Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

Unlike most of the great religious figures studied by Ignispedia, Gandhi is a figure of the contemporary era whose life is documented with unusual precision. Between 1925 and 1929, in the columns of his Gujarati journal Navajivan, he wrote an autobiography entitled An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, covering his life up to 1921^[6]. His correspondence, articles and speeches were collected in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, a critical edition in one hundred volumes published by the Indian government between 1958 and 1994^[7].

Two reference biographies structure contemporary academic research: that of the American journalist Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950), written after several direct interviews with Gandhi between 1942 and 1948^[8], and the diptych of the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (2013) and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 (2018), which systematically exploits South African and Indian archives^[9][10]. This article rests on that foundation — Gandhi's own primary sources, scholarly biographies, and, for the most disputed episodes, specialised academic works — rather than on the golden legend or the black legend that likewise circulate about him.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a small principality of Kathiawar under British suzerainty, where his father Karamchand Gandhi held the office of dewan — prime minister — of the local state^[11]. His mother, Putlibai, belonged to a Vaishnavite family (devotees of Vishnu) strongly marked by Jainism, a religion of exacting moral rigour centred on non-violence (ahimsa) towards every living being^[12]. This double imprint — Vaishnavite devotion and Jain asceticism — lastingly shaped the religious sensibility of the future Mahatma.

In May 1883, at the age of thirteen, Mohandas married Kasturbai Makanji Kapadia, herself aged fourteen, in an arranged marriage in keeping with the customs of Gujarat at the time^[13]. His father died at the end of 1885, when Mohandas was only sixteen^[14]. After secondary schooling in Rajkot and a brief, half-hearted spell at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar, the family decided to send him to study law in England^[15].

The vow made to his mother before London

Before his departure in 1888, his mother, anxious about the temptations of London life, consulted a Jain monk, Becharji Swami, who advised her to require a solemn vow from her son, pronounced before her. Mohandas then pledged to touch neither meat, alcohol nor women during his stay in England^[16]. This vow, kept with a rigour that astonished his London circle, was the first act of a personal discipline that Gandhi would never stop deepening throughout his life — down to his late and controversial brahmacharya experiments, discussed further in this article.

Arriving in London on 4 September 1888, aged eighteen, Gandhi enrolled at the Inner Temple to become a barrister and at the same time followed courses in English literature at University College London^[17]. While looking, out of fidelity to his vow, for a vegetarian restaurant, his landlady pointed him to an establishment frequented by English reformist circles; there he discovered the Vegetarian Society, of which he became an active member, then the founder of a local branch — a decisive experience that turned a filial obligation into an assumed intellectual conviction^[18]. It was also in London, through English theosophists, that he read the Bhagavad-Gita for the first time, in Edwin Arnold's verse translation, The Song Celestial — a text which would become, in his own words, his "spiritual reference dictionary"^[19]. Called to the bar on 10 June 1891, he returned at once to India, where he learned on arrival that his mother had died in his absence^[20].

Back in Bombay, Gandhi failed to establish a viable legal practice: timid, ill at ease with the courtroom oratory of the courts, he lost his first brief and turned to drafting administrative petitions in Rajkot, an activity he had to abandon after a humiliating dispute with a British political officer^[21]. It was against this background of professional failure that he accepted, in April 1893, a one-year contract to represent a Gujarati Muslim merchant, Dada Abdullah, in a commercial case in Durban, in the colony of Natal (South Africa)^[22].

The Pietermaritzburg incident and the birth of a militant

On 7 June 1893, barely arrived, Gandhi — travelling first class with a valid ticket — was forcibly thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg station because a white passenger refused to share the compartment with an Indian "coolie"^[23]. He spent the night on the platform, in the cold of the southern-hemisphere winter, and described this episode in his autobiography as the moment when he realised that the fight against racial injustice had to become his vocation rather than simply returning to India^[24]. The following months confirmed this systemic humiliation: he was thrown into the gutter for refusing to give up the pavement to a white horseman, and ordered, in the courts, to remove his turban^[25].

The Natal Indian Congress and the Empire's wars

In 1894, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress to organise the political resistance of Natal's Indian community against a bill stripping it of the right to vote^[26]. In 1899, during the Boer War, he raised a corps of Indian volunteer stretcher-bearers — the Indian Ambulance Corps, some eleven hundred men strong — in the service of the British army, judging that loyalty to the Empire, even criticised, was the condition for subsequently claiming rights from it^[27]. In 1906, during the Bambatha Zulu rebellion, he renewed this choice by raising a mixed corps of Indian and African stretcher-bearers charged with tending wounded combatants^[28].

1906: the birth of satyagraha

It was in September 1906 that Gandhi devised his method of non-violent resistance, in reaction to a Transvaal government law imposing compulsory registration by fingerprinting on all Indians and Chinese in the colony^[29]. Judging the English term passive resistance too weak — there was, in his view, nothing passive about this form of struggle — he launched a competition in his journal Indian Opinion to find a more fitting Gujarati word. His cousin Maganlal Gandhi proposed sadagraha; Gandhi refined it into satyagraha, from satya (truth) and agraha (firmness, tenacity): the "force born of truth"^[30].

"I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence [...]. Satyagraha is soul-force pure and simple." — Mohandas Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa, English transl. Valji Govindji Desai, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1950 ed., chap. XIII^[31]

Tolstoy Farm and the correspondence with Leo Tolstoy

In 1910, with the financial support of his German architect friend Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi founded near Johannesburg a self-sufficient farming community, Tolstoy Farm, where he put to the test the principles of simple living, manual labour and non-violence that would later structure his Indian ashrams^[32]. That same year, he began a correspondence with the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose The Kingdom of God Is Within You he had just read — a work which, by his own account, had "overwhelmed" him and "left a lasting impression"^[33]. A few months before the latter's death in 1910, Gandhi sought and obtained Tolstoy's permission to translate and republish his Letter to a Hindu in Gujarati^[34].

After twenty-one years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India for good in January 1915, at the age of forty-five, at the invitation of the veteran of the Indian National Congress Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who became his political mentor until his death that same year^[35].

Champaran and Kheda: satyagraha on an Indian scale

Gokhale advised Gandhi to spend a year observing India before committing himself publicly. His first great Indian campaign took place in 1917 in the district of Champaran (Bihar), where peasants were compelled by a system called tinkathia to grow indigo on about 15% of their land for the benefit of British planters, without profiting from it^[36]. The local inquiry conducted by Gandhi, despite an expulsion order from the British authorities which he refused to obey, led to the abolition of the system and to a compromise partly compensating the peasants^[37]. The following year, in 1918, he applied the same method of non-cooperation in the district of Kheda (Gujarat), where peasants ruined by drought collectively refused to pay the land tax; the colonial government ended by easing the collection terms^[38].

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the break with the Empire

In early 1919, the British government had the Rowlatt Act voted through, authorising the arrest and detention without trial of any terrorism suspect for up to two years^[39]. In reaction, Gandhi organised a general strike (hartal) on 6 April 1919, the first genuinely pan-Indian protest movement he had ever launched^[40]. On 13 April 1919, at Amritsar, British troops commanded by General Reginald Dyer opened fire without warning on a peaceful crowd gathered in the walled enclosure of Jallianwala Bagh, killing, according to the official estimates of the time, at least 379 people and wounding about 1,200^[41]. This massacre, which Gandhi publicly described as a crime against humanity, marked the definitive breaking point between him and the idea of a gradual reform of the British Empire from within^[42].

The non-cooperation movement and the halt at Chauri Chaura

In September 1920, the Indian National Congress adopted at Calcutta the non-cooperation programme proposed by Gandhi: boycott of British honorary titles, schools, courts and imported goods, promotion of hand-spun cotton (khadi) as a symbol of economic self-sufficiency (swadeshi)^[43]. The movement, the first truly massive uprising in the history of Indian nationalism, mobilised peasants, workers and students alongside the urban elite for the first time^[44].

On 4 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura, in the United Provinces, a crowd of demonstrators, after coming under police fire, set fire to the local police station and killed twenty-two policemen^[45]. Gandhi, judging that he had committed a "Himalayan miscalculation" in launching a mass movement without sufficient preparation in non-violent discipline, unilaterally suspended the campaign on 12 February 1922, to the bewilderment of some of his supporters^[46]. Arrested for sedition on 10 March 1922, he was sentenced to six years in prison, of which he would serve only two, the sentence being commuted on medical grounds in 1924^[47].

1. 26 January 1930
   Independence Day proclaimed

   The Indian National Congress celebrates a symbolic "Independence Day" at Lahore and charges Gandhi with choosing the next civil disobedience campaign^[48].

2. 12 March - 6 April 1930
   The Salt March

   Gandhi and his followers walk some 390 kilometres from the Sabarmati ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, there to produce salt freely, in open defiance of the British monopoly and of the tax levied on this staple product^[49].

3. 6 April 1930
   Symbolic breach of the law

   At 8:30 a.m., Gandhi picks up a handful of salt on Dandi beach, a gesture that triggers similar acts of civil disobedience across the country^[50].

4. 21 May 1930
   Dharasana

   Without Gandhi, already arrested, hundreds of satyagrahis present themselves without resistance before the Dharasana salt works and are violently beaten by the police, an episode widely relayed by the international press^[51].

5. March 1931
   Gandhi-Irwin Pact

   Gandhi signs an agreement with the Viceroy Lord Irwin putting an end to the campaign in exchange for the release of political prisoners and a limited authorisation to produce coastal salt^[52].

More than sixty thousand people were imprisoned during this campaign, which lastingly established Gandhi and his method of non-violent civil disobedience in the international consciousness, notably thanks to American press coverage^[53]. In 1931, Gandhi took part in London in the Second Round Table Conference on India's constitutional future, with no immediate concrete result^[54].

In parallel, within Hinduism itself, Gandhi waged a struggle for the practical abolition of untouchability. He designated the Dalits — traditionally regarded as outside the system of the four varna — by the term Harijan, "children of God", which he popularised from the 1930s^[55]. This struggle collided head-on with that of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, himself born into an Untouchable family and become a jurist, for whom the caste question was not only moral but political, and demanded separate electoral representation for the Dalits^[56].

In August 1932, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald granted, through the Communal Award, separate electorates to the "depressed classes". Gandhi saw in this a mortal peril for Hindu unity and began, on 20 September 1932, an unlimited hunger strike from his cell in Yerwada prison to force the withdrawal of this measure^[57]. The Poona Pact, signed on 24 September 1932 between Gandhi and Ambedkar, replaced the separate electorates with a system of reserved seats within a common electorate — 148 seats instead of the 71 initially provided^[58]. Ambedkar, who yielded under the pressure of Gandhi's fast rather than from conviction, would later describe this episode as a moral blackmail exercised over an old man's life to bend a minority with no other political recourse — a reading radically different from the providential one Gandhi himself would give of his own fast^[59]. This tension between the two men, never truly resolved, still structures the Indian debate on the Gandhian legacy towards the Dalits today.

On 8 August 1942, the Indian National Congress adopted, at Gandhi's initiative, the Quit India resolution, demanding the immediate departure of the British and launching the slogan Do or Die^[60]. Gandhi was arrested the next day and interned, with several Congress leaders, at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, until May 1944^[61]. His wife Kasturba, imprisoned with him, died in detention on 22 February 1944, after more than sixty years of marriage^[62].

After the war, negotiations on India's constitutional future stumbled over the demand for a separate Muslim state carried by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League. Gandhi consistently opposed the very principle of Partition, declaring that it would happen "only over his dead body"^[63]. The Direct Action Day proclaimed by the Muslim League on 16 August 1946 triggered in Calcutta intercommunal riots that left more than four thousand dead and ten thousand wounded, foreshadowing the coming violence of Partition^[64]. On 15 August 1947, India's independence was proclaimed simultaneously with the partition of the subcontinent between the Indian Union and Pakistan; Gandhi, refusing to take part in the official celebrations in Delhi, spent the day in prayer and fasting in Calcutta^[65].

Described by the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, as a "one-man boundary force", Gandhi undertook in September 1947 a fast in Calcutta which managed to stop violence that fifty-five thousand British soldiers had failed to contain in the Punjab^[66]. This fast, perceived by some radical Hindu militants as a betrayal in favour of the Muslims, added to the resentment that would lead to his assassination a few months later^[67].

A first assassination attempt failed on 20 January 1948 at Birla House in Delhi: an explosive device was set off on the margins of a prayer meeting, but one of the conspirators, Madanlal Pahwa, was apprehended on the spot^[68]. Ten days later, on 30 January 1948, as Gandhi was making his way to his evening prayer in the garden of Birla House, Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist militant from Pune, approached him, bowed in a sign of respect, then fired three bullets at point-blank range into his chest and abdomen^[69]. Gandhi's last words remain disputed by witnesses: those close to him report that he uttered "Hey Ram" ("O God"), while Godse's brother would later claim that he emitted only an inarticulate breath^[70].

Godse was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and, according to several later family testimonies, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation which was banned by the Indian government a few days after the assassination, on 4 February 1948, before being authorised again in 1949^[71]. Godse reproached Gandhi for having, through his fasts and concessions, favoured Muslim interests to the detriment of Hindu unity and for having accepted Partition^[72]. The trial opened in May 1948 at Delhi's Red Fort; Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were sentenced to death on 8 November 1949 and hanged at Ambala prison on 15 November following^[73]. The name of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, ideologue of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva), figured among the accused in the conspiracy but he was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence^[74].

Ahimsa: non-violence as soul-force

The Sanskrit term ahimsa derives from the root han (to kill), preceded by the privative prefix a-: it literally designates the absence of the desire to kill, and more broadly the refusal to harm any living being in thought, word or deed^[75]. This notion, common to Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism, long predates Gandhi; his own contribution consists in having made it, for the first time in history, an instrument of mass political struggle against a colonial power, and not only a personal discipline of renunciation^[76].

Satyagraha: truth-force, and the unity of means and ends

For Gandhi, ahimsa is the means, and truth (satya) is the end: "ahimsa is our supreme duty" precisely because "the means must always be within our reach"^[77]. This articulation rests on a central principle of his political thought: the refusal to separate means from ends.

"They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end." — Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, 17 July 1924^[78]

For him, it is squarely contradictory to seek to obtain justice by unjust means, or peace through violence — a position which distinguishes him as much from revolutionary Marxism as from classical Western political realism^[79]. A frequently quoted phrase, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind", is in reality a later reformulation and not an exact quotation from Gandhi: research conducted across the entirety of his collected works has not recovered its precise wording, the closest documented version being this one, published in 1920:

"If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless." — Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, 1920^[80]

Likewise, the very popular formula "Be the change you want to see in the world" is attested in none of his writings; it comes in reality from a New York schoolteacher, Arleen Lorrance, in 1970 — nearly a quarter of a century after Gandhi's death. What Gandhi actually wrote, in 1913 in Indian Opinion, is more modest and more exact: "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change [...]. We need not wait to see what others do"^[81]. This precision illustrates a rule of method that every serious encyclopaedia must observe: legend, however flattering, never replaces the verified quotation.

Sarvodaya and trusteeship: an economy of charity without grace

In 1904, during a train journey across South Africa, a friend offered him John Ruskin's essay, Unto This Last (1862), a critique of Victorian political economy. From it Gandhi drew three principles that would become the bedrock of his economic thought: the good of the individual is contained in the good of all; all work has equal value; the life of the peasant and of the craftsman who works with his hands is the life most worth living^[82]. He translated and paraphrased this text into Gujarati in 1908 under the title Sarvodaya — from sarva (all) and udaya (uplifting, welfare): "the welfare of all"^[83].

From this principle Gandhi derived the theory of trusteeship: rather than abolishing private property by revolution, he invited the rich to regard themselves as mere administrators (trustees) of their goods in the service of the common good, in a society with no privileges of birth, fortune or talent^[84]. This economy of voluntary solidarity, without coerced redistribution, found concrete expression in the promotion of khadi (hand-spun and hand-woven cloth) and of swadeshi (preference for local production), which Gandhi raised to the rank of a spiritual as much as an economic discipline — spinning cotton each day became, in his ashrams, an almost liturgical exercise^[85].

Brahmacharya: asceticism and discipline of the body

In 1906, aged thirty-seven, Gandhi took a vow of brahmacharya — literally "walking towards Brahma [Truth]", traditionally understood as absolute sexual continence, including within marriage^[86]. This vow, presented by Gandhi as the condition of all political self-mastery — "the control, in thought, word and action, of all the senses, at all times and in all places"^[87] — lastingly structured his personal spirituality, before drifting, in the last decade of his life, towards practices which contemporary historians examine with an increasingly frank critical eye, as will be seen below.

The daily reading of the Bhagavad-Gita

Gandhi held the Bhagavad-Gita to be the reference book of his entire spiritual life, reading and commenting on it daily, finding in Krishna's teaching to Arjuna above all the foundation of disinterested action — acting according to one's duty (svadharma) without attachment to the fruit of the action^[88]. This founding text of the Hindu tradition is already studied for itself, in its own doctrinal setting, in the Ignispedia article devoted to Hinduism, to which the reader is referred for the Hindu theology of the Gita — the present article focuses on the way Gandhi personally made it his rule of life.

The Sermon on the Mount and Leo Tolstoy

It was also in London, through theosophical circles, that Gandhi discovered the New Testament, and quite particularly the Sermon on the Mount, of which he would later say that it "went straight to his heart"^[89]. This reading was amplified many times over by his discovery, in South Africa, of Leo Tolstoy's essay The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), in which the Russian writer defended a radically literal reading of the commandment of non-resistance to evil stated in Matthew 5 — "turn the other cheek" meaning, for Tolstoy, the abolition of all violence, including defensive violence^[90]. Gandhi ranked this work, alongside Ruskin's Unto This Last and the writings of the Gujarati poet Shrimad Rajchandra, among the three major modern influences on his life^[91].

Sarva dharma sama bhava: the equal dignity of religions

From this double nourishment — Hindu and Christian, completed by readings of the Qur'an, the Torah and the Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta — Gandhi drew a constant conviction: all the great religions are, in his view, fundamentally equal in their capacity to lead man to God, a formula he summed up in the Sanskrit expression sarva dharma sama bhava, "equal regard for all religions"^[92]. He held that every religious tradition contained its share of truth and error, including Hinduism itself, and professed an active respect — not a mere tolerance — for the convictions of others^[93].

The refusal of Christian missions and of conversion

This conviction found expression in a constant, publicly assumed opposition to every missionary enterprise aimed at conversion. In his autobiography, Gandhi reported having been shocked, as a child, by Christian missionaries who publicly insulted Hindus and their gods on a Rajkot street corner, and by the spectacle of Hindu converts compelled to eat beef, drink alcohol and adopt European dress as a condition of their conversion^[94]. As an adult, he regarded religious conversion, as practised in India by the Christian missions, as "probably the greatest obstacle to the progress of humanity towards peace", preferring that a would-be convert strive first to be an exemplary faithful of his own tradition rather than change religion^[95].

Gandhi also confessed a genuine admiration for the person of Jesus, of whom he held that he "expressed the will and spirit of God", while explicitly refusing to recognise him as the unique incarnate Son of God^[96]. He further judged that the Scriptures themselves bore the mark of a human "double distillation" — pointing to the divergences between the evangelists Matthew and John — which prevented him from granting them an authority overarching his own reason^[97]. A very widely circulated formula, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ", is frequently attributed to him although no primary source attests it with certainty; it seems to derive from an account by the Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones, who reports converging remarks by Gandhi without quoting that exact wording, or from a similar phrase uttered in the same years by another Indian thinker, Bara Dada^[98]. Whatever its exact formulation, the spirit of the quotation faithfully matches Gandhi's documented position: genuine esteem for the moral teaching of Christ, combined with severe criticism of Western missionary practice and a stubborn refusal of conversion.

A Catholic encyclopaedia claiming rigour cannot content itself, on Gandhi, with a civil hagiography. Three dossiers, documented by serious historians — including Indian historians who otherwise acknowledge his major historical role — must be set out honestly.

Remarks on black Africans during the South African years

The young Gandhi of the South African years (1893-1914) held, in his writings of the time, views explicitly ranking the races. He repeatedly described black Africans as "Kaffirs", a term already regarded as insulting at the time, depicting them as leading "a life of idleness and nakedness", and firmly opposed any assimilation between the situation of Indians and that of black Africans, whom he judged inferior in the scale of civilisation^[99]. In a 1905 letter, he protested against the use of Johannesburg's Indian quarter as a place of relegation for the city's "Kaffirs"^[100]. The South African historians Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, in their study The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer [REDACTED] Empire (Stanford University Press, 2015), document this period in detail and conclude that the young Gandhi then shared a conception of "Aryan brotherhood" placing Whites and Indians above black Africans in a racial scale of civilisation^[101]. This period contrasts sharply with the later evolution of his thought, but it forbids presenting Gandhi's South African struggle as a universal anti-racist struggle from the outset: it was first a matter of obtaining for Indians a status superior to that of black Africans within the colonial hierarchy, not of abolishing it^[102].

The brahmacharya experiments at the end of his life

During the last two years of his life, in 1946-1947, Gandhi, then in his seventies, undertook what he himself called "experiments" intended to test the soundness of his vow of continence: he shared his bed, naked, with several young women of his circle, including his grand-niece Manu Gandhi, to verify, in his own words, whether his body remained insensible to all arousal^[103]. These practices, which he justified as the summit of his personal asceticism and which he made public in his own writings without concealment, provoked sharp protests from several of his closest collaborators, including his secretary Pyarelal and the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru himself, as well as the resignation of several members of his circle^[104]. The historian Vinay Lal, in a study published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (2000), analyses these experiments as a questionable attempt, without precedent in the classical Hindu tradition of brahmacharya, to fuse religious asceticism with an almost clinical empirical self-verification^[105]. An honest biography can neither conceal this episode nor present it as a mere anecdotal curiosity: it illuminates, as will be seen in the Catholic conclusion of this article, a fundamental difference between Gandhian asceticism and Christian asceticism, the former knowing no instance of discernment outside the subject himself.

The break with Harilal and authority over those close to him

Gandhi maintained with his eldest son, Harilal, born in 1888, a relationship of great harshness: he notably refused him access to the higher education in England which he had himself received, holding that his son should be formed through service and not through diplomas^[106]. Harilal, openly estranged from his father since 1915, sank into alcoholism after the death of his wife and of his young son from cholera, publicly converted to Islam in May 1936 under the name of Abdullah Gandhi before returning to Hinduism a few months later, and died of tuberculosis on 18 June 1948, four and a half months after his father's assassination, in such destitution that he was barely recognised at Gandhi's funeral a few months earlier^[107]. Gandhi himself wrote in 1935 that the difficulties posed by his son were "more painful to him than the struggle for India's independence"^[108]. This documented family failure invites us not to confuse a reformer's public exemplarity with the actual exercise of charity in the closest circle — a demand which Christianity, unlike Gandhian asceticism, places precisely at the heart of all true holiness.

Gandhi was nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize — in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and a last time in January 1948, a few days before his assassination — without ever receiving it^[109]. In 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee publicly declared that it had found "no suitable living candidate", wrongly implying that it could not award the prize posthumously, even though the foundation's statutes allowed it at the time under certain conditions^[110]. Several later chairmen of the committee publicly expressed their regrets: when the prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989, the committee's chairman explicitly presented the distinction as an indirect tribute to Gandhi's memory, and the committee's secretary, Geir Lundestad, described this absence in 2006 as the "biggest omission" of the prize's first one hundred and six years of history^[111].

His method of non-violent resistance directly inspired several of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr., from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 onwards, designated Gandhi as "the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change"^[112], and made a pilgrimage to India in February-March 1959 which he would describe as having strengthened his conviction that "nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity"^[113]. Nelson Mandela, who himself began his militant career in South Africa on the very ground where Gandhi had forged satyagraha, would likewise claim this heritage, while qualifying it by the necessity, in his view, of recourse to armed struggle against apartheid^[114].

What Rome has hailed: Paul VI, John Paul II, Francis

The Catholic Church has, on several occasions and at the highest level, publicly hailed the figure of Gandhi as a man of peace. On 30 January 1978, for the thirtieth anniversary of his assassination, Pope Paul VI addressed the Indian people, via All India Radio, with a message in which he declared:

"No to violence, Yes to Peace!... To reject violence and to accept all the conditions and demands of Peace is an activity of the highest dignity; it is an expression of the truest patriotism. May God give his peace to India. May the love and peace of God abide in your hearts forever!" — Pope Paul VI, message to the Indian people on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Mahatma Gandhi, broadcast by All India Radio, 30 January 1978^[115]

On 1 February 1986, during his first visit to India, Saint John Paul II prayed at the Raj Ghat memorial in Delhi, dedicated to Gandhi's memory, and there delivered an address hailing in him "the illustrious Mahatma Gandhi, Father of the Nation and apostle of non-violence", whose "figure [...] has penetrated the conscience of humanity"^[116]. He there affirmed that true peace requires following Gandhi's central teaching: "the supremacy of the spirit and satyagraha, the 'force of truth', which triumphs without violence"^[117]. In 2017, in his message for the 50th World Day of Peace — the first pontifical document devoted specifically to non-violence as a political method — Pope Francis explicitly cited Gandhi alongside Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Martin Luther King:

"The decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results. The achievements of Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the liberation of India, and those of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle against racial discrimination, will never be forgotten." — Pope Francis, message for the 50th World Day of Peace, Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace, 1 January 2017, § 4^[118]

Seeds of the Word and the limits of a religious universalism

This genuine esteem is not a matter of circumstantial diplomatic relativism: it belongs within the doctrine of the "seeds of the Word" (semina Verbi), formulated by St Justin in his Apologies, and taken up by the Second Vatican Council in the decree Ad Gentes on the Church's missionary activity, which recognises the presence of authentic traces of truth and goodness in the religious and moral traditions of humanity, called to be purified and fulfilled in Christ^[119]. The conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate points in the same direction: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions"^[120].

But this recognition cannot be confused with Gandhi's own religious universalism, for whom all religions are equally valid as paths to God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, following the constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church, the "universal sacrament of salvation", remains necessary to the plan willed by God, even if divine mercy is not confined to the visible sacraments alone for those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel^[121]. There is therefore, between the Gandhian position of sarva dharma sama bhava and the Catholic position, a difference of nature and not only of degree: the Church honours what is true and good in Gandhi precisely because she believes that this partial truth finds its fulfilment in Christ, and not because she would hold Hinduism, Christianity and the other traditions to be interchangeable.

Ahimsa and charity: two forces that resemble each other without merging

Gandhian ahimsa and evangelical charity meet on one decisive point: both refuse to let the end justify any means whatsoever, and both hold that suffering freely accepted can have a converting power greater than violence. The parallel stops, however, where the theology of the Cross begins. For Gandhi, ahimsa remained a force of the human soul, a discipline of the self acquired through asceticism and personal mastery; for Christianity, love of enemies and forgiveness offered to the executioner ("Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing", Lk 23:34) are not first and foremost a technique of political resistance, but a supernatural participation, through grace, in the very charity of the crucified Christ — what the Catechism designates as a life "in Christ" and not as the fruit of a mere moral effort^[122]. Catholic non-violence, as taken up for instance by Pope Francis, is likewise not opposed on principle to the legitimate defence of persons and societies against the unjust aggressor, which the Catechism explicitly recognises as a right and sometimes a grave duty, unlike an absolutist reading of the refusal of all force found among certain radical disciples of the Tolstoyan non-violence on which Gandhi fed^[123].

An asceticism without ecclesial discernment

Finally, the documented shadows of Gandhi's life — particularly the brahmacharya experiments at the end of his life — illuminate, by contrast, a constitutive trait of authentic Catholic holiness: no mystic or ascetic recognised by the Church as Catholic ever conducted his most intimate spiritual trials without submission to a spiritual director or to a confessor empowered to judge their legitimacy. The Catholic tradition of spiritual accompaniment — to which bear witness, each in his own way, figures as diverse as St John of the Cross or, closer to us, the great mystics accompanied by their confessors — protects precisely against the risk, documented here factually and without polemic, that an asceticism authentically willed by its subject may drift, for lack of any outside gaze empowered to correct it, towards practices which even Gandhi's most devoted intimates judged problematic in his lifetime. It is not the sincerity of Gandhi's spiritual search that is at issue here, but the structural absence, in his journey, of any instance of discernment outside his own conscience — a fundamental difference from the Catholic practice of the discernment of spirits, which never grants the individual alone the final authority over the authenticity of his own spiritual experience.

• Hinduism — the complete doctrinal setting of the religious tradition in which Gandhi grew up and which he never left
• Swami Vivekananda — another great figure of universalist neo-Hinduism, contemporary with Gandhi
• The Sermon on the Mount — the Gospel text which Gandhi discovered and meditated on at length alongside the Bhagavad-Gita
• Confucius — another great non-Christian sage whose moral legacy raises a comparable question for the Church
• Peace — the Catholic doctrine of peace and evangelical non-violence