Things You May Not Have Known About Gandhi

Posted on 02 October 2007

For the majority of time I studied and worked as a T.A. at Georgetown in 2003-2005 I lived in Adams Morgan - about 30 minutes walk from the Georgetown Campus. Not having a car, I walked to campus most days, passing the statue of Gandhi at Embassy Row. The memories I have of seeing that statue over and over on those walks are as vivid as any I have from that period in my life. The brass statue stands as a strong reminder of the legendary humanitarian.

The intended effects of the deliberate display of symbolic artifacts like this statue in public areas is undoubtedly to send a very clear message to the public - that certain ethical and moral values, for instance, are good for society. And why not remind the public of the virtues of non-violence, helping the poor and selflessness?? By any of these measures, Gandhi is a legend - which is why it makes perfect sense that this particular statue was chosen to stand amid a cluster of over 50 international embassies in D.C. - it’s the perfect political marketing message for international cooperation and peace.

That said, here are some interesting questions for those of you reading this. What if you learned something about Gandhi today that you found shocking and offensive? Would it change the value of the statue’s symbolism for you? After all, what the statue means to you (or any of us) is directly related to what you know of Gandhi (and, most importantly, how you feel about what you know). You have a relationship, so to speak, with the object based on your knowledge of it.

I, like most I’m sure, associated this statue with all of the positive P.R. Ganhdi gets. In fact, in Western pop culture it’s rare that you would hear Gandhi’s name associated with anything but praise, so our collective opinion as a society is (naturally) overwhelmingly positive. But the reality is, on an individual level, all I really know of Gandhi is what I’ve been exposed to in popular media and from books and TV. And to be honest, those opinions, until recently, have been unanimously positive. After reading Robyn Meredith’s The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India & China and What It Means for All of Us, my eyes have been opened to a new side of this great man - a side characterized by stubbornness, backward thinking, and, for lack of a better word, fundamentalism. Most importantly - and this is what blew me away - Meredith, in brilliant journalistic style, makes a very persuasive argument for why Gandhi’s ideals and politics and focus on isolation and protectionism gradually crippled a nation (of now, 1 billion people) with backwards rhetoric and autarkic policies. Here’s Meredith giving us a slightly darker picture of Gandhi:

Admired around the world for his advocacy of nonviolence and for his moral insistence on helping the poor, Gandhi supported policies that were meant to ensure India’s economic independence from the industrialized West. He advocated traditional means of production, symbolized by his own daily use of a wooden spinning wheel and asked Indians to stop wearing imported clothing and using imported goods, as a revolt against economic ties to a colonial power. Gandhi’s insistence that only natural medicines be used led many, including his own wife, to forgo available vaccines and medicine. When his wife was dying of bronchitis in 1944, the British flew a supply of penicillin to her, but Gandhi refused to allow doctors to inject her with it, because he believed the use of needles violated his principles of non-violence. He held her head as she died. Gandhi practiced celibacy for the last forty-two years of his life and believed that abstinence was the only acceptable form of birth control. The result? India’s population boomed and it’s scant resources were stretched because others were not as disciplined. His economic policies, too, grew to be just as impractical, for all their wealth of symbolic meaning…

– Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and The Dragon, pg 42.

Does reading any of this affect you as much as it affects me? One thing’s for sure, being Gandhi’s wife couldn’t have been easy.