Questions to Ask Gandhi

The questions

Open any question to see why it works.

1. 1

   You were so shy as a young barrister that you sat down without speaking in your first case. How did you become someone who could hold a crowd?

   He described the early failure himself, which makes it safe ground and a good opening. The useful answer is mechanical rather than inspirational: writing before speaking, working in small rooms first, and discovering that a quiet voice forces a crowd to be silent rather than the other way around.

2. 2

   You arrived in South Africa in 1893 expecting a year of legal work and stayed two decades. When did you decide not to leave?

   The train at Pietermaritzburg is the story everyone knows, and it is the least interesting version of the answer. What is worth pressing on is the weeks afterwards, when he chose to organize other Indian merchants rather than go home, and what he thought he was building at that point.

3. 3

   In those South African years you campaigned for Indian rights while writing about Black South Africans in terms most readers now find indefensible. What did you believe then?

   This is the question that decides whether the exercise is honest. The material is in his own published writing, so it cannot be waved away as hostile invention. Watch for whether the answer claims he changed later, and if so, insist on when and on what evidence.

4. 4

   You served the British in the Boer War and again as a stretcher bearer during the Zulu uprising. How did you square that with what you later taught?

   For years he argued that Indians should earn the rights of citizens by shouldering the duties of citizens, including war service. An answer has to explain how loyalty to the empire coexisted with a doctrine of resistance, which is the hinge of his whole early career.

5. 5

   You rejected the phrase passive resistance and coined satyagraha instead. What was wrong with the older words?

   He objected that passive suggested weakness and the absence of something. The distinction matters practically, not just linguistically: satyagraha as he described it required the resister to accept punishment openly, which is a different instruction from refusing to cooperate quietly. Ask him to name the difference in a specific campaign.

6. 6

   Hind Swaraj rejects railways, courts, lawyers and modern medicine. Did you still mean all of it thirty years later?

   He wrote it in 1909 and never fully disowned it, while spending decades using trains, lawyers and printing presses. The interesting answer is where he thought the line ran between using a system and endorsing it, and whether he considered his own position a compromise or a consistency.

7. 7

   At Champaran in 1917 you persuaded indigo tenants to trust an outsider from Gujarat. What did you do first?

   His method there was to collect thousands of statements from cultivators before making any demand, which turned a grievance into a record. That is a repeatable technique rather than a personal quality, and a good answer would describe it as such.

8. 8

   In 1918 you recruited Indians to fight in the First World War. Explain that.

   This is the hardest question about his nonviolence and it comes from his own hand, since the recruiting appeals survive. Any answer has to reconcile the man who would later refuse cooperation with the man who asked villagers to enlist, and the reconciliation he offered at the time was about eligibility for self rule.

9. 9

   You called off non cooperation after Chauri Chaura, when the movement was at its peak. Was that discipline, or fear of the people you had raised?

   Twenty two policemen died and he suspended the campaign nationally, to the fury of colleagues who had gone to prison for it. Press for whether he thought the crowd had failed him or he had failed to prepare it, because those are two entirely different theories of mass politics.

10. 10

    Why salt?

    Of all the possible targets in 1930 he chose a tax on something every household used and nobody could do without. A strong answer explains the choice as a piece of design: legible to an illiterate villager, illegal to break in public, impossible for the government to ignore or to punish selectively without looking absurd.

11. 11

    You spun thread every day and asked the entire Congress to do the same. What did you think it did to a person?

    The economic argument about foreign cloth is the easy half. The other half is that he treated the wheel as daily discipline binding an educated leadership to manual work, which many of his colleagues privately found tedious. Ask which of the two purposes he would have kept if he had to choose.

12. 12

    You fasted against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, and Ambedkar signed the Poona Pact while you were starving. Was that coercion?

    Ambedkar wrote afterwards about being placed in an impossible position, and this remains the sharpest charge against Gandhi's use of fasting. The question is whether a fast aimed at one's own side is persuasion or a threat, and no answer that avoids the word coercion is a real answer.

13. 13

    Ambedkar held that untouchability could not be separated from Hinduism. You held that it was a corruption of it. Which of you was describing the religion as practised?

    This is the central disagreement of twentieth century Indian social thought and it was never resolved between them. A good answer would have to say what would count as evidence either way, rather than restating the position, and would have to address why the reform he wanted did not come from within the priesthood.

14. 14

    You called them Harijan. They rejected the word. What did you miss?

    He intended it as elevation and it was received as condescension from someone who was not going to be affected by the label. The useful follow up is not about the word but about the pattern: how often he spoke on behalf of a group without a member of it in the room.

15. 15

    You wrote to Hitler twice, addressing him as a friend, and asked him to stop. What did you expect to happen?

    The letters exist and are short. The charitable reading is that he applied his method consistently to the worst case rather than making an exception. The unsympathetic reading is that he had no working model of a state that would not be embarrassed by anything. Make him choose.

16. 16

    You advised Jews in Europe to meet Nazism with nonviolent resistance. Would you write that again, knowing what followed?

    He was answered at the time by correspondents who told him his method assumed an opponent with a conscience and a press. This is the limit case of satyagraha, and the honest question is whether the method requires certain conditions to work or whether he believed it required none.

17. 17

    Your eldest son Harilal spent most of his adult life estranged from you. What happened between you?

    Harilal wanted the formal education Gandhi had received and would not fund, and the break widened from there through drink, conversion and public embarrassment. The question tests whether the man who wrote endlessly about family duty could describe his own failure in specific terms rather than as a general sorrow.

18. 18

    Late in life you slept beside young women, including a grandniece, and described it as a test of your vow of celibacy. Who was that test costing?

    Close colleagues objected at the time and some left him over it, which means this cannot be dismissed as a modern reading imposed backwards. The framing that matters is consent and power: he was in his seventies, they were young women in his household, and he was the person defining what the experiment meant.

19. 19

    Partition came anyway. You walked through Noakhali and fasted in Calcutta while people were being killed. Did the method fail, or arrive too late?

    He was largely absent from the negotiations that drew the line and spent the period of independence itself among the violence rather than at the ceremonies. An answer would have to say whether he thought mass nonviolence had been genuinely adopted or only borrowed for the duration of a campaign against the British.

20. 20

    Your last fast pressed your own new government to pay Pakistan money it owed, and men who thought that was betrayal killed you weeks later. Did you know what you were risking?

    There had been earlier attempts on his life and the hostility was public, so the question is not rhetorical. It closes the interview on the same theme it opened with: whether he understood how his personal acts of conscience landed on people who had not chosen them, including himself.