Sometimes I like to make an argument on fresh issues related with MahatmaGandhi and his practices.But it is shame to us that people usually find bravery to make a joke of this Mhatma.In all over the world, his methods were easily misinterpreted by Westerners. In order to fathom what he was about, westerners fluctuated between hyper-difference, in which Gandhi was seen as the inexplicable product of a foreign culture; and over-likeness, in which they found similarities that were not really there. The real Gandhi lay somewhere in between. The concept of non violence and making the country fre is somehow related to some basic experiments what this Mahatma did during the first cycle of our great revolution.it is being explained by some of our modern philosophers that gandhi was somehow a little bit controversial about his experiments can be eventually compared with the hindu religion.Gandhi departed from Hindu orthodoxy in two significant ways: on nonviolence and on caste. Ahimsa, or nonviolence, maintained that all killing should be avoided to accrue spiritual merit. Gandhi, who had encounters with poisonous snakes in South Africa and rabid dogs in India, redefined the concept and mandated killing for humanitarian purposes, as in the euthanasia of rabid dogs. If some Hindus were alienated by his lack of orthodoxy on ahimsa, many more fell out with him over his championing of the untouchables, the lowest of India's castes.in most of the part of our contry we common people still having this disease what we call as a regional old manuscripted thought where the people from lower caste should not be touched. In traditional Hindu belief, an untouchable's contact with the person, food, or drink of a member of a higher caste would defile that person. For orthodox Hindus, it was a scripturally enjoined inequality, a product of individual karma (action) and performance of dharma (dedication to a calling), and a proof of the cycle of sansar (reincarnation). Gandhi never succeeded in justifying his stance against untouchability; in the end, he simply asserted that Hinduism needed to change.Attempting to understand Gandhi fares no better if he is misconstrued as a product of Indian asceticism. Although Gandhi followed various ascetic regimens such as brahmacharya (celibacy), his purpose was to gain the strength for successful worldly action, rather than to accumulate spiritual merit. Just as mistakenly, Gandhian protest can take on the guise of things.it is not a matter a joke when there was a time people started to follow a person just by hearing his speech.in the stories and fairy tales we have heard the youngesters started to follow the witch or fairy because of her hyptonacy.But this was not the case at the time of slavery,where people from our country started to listen a particular person.It was the magic and poer of a mahatma whose theory and style somehow reflects the hope to get the freedom from slavery.Westerners already know well. Attempting to see in Gandhian nonviolence a form of Christian nonresistance glosses over the activist, confrontational element in Gandhism. Gandhi wanted worldly success, the independence of India, not divine martyrdom. He made salt, he burned cloth, he led boycotts, he was thrown in prison, but he never waited around to be thrown to the lions. The concepts of Gandhian nonviolence and pacifism are not at all close. Gandhi did not believe in turning the other cheek in every situation―evil had to be resisted, best done nonviolently, but better by violence than not at all. Passive resistance was the term that Gandhi originally used for his South African protest, but he soon disowned the term in favor of his neo-locution, satyagraha or soul-force. For Gandhi, passive resistance was a weapon of the weak, used expediently, not morally, when violence was impossible or too costly. When Gandhi pondered the case of the British suffragettes and Irish Republican hunger-strikers offering passive resistance in jail, he saw an essential coercive element in the protests, which made them akin to violent resistance. Such passive resistors were perpetrating nonviolence to extract concessions from their enemies. The purpose of India's nonviolent resisters, in Gandhi's terms, was to suffer nonviolently to engender trust and respect in their opponents. Civil disobedience against the state, and the anarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departure from the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed by Thoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts. Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the same conviction or some might feel coerced into action.
In Gandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individual acts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest. Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moral action. Gandhi's truth was not just a product of his Indian tradition; nor was he parroting methods already known in the West. It was a syncretism of Western and Indian practices that drew upon Gandhi's experiences living in England, South Africa, and India. By 1918 Gandhi had put together the three most important elements of his philosophy―namely, morally informed nonviolence, mass civil disobedience, and courageous suffering.
The concept was almost as strange to Indians as it was later to Americans. In the West, Gandhi was perceived as powerful for his ability to hold back threatened violence from the Indian masses. That power was taken as spiritual. Gandhi "suffers himself to be adored," as one New York Times commentator put it. Another commented that Gandhi's penitential fasting for political ends illustrated the "difference between East and West." A Gandhi sanctified in this manner spoke to American social activists only as a saint―which meant that he was heard best by Christian militants, rather than by secular ones, and that his work was taken as prophecy, not politics. Even this depended on seeing Christ like qualities in Gandhi and in tailoring nonviolent resistance to Christian nonresistance and pacifism. This over-likeness grew stronger from the 1920s on as Gandhi's influence over Indian nationalism developed and as more and more American clergymen went to India to meet the Mahatma and bring his ideas home. John Haynes Holmes, a Protestant minister, pacifist, and activist with A. J. Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was a major agent of Western over-likeness. He began to preach a Christianized version of Gandhi and Gandhism as early as 1918 and met the Mahatma in 1931. In a 1922 sermon, Holmes said that "Gandhi is thus undertaking to do exactly what Jesus did when He proclaimed the kingdom of God on earth." For many U.S. activists in the 1930s, even Christian ones, a Christ-like Gandhi gave no political direction. A. J. Muste remembered the period with regret: "In the thirties . . . we faced a terrible situation . . . .I did not know how to apply nonviolent methods effectively to the situation. The effort to apply Gandhian methods to American conditions had scarcely begun. Pacifism was mostly a middle-class and individualistic phenomenon." Rejecting Christ and a Christ-like Gandhi, Muste turned to Trotsky and Communism for a period.
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