I have no more influence with God than you have. Suppose a crow sits on a palm tree at the moment when the tree falls to the ground. Will you imagine that the weight of the bird brought down the tree?

M.K. Gandhi

 

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the father of the nation, has become for Indians a powerful symbol representing mainly the ordinary and powerless people. In this article I want to study two ‘seemingly outdated’ but still powerful symbols of Gandhi: Sevagram and Sarvodaya. Sevagram is an ashram (hermetic) type of living together where everything was shared, the people had a common goal and they lived in utter simplicity. The philosophy behind Sevagram was Sarvodaya, the welfare for the whole. It was a welfare without in any way belittling the individual, a specially the poor and the powerless. These have been key paradigms used by Gandhi during the freedom struggle to give the people an ideal to strive for and a symbol to live for. The symbolic significance of these two practical notions is beyond our full grasp. They were definitely powerful symbols for the Indians of 50 years ago, and there were millions who lived this philosophy and realized fulfilled and meaningful lives through these symbols.

Gandhi has acknowledged how the passage in the Sermon on the Mount B "Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also" - had gripped him when he first read it as a student. Though this may point to an assumption that his was a Christian interpretation of the Gita, this is an unjustifiable step. If you grant him the initial bold leap in which Kurushetra becomes the human heart, all the rest of his interpretation is within the framework of the Upanishads and the text of the Gita. His reasons for making this bold leap were all based upon his perception of self-evident truth (i.e., self-evident to him) as shown by the long study of the Gita itself.

It was foreign to Gandhi to preach what he did not practice; he decided to settle in a village. He could have gone to his native Gujarat, but he had a number of devoted workers in that province. Maganwadi, near Wardha, was suggested, but it was a large village and did not present the difficulties which workers would face in small and undeveloped villages. His choice eventually fell upon Segaon, which was also situated near Wardha but had only a population of 600 and lacked such bare amenities as a good road, a shop and a post office. Here, on some land owned by his friend and disciple Jamnalal Bajaj, Gandhi occupied a one-room hut. Those who came to see him during the rains had to wade through ankle-deep mud. The climate was inhospitable; there was not an inhabitant of this village who had not suffered from dysentery or malaria. Gandhi himself fell sick, but was resolved not to leave Segaon. He had come alone; he would not allow even his wife to join him. He hoped he would draw his team for the village ‘uplift’ from Segaon itself, but he could not prevent his disciples (old and new) from collecting around him. When Dr. John Mott interviewed him in 1937, Gandhi was in the solitary hut, but before long a colony of mud and bamboo houses grew up around it. Among its residents were Professor Bhansali, who had roamed in the forests naked and with sealed lips, subsisting on margosa leaves; Maurice Frydman, a Pole, who became a convert to the Gandhian conception of a handicraft civilization based on non-violence; a Sanskrit scholar who was a leper and was housed next to Gandhi’s hut so that Gandhi could take care of him; a Japanese monk who (in Mahadev Desai’s words) "worked like a horse and lived like a hermit." No wonder that Vallabhbhai Patel called Segaon a ‘menagerie’. Gandhi referred to it as the ‘Home for Invalids.’

Sevagram (as Segaon was renamed) was not planned as an ashram; Gandhi never conceived it as such and did not impose any formal discipline upon it. This motley group, consisting of men and women of vastly dissimilar temperaments and attainments, bound to him by varying degrees of respect or affection and by the common ideal of service to the village, constituted a human laboratory which gave him, according to Mahadev Desai, exercise in the practice of ahimsa (non-violence) in the domestic field. Its successful practice would mean its automatic extension to the political field. That is why he always longs to get back to his laboratory in order to be free for more self-examination and more experimentation. That difficult instruments make his immediate task more difficult is true, but it is also true that they make him all the more fit for the larger task.

Before long, Sevagram became a center of the Gandhian scheme of village welfare. A number of institutions grew up in and around it to take up the various strands of economic and social upliftment. The All-India Village Industries’ Association, with its headquarters at Maganwadi, supported and developed such industries as could easily be fostered in the villages. These industries required little capital and did not require help from outside the village. The Association set up a school for training village workers and published its own periodical, the Gram Udyog Patrika.

The ashram was a laboratory in which Gandhi experimented with himself and others. It was also a military academy, if the term may be used, for training men and women for a war without violence. Early in 1915, he had told C. F. Andrews that he did not anticipate an occasion for satyagraha for five years. Nevertheless, in his ashram a band of young men and women were being trained in the moral and emotional controls essential for a satyagrahi, so that the group did not give way to hatred or violence, even under provocation. The Sabarmati Ashram was to do for the satyagraha struggles of 1920 and 1930, what the Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm had done in South Africa. It was also to provide men and women for constructive activities which, between spells of satyagraha, built up the nation’s morale.

Sarvodaya is the principle that guided Sevagram. The word Sarvodaya was coined by Gandhi. It is a compound of two Sanskrit words: Sarva which means ‘All,’ and Udaya which means ‘Upliftment or Welfare or Prosperity’. Therefore Sarvodaya means the ‘Upliftment or Welfare or Prosperity of All.’

Gandhi used the word Sarvodaya to describe the principles he felt should guide us in our efforts to build ourselves, our families, our communities and nations. He had arrived at these principles of a Sarvodaya society on the basis of his studies, his observations and his experiments with truth and non-violence. He felt very strongly that the soundest foundation on which societies should be built were the qualities of truth, love and compassion in both our personal and our public lives.

Gandhi first used the word Sarvodaya in a booklet which he published in his native Gujarati after he read John Ruskin. That essay, Unto This Last, was based on a parable from the Gospel according to Matthew (20:1-16) concerning the owner of a plantation and his hiring of laborers to work in his vineyard. In his parable Jesus made the master of the vineyard declare: "I will give unto this last even as I give unto thee." The emphasis of Ruskin’s essay, as interpreted by Gandhi, is certainly that the ideal society is one in which there is concern for the welfare of all: `unto this last’, that is the neediest or the poorest of the poor. This is the foundation for his Sarvodaya movement. It’s main features are trusteeship, economic equality and networking.

Trusteeship: The theory of trusteeship, elimination of exploitation in every shape or form; a classless society which offers no privileges by the birth or wealth or talent; mutual cooperation being the driving force of motivation and behavior; and above all, securing the welfare of all without any distinction of race, religion, sex or political affiliation: these may be said to be the highlights of the Sarvodaya society envisioned by the Mahatma.

In other words, human values, individual development that is always consistent with its use for the development of society; promotion of altruism to the highest degree; integration of the individual with society; and lifting the whole human society to the highest level of existence where love and fair play will play the most crucial roles. These are the predominant characteristics of the Sarvodaya ideal.

A Guyanese author, Arnold Apple, summarizes the same vision of society when he writes:

We must be able to close the gates of unfairness, racism, untruthfulness and selfishness. To think that we are equal in every respect is indeed a misguided thought! But we must find a system to give every person the right initiative and opportunity to perform to the fullest in his or her capacity B a system to make us seek out and discover new attitudes in which we could move to transform our selfish talents into usefulness, and eventually a progressive nation.

 

Sarvodaya, then, is the application of the principle of non-violence in the transformation of societies from their present forms which are mostly exploitative of and unfavorable to the disadvantaged, toward more balanced, inclusive and egalitarian forms in which can be enshrined the principle of social justice for all.

The most disadvantaged sections of the community being the economically, physically and mentally poor, it is obvious that no egalitarian society could evolve without the poor taking part in the evolutionary process. And for this sector to take part, the focus must be put on raising their status to an acceptably decent level.

However, as it should be for all the other sectors of society, if an acceptable level of existence is to be reached and maintained for the disadvantaged sector, it is imperative that it should be self-sustainable through their participation in their own management. Otherwise, they will continue to be dependent on others B a state in which true liberation or empowerment could never take place.

The Sarvodaya network: During his lifetime, Gandhiji never allowed Sarvodaya organizations to be formally instituted. His thinking was that once you served people, as ‘sevaks’, within the Sarvodaya philosophy there was no need for institutionalization. But since his demise, Sarvodaya organizations have been established (some 40 of them) worldwide B on all the continents B genuinely helping people towards building new societies from the ‘grass-roots’ up. These are now being connected into a Sarvodaya network with headquarters in Bangalore, India.

At the operational level, the most successful Sarvodaya programs have most often been those which, apart from being self-created and self-managed, have employed practical hands-on, learning-by-doing methods, including a lot of income generation, skills training and conscientisation; rather than the theoretical "talk-shop" or workshop approach. And they have always exercised the utmost respect for the cultural more’s of the people involved, whether their ethics come from world faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. or any other traditional religion.

The Credo of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (based in the Philippines), as articulated by its founder, Dr James Yen, encapsules a methodology that is very much in consonance with Sarvodaya:

Go to the people

Live among them

Learn from them

Plan with them

Work with the people

Start with what they know

Build on what the people have

Teach by showing, learn by doing

Not a showcase but a pattern

Not odds and ends but a system

Not piecemeal but integrated approach

Not to confirm but to transform

To sum up, some of the dominant Gandhian concerns that we see in Sarvodaya philosophy are: welfare for all, a religious basis for life, a holistic outlook of life and cooperation through networking.

Having seen briefly some of the significant practical and philosophical insights of Gandhi, we are in position to study the relevance of Gandhi as a person and a mass leader. Though his vision and life is exemplary, he lived as a loner, pursued a pilgrim’s way and gave up his life for a cause dear to his heart! Even in the ashram, he dared to have his individual dreams and convictions. He was a human being set apart. His relevance can be found also in his ‘lonely’ life with deep convictions, in spite of the fact that there has been no other human being in history who had such a massive following during his or her life time. There were thousands of people for whom Gandhi was a symbol for God and for whom they would easily give up their own lives.

Part of the explanation for his meteoric rise and enduring influence lay in the impact which he made upon the imagination of the Indian masses. The symbol or myth of ‘the Mahatma’ had its practical inconveniences; it turned his tours into a terrible ordeal for him, but it also made his prestige independent of the immediate success or failure which attended his movements.

There were other reasons for this pre-eminence. The struggle in South Africa had matured him; he had outgrown the diffidence which had dogged him as a student in England and a young lawyer in India, and had taught him to combine tremendous confidence with a disarming humility. Those who came under his spell and changed the very texture of their lives included men and women of vastly dissimilar talents and temperaments: great lawyers and parliamentarians like C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru, humanists like Madan Mohan Malaviya and Rajendra Prasad, realists like Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajagopalachari, idealists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan. They saw in his non-violent technique the only practical alternative to speech making and bomb throwing, between which Indian politics had so far ineffectively oscillated. They turned their backs upon personal comfort and professional ambitions and spent the best part of their lives in trains or in British prisons. They did not share all his ideas on politics and economics; few of them shared his religious outlook, but they were tied to him by a deeply emotional bond. He was not only the leader, but the Bapu, the father who deserved affection and respect. With his immense appeal to the masses, and his peculiar relationship with the Congress leaders, Gandhi symbolized in his own person the basic unity of Indian nationalism over a quarter of a century, thus providing a prophylaxis against the fatal tendency of nationalist movements towards schism. With other political parties, he stressed the points of contact rather than those of conflict; he did not ridicule or denounce those with whom he differed. With the three Liberal leaders, Tej Bahadur Sapru, M. R. Jayakar and Srinivasa Sastri, he corresponded frequently, often thinking aloud with them and seeking their candid reactions "Your truthfulness," he wrote to Srinivasa Sastri, "is more important to me than your cooperation." If he could not develop a similar equation with the Muslim League leaders, it was not for want of trying.

Truth as Freedom: The real significance of the Indian freedom movement in the eyes of Gandhi was that it was waged non-violently. He would have had no interest in it if the Congress had not adopted satyagraha and subscribed to non-violence. He objected to violence not only because an unarmed people had little chance of success in an armed rebellion, but also because he considered violence a clumsy weapon which created more problems than it solved, and left a trail of hatred and bitterness in which genuine reconciliation was almost impossible.

This emphasis on non-violence jarred on Gandhi’s British and Indian critics alike, though for different reasons. To the former, non-violence was a camouflage; to the latter it was sheer sentimentalism. To the British, who tended to see the Indian struggle through the prism of European history, the professions of non-violence seemed too good to be true. Their eyes were riveted on the stray acts of violence rather than on the remarkably peaceful nature of Gandhi’s campaigns. To the radical Indian politicians who had browsed through the history of the French and Russian revolutions or the Italian and Irish nationalist struggles, it was obvious that force would only yield to force, and that it was foolish to miss opportunities and sacrifice tactical gains for reasons more relevant to ethics than to politics.

Gandhi’s critics were too prone to apply to his non-violent campaigns yardsticks suitable to violent warfare. Satyagraha was not designed to ‘seize’ any particular objectives or to ‘crush’ the opponent, but to set in motion forces which could lead to his conversion. In such a strategy it was perfectly possible to lose all the battles and win the war. In fact, victory or defeat inadequately describe the object of a Satyagraha campaign. Its object is peace, honorable to both parties.

The battles for Indian freedom under Gandhi’s leadership were thus waged on the moral, or the psychological front. "Even under the most adverse circumstances," he wrote in January 1920, "I have found Englishmen amenable to reason and persuasion, and as they always wish to appear just, it is easier to shame them than others into doing the right thing." The process or conversion was twofold. Indians no less than the British needed a change of heart. Gandhi said many hard things about the British rule in India, but he said harder things about the evils which divided and corroded the Indian society from within.

The final consummation in 1947, the transfer of power, was due to the interaction of numerous national and world forces, but there is no doubt that the timing and the method of British withdrawal were influenced by what Gandhi had said and done for a quarter of a century. In retrospect, it would seem that the three major Satyagraha campaigns in 1920-22, 1930-32 and 1940-42 were so well-spaced that they gave time for second thoughts and for that conversion of the British conscience. With the Indian independence in August 1947 it was not only that the Indian felt a load fall off his back, but also the British felt really free for the first time.

Religious Search: Though his role in the political liberation of India inevitably loomed large in the eyes of the world, the mainspring of Gandhi’s life lay not in politics but in religion. "What I want to achieve," he wrote in his autobiography, "what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years is to see God face to face, to attain moksha. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal." His deepest strivings were spiritual. Finding him in a political deputation, Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, had exclaimed, "How have you, a social reformer, found your way into this crowd?"

Gandhi explained that participation in politics was only an extension of his social activity: "I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind, and that I could not do so unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of human activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social, economic and purely religious work into watertight compartments." He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human activity; the spiritual law did not work in a field of its own, but expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life. To be truly religious, one did not have to retire to the Himalayas nor shrink into the security of a home or a sect.

The dissociation between politics and religion, between state rule and ethics had lasted so long that honest people revolted against any mixture of the two. Truth, charity and love are considered virtues applicable only in the domestic and social spheres. In politics expediency seems to be the prime mover. Gandhi’s whole career was a protest against this double morality. He did not divorce the sacred from the secular. His interest in politics was derived from the fact that he had developed a technique satyagraha which sought to introduce the spirit of religion into politics. The question was often asked by Western observers whether Gandhi was a saint or a politician. The answer to which is that he was a saint who did not cease to be one when he entered politics.

Gandhi himself considered the word ‘saint’ too sacred to be applied to him. He was a humble seeker after truth, who had caught "only the faintest glimmer of that mighty effulgence." He was only conducting experiments with some of the eternal truths of life, but could not even claim to be a social scientist because he could show no tangible proof of scientific accuracy in his methods nor such tangible results of experiments as modern science demands. He made no claims to infallibility, and let all the world know when he was groping in the dark. If he thought or spoke of himself as if he were an instrument of God, it was not as a chosen instrument with a special revelation of God’s will. "My firm belief," he said, "is that He reveals himself to every human being, but we shut our ears to the still small voice within." When someone represented him as an incarnation of Lord Krishna, he described it as a sacrilege. He had often to restrain his admirers when their adoration outran their common sense. During one of his tours, the inhabitants of a village told him that his auspicious presence had made the village well miraculously fill with water. "You are fools," he reproved them, "beyond a doubt it was an accident. I have no more influence with God than you have. Suppose a crow sits on a palm tree at the moment when the tree falls to the ground. Will you imagine that the weight of the bird brought down the tree?"

Open to Change: His humility was not a cultivated virtue, but sprang from a ceaseless struggle for self-mastery in which he remained engaged from his childhood to the last day of his life. "For him," wrote his secretary Mahadev Desai, "the struggle with the opponent within is keener than with the opponent without." He described himself as an average man with less than an average ability. "I admit," he remarked "that I am not sharp intellectually. But I don’t mind. There is a limit to the development of the intellect but none to that of the heart." One cannot resist the impression that, in exalting the goodness of the heart at the expense of mere intellectual brilliance, Gandhi tended to foster the idea of his own intellectual mediocrity. He did not care much for book learning, but his occasional imprisonments helped him to catch up with his reading, and what he read he turned to good account. His autobiography and his history of satyagraha in South Africa are proofs of a retentive memory, and both his colleagues and opponents bore testimony to his keen intellect. Nevertheless, it is a fact that he considered reasoning a poor guide beyond a certain point, unless it was controlled and directed by his intuition.

The truth he sought was not a static but a dynamic one which endlessly continued to unfold its myriad facets. When charged with inconsistency, he retorted that he was consistent with truth and not with the past. He went on modifying, correcting and enlarging his ideas in the light of fresh experience. One can discern a process of evolution even in his daily prayers; beginning with recitations from Hindu and Christian scriptures in South Africa, there came to be incorporated later, verses from the Zend Avesta, The Koran, and Buddhist and Japanese scriptures. A few hours before his death he wrote out his last exercise in Bengali, a language which he had started learning a year earlier so that he could serve the riot-torn Bengal more efficiently. Till the end he retained the zeal and humility of a student. He was a seeker.

Since he was continually elaborating his ideas on every subject, it was easy to confront him with his own earlier pronouncements on caste, machinery or Khadi and point out the discrepancies. In the glare of the ruthless publicity in which he lived, every one of his gestures and words was public property, but he willingly shared with the world even an insignificant thought, if it happened in a dream to flash across his mind. What he wrote of Tolstoy is equally true of him. "Tolstoy’s so-called inconsistencies were a sign of his development and passionate regard for truth. He often seemed inconsistent because he was continuously outgrowing his own doctrines. His failures were public; his struggles and triumphs private."

Rabindranath Tagore once aptly described Gandhi as essentially "a lover of men and not of ideas." Though he loved to reduce all problems to his moral algebra, Gandhi did not ram his opinions down anybody’s throat. "Never take anything for a gospel truth," he warned, "even if it comes from a Mahatma." Hind Swaraj, his first political testament, included a scathing attack on modern civilization and all its appurtenances of schools, railways and hospitals, but Gandhi no more tried to foist this philosophy on his followers than he compelled them to change into the loin cloth. Agatha Harrison has recorded how he used to lecture her on the evils of tea drinking, but when she accompanied him on his tours, tea was invariably served to her at 4 p.m. Thousands of people in India and abroad who met him or corresponded with him treasured small acts of courtesy and affection for which, in spite of all his preoccupations, he was never too busy.

He aspired to identify himself with ‘the least, lowliest and the lost’. He used a stone instead of soap for his bath, wrote his letters on little bits of paper with little stumps of pencils which he could hardly hold between his fingers, shaved with a crude country razor and ate with a wooden spoon from a prisoner’s bowl. All this austerity, while it may have satisfied some of his own inner needs, was primarily a means to an emotional identification with the Indian masses whose poverty and misery always haunted him; it provided the motive power for all his political, social and economic activities; it gave him his unique hold over the people, and it also sometimes created barriers between him and the town-bred Indian intelligentsia.

Joy and Non-violence: Gandhi’s asceticism sat lightly on him; it did not make of him a spoil-sport. He had the gaiety of a child. Every one of his visitors could expect to be entertained by a joke or two. "Do you suffer from nerves?" he was asked by a woman visitor. "Ask Mrs. Gandhi," straight came the reply, "she will tell you that I am on my best behavior with the world but not with her." "Well," continued Mrs Miles, "my husband is on his best behavior with me." "Then," retorted Gandhi, "I am sure that Mr Miles has bribed you heavily." Asked why he was uncharitable to those who drank, Gandhi answered: `because I am charitable to those who suffer from the effects of the curse." "How many children have you," he asked a sailor. "Eight, sir, four sons and four daughters." "I have four sons," said the Mahatma, "so I can race with you half-way." He could expect mirth out of the most unpromising situations. In September 1932, when the Hindu leaders met in Yeravda prison under the shadow of his Pune fast, he sat at the center of the table and chuckled, "I preside."

Gandhi devoted the best part of his life to one crucial problem: how to perfect and extend ahimsa (non-violence) in human relationships. On several occasions he declined invitations to tour Europe and America as he saw the absurdity of preaching non-violence abroad before there was a successful demonstration at home. And when at last the British decided to transform Indo-British relations on a basis of equality, as Gandhi had long urged, and a bloodless revolution was in the offing, India was caught in a vicious chain of communal fanaticism and bloodshed. Gandhi saw the fabric of national unity, which he had cherished, tear into bits before his eyes. Even as he struggled to guide the forces of violence into the paths of peace, he was haunted by a deep sense of failure. His popularity had not diminished. He was hailed as the Father of the Nation. The leaders of the Government paid him homage. He continued to draw huge crowds which shouted "Victory to Mahatma Gandhi"; these words had always grated on his ears but now they cut him to the quick. For there could be no victory for him when parts of India were given over to fear and violence. The tragedy stemmed from several causes, some of them rooted in recent Indian history and others in a political-cum-religious movement which had temporarily unhinged the minds of men. Gandhi lived long enough to witness two spectacular triumphs of his method; his fasts shamed Calcutta and Delhi into peace. And his death achieved what he had tried so hard in his last days to achieve, the return of sanity to the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent.

For Gandhi, however, the validity of non-violence was independent even of his own success or failure. His criticisms of Western materialism and militarism in Hind Swaraj were made six years before the outbreak of the First World War, when Europe was at the zenith of its prestige and power. These criticisms may have appeared quixotic fifty years ago; today they seem prophetic. By not spurning material progress at the cost of moral values, and by irrevocably renouncing violence, Gandhi took a line in direct opposition to the two dominant ideologies of the twentieth century: capitalism and communism. He visualized and worked for a society which would provide for the essential needs of the community (and no more), and in which the decentralization of economic and political structures would minimize the incentives for exploitation within and conflict without. Such a society could, he believed, dispense with the coercive apparatus of the modern state and depend upon non-violent techniques not only to maintain order, but also to protect itself against external aggression. Merely utopian?

It is difficult to say whether Gandhi’s dream will come true. Nations, like individuals, are tempted to continue along the beaten path, the convenient way, even though it may end in a blind alley. Gandhi knew the difficulties of translating his non-violent dream into a world of reality, but he refused to compromise on what he held to be the fundamentals. To the last he affirmed that even good ends do not justify dubious means; that our real enemies are our own fears, greed and egoism; that we must change ourselves before we can change others; than the laws of the family, of truth and love and charity, are applicable to groups, communities and nations; and above all, that "non-violence is the law of our species, as violence is the law of the brute." To those who are charged with the destinies of nations, all this may sound a very desirable but a very distant ideal. Yet, in the thermo-nuclear age, if civilization is not to disintegrate into a mass of torn flesh and molten metal, the premises of Gandhi have an immediate relevance.

Finally, here we are impressed by some of the weighty Gandhian concerns, like: openness to change, joy in life, the conviction that truth is freedom and the integration of politics with religion.

If they answer not to thy call, walk alone;

If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,

O thou of evil luck,

Open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,

O thou of evil luck,

Trample the thorns under thy tread,

And along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,

O thou of evil luck,

With the thunder flame of pain ignite thine own heart,

And let it burn alone.

Gandhi was always on the way; he was a loner; he was a leader with a mass following. He dared! And he dared to walked alone! And even when he dreamt and dared alone he had the philosophy Sarvodaya in his heart and the practices of Sevagram in his hands to guide his destiny.

1. Shriman Narayan (ed.) The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1968). Vol VI, p. 438. (Abridged as SW)

2. B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi B A Biography. As found in http://web.mahatma.org.in.

3. SW, II, p. 589.

4. M.K. Gandhi, India of My Dreams (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1992), p. 199.

5. See URL http://www.sarvodaya.org.

6. See hyperlink http://www.sarvodaya.org. The author is speaking of the situation in Sri Lanka.

7. Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo. The author is Guyanese, at present settled in Britain after working along Sarvodaya lines in Africa for the last ten years. Hyperlink http://www.sarvodaya.org.

8. Adapted from the Epilogue of Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi.

9. Nanda.