INDIA: Good v. Pleasant

Since Mahatma Gandhi dropped his anti-British disobedience campaign and turned to such a forlorn cause as abolishing Untouchability, more and more of India’s Hindus have turned away from him. In 1930 when he was all India’s idol and a prisoner in the Poona jail, he whiled away the time translating from Sanskrit into English hymns from the Upanishads and other Sanskrit scriptures and from the Bhakti poets. Last week Macmillan Co. published his Songs From Prison. Samples:

God is the bow,

Man’s spirit the arrow,

God again is the target: Shoot straight, this day,

That the arrow be one with the target.

. . .

Man is faced by a double choice,

On the one hand, the Good,

On the other, the Pleasant.

. . .

To thee we bow,

O Holy Earth

Beloved of God the Savior:

Forgive, we pray,

The touch of our unhallowed feet.

Since many of his old followers have broken away in an opposition led by the highcaste Hindu Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Gandhi has not been so humble. Last April he said tartly that the civil disobedience campaign should be resumed “in my lifetime only under my direction.” Since April the little man has been stoned and bombed. And last week he announced that he will soon visit the Afghan border to support his Afghan disciple, Abdul Gaffur Khan (“The Frontier Gandhi”), and “gauge the strength of the spirit of non-violence among the tribes.”

The Afghans are probably the world’s most violent people. They kill strangers for a small breach of etiquet. When Afghan kings really dislike a man, they boil him in oil or strangle him with chains. The only possessions an Afghan keeps clean are his rifle, his sling of cartridges, his short dagger and his bayonet sword.

Last week the British Government seemed likely to refuse Gandhi permission to visit the Afghan border. Gandhi insisted that he would goanyway.