Seventy years after Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death, opinions and views about his personality and nonviolent philosophy remain deeply divided. For his opponents, Gandhi was a puritanical, conservative criticizer of modernity, who created and perpetuated unrealistic and confused ideas about economic development and technological progress. However, for his admirers, Gandhi was a man of spiritual truthfulness and democratic action, both at public and personal levels, with a unique method of struggle that combined political pragmatism and ethical integrity, with impact on human history as significant as that of Jesus, Buddha, and Karl Marx. Thus, in the mind of many people, Gandhi represents two different and contradictory characters. The first Gandhi is the political Gandhi, who fought against the British colonialism, and was eventually named as the Father of the Modern Indian Nation. This is the man, whom Albert Einstein lauded as “a leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority, a politician whose success rests not upon craft or mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality” (as cited in Sanghvi 2006: 29). The second Gandhi
is the Ashramic Gandhi, more of a mystic than a politician, who uses fasting as a method of struggle, and whom Rabindranath Tagore and others named “Mahatma” (“The Great Soul”).
Mahatma Gandhi was a great and courageous fighter, a deep thinker and an inspirational leader of men and ideas. But Gandhi also was a man of experimentation, who insisted on truth.