Reckoning: Gandhi Beyond the Ashram

During an eight-month stay in Gujarat, an Indian American finds both the quiet persistence of Gandhi’s ideals and the widening gap in public and political spheres between honoring the Mahatma and living by his principles.

As I savored the tranquility of Sabarmati Ashram, a modest cluster of whitewashed buildings shaded by neem trees, it was hard to miss the contrast between this peaceful setting on the banks of the Sabarmati River and the noise and congestion of the city of Ahmedabad surrounding it. It’s as if this contrast symbolized the widening gap between Gandhi’s ideals of truth and nonviolence and their scarcity in today’s conflict-ridden, divided world.

Gandhi’s words appear throughout the museum at the ashram. One exhortation widely attributed to him, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” seemed particularly distant from the present. Was the ashram still a living guide to Gandhi’s values, I wondered, or had it become a relic in an India where rampant consumerism, the worship of Western designer brands, and deepening political and communal divides are on the rise?

I had come to Sabarmati during an eight-month stay in Vadodara, Gujarat, where I divided my time between Pathshala, a school serving children from nearby low-income communities, and Exxat, an education technology company. I chose this pairing because they have both been founded by Aarti Vaishnav, an ardent proponent of Gandhian philosophy. Born in the United States, I had traveled to Gujarat hoping to work in a compassionate setting where Gandhian principles were being put into practice.

Vaishnav told me that Pathshala grew from a question that had occurred to her as she watched children playing by the roadside: what might become possible if they had the same opportunity for an education that more privileged children receive? Exxat had an underused canteen, so she converted it into a learning space that grew into Pathshala. Her aunt, Maya Shintre, visited the nearby Mujmahuda slum to encourage parents to enroll their children at no cost. Only a few attended at first. As the children responded to the teachers, enrollment grew, and the school eventually moved into a converted 6,000-square-foot office building within walking distance of the community.

Pathshala complicated any easy conclusion that Gandhi’s values had disappeared from Gujarat. Inside the school, I saw education being offered with values of compassion, service, and self-reliance.

Outside that setting, however, I encountered casual remarks and assumptions that were reminders of stereotypes surrounding various religious groups. Gujarat’s long history of cultural exchange was overshadowed by narratives of communal exclusion.

One incident that brought this into focus was when my mother told an apartment caretaker she had hired two Muslim technicians to service her air conditioner. He admonished her for hiring them, declared Muslim workers untrustworthy, and recommended Hindu technicians instead. This wasn’t an overt act of violence, but its ordinariness disturbed me: suspicion had become casual enough to pass as common sense.

MANY FAITHS, ONE HUMANITY

Gandhi’s refusal to dehumanize others extended to religious difference. His belief in sarva dharma sambhava, or equal respect for all faiths, grew from his commitment to truth and nonviolence. In Hind Swaraj, he compared religions to different roads converging at the same destination.

Varun Soni, dean of religious life at the University of Southern California, described Gandhi’s religious identity as expansive rather than defensive. In Soni’s interpretation, being a good Hindu required Gandhi to recognize and cultivate what was true in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and other traditions. Faith did not require retreating from religious difference; it required encountering that difference with humility.

That understanding was not foreign to my own family. My grandmother, a survivor of Partition, learned classical music from a Muslim ustad whom she regarded as family. During our Arya Samaj havans in New Delhi, he and his relatives would sit with my family and the priest around the sacred fire, singing bhajans with us. Hindus and Muslims worshipping together: it felt like Gandhi’s dream of shared humanity made tangible.

Inspired by that inheritance, I explored different religions in college and came to understand faith less as a boundary and more as a path toward recognizing the divine in others. Yet the inclusive India I had admired from the United States seemed increasingly fragile when I encountered the social and religious divisions around me in Gujarat.

These moments unsettled an understanding of India that I had long taken for granted. My Muslim colleagues at Exxat were well-liked and treated like everyone else; yet beyond the office I encountered a different vocabulary of belonging. These experiences made Gandhi’s pluralistic vision feel less like an ideal preserved from the past and more like an urgent standard against which the present must be measured.

FEAR NOT, HATE NOT

To understand what Gandhi’s teachings demand beyond slogans, I spoke with Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson and a research professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He emphasized that his grandfather “never sought to found a doctrine in his own name.” The Mahatma, he said, reminded people that his teachings were “as old as the hills” and that he was only standing where others had stood before him.

According to Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s “ahimsa is not mere abstention from harm, but an active force of love grounded in truth.” It requires the moral courage to resist hatred. One may reject an opponent’s arguments, demands, or threats without rejecting the opponent’s humanity. He distilled the message into two formidable instructions: “fear not” and “hate not.”

Dr. Bindu Puri, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, believes that Gandhi’s satyagraha calls for “the bearing of pain rather than inflicting it,”evenwhen protesting against an antagonist. When such a willingness to accept suffering is absent, resistance can harden into duragraha: an insistence on one’s own position that coerces rather than persuades. Whenever Gandhi seriously pursued what he believed to be true, Puri said, he always considered the other person. Resistance had to retain “love and respect,” because hatred cannot transform hatred into love.

Tara Sethia, founder of the Ahimsa Center at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, connected this with one’s refusal to de- humanize others in one’s daily conduct. Viewing people as inferior, she said, makes it easier to exploit them as well as the environment. Compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, by contrast, make kinder relationships possible. That standard sounds almost impossibly demanding  in  an  age when humiliation, certainty, and outrage have become the norm in public arguments. Sethia’s observation made me realize that Gandhian nonviolence is not confined to marches and political movements. It begins in the language we use and the assumptions we permit ourselves to carry.

THE NATION GANDHI IMAGINED

The distance between Gandhi’s celebrated image and his teachings is especially stark in contemporary India. “India loves Gandhi but not so much his teachings,” Soni said. During Gandhi’s lifetime, he observed, the force of his personality helped some of his ideas gain momentum. After his death, much of that momentum faded because it had been so closely tied to the man himself.

The contradiction is clearest in competing ideas of who belongs to the nation. Rajmohan Gandhi described his grandfather’s vision of India as a country belonging equally to all its citizens, regardless of religion. That vision stands against the majoritarian idea in present-day India that the country belongs primarily to Hindus. Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj that people who truly understood nationality did not interfere with one another’s religion. “In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms,” he wrote, “nor has it ever been so in India.” In recent years, however, political rhetoric and majoritarian mobilization have deepened distrust. In Gandhi’s home state, the contrast between public reverence for the Mahatma and private departures from his ideals felt particularly acute.

Aziz Akbari, an engineer and elected member of the Alameda County Water District board in California, was born to Gujarati Muslim immigrants. His family experienced the lasting consequences of the 2002 Gujarat violence, after which his relatives left the state for Mumbai and elsewhere. Gandhi’s achievement, Akbari said, was to unite a broad coalition behind the vision of a secular, democratic state. He laments the current political inclination toward divide and rule, which, he feels, exploits insecurity and scapegoats minorities instead of addressing economic and social problems.

A USEFUL LEGACY OR AN UNTOUCHABLE ICON

Any contemporary consideration of Gandhi must also resist turning him into a flawless moral icon. His record has drawn serious criticism, including over his early writings about Black Africans, his evolving but contested approach to caste, his views about women and sexuality, and the troubling experiments through which he tested his vow of celibacy. Acknowledging these aspects of his life does not require discarding everything he taught. It requires applying the same scrutiny and openness to correction to Gandhi himself that his own pursuit of truth demanded.

The more useful question, then, is not whether Gandhi was beyond reproach. It is whether ahimsa, satyagraha, pluralism, and swaraj still offer tools for resisting injustice without surrendering our own humanity. Puri sees those practices as “terribly relevant” in a world marked by war and political conflict. Their relevance, however, depends on whether they can move beyond ceremonial tributes and enter ordinary choices.

LIVING THE PRINCIPLES

Vaishnav sees that work beginning with inclusion and opportunity. At Exxat, she said, it means creating conditions in which women engineers can balance work and family responsibilities, and ensuring that neither religion nor gender determines career advancement. “The idea of inclusion resonates most for me as I think about Exxat,” she said. For Vaishnav, Gandhi’s enduring challenge was to take responsibility for change rather than merely wish for it, a conviction that also shaped her decision to establish Pathshala.

Pathshala’s students offered one answer. After completing their Class 10 exams, they were invited to serve as scribes for visually impaired Class 11 students. Every hand went up, and none of the volunteers withdrew from the three-hour commitment. Each later received 300 rupees for the work. Every student donated 100 rupees to help cover another child’s tuition, and one gave the entire payment toward a classmate’s medical expenses. Many of these young people were accustomed to being viewed chiefly as recipients of help. Through service, they discovered that they, too, had something meaningful to give.

Gandhi’s principles have also found expression in Atlanta classrooms. Uma Majmudar, a former professor at Emory University and Spelman College, stayed at Sabarmati Ashram in 2008 and saw its ethic of self-reliance practiced through ordinary communal responsibilities. Residents shared the cooking, cleaning, gardening, teaching, and daily spinning of cloth. Later, at Spelman, Majmudar introduced students familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement to its Gandhian roots, including the principles of truth, nonviolence, and a willingness to endure suffering rather than inflict it.

Ramanujan Nadadur, a criminal defense and immigration attorney in Los Angeles, said Gandhi’s example informs how he represents vulnerable clients. Before hearings, he asks himself what Gandhi would do, then tries to explain injustice calmly even when anger would be understandable. The anecdote suggests that nonviolence need not mean passivity. At its best, it can be a disciplined method of making injustice visible without allowing an adversary’s conduct to determine one’s own.

For Gandhi, freedom was not merely independence from an external ruler. It also meant developing the discipline to govern one’s own desires and actions. Puri described such self-rule as a condition of political freedom: institutions cannot remain accountable if citizens surrender responsibility for their own conduct or if power becomes too distant from those it is meant to serve.

RETURN TO SABARMATI

Gandhi’s teachings should not become relics, nor should Gandhi be protected from scrutiny. The value of Gandhi’s teachings lies in resisting injustice without dehumanizing others and in joining conviction with humility and responsibility. Puri’s challenge was simple: “Never be discouraged by the enormity of the task. Just make the change in yourself.” These principles become a living guide only when practiced beyond museum walls.

As I looked across the Sabarmati, I arrived at no easy resolution. Before my stay in Gujarat, I had understood Gandhi chiefly as a freedom fighter and national symbol. The contradictions I witnessed, from Pathshala’s ethic of service to the casual prejudice of everyday conversations, made his pluralistic vision newly immediate. The quiet river could not answer whether Gandhi’s India was receding or waiting to be reclaimed. But the visit changed the question I was asking. Instead of wondering only why others had failed to live by Gandhi’s values, I began asking what truth, courage, and compassion required of me.

Nikhil Misra-Bhambri is a freelance journalist living in Los Angeles, California. He graduated in history from the University of Southern California and writes about relationships between cultures, cuisine, music, and history.