandhi were despised and opposed form ‘within’, Gandhi by militant Hindu fundamentalist, King by extremist blacks, and from ‘without’, Gandhi by ‘two-nation’ Muslims, King by J. Edgar Hoover and white racists and segregationists. Both were murdered and martyred. These affinities and parallels between King’s and Gandhi’s lives made Gandhi a familiar figure in other wise unlikely American households.[51]

Gandhi’s presence in American popular consciousness as a person to respect or to vilify is partially linked to Martin Luther King’s reputation and standing. They were at their nadir in the years immediately following his death in 1968. His growing significance for Americans, whites as well as blacks, was evident when a King bust joined representative of other American statesmen and heroes in the rotunda of the Capitol on 20 January 1996 and the US for the first time celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national holiday.

The Mahatma

One of Gandhi’s images in America was that of the mahatma. Its meaning was determined in part by longstanding attitudes and beliefs about India and the Orient and about Christianity that structured perceptions and evaluation.

Since the late renaissance and certainly since the mid-18th century the occident has found it difficult to regard the orient in any other light than backward, inferior, and benighted. Gandhi, the homo religious, the man of religion, whether as a mahatma, a saint or a teacher of a way of life like Buddha or Jesus, quickly became a source of both controversy and inspiration.

Until Gandhi became America’s ‘lens on India’, American views on Indian religion, society and politics were largely filtered through British sources. They include those of the missionary, Alexander Duff, who held that ‘of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen men, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous’. Charles Grant could not ‘…avoid recognizing in the people of Indostan a race of men lamentably degenerate and base,’ and John Stuart Mill, echoing the view of his father, James Mill, regretted that ‘in truth, the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of the slave’.[52] More generally, the West’s cultural hegemony and superiority made it difficult to accept an Indian, an oriental such as Gandhi, as a teacher of the good life.[53] The conquering West equated the superiority of its power and wealth with the superiority of its civilization and beliefs. Gandhi made a dent in this sense of superiority. The notion that the East could teach the West, that the US had something to learn from Gandhi, was strongly, sometimes hysterically, resisted. Gandhi’s reception as a religious as a religious figure reveals a great deal about how American attitudes about India and the orient structured his presence in the US.

‘Charlie’ Andrews, the Anglican missionary who early on became one of the principal interpreters of Gandhi to the West, first met Gandhi in Durban on 1 January 1914.[54] He bent to touch his feet. It was an act of canonization. Mark Juergensmeyer, a leading contemporary interpreter of Gandhi in the US, traces the origins of the Western propensity to construct Gandhi as a saint to C.F. Andrews’ accounts of his initial encounters with Gandhi [55] and to Rabindranath Tagore’s use of the term ‘mahatma’ in 1915 when Gandhi returned to India.[56]

‘Saint,’ a culturally available category for an otherwise anomalous being, was not an Indian term.[57] Saint in Western parlance can refer to persons canonized by the Church for pre-eminent holiness (official saints) or to one of a Christian God’s chosen people, a person in whom grace had triumphed and who was, as a consequence, eminent for piety or virtue. The aura of Christian holiness and transcendent power associated with the term ‘saint’ quickly melded with English versions of Indian terms loosely translated as saint. In 1915, Tagore, the recent Nobel laureate, used an Indian term, mahatma (great soul), to welcome Gandhi on his return to India from South Africa. Mahatma was taken to be an Indian version of a saint and the two terms became hard to distinguish in Western usage. Mohandas Gandhi came to be referred to and known as Mahatma Gandhi (as if this were his proper name), a designation that nevertheless suggested his saintly meaning and provenance. But was Gandhi a ‘saint’ by his own lights? Could he have meant to be a saint in India, much less in the US? What does his construction as a saint tell us about Gandhi in the US?

Saintliness, like charisma, is the fruit of collaboration between viewer and viewed. Mark Juergensmeyer argues that although Gandhi’s canonization as a saint was largely at the initiative of his English and American admirers, he collaborated in the result: ‘What made Gandhi truly a Christ figure for Westerners from Andrews through Attenborough…was not just that he looked the part. He acted the part too—or at least his actions were amenable to that interpretation. He was regarded as a man who exhibited saintly qualities.’ Gandhi, it seems, wanted it that way, wanted his Western admirers to believe he was a saint. His capabilities, Juergensmeyer reasons, revealed his intentions. The fact that he …appeared unclad but for a loin cloth made him look like what many Americans expected in a Messiah …. [B]ehind his wizened appearance was the awesome cultural backdrop of India, which seemed to Gandhi’s American admirers as distant from the modern age as Jesus’ Galilee.’

Ultimately Gandhi himself becomes responsible, holds Juergensmeyer, for the cultural noise that accompanied his translation from the world of the Indian orient, the world of sanyasis, sadhus, gurus, and swamis, to the world of the American occident, the world of saints. It begs the question to hold that ‘saintliness, like beauty, exists largely in the eye of the beholder…’ if Gandhi meant to play the saint to his occidental admirers. They may have ‘extravagantly revered’ him but Gandhi becomes culpable if they were gullible. An authentic modern saint had a powerful appeal: more ‘adequate’ than Jesus to the ‘global, rational, modern point of view…. Gandhi, the English speaking, London trained, Hindu is intercultural in his appeal—“a universal saint” as [John Haynes] Holmes put it…. Many Christians, especially those of a liberal theological bent who shy away from an other worldly view of Christ, feel that Gandhi fills the role as adequately as Jesus did.’

According to Juergensmeyer, ‘the point of view is as interesting as the object of attention’. It is the authenticity of the believers, not the authenticity of the saint that ‘shows that sainthood is far from dead, even in like present day.’ Gandhi seems to have become a saint by pretence and enticement. For Juergensmeyer there seems to be a touch of manipulation and a hint of fraud in the emergence of Gandhi the saint.[58]

Gandhi himself had trouble coping with his ‘saintly’ image, what he called his ‘darshan dilemma’. To take darshan is to profit spiritually from the sight of an auspicious person or icon. Soon after Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 he attended the Kumbha Mela, a vast religious assemblage of pilgrims and sadhus. Darshan-seekers did not allow him a minute to call his own. ‘The dharshanvalas’ blind love has often made me angry, and…sore at heart.’ At the same time, ‘the unique faith of India and the frankness and generosity of our people enchant me.’ Yet the people do not ‘profit in any way by having darshan’; he knew nothing in himself, he said, that made him ‘worthy of giving darshan’. ‘It is not possible,’ he said, ‘simultaneously to work and to give darshan.’ ‘I do,’ he protested, ‘…make every effort to extricate myself from this dilemma.’ His solution ultimately was not to choose between darshan and work but to try to do both: ‘At present, even when people come for darshan, I continue to write and do other work.’[59]

The second difficulty that Juergensmeyer encounters with ‘St Gandhi’ is one endemic to saints. Those who bracket Gandhi with Jesus as a saint encounter the same difficulty with respect to Jesus. We ordinary mortals cannot be like such saints. According to Juergensmeyer, Gandhi ‘…is portrayed as essentially different from us, endowed with a spiritual power to which ordinary mortals are not privy…. We can laud his moral achievements without felling the necessity to live up to all of them ourselves.’ Reinhold Niebuhr, Juergensmeyer’s teacher, found Jesus’ virtues ‘dazzling precisely because they are not emulative: they are extremes of selfless love that provide ordinary Christians with a noble but ultimately unobtainable goal’. For Juergensmeyer Gandhi’s saintliness is similar; ‘We cannot live up to the standard that he achieved.’[60] Saint Gandhi may be a credible construction for some like John Haynes Holmes but for grudging admirers like Niebuhr and Juergensmeyer his sainthood did not provide a satisfactory guide to the religious life.

Gandhi neither wanted to be nor claimed to be a saint. A guru, yes, perhaps a sanyasi or sadhu, even a mahatma, but not a saint. The lives of saints are indeed unlike those of ordinary mortals. Gandhi’s confessional autobiography was meant to show just how ordinary and mortal a creature he was. It showed too that he managed to realize in his daily life and public actions cultural ideals that many Indians honored in their own lives and actions but found difficult though not necessarily impossible to enact. Gandhi did not, like a saint is said to do, mean to mediate for or empower others. If he meant to be anything, he meant to be a guru, to teach through example, action, and precept. Margaret Chatterjee in her superb book on Gandhi’s Religious Thought observes that ‘The guru idea has been explored in recent years by Christian theologians in India, but not too successfully, for the guru in Hindu traditions is a preceptor, not a mediator. The tables can be turned and guru and disciple reverse their roles.’[61]

If I am right in believing that those who, for good or ill, assimilated Gandhi to the essentially Christian concept of saint misread the historical text they confronted, their ‘mistake’ does not remove the image of ‘St Gandhi’ from the meaning of Gandhi in the US. It continues to play an important and controversial role.

Beyond the image of Gandhi, the universal saint, and incorporating it lay the possibility that Gandhi was a world historical teacher of transcendent ethics comparable to Buddha, Mohammed, and, particularly for Christians, Jesus. During Pope John Paul II’s widely reported visit to India in February 1986 he told inquiring reporters on his return to Rome, ‘I was there to evangelize…. I have evangelized the Indian people through the works of Mahatma Gandhi.’ ‘Gandhi,’ according to the Pope, ‘was much more of a Christian than many people who say they are Christians.’[62] Other Christians have viewed Gandhi in this framework. Kenneth Scott Latourette in his 1953 A History of Christianity argued that through Gandhi ‘the influence of Christ …became more dominant in …[India] than at any previous time. Through Gandhi the teaching and example of Jesus made for nonviolent resistance, greater opportunity to the depressed classes, and the positive meanings of unselfish service.’ Jaroslav Pelikan, another distinguished Yale historian of Christianity, in his 1985 Jesus Through the Centuries; His Place in the History of Culture, the Gandhi to Jesus in his chapter on ‘The Liberator!’[63] John Haynes Holmes, a Protestant, and Thomas Merton, a Catholic, treat Gandhi as a redeemer and a liberator.[64]

Pope John Paul II; ‘recognition’ of Gandhi in 1996 was foreshadowed by Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris and by the Church’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) of the Second Vatican Council 28 October 1965. This Declaration recognized Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other faiths as religions and said of them, ‘The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions, [they] often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men (John 1:9).’

Gandhi as world historical teacher of transcendent ethics revived issues first raised in the fifth century by the English (of Irish) theologian, Pelagius, in his dispute with Augustine of Hippo over Adam’s fall, original sin, and God’s grace. Pelagius disputed Augustine’s doctrine that the consequence of Adam’s fall entailed original sin and restricted to Christians only the possibility of knowing God and of God’s grace. The doctrine carved a deep divide between Christians and non-Christian believers. Pelagius took the view that God’s grace gave man free will, that subsequently it was ‘helpful but not necessary and that the heirs of Adam were not stained with original sin’. Consequently, non-Christians could act righteously and know God. Pelagius’ doctrine narrowed the space between Christian and non-Christian believers. Pelagius’ dispute with Augustine did not end in the fifth century, ‘semi-Pelagianism’ has survived as a recurrent mentality in Christianity.[65] It is the mentality that made it possible to write Nostra Aetate in 1965 and for Pope John Paul II to evangelize in Gandhi’s name in 1986.

We have seen that ‘Saint Gandhi,’ while an image of Gandhi in the US, was not an image Gandhi meant to convey. At the same time, Gandhi thought about Christianity in terms not unlike those used by liberal Protestants and neo-Pelagian Catholics about him. There was, at this level but not at others, mutual admiration and an elective affinity that facilitated Gandhi’s reception in the US. In words that might have pleased Pelagius and no doubt did please John Haynes Holmes, Gandhi said in 1941, ‘…because the life of Jesus has the significance and the transcendency to which I have alluded, I believe He belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world, to all races and people’.[66] ‘But this is not to say,’ Margaret Chatterjee adds to her gloss of Gandhi’s views, ‘that those who have not heard the name of Jesus Christ cannot do the will of the Lord’. For Gandhi, Jesus was ‘a great world teacher among others’. ‘Jesus,’ Gandhi continued, ‘preached not a new religion but a new life’.[67]

Catholic Christians were not as quick to respond to Gandhi, as were some liberal Protestant Christians. Pope Pius XI twice refused Gandhi’s requests to call on him when, in his only trip abroad as India’s national leader, he passed through Rome in December 1931 on his way back from the second Round Table Conference. On the other hand, Pope John Paul II’s first act on his visit to India 55 years later was to visit the site of Gandhi’s cremation on the bank of the Yamuna River. Removing his shoes, the Pope knelt in silent prayer at the memorial to the ‘apostle of non-violence’ and then spoke of humanity’s debt to ‘this man so marked by his noble devotion to God and his respect for every living being….’ ‘It is entirely fitting,’ he said, ‘that this pilgrimage should begin here. Today we still hear him pleading with the world, “Conquer hate by love, untruth by truth, violence by suffering”.’[68]

The Pope’s ten-day tour of India was widely reported in US electronic and print media. His tasks were manifold, complex, and delicate. Unlike his visits to other Third World countries, in India he was a Christian pontiff appealing to a predominantly Hindu country. The Pope prepared for his trip to India by immersing himself in the teachings of Gandhi. In India he quoted Gandhi often and at length. It was on his return to Rome that he uttered the sentence already cited, ‘I have evangelized the Indian people through the words of Mahatma Gandhi.’[69] Was this good tactics in a poor, Hindu country or the revitalized neo-Pelagianism and the ecumenism of Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate? At the beginning of his tour, the Pope appealed to Gandhi when he said, ‘I want to show respect, esteem, and encouragement to all those who search for God, who commit themselves to search for perfection, who work in the service of their brothers to construct peace and justice’. Joaquin Navarro Valls, the chief Vatican spokesman accompanying the Pope, characterized the Pope’s invocation of Gandhi as part of a ‘…broader effort to link Roman Catholic teaching to Gandhi’s objectives.’[70]

Gandhi the saint, mahatma, and possible redeemer had been heard and seen in the US for three decades to mixed reviews, contested evaluations, and ambiguous understandings. His presence in American consciousness was mediated by shifting and intersecting historical currents and by metathought, the mentality that selects and colors contemporary events and experience.

The Fraud

Gandhi, Charles Chatfield found, was America’s lens on India. He was also its lightning rod for images of India and the orient, a particularly powerful, pervasive, and intrusive version of the ‘other’. Xenophiles find themselves attracted by the other, xenophobes repelled; but what comes first, the experience of thinking and feeling about the other or the cultural paradigms, the meta-ideas, that distinguish ‘them’ and ‘us’?

The British images of India depicted earlier, the India of ‘false religion’, a ‘lamentably degenerate’ people, and a ‘slave’ mentality, were common in an America that, until after World War I, got most of its news and views from British sources. There were exceptions to the European and British image of India and the orient, contributors to the integral humanism of the ‘oriental renaissance’ who learned in India as well as about India. Such were the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron and the Englishman Sir William Jones. So too were there American exceptions, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. But when Gandhi, the Indian and the oriental, appears in the press and quarterlies of the early 1920s, he is constructed and interpreted not only in terms of the imperialist politics of that era, but also in terms of deep-rooted meta-ideas and cultural paradigms about India and the East. The residues of such paradigms persist into the 1980s, perhaps into the millennium.

The film Gandhi provided a particularly effective lightning rod for the view of Gandhi as Fraud. Released in 1982 but seen for the most part in 1983, it won an unprecedented eight Academy Awards, topped the list for viewers, and made a lot of money. It presented Gandhi as an epic hero: a myth for our time, perhaps for all time. In a world in which entertainment and news construct each other, and history is made as well as represented on the screen, illusion and reality can merge. Gandhi was great entertainment and great box office but it was also a message and a worldview. An Indian saint became a transcendent figure. Although America was neither seen nor mentioned in the film, the visual language of the film—the film as text—was taken by some to legitimize and justify ideas and actions at issue in the US. More than ever before, Gandhi became a popular concept in the US, a brand name that could be deployed for an array of causes from environment to health to diet to peace.

The film generated a neo-conservative backlash, what Hendrick Hertzberg in a brilliant riposte to two such attacks labeled ‘nasty outbreak of Mahatma-bashing’.[71] Its principal spokesman was Richard Grenier, film critic for Commentary and sometime novelist. In the March 1983 number of Commentary Grenier engaged in ‘Deflating the Gandhi Myth’ by depicting ‘the Gandhi Nobody Knows’ as a fraud. In particular, he asserts the ‘St Gandhi presented in the film was really a lecher, racist, hypocrite, fool, and faddist’. The film’s director, Sir Richard Attenborough, ‘Dickie’ to Grenier, is depicted as a paid political propagandist for the Government of India (it financed one-third of the film’s cost) who surreptitiously, even subliminally, slipped in his pacifist, socialist, environmentalist, and anti-imperialist views.[72]

‘We are dealing,’ Grenier says, ‘with two strangenesses here, Indians and Gandhi himself.’ His principal authority for the claim of strangeness is V.S. Naipaul, ‘a Hindu and a Brahmin, born in Trinidad’ and the author of two ‘quite brilliant’ books, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. It is not the literary quality of Naipaul’s books that Grenier admires but their depiction of Indian orientalism, the alien other that Grenier feels is so repellent.

India, according to the Naipaul quoted in Grenier, ‘has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men’. Hinduism, as Naipaul understands it, ‘has given men no idea of a contract with other men …. It has enslaved one-quarter of the population [the untouchables] and has left the whole fragmented and vulnerable…Through centuries of conquest the civilization declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from the mind …and creativity…stripping itself down, like all decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning social forms’.

Naipaul says that Gandhi’s autobiography reveals that he was headed for ‘lunacy’. He was rescued by his response to external events, a response—presumably satyagraha—that was determined in part by ‘his experience of the democratic ways of South Africa’. It was in South Africa that Gandhi caught a glimmer of that strange institution, that is, democracy, ‘of which he would never have seen even a reflection within Hindu society’. Gandhi, like India more generally, is ‘dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilizations’. Grenier and Naipaul are building not only on 19th century British orientalist views of India but also on more recent orientalist constructions of India and Gandhi, among which Katherine Mayo’s Mother India is paradigmatic.

Katherine Mayo’s Diseased Continent

Gandhi-bashing, like India-bashing, has a history. One of its first transnational statements was Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. First published in 1927, it was written in the context of official and unofficial British efforts to generate support in the US for British rule in India. Mother India appeared on the eve of the Simon Commission’s visit to make inquiries about the viability and propriety of further measures of statutory reform. The book added contemporary and lurid detail to the image of Hindu India as irredeemably and hopelessly impoverished, degraded, depraved, and corrupt. Mayo’s Mother India echoed not only the views of men such as Alexander Duff, Charles Grant, and John Stuart Mill but also those of Theodore Roosevelt who gloried in bearing the white man’s burden in Asia and celebrated the accomplishments of imperialism.[73]

Mayo’s enthusiastic and detailed chronicling of a diseased and unhygienic India—Gandhi referred to it as a ‘Drain Inspector’s Report’—carried special pain for Gandhi, whose notorious concern for cleanliness made him vulnerable and perversely sympathetic to her critique even while rejecting its gross reductionism. Mayo took special aim at Gandhi, whose success in challenging British rule deeply troubled her British friends and patrons. They took special pains to provide information, facilitate train travel, and interviews in India and publicize her book after its publication. Gandhi agreed to her request for an interview and spent a good deal of time answering her queries about the state of India and giving his views about the causes of and remedies for India’s ills. Her selective and truncated account of Gandhi’s views made them appear ‘thoroughly ridiculous’.[74]

Mayo was obsessed by two evils, Hinduism and disease. The two seemed to be linked in some kind of ontological nexus. In an article in The Atlantic soon after Gandhi’s widely reported Salt March in 1930, she returned to the task of denigrating his image in the US. After charging him with sedition, she alleged that a smallpox epidemic in an area where Gandhi had walked on his way to Dandi was due to the contagion carried by his followers. They in turn had been contaminated before their departure on 12, March 1930 because Gandhi’s ashram was a ‘smallpox pest center’. Mayo succeeded in adding a new dimension to the litany of the ills of Hindu India. Many years later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as US ambassador to India under Presidents Nixon and Ford, demonstrated the persistence of Mayo’s vision when he publicly remarked that the only thing India had to export was communicable diseases.

Mayo made sense to Americans: health was better than disease, monotheist Muslims better than idolatrous Hindus; enslaved, dehumanized, but underdog and potentially Christian untouchables better then their upper-caste Hindu oppressors who were, in any case, incapacitated physically and morally by their horror of pollution. The obvious and moral conclusion was that British rule, which helped and protected Muslims, untouchables, and Christians, must and should continue. Gandhi’s teaching that all religions approached truth and his doctrinal and practical efforts to realize national and religious brotherhood and to purify Hinduism by ridding it of untouchability were spurious politically inspired deceptions designed to unite India behind his ill-fated demand for independence.

Arthur Koestler’s ‘Naked Fakir’

We move in time in our selective review of pre-Grenier versions of Gandhi-bashing. It is the late 1950s. World War II has been fought and won; decolonization is almost complete. Freud’s perspective on human nature has become conventional wisdom. A jaded, disillusioned Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon [1940] brilliantly and starkly conveyed the horror of Stalin’s 1930s purge trials, sets out for Asia to find the answer to Europe’s ‘deadly predicament’: ‘the exhaustion of the old ideologies…[and] a hunger for new ones’[75] and the ‘coca-colonization of Western Europe’ under the impact of American mass culture and materialistic civilization. Alarmed 40 years before the disruptions in 1999 and 2000 of WTO meetings in Seattle and Genoa that ‘A global civilization with a standardized style of living…is beginning to emerge all over the world’, Koestler hastened to Asia to find answers at mid-century to the pernicious effects on European civilization of US-driven globalization before it was too late.[76]

‘I traveled in India and Japan [in 1958–9],’ Koestler tells us in the preface to The Lotus and the Robot, ‘in the mood of the pilgrim’ seeking answers to ‘our perplexities and dead-locked problems’ from ‘a different spiritual latitude’. Four ‘saints’ and some Zen masters later, he concludes that Asian mysticism has no ‘significant advice to offer’. His encounter with the Asian ‘other’ convinced him that his ‘place was in Europe’ whose ‘unique history’, ‘organic coherence’, and ‘distinct identity’ stood in marked contrast to their absence in Asia. In Asia, there was ‘continuity with change’, ‘rationalism’, and ‘conceptual thinking could not develop’ in face of the ‘irrationality, subjective, mystical, logic-rejecting’ modes of being. Having begun his journey ‘in sackcloth and ashes’, he returned ‘rather proud of being a European…. and with a new confidence and affection for that small figure [Europe] riding on the back of the Asian bull.’[77]

It was not Europe but India that faced a ‘tragic predicament’. The heart of the predicament lay in family relations, specially ‘the need to submit oneself unreservedly to one’s father’s authority, to treat him as a good….He stands for …disciplining of the passions….to yield to spontaneous emotion or sensual appetite is felt to be both wrong and dangerous: this is especially the case with sexual satisfaction, which is always felt to be illicit and somehow impious’.[78]

As he warms to his subject, Koestler, in extended psychological and cultural language, echoes John Stuart Mill’s succinct characterization: ‘in truth the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave’. Hindu India’s ‘religious-social ideal [produced] something like a Hindu national character…. The young male’s unconditional submission to the will of his father…[was] designed to …undermine his initiative and independence; the family household was a school of conformity, obedience and resignation….The result was an ingrained reluctance to make decisions, a lack of self-reliance and independence; a tendency to evade responsibilities… Indians give that curious impression of never having grown up, of a rather moving child-like quality…which seems somehow blurred, soft… without proper contour and individuality’. Some ‘…seem to have no will and no personality of their own—eager for praise, over-sensitive to criticism, smilingly irresponsible….[Yet] underneath the meek and gentle manner there may be a furnace of repressed passions, leading to unexpected outbursts….’[79]

Koestler then links India’s slave mentality to Gandhi. In India, while he was alive, Gandhi was known as ‘Bapu’ or father; it was a more common designation than Mahatma. India, a democracy ‘in name only…’ is in fact ruled by bapus, father figures, who put ‘a premium on uncritical obedience….’ How could a citizen be expected to elect a government when he was not allowed to elect his own bride? ‘….Out of the sacred womb of the Indian family only political yes-men could emerge’.

At a less grand level of discourse than civilizational angst or national character but one equally important for locating Gandhi in the mind of America, Koestler found that most Asians are either frauds or deeply troubled neurotics. Gandhi was no exception. Here is Koestler’s summing up of Gandhi: “Gandhi was an extremist in every respect. The secret of his genius, of his power over the nation’s imagination, lies perhaps in his unique gift to exaggerate [sometimes to grotesque proportions] and to dramatize [sometimes to the degree of showmanship] precisely those elements in Hindu tradition which had the deepest emotional appeal. This is true for the whole range of his activities: his vegetarian and fruitarian apostolate; his [sometimes fatal] activities as a nature healer; the loin-clothed appearance of the ‘naked fakir’ in Buckingham Palace; the Stakhanovite cult of khadi; the principles of tolerance and non-violence carried to Jacobin extremes; the martyrdom of the fasts; the prayer meetings in the patriarchal ashram; the rejection of sex, even among married couples, as a source of spiritual debility; the inhuman ‘detachment’ from his family in the interest of public service; and the belief in the life-long absolute right of the father to rule over his sons.”[80]

We have here an amalgam of ‘queerness’ and ‘wackiness’ with extremism and obsessiveness that, in popular parlance, translate into ‘sick’ and ‘sickening’, and in social scientific language into psychologically disturbed and culturally deviant. At the same time Gandhi’s exaggeration and showmanship suggest that he is a trickster or magician, that is, a fraud. ‘Naked fakir’ becomes an irresistible double entendre. Once the great issue of British rule over India was removed and psychological language captured discourse, Gandhi the saint or mahatma could be treated as a celebrity and at the same time unmasked as a neurotic and a fraud whom only the gullible could revere.

Erik Erikson and Clifford Geertz: Gandhi’s Truth or Gandhi’s Malaise?

Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth; On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence appeared in 1969, about a decade after Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot announced that a sick and dying traditional Asia had nothing of value to say to the Western world. Erikson, an eminent neo-Freudian whose theory of the stages of life and concept of identity spoke particularly to the civil rights and Vietnam generations, used his examination of Gandhi’s life to suggest that there was a convergence between Freud’s psychoanalysis and Gandhi’s satyagraha. Both were therapeutic methods of pursuing and realizing truth, one in the individual, the other in society. The result, Erikson held, was ‘a correspondence in method and convergence in human values which may well be of historical, if not of evolutionary significance’.[81] In this sense Erikson’s book contributed to Gandhi’s ‘Mahatma’ image in the mind of America. But this section is about Gandhi as ‘fraud’, not Gandhi as social therapist. It is Clifford Geertz’s reading of Gandhi through the medium of Erikson’s book rather than Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth that interests us here.

Suggesting that Gandhi, like Freud, provided a way to pursue and realize truth was too much for Clifford Geertz. In the late 1960s he was a rising star, in the 1980 one of the brightest stars in America’s social science firmament. By the 1990s, Geertz had become ‘…a kind of demigod’ of academic anthropology.[82] In the 20 November 1969 number of The New York Review of Books, Geertz did not attack Erikson directly of Gandhi head-on. Yet his interpretation of Gandhi left no doubt that he thought of him as a poseur and a sham. Confused, muddled, contradictory, in life Gandhi had been a danger to India as well as to himself, in death as an icon, he could join the Koestler pantheon as a ‘god that failed’. The unstated message of the review was that Erikson, guide to the concerned and perplexed, was himself gullible and foolish in his admiration for Gandhi.

Geertz says that Erikson is like the little girl who visited the dinosaur in the museum only after she had decided the dinosaur was ‘good’ rather than ‘bad’. Erikson chose to study Gandhi because, ‘for twenty years, since his Childhood and Society announced the Freudian vocation to be the empowerment of the ego, Erikson has been asking the same question…whence does hope arise’. In Gandhi, Erikson found an ‘appropriate’ but ‘most refractory’ subject.

Gandhi claimed to be a saint, Geertz argues, ‘if not in so many words, certainly in almost every action he took…’ because a saint ‘demands a moral response’. ‘It is the triumph of Erikson’s book,’ Geertz tells us, to uncover Gandhi’s ‘inherent moral ambiguity’, the ‘admiration and outrage, awe and disgust, trust and suspicion’, that accompany the career of ‘a man who recommends his character to the world as a saving revelation.’

After taking from Erikson’s account of Gandhi that he is ‘an obsessive tease’, a person ‘with an extraordinary capacity to make others feel furious and foolish at the same time’, Geertz proceeds to explain satyagraha as a form of teasing. ‘He is always taunting, testing limits, playing with other’s emotions….Forged into a political instrument this becomes the famous Satyagraha….’ Geertz renders satyagraha as ‘mass taunting’ or ‘collective needling’. What in the end Gandhi did to colonial India was to ‘drive it to distraction’. In his conduct during ‘the event’, the Ahmedabad textile strike of 1917, which is the centerpiece of Erikson’s book, Gandhi’s teasing ‘was openly exposed, and with it the fact that shaming men into virtue was a complex and treacherous business, both less selfish and less pacific that it looked’.

Geertz pictures Gandhi’s thinking about non-violence as ‘moral double talk’ and hypocrisy. Non-violence, as Geertz understands Gandhi, derives its ‘moral grandeur’ from the violence it contains. In a remarkable trans-valuation of values, Geertz argues that the practitioner of non-violence must be powerful in the sense that he must be ‘competent to strike back, even to kill….’ If one has such competence, not to strike back or kill is ‘an assertion of moral superiority which an aggressor…must necessarily acknowledge. The road to true non-violence passes then through the attainment of power, that is, the means of violence….’ Because Gandhi the thinker was ‘stymied by the paradox that non-violence is the reciprocal of strength’ his philosophy ‘dissolved into a collection of colliding homilies and Indian eccentricities.’

Geertz concludes his essay on Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth by observing that the book was ‘more convincing in describing the dinosaur than in judging him’. This gets to the heart of the problem. Can a subject be intelligible if it lacks credibility, ‘the power to inspire belief’? The little girl was not sure she could learn anything about the dinosaur in the museum because she was not sure she believed in dinosaurs. Ten years after attacking Gandhi as a poseur and sham, Geerts published the brilliantly convincing Negara,[83] a tale about an erstwhile Balinese kingdom. In Negara we learn about the ‘theater state’ where the represented—symbols, ceremonies, rituals—is the real; in Geertz’s words, ‘all there is’. But Geertz has trouble making sense of Gandhi because he doesn’t find Gandhi’s representations credible; his peasant dress, like his saintliness, were unconvincing affectation.[84] For Geertz, Gandhi isn’t for real. Lacking credibility, Gandhi lacks intelligibility.

Who Goes There, Friend or Foe?

Gandhi first entered American public consciousness in 1921 when John Haynes Holmes declared him to be the greatest man in the world. Eighty years later, at the turn of the 21st century, Holmes’ claim seems far less farfetched than when it was first made. Time’s 31 December 1999 end-of-the-century issue named Gandhi [along with Albert Einstein and Franklin Roosevelt] as Person of the Century. His prospects for the coming century look good.

In June 1983 Firing Line host William Buckley asked Richard Grenier, Commentary’s film critic, ‘what was it about the movie Gandhi that struck [you] as historically offensive?’ ‘Above all,’ Grenier replied, ‘Gandhi has been on the back burner for 30 years, he’s been completely off the stove, he’s been down in the cellar. What brought him back was…the new wave of pacifism—a new pacifism. Otherwise they would not be making the movie today.’[85] These words were spoken in 1983, the high noon of cold war. MAD [mutually assured destruction] was the prevailing nuclear doctrine, Ronald Reagan’s metaphor, the ‘evil empire’, was the prevailing signifier. Grenier was attacking Gandhi, the film and the man, because they legitimized non-violent politics and morality. But was he right in claiming that Gandhi had disappeared from view after Indian independence. Could he be so potent a symbol of non-violence if he had been on the back burner for thirty years? I have tried to show why and how Gandhi has been an active presence in American consciousness since at least 1921, and not least in the post-World War era of decolonization.

Let us recall that Gandhi began his career in the US as an anti-imperialist, an intrepid opponent of the British Empire in India who appealed to William Randolph Hearst, an American press baron jealous of and virulently opposed to British power and prestige. Gandhi’s meaning quickly moved from the realm of history, of factuality and positive truth, to encompass the realm of myth, of belief and imaginative truth. A guru for some, a mahatma for others, in time he became a world historical figure whose life and message taught a new way of thinking, living and acting that inspired and legitimized peace, environmental, and self-help movements.

John Haynes Holmes, a liberal Protestant, told his parishioners in 1921 that when he thought of Gandhi he thought of Jesus. For Holmes, a social reformer, Gandhi was a universal saint, a person who could show the way to realizing the Kingdom of God on earth. Reinhold Niebuhr, an incipient Christian realist, scorned such claims. Yet, confronted in 1932 with the collapse of capitalist economies and liberal democracies, he identified for a time with Gandhi, the ‘prophet’ and the ‘statesman’, a leader whose religious energy could inspire the disinherited and disenfranchised to achieve justice. In the 1950s Martin Luther King ‘came to see that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence [was]… one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom’. Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth spoke to civil rights and Vietnam generations in search of meaning and identity. Nelson Mandela credits ‘the Gandhian influence’ with dominating ‘freedom struggles on the African continent up to the 1960s because of the power it generated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless’.[86] In the early 1980s Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley’s film Gandhi served as counter-poise to the threat of nuclear was in what proved to be the closing decade of the Cold War. In 1986, Pope John Paul II chose to evangelize in India through the word of Mahatma Gandhi.

But there was a powerful countercurrent that challenged the view that the US had anything to learn from Gandhi. Some held that Americans were being deceived; Gandhi was a fraud, not saint. As Franky A. Schaefer, the evangelical fundamentalist who introduced Richard Grenier’s denigrating book, The Gandhi Nobody Knows, put it, ‘it is time that Westerners—Christians and Jew—adopt a little more self-confidence in answering the challenge of Hinduism. Christians in particular need to affirm the fact that there is only one Christ and Savior and his name is Jesus, not Gandhi.’[87] The persistence and intensity of efforts to denigrate and unmask Gandhi are measures of the threat that some feel from his acceptance in much of the West. Gandhi’s contradictions weigh heavy on Geertz and Niebuhr—saint in era of saintlessness, otherworldly Mahatma acting in the world, non-violent advocate of militancy, Hindu with a Christ-like ethic of love, homo religious believing in may paths to God. It may be that it is these very contradictions that make him a world historical figure in a global era whose denizens have difficulty finding consistent moral commonalities.

1. See Mohandas K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, Ahmedabad, Navajivan Publishing House, 1950, 1928, and Robert A. Huttenback, Gandhi in South Africa; British Imperialism and the Indian Question, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1971.
2. Charles Chatfield (ed.), The Americanization of Gandhi; Images of the Mahatma, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1976.
3. Chatfield, pp. 24–5.
4. Claude Markovits, The Un-Gandhian Gandhi; the Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2003, pp. 17–18.
5. Roosevelt to Whitlaw Reid, ambassador to London, 26 November 1908, in Elting E. Morrison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1952, Vol. 6, pp. 1383–4.
6. ‘Some American Opinions on the Indian Empire’, London, n.d., pp. 1–2, as quoted in Jha, Civil Disobedience and After; the American Reaction, Meerut and Delhi, Meenakshi Prakashan, 1973, p. 10.
7. David Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928, p. 492, n. 56, and Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: The Ending of the War, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928, p. 311. Only after General Smuts pointed out that India, as a signatory power, ‘would automatically have a right to a delegate’ did Wilson “acquiesce” to Government of India membership.
8. Reproduced in the Hindu (Madras), 27 February 1922, as quoted in Manoranjan Jha, Civil Disobedience and After; the American Reaction, Meerut and Delhi, Meenakshi Prakashan, 1973.
9. But for Mark Hanna’s shrewd and expensive management of William McKinley’s nomination and campaign, Bryan might have become president in 1896. And Bryan is sometimes pictured as a yokel rather than a progressive and statesman. As a boy wonder orator his speeches were sometimes mocked as being like the great Platte river, a thousand miles long three inches deep. His ‘Cross of Gold’ speech became a myth in his time and the inspiration for Frank Baum’s compelling and enduring Wizard of Oz story. He ended his career as Clarence Darrow’s fundamentalist foil in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ where, in the name of the literal truth of Genesis, he opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary biology.
10. The Old World and Its Ways, St. Louis, The Thompson Publishing Co., 1907, Ch. XXVI, ‘British Rule in India’, p. 308.
11. See the late Barbara Stoller Miller’s Introduction and Afterword, ‘Why Did Henry David Thoreau Take the Bhagavad-Gita to Walden Pond?’ in her Bhagavad-Gita; Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, Toronto, New York, Bantam Books, 1986, 1988.
12. For the text and a brilliant framing essay see Anthony Parel, editor, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj was the first text to appear in ‘Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics’, editors, John Dunn and Geoffrey Hawthorn.
13. Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World, New York, Simon and Shuster, 1974, p. 163.
14. The Holmes papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Holmes left his extensive collection of books by and about Gandhi to Harvard where they are now housed in the university library.
15. He was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College for most of his career.
16. John Haynes Holmes, My Gandhi, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1953 p. 29. The sermon was delivered on 10 April 1921 at the Lyric theatre to an overflow congregation ‘who expected to hear Woodrow Wilson or Sun Yat-Sen, Lloyd George, or Lenin!’ Carl Hermann Voss, ‘John Haynes Holmes: Discoverer of Gandhi,’ Christian Century, 6 May 1964, in Chatfield, pp. 589–98.
17. ‘Who is the Greatest Man in the World’, New York, The Community Church, 61 East 34th Street, New York, 1921, in Chatfield, pp. 599–621. Quote on p. 620.
18. Holmes, My Gandhi, p. 33. Holmes told his audience that he first came across Gandhi’s name in 1918 in an article by the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray in the Hibbert Journal. Murray’s article on the concept of the soul went on to discuss saints including recent ones such as Gandhi. Murray warned Great Britain in connection with Gandhi that a nation whose government prosecuted saints is neither wise, generous, nor high-minded. Voss, ‘Discoverer of Gandhi’, in Chatfield, p. 589.
    As we shall see below, the Anglican missionary in South Africa and India, Charles F. Andrews, ‘discovered’ and ‘canonized’ Gandhi four years earlier in 1914 when he met him for the first time in South Africa but no public word of Andrews’ experience seems to have reached Europe or the US until after Murray’s article.
    The discovery in 1986 of 260 letters written between February 1909 and 5 December 1944 by Gandhi ‘to his close friend and disciple, the Jewish-Polish-German architect Hermann Kallenbach’, forcefully reminds us that Kallenbach should be recognized as the first non-Indian to acknowledge Gandhi. In May 1910 Kallenbach, ‘mesmerized by Gandhi,’ donated to him the 1,100-acre farm near Lawley, 20 miles from Johannesburg, that became Tolstoy Farm. ‘In 1914, the [Gandhi] compared Kallenbach with C.F. Andrews, and wrote: “Though I love, almost adore, Andrews so, I would not exchange you for him”.’ In a letter to another friend in 1946, the year of Kallenbach’s death, Gandhi spoke movingly of his ‘old friend’. Ramesh Chandra, ‘The Mahatma’s Letters,’ India Today, 31 December 31 1986, pp. 52–3.
19. Both were important members of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and active supporters of Norman Thomas, who had abandoned his ministerial career in 1917 to lead the Socialist Party in New York. Holmes’ younger colleague, friends, and incipient rival, Niebuhr, had recently left his well-publicized socially concerned pastorate of Detroit’s comfortable Bethel Evangelical Church to become a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York where, in November 1930, his candidacy for a State Senate seat attracted more publicity than votes. Richard W. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr—A Biography, New York, Pantheon Books, 1985, pp. 129–30.
20. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 130.
21. Mark Juergensmeyer, Fighting with Gandhi, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1984, p. 127.
22. Holmes, My Gandhi, pp. 35–6.
23. John Haynes Holmes Paper, Box 3, Autograph Collection, A-1 folder (Gandhi), Library of Congress, Washington D.C. As at Sabarmati, 30 July 1931. [Typewritten] ‘There is no certainty about my going to London as yet. There are difficulties, which may prove insuperable. I feel I must not leave India unless some glaring breaches of the Settlement are repaired. I am straining every nerve to avoid a conflict, but the result is in God’s hands. But if I do succeed in going to London we must meet.’
24. Gandhi broke the law by taking salt—protected by government monopoly—from the area at the government’s Dharsana Salt Works 150 north of Bombay near Dandi; 400 policemen brutally assaulted the non-violent marchers who remained courageously steadfast in their commitment. Miller’s account is reproduced inter alia in Homer Jack (ed.), The Gandhi Reader; a Source Book of his Life and Writings, Bloomington, Indiana University press, 1958. William L. Shirer in his Gandhi, a Memoir, New York, Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1979, described Miller four decades after the Salt March as ‘one of the great American foreign correspondents.’ His story, Shirer says, ‘was flashed around the world’ and ‘published in more than a thousand newspapers at home and abroad’, pp. 97–9.
25. Webb Miller, I Found No Peace: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1936. See Chapters 16 through 19 and 21 for Miller’s coverage of India and Gandhi.
26. The account of Holmes’ advice to Gandhi on the Walker interview and invitations to the US is given in his My Gandhi, pp. 48–51, and in Manoranjan Jha, Civil Disobedience and After, pp. 181–3.
27. Britain was afflicted with social unrest, vast and growing unemployment, a stagnant economy, an unbalanced budget, a slipping pound, and a sense of mounting financial and political crisis. Britain, leader of the financial and trading world, abandoned the gold standard on 21 September 1931, a move which had the effect of devaluing the pound by 25 percent.
28. J.L. Garvin, editor of the Observer, described Gandhi’s call for India independence as ‘a vain dream’ and warned that without strong British rule, anarchy, worse than that in China, would follow. ‘Though Gandhi is a gifted and fascinating agitator, his exalted but unconstructive ideology suggests the breaking and not the making of India.’ Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express ran a lead editorial entitled ‘The Failure of Gandhi.’ ‘Gandhi,’—it opened, ‘is out of his depth in England. He has gained publicity which a film star might envy, but he has been a complete failure in solving Indian problems. Unless he provides a miracle, the Conference will break up in two or three days and the last remnants of his prestige will disappear,’ Shirer, Gandhi, pp. 168, 177, 191–2.
29. Soon after World War II, Niebuhr became a ‘prophet to politicians,’ the ‘Establishment theologian’ and a ‘celebrity intellectual’, Fox, p. 273. The phrase, ‘prophet to politicians’, was used as the subtitle of Ronald Stone’s 1972 biography, Reinhold Niebuhr. The often quoted phrase, ‘father of us all,’ has been attributed to George F. Kennan but Richard Fox reports that in 1980 Kennan ‘did not recall’ describing Niebuhr in these terms, Fox, p. 238.
30. The term, ‘social intelligence’, may have been a ‘translation’ into American political vocabulary of British Fabian Socialist and Labour Party views. Labour under the leadership of Ramsey MacDonald, then a much-admired figure in Niebuhr’s circle, won power in Britain in the May 1929 election. American socialists were encouraged and influenced by Labour victory.
31. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 130.
32. ‘What Chance Has Gandhi,’ Christian Century, 16 December 1931, in Chatfield, Americanization of Gandhi, p. 705.
33. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, New Yolk, Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 234; Chatfield, Americanization of Gandhi, p. 705.
34. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 136.
35. Chatfield, Americanization of Gandhi, p. 706.
36. Moral Man, p. 242.
37. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 138.
38. Moral Man, pp. 234, 247–9, 255–6.
39. Moral Man, p. 256.
40. Fox, Niebuhr, pp. 142–3.
41. Fox, Niebuhr, pp. 136, 143, 152–3.
42. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 140.
43. Fox, Niebuhr, p. 134.
44. If Niebuhr had understood Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and coercion, the first based on willing, voluntary choice and action, on shared understandings, values, purpose or interest, the second on unwilling, forced choice and action, choice and action that arise out of intimidation, fear of physical and other forms of harm, threats to life and well-being, he might have re-thought his sweeping commitment to force, i.e. that to do good one must do evil. For Hannah Arendt on the distinction between coercion and power, see her On Violence plus other writings.
45. Among those he read while a divinity student at Boston University was Holmes’ book on Gandhi. King told Stanley Katz, Holmes’ grandson-in-law, that the book had been a factor in his move toward Gandhi. Personal letter, 20 July 1988. William Stuart Nelson in ‘Gandhian Values and the American Civil Rights Movement,’ in Paul F. Power (ed.), The Meaning of Gandhi, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1971, reminds us that the first known contact between Gandhi and American blacks (then Negroes) occurred when Howard Thurman, then a professor at Howard University, and the Reverend Edward Carrol, and their wives, met Gandhi in India on 28 February 1936. Among other things, Gandhi told his guests that ‘one cannot be passively non-violent,’ p. 155.
46. See, for example, Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, Princeton, Princeton University press, 1958, reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967; Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973; Richard Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence, New York, Schocken Books, second revised edition, 1971; Staughton Lynd (ed.), Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966; Karl Potter, ‘Explorations in Gandhi’s Theory of Nonviolence,’ and William Stuart Nelson, ‘Gandhian Values and the American Civil Rights Movement,’ in Power, (ed.), The Meanings of Gandhi; Mulford Sibley (ed.), The Quiet Battle; Writings on the Theory and Practice of nonviolent Resistance, Garden City, Anchor Books, 1963; S. Kapur, Raising Up A Prophet, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, and The Journal of Conflict Resolution have published over the years many articles on non-violent civil resistance and collective action.
47. Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom; the Montgomery Story, New York, Harper and Row, 1958, pp. 85, 97. See also Bhiku Parekh, Gandhi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997 p. 61.
48. Rosa Parks, Quiet Strength, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994.
49. Dennis Dalton, Gandhi’s Power; Non-Violence in Action, New Delhi, Oxford, 1999, p. 180; see also ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail,’ the most powerful of King’s rhetorical efforts, cited in David Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2003, p. 263.
50. For King’s views on these matters see his Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, New York, Harper and Row, 1967, particularly Chapter 2, ‘Black Power’, where he remarks inter alia that the bible of Black Plower advocates such as Stokely Carmichael is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. ‘They don’t quote Gandhi or Tolstoy.’
51. For a vivid, insightful, and detailed firsthand account of these troubled and turbulent years that attends to the Gandhian dimension, see Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: making Sense of the Sixties, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980. See also William Stuart Nelson, ‘Gandhian Values and the Civil Rights Movement,’ in Power (ed.), Gandhi, ibid., pp. 153–104. Nelson reminds us that Gandhi’s influence on the civil rights movement among American blacks precedes King’s. James Farmer was founding director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), programme director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Nixon Administration. His book Freedom When?, New York, Harper, 1965, gives an account of his understanding of Gandhi, Gandhi’s relevance to American blacks, and Farmer’s use of Gandhi’s ideas and practice in the civil rights movement. See also James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement, New York, Plume, 1986.
52. These familiar quotes are drawn from a letter to the Times of India, 2 March 1988 by Sita Ram Goel.
53. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance; Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880, New York, Columbia University Press, 1984, translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking from the original 1936 French publication, shows how much Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries learned about and from the Orient. In the US leading figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were carries of what might be called the ‘oriental renaissance.’ For orientalism with reference to India, see Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India,’ Modern Asia Studies, 20:3, July 1986, pp. 401–40.
54. His Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas, Including Selections from his Writings, New York, Macmillan, 1930, and subsequent writing about Gandhi were among the earliest and certainly among the most read in the US Romain Rolland’s 1924 biography in English was probably the first account of Gandhi available in the US.
55. Charles Andrews’ first encounter with Gandhi is narrated by Hugh Tinker in his book The Ordeal of Love; C.F. Andrews and India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1979, 1998 pbk. The S.S. Umtali reached Durban on 2 January 1914. Charles Andrews and William Pearson were on board. They had sailed from Calcutta on 5 December. From Colombo he wrote on 12 December to his friend, Munshi Ram, ‘I have a great happiness and blessing in store for me—to see Mohandas Gandhi. NO life lived in our day could be more moving than his. My Journey will be a pilgrimage to touch his feet’, p. 79. ‘Andrews was expecting to encounter another superbly impressive spiritual presence, like [Rabindranath] Tagore or Mahatma Munshi Ram; he looked in vain among the waiting group….Hastily, he asked [Henry] Polak [whom he had met in Delhi] whether Gandhi was present, and was surprised to be taken to meet someone whose appearance was insignificant….’, p.84.
    Andrews, writing two weeks later, says that ‘He [Polak] pointed to an ascetic figure with shaven head [probably a result of Gandhi’s recent stint in prison], dressed in white dhoti and kurta of such coarse material as an indentured labourer might wear, looking as though in mourning, and said: “Here is Mr Gandhi.” I stooped at once instinctively and touched his feet, and he said in a low tone, “Pray do not do that, it is a humiliation to me”.’ Charles Andrews, Modern Review, 14 March ‘Letter from Natal,’ as quoted on p. 14 in Tinker and cited in chapter endnote 1, p. 113.
56. See his ‘Saint Gandhi,’ in John S. Hawley (ed.), Saints and Virtues, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1986, for a more detailed account of these early formative events. While I learned a great deal from this important paper, his essay is in part a rejoinder to it and to George Orwell’s 1949 Partisan Review essay, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ which articulates a similar grudging and skeptical admiration. Republished in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, Vol. IV, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Juergensmeyer’s earlier Fighting with Gandhi, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1984, provided a ‘step-by-step strategy for resolving everyday conflicts’ at home and in public life by translating Gandhi’s method of satyagraha into a language familiar to Americans and constructed dialogues between Gandhi and Marx, Freud, Niebuhr, and the Mahatma himself that were not always to Gandhi’s advantage.
57. The absence of an equivalent term to ‘saint’ may be discerned from the meanings of Hindu terms loosely translated as saint: sant, in ‘proper’ Hindu usage an adjective (rather than a noun) indicating devotion to a guru or his text, has under the influence of English usage come to be used for ‘saintly’ and as an equivalent for the noun ‘saint’; sadhu, a person who practices asceticism (mental and spiritual control), more loosely a religious mendicant, a holy man, or simply a good man but often translated as a saint; sanyasi, a monk or ascetic, he has taken the vows of sanyas, i.e., to leave all worldly things, including wealth and property, a state often identified with the fourth and final stage of life; guru, teacher, mentor, or spiritual guide, it can be applied to any teacher of any subject but is usually used specifically for religious teachers; rishi, a sage or seer who expounds or comments on the vedas, the oldest Hindu scriptures; and swami, master or lord, usually used for a religious ascetic but can be used to refer to a master in any context, i.e., proprietor of land, a craft, or a trade, a husband.
    Karine Schomer, in the introduction to The Sants; Studies in a Devotional Tradition, a book that she and W.H. McLeod co-edited (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass for Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1987), refers to sants as ‘…those who sincerely seek enlightenment ….[C]onceptually as well as etymologically, it [sant] differs from the false cognate “saint” which is often used to translate it’, p. 3.
58. Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘Saint Gandhi,’ in John Stratton Hawley (ed.), Saints and Virtues, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 194, 201, 188.
59. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1953, p. 1442; New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985. For these quotations and a more extended discussion of this dilemma, see Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Gandhi; The Traditional Roots of Charisma, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 75–6. Diane L. Eck has dealt with darshan in the context of religious worship in Darshan; Seeing the Divine Image in India, second edition, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Anima Publications, 1985.
60. Juergensmeyer, ‘Saint Gandhi,’ p. 202. In 1962, when he was 70, Susanne Rudolph and I talked to Reinhold Niebuhr about Gandhi. He was living in Quincy House while teaching part-time at Harvard. He told us that Gandhi was too clever, too calculating to be a saint, a remark that presumably distinguished Gandhi’s from Jesus’ ‘dazzling’, non-emulatable qualities of selfless love. Saints were innocent of the strategy and tactics that distinguished Gandhi’s conduct and message. Niebuhr’s remark in 1962 was consistent with his characterization of Gandhi, after he saw him in London in 1931, as a ‘prophet’ and ‘statesman’. In assimilating ‘St Gandhi’ to Jesus in the context of Niebuhr’s remark about Jesus, Juergensmeyer was, presumably, constructing and argument rather than representing Niebuhr’s view of Gandhi.
61. Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi’s Religious Thought, London, Macmillan, 1983, 1 p. 49.
62. The New York Times, 2 and 12 February 1986.
63. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953, p. 142; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
64. For Merton’s view, see his introduction, ‘Gandhi and the One-Eyed Giant’, in his Gandhi on Non-violence, New York, New Directions, 1964.
65. This account draws on and quotes from p. 50 of Mary T. Clark’s introduction to Augustine of Hippo; Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press, 1984, and Kenneth Scoff Lattoure, A History of Christianity, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1953, ‘Augustine and Pelagius,’ pp. 173–81, and ‘Semi Pelagianism,’ pp. 181–2. Peter N. Brown’s ‘Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment’, Journal of Theological Studies, 19, Pt. 1, April 1968, and ‘The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy Between East and West,’ Journal of Theological Studies, 21, Pt. 1, April 1970, have been very helpful. Also relevant to the Pelagius-Augustine struggle are aspects of Peter Brown’s The Body and Society; Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988, and Elaine Pagel’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York, Random House, 1988.
66. The Modern Review, October 1941, p. 400, as quoted in Chatterjee, p. 55.
67. Harijan, 18 April 1936 and 12 June 1937, as quoted in Chatterjee, p. 55.
68. The New York Times, 2 February 1986.
69. The New York Times, 12 February 1986.
70. The New York Times, 2 and 9 February 1986. For a Catholic commentary on Gandhi, see also John Chathanatt, S.J., ‘In Pursuit of Truth; The Gandhian Experiment’, unpublished paper, Divinity School, University of Chicago, 1986.
71. Hertzberg’s reply to Richard Grenier, to be dealt with below, and to Elie Kedourie’s ‘False Gandhi’, in The New Republic, 21 March 1983, appeared in The New Republic, 25 April 1983 under the title ‘True Gandhi’.
72. For an account of the controversy over the film and the man see my ‘The Gandhi Controversy in America’, in Robert M. Crunden (ed.), Traffic of Ideas Between India and America, Delhi, Chanakya, 1985. This article, and one by me and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Gandhi Critic’s Article Distorts History’, in Views, Sunday Sun-Times, 1983 April 3, deal in some detail with Grenier’s many errors and distortions. So too before the fact does our Gandhi; The Traditional Roots of Charisma, cited in note 59. Also relevant to the controversy raised by Grenier’s attack on Gandhi is the television programme on Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., during which Richard Grenier and I spent an unrehearsed hour contesting facts and interpretations. The programme was taped in New York on 9 June 1983, and appeared subsequently on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations in July and August. Video cassettes, audio cassettes, and published transcripts are available from Firing Line, P.O. Box 5966, Columbia, South Carolina 29250. Another response to Grenier-inspired attacks on Gandhi was by B.R. Nanda, author of a distinguished biography of Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, London, Allen and Unwin, 1958. His Gandhi and His Critics appeared in 1985, Delhi and New York, Oxford University Press.
73. One of Mayo’s earlier books, The Isles of Fear: An Evaluation of America’s Task in the Philippines, helped to block the Wilson administration’s efforts to move toward self-government in the Philippines by ‘showing’ that the Filipinos were neither ready nor desirous of independence. The message of Isles of Fear led the British to believe that they could count on a book supportive of British rule in India, a belief in which they were not disappointed. Here and below I rely primarily on the late Manoranjan Jha’s careful and detailed research in Katherine Mayo and India, New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1971. Jha’s account of Mayo on the Philippines is on p. 20 and elsewhere.
74. These are Manoranjan Jha’s words on p. 69 in Katherine Mayo. Jha reproduces as Appendix I a six-page version of a typescript that Mayo had sent to Gandhi (pp. 106–111) and that Gandhi in turn had ‘taken pains to fill in the gaps and amplify some of her statements’ (p. 88). He also sent her long quotations from W.W. Hunter and Romesh Chunder Dutt on the causes of India’s poverty. A reading of Mayo’s account of Gandhi’s views when compared to these texts supports Jha’s characterizations.
75. These are Daniel Bell’s, not Arthur Koestler’s, words but I use them because they capture the spirit of Koestler’s odyssey to Asia. Bell used these words in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society New Delhi, Arnold-Heinemann, 1974, to speak about his 1960 book, The End of Ideology. He used them to warn readers about surmising the thesis of a book from its title rather than from reading its argument. p. 34, fn 39.
76. The Lotus and the Robot, New York, Macmillan, 1961, and London, Hutchinson, 1960, p. 277.
77. Koestler, Lotus, pp. 282–5.
78. Koestler, quoting with approval Morris Carstairs, The Twice Born, London, 1957, pp. 71–2, on p. 148. Earlier quotations in this paragraph are on pp. 155 and 142.
79. Koestler, Lotus, pp. 153–4.
80. Koestler, Lotus, pp. 156–7.
81. Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth; On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, New York, W.W. Norton, 1969, p. 245.
82. ‘A kind of demigod’ modified by ‘within the academy’ is taken from Tanya Luhrmann’s review, ‘The touch of the real; At once cold and concerned: the exemplary eye of Clifford Geertz,’ in The Times Literary Supplement for 12 January 2001, of three books by or about Geertz, Sherry B. Ortner (ed.), The Fate of “Culture”; Geertz and Beyond, Berkeley, CA, The University of California Press, 2000; Clifford Geertz, Available Light, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000; Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics, Chichester (UK): Polity, 2000.
83. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton University Press, 1980.
84. In her prize-winning book Clothing Matter; Dress and Identity in India, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, particularly Chapter 3, ‘Gandhi and the Recreation of Indian Dress,’ pp. 62–93, Emma Tarlo convincingly shows that Gandhi’s peasant dress was symbolically constitutive for most Indians and many foreigners of Gandhi’s time and since.
    As suggested above, Mark Juergensmeyer, who found Gandhi’s saintliness deceptive, would probably agree with Geertz that Gandhi’s saintliness, like his peasant dress, were unconvincing affections.
    We have seen how in 1931 Reinhold Niebuhr, the budding political realist, did not find Gandhi bizarre or absurd: ‘Nor is there anything ridiculous about him, in spite of the loincloth (that article of apparel looks like what boys call track pants) and the homespun Indian shawl. There is too much innate dignity about the man to allow the impression of a ridiculous figure, which London newspapers try so assiduously to cultivate, to remain.’ ibid: pp. 62-93.
    Like the budding realist Niebuhr, George Orwell, also a realist on guard against being taken in or put on, was of an age to have directly experienced the Gandhi phenomenon. Geertz, having served in the Navy during World War II, was in college when Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. Orwell concludes his essay, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, by observing: ‘One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf [he never made any such claim himself, by the way]….regarded simply as a politicians, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’ Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. IV. In Front of Your Nose, 1945–50, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19xx, p. 470.
85. Firing Line programme, ‘Is Gandhi for Real?’ appeared on PBS stations over the 1983 summer season.
86. Nelson Mandela, ‘the sacred warrior’, Time, 31 December 1999, p. 74. Mandela continues: ‘Nonviolence was the official stance of all major African coalitions, and the South African A.N.C. remained implacable, opposed to violence for most of its existence….I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could….Even then [after adding “a military dimension to our struggle”] we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations”, p. 74.
87. (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1983) 4. Diana L. Eck’s chapter in this volume provides a keen analysis of recent American responses to what is perceived as Hinduism.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lloyd I. Rudolph is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship; several Fulbright Program teaching positions, including in India, and a Smithsonian Institution fellowship also in India. He has been chair, South Asian Studies, University of Chicago, the College, 1985-2002. His numerous books include Gandhi:  The Traditional Roots of Charisma, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983; Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006; and Experiencing the State, New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. We are grateful to Dr Rudolph and to the Indian journal Economic & Political Weekly for permission to post this article.