Mohandas Gandhi and the Theosophists, the Plymouth Brethren, and the Ruskinites
Scene 4 – The Ruskinites, Johannesburg, 1903
Mohandas Gandhi and the Theosophists, the Plymouth Brethren, and the Ruskinites
Scene 4 – The Ruskinites, Johannesburg, 1903
In Johannesburg, Gandhi used to have his meals at a vegetarian restaurant where he became acquainted with Mr. Henry Polak, the sub-editor of The Critic, and with Mr. Albert West, who was a partner at a printing company. During Gandhi’s absence to help the workers stricken with the plague, Mr. West agreed to take charge of Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion, and he later reported to Gandhi of its financial problems.
[from ‘The Story of my Experiments with Truth’, Part IV, Chapter XVIII]
“On receipt of Mr. West's letter I left for Natal. I had taken Mr. Polak into my fullest confidence. He came to see me off at the Station, and left with me a book to read during the journey, which he said I was sure to like. It was Ruskin's Unto This Last. The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it. It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours' journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book.
This was the first book of Ruskin I had ever read. During the days of my education I had read practically nothing outside text-books, and after I launched into active life I had very little time for reading. I cannot therefore claim much book knowledge. However, I believe I have not lost much because of this enforced restraint. On the contrary, the limited reading may be said to have enabled me thoroughly to digest what I did read. Of these books, the one that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto This Last. I translated it later into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all).
I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure.
The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be:
1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.
2. That a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.
3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.
The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.”
Gandhi admitted to being someone who wasn’t well-educated, who hadn’t read much and didn’t have much ‘book knowledge’, who was living in a country that was under a British military and administrative dictatorship, who was being bombarded with various psychological warfare operations like Theosophy, yet none-the-less, Gandhi’s simple common sense was able to ‘cherry-pick’ something useful from the romantism, christian-socialism, and spiritualism of John Ruskin.
The political economy of John Ruskin
In the Preface to Unto This Last, Mr. Ruskin writes that he is attempting to give
“a logical definition of WEALTH’, and that the acquisition of wealth is ‘possible only under certain moral conditions’ – in honesty, and not as Adam Smith says in his Wealth of Nations, by a ‘fear of losing employment’.”
Mr. Ruskin was referring to this quote from Adam Smith, from Wealth of Nations, Book I, chap. 10.
“The effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds, and corrects his negligence.”
But what does Mr. Ruskin mean by ‘moral conditions’?
In the first essay, he writes of how the most work can be gotten by a master from his servant.
“It will be done only when the motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel: namely, by the affections.”
And what does Mr. Ruskin mean by affection? He writes that the master treating his servants with kindness, or the officer treating his men with kindness and firmness, can illicit ‘an enthusiastic affection’. Perhaps this could be a political economy according to a Charles Dickens novel (who Ruskin quite admired).
And what could be the result of this affection?
“We continually hear it recommended by sagacious people to complaining neighbours (usually less well placed in the world than themselves), that they should ‘remain content in the station in which Providence has placed them’. There are perhaps some circumstances of life in which Providence has no intention that people should be content. Nevertheless, the maxim is on the whole a good one … We need examples of people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the world, decide for them selves that they will be happy in it, and have resolved to seek - not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions, self-possession; and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of peace.”
Ahhh … peace by being content with our station in life? But then Ruskin writes of how best to apply this rule to the workmen of a manufacturer, that:
“For a servant or a soldier is engaged at a definite rate of wages, for a definite period; but a workman at a rate of wages variable according to the demand for labour, and with the risk of being at any time thrown out of his situation by chances of trade ... the best labour always has been, and is, as all labour ought to be, paid by an invariable standard”.
This is Ruskin’s ‘game-changing’ idea, that Gandhi ‘cherry-picked’ from Ruskin, and that he applied on his ashram - equal pay for all. But Gandhi was looking at it in terms of a nation of manipulated caste system that blocked the possibility of equality among his fellow countrymen, especially among the untouchables – something that Gandhi tried to overcome with this experiment.
As he writes in his third essay, Ruskin saw this proposal in the opposite way:
“Whether socialism has made more progress among the army and navy (where payment is made on my principles), or among the manufacturing operatives (who are paid on my opponents’ principles), I leave it to those opponents to ascertain and declare. Whatever their conclusion may be, I think it necessary to answer for myself only this: that if there be any one point insisted on throughout my works more frequently than another, that one point is the impossibility of Equality.
My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others; and to show also the advisability of appointing such persons or person to guide, to lead, or on occasion even to compel and subdue, their inferiors, according to their own better knowledge and wiser will.”
When we read that last statement, there seems to be echoes of ‘the white man’s burden’ in the background, perhaps?!?
Note: Unto This Last was written as four essays for Cornhill Magazine in 1860. To situate these essays historically, recall that a few years earlier in 1858, the British Raj was established to rule over India, and the Second Opium War with China ended.
And also in 1858, Ruskin was asked to give drawing lessons to the children of Mrs. La Touche, and he became infatuated with her youngest daughter, nine-year-old Rose, who was ‘mentally unstable’, and his obsession would drive him to propose marriage, later in 1866.
It was also at this time that he attended seances with spiritualists at the Broadlands home of William Cowper-Temple. Mrs. Georgina Cowper-Temple was the second wife of William Cowper-Temple, the stepson of Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston. This puts Ruskin firmly into the Palmerston circle.
The marriage was prevented by Rose’s increasing illnesses, and by her parents worries about Ruskin’s failed first marriage and divorce (on the grounds of impotence). Lady Cowper-Temple (a follower of Swedenborg) would become the go-between for Ruskin and Rose’s parents, and the Cowper-Temple home would be ‘one of the few places where Ruskin and Rose had been able to meet’.
So was the mind of Ruskin occupied, when he wrote Unto This Last.
After Rose’s death in 1875, Ruskin moved into the Broadlands home of Cowper-Temple, where he also would have the use of Lord Palmerston’s library, and where he sought to contact Rose’s spirit through the use of spiritualists. Ruskin would write:
“Everything we had thought nonsense is turning out true. Ghosts – witches – magicians – even fairies.”
[from ‘Ruskin, Lady Temple and the Spiritualists’, by Van Akin Burd]
[next week - scene 5 - Gandhi and Captain Nemo]