‘Moral Lapse’ that made Gandhi go on a fast

On November 23,1925, after two days of agony, MK Gandhi decided to go on a fast for seven days. There was a “moral lapse” among the young boys and some girls at the Satyagraha Ashram at Sabarmati. This fast was to commence on November 24 and last up to November 30. This decision was taken neither in haste nor without the awareness of its consequences, both on his body and on the boys and girls and whose moral lapse had prompted this fast. The Phoenix Settlement in South Africa had “ashramic character”, especially after the advent of Satyagraha in 1906. The community at Sabarmati was ashramic, in the full sense. That is, each member was aware of the ashram observances and the ideal conduct that they were expected to strive towards, if not attain in every instance.
What was it about this community that its moral lapse prompted Gandhi on several occasions to undertake purificatory penance? In his account of an earlier lapse at Phoenix Settlement, Gandhi confessed that he was wounded. “News of an apparent failure in the great Satyagraha struggle never shocked me, but this incident came upon me like a thunderbolt. I was wounded.”
For Gandhi, untruth in the ashram was a symptom of a deep failing, a failing that could only be attributed to himself. It was a sign that the light with which he aspired to lead his life still eluded him. What he was required to do was reach deep within and seek to dispel the darkness. This he hoped and believed would purify himself and those around him. Before establishing the Satyagraha Ashram, first at Kocharab and later at Sabarmati, Gandhi had established two ashramlike communities in South Africa. Ashram-like, as he steadfastly refused to describe them as ashrams. One was merely a settlement the Phoenix Settlement — and the other a farm — the Tolstoy Farm. Phoenix was established in 1904 under the “Magic spell” of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last but acquired an ashram-like character only after 1906. It was in 1906 that Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya, initially in the limited sense of chastity and celibacy. Gandhi says, “From this time onward I looked upon Phoenix deliberately as a religious institution.” Observance of a vrata, often inadequately translated as vow, is a defining characteristic of the ashram. It is only through the observances that a community becomes a congregation of co-religionists and a settlement becomes a place for experiments with truth.
The ashram and its community were Gandhi’s greatest experiment and also the site for his experiments. It was a community that had its foundations in truth. In absence of truth, or even in case of violation of it, the ashram could not be. It was simultaneously a community that aspired to Ahimsa, not only as a negation, as non-violence but as active working of love. This community sought to lead a life of non-stealing, which included in its understanding “Bread-Labour” and non-acquisition. This community sought to cultivate equability or Samabhava, with regard to religion and on the practice of untouchability. Samabhava, Gandhi knew, is possible only when the sense of Mamabhava, of “mine-ness”, of possession disappears. Gandhi had hoped that his ashram would be like the Sthitprajna, a person of equipose, a person whose intellect is secure as described in the Bhagvad Gita. “When it is night for all other beings, the disciplined soul is awake! When all other beings are awake it is the night for the seeing ascetic.” Such an ashram, Gandhi believed, was his only creation, the only measure by which he would be judged and would like to be judged. Writing at the conclusion of the 1925 fast, he said of the ashram, “It is my best and only creation. The world will judge me by its results.”
It was to this community that Gandhi chose to retreat each time he had to do soul-searching or dwell closer to Satyanarayan, Truth as God. Gandhi had one deeply felt need, desire, want and aspiration; to be an ashramite in the sense of living for a length of time in the communities that he had created. His oft repeated lament was that his work and obligation to myriad causes made him an itinerant ashramite. The ashram observances went with him, but the community of co-religionists could not. This was true not only of ashram at Sabarmati, but also of Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm.
The day the ashram at Sabarmati was founded — June 17, 1917 — Gandhi was far away in Motihari for his work on the Agrarian Inquiry Commission. From June 17, 1917, to March 12, 1930, when he left the ashram for the coastal village of Dandi, never to return, Gandhi spent a total of 1,520 days at the ashram. His most intense period of in-dwelling was from November 1925 to February 1929, when he lived at the ashram for 685 days. It was during this period that he wrote his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth and gave discourses on each verse of the Gita and also translated it in Gujarati.
With passage of time Gandhi’s need to dwell within ashramic community decreased, till such time that during his lonely pilgrim through Noakhali that reminded Sarojini Naidu of Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus of Nazareth walked carrying his cross, he chose to be alone with only two companions N K Bose and Manu Gandhi. He had been never been so isolated from people ever since his return to India in 1915, not even during his incarcerations. His need for the physical space called ashram and community decreased as his reliance upon the ashramic observances increased, as did his devotion to Ramanama. Ashram was what lived within him, his Anataryami, the dweller within that guided him.
(Suhrud has recently published a critical edition of M K Gandhi’s Autobiograhy and The Diary of Manu Gandhi)
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References

1. ^{^} Satyagraha (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

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