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Martin Luther King Jr. Special Edition
Jan. 13, I 999
Q27
Nonviolence Or Nonexistence — Gandhi for the 21st Century
B y A run G andhi
Arun Gandhi is the fifth
grandson of India’s late spiri
tual
leader
M ohandas
Karam chand
“ M ahatm a”
Gandhi.
I recall when I came to India
as a young boy 12 years old in
1946 because I had suffered a
lot of humiliation in South Af
rica - racial humiliation. At
the young age of 10, I was
beaten up by some black
youths. And both times be
cause they didn’t like the color
of my skin. 1 was furious. I
wanted to grow up and be
strong and beat everybody
back again. The usual eye-for-
an-eye theory. And I think that
when my parents decided that
it was time to go to India and
give me an opportunity to live
with Grandfather, hopefully
learning something from him.
I’m ever grateful to them for
having taken that decision. Be
cause I think in many ways,
the 18 months that I spent
with Grandfather at that age
laid the foundations of my un
derstanding of his philosophy
of nonviolence as I grew up. I
had the added advantage of
having parents who had dedi
cated themselves to the phi
losophy of nonviolence. They
worked in South Africa all their
lives fighting apartheid in a
nonviolent way.
When I went to India at that
age with all that anger pent up
in me, the first lesson that
Grandfather taught me was
how to deal with anger. And
he did is so beautifully, he
explained it in such simple
terms even for a young person
to understand.
The profoundness of his phi
losophy of nonviolence: it’s
not just the non-use of physi
cal force, as we assume. It’s
much more. It’s an attitude, a
way of life. The best way to
understand it is to understand
violence, to understand that
we practice violence in two
basic forms. There is the
physical form, physical vio
lence - the murders, rapes,
killings, wars. All the physical
manifestations of violence that
we see in life. And there is the
passive violence that we prac
tice all the time - the hate, the
anger, the prejudices, the op
pressions, suppression for
economic reasons, social, po
litical, cultural. All these little
things that we practice in our
lives - the passive violence.
The exclusivity that we prac
tice. For one reason or an
other we are excluding people
from our life. It is that which
causes anger and the anger
then results in physical vio
lence.
Gandhi described his phi
losophy as Satyagraha. It’s a
combination of two words:
Saty m eaning truths and
Agraha in one sense meaning
false. I say one sense because
the common translation of the
word S aty ag rah a is truth/
false. That is the literal trans
lation. But I don’t think that is
what Gandhi meant.
He believed that nobody re
ally knows the truths. We have
to search for them. Life is one
long search for Truths. So I
translate his Satyagraha to
mean the pursuit of truths, not
truth/falsehood.
The fourth aspect of his phi
losophy was Sw araj. Now that
again is a combination of two
words - Swa meaning self and
Raj meaning freedom. This has
been translated to mean free
dom in the political sense. He
felt that we could gain our
political freedom and yet not
be totally free. We can see that
today, we here in the US who
claim to have our indepen
dence. We have it only in the
political sense, not in the eco
nomic sense, not in the cul
tural sense.
Gandhi used to believe that
many of us had the ambitions
of changing the whole world.
And when we realized that we
couldn’t achieve it, we would
give up and do nothing about
it. And that is a tragedy be
cause we may not be able to
change the whole world but
we can certainly change our
selves, and change people
around us. And when we begin
to do that, the world will take
care of itself.
I’m not here to suggest to
you that his philosophy is the
only philosophy that we should
look at. There are many other
philosophies, there are many
other nonviolent ways in which
we can deal with issues. We
should have an open mind to all
of this. And that was one other
lesson that I learned from him.
He said your mind should al
ways be like a room with many
open windows. Let the breeze
flow in from all the windows,
but refuse to be blown away by
any one of them. And that is
what I would urge all of you to
do today. Keep an open mind.
Discuss this without anger and
emotions and let us see how we
can incorporate all these phi
losophies into our lives and how
we can bring about a change so
that we don’t carry this gar
bage of violence into the next
century.
Let’s leave the violence in
the 20"' century and begin the
21” century as people who are
more peaceful, loving and able
to live in harmony.
Mahatma Ghandi and his wife, Kasturbai
Artwork by Lawrence Levy
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