SOURCE: "Saint Gandhi," in Saints and Virtues, edited by John Stratton Hawley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 187-203.

In a reminiscence entitled "Saint, Patriot and Statesman," Henry S. L. Polak writes that when he first visited Gandhi he felt that he was "in the presence of a moral giant, whose pellucid soul is a clear, still lake, in which one sees Truth clearly mirrored." Writing in the same anthology, Gandhii as We Know Him, published in 1945, the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu unleashes a burst of adjectives likening the Mahatma to the Buddha and the Christ. In her mind they are each

richly endowed with the loftiest and loveliest qualities of the human mind and spirit: an exquisite courtesy of heart, a wisdom at once profound and luminous, an unconquerable courage, an incorruptible faith, a surpassing love of suffering and erring humanity.

Was Gandhi worthy of all these superlatives? When confronted with such adulation, he responded with a delicate modesty. "It is too early … to clothe me in sainthood," he wrote. "I myself do not feel a saint in any shape or form." Elsewhere he assured his admiring followers that he was "not perfect," and was "only a humble seeker."

Some of Gandhi's less admiring observers have felt that such protests were warranted. They have argued that he was morally arrogant, that he yearned for attention from Westerners and pandered to their tastes, that he slighted his family, and was less than successful in maintaining his vows of chastity. Others have remarked that it took a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty; they have claimed that, despite his image as a friend of the poor, the Mahatma was really the savior of the rich and an advocate of capitalist development. Still others argue that Gandhi was inconsistent—perhaps even hypocritical—in applying his ethical principles. According to some observers, Gandhi's conduct of satydgraha, a technique of fighting that requires the renunciation of coercion, was little more than a mask for moral manipulation.

Yet somehow the facts of Gandhi's life and his apparent inability to live up to the moral expectations of those who revered him seem not quite relevant to the matter of Gandhi's sainthood. Saintliness, like beauty, exists largely in the eye of the beholder, and the point of view is as interesting as the object of attention. The fact that Gandhi was extravagantly revered presents us with a phenomenon worth considering in its own right, regardless of whether or not we feel that the man deserved it. Such adulation shows that sainthood is far from dead, even in the present day and even, perhaps, when the "saints" themselves—Gandhi included—disavow it.

It takes a great deal to qualify as a modern saint. Citizens of this century do not easily attribute extraordinary power and moral perfection to their fellows. Yet Gandhi's saintly image has captivated the attentions of educated people from a variety of backgrounds, both religious and nonreligious, and seems to have gained in popularity over the years. My primary material for reconstructing the Gandhian hagiography has come from the vast literature produced by an international group of admirers in the 1930s and 1940s. I will try to recreate that image and then compare it with traditional Christian and Indian views of saintliness, with the more recent portrayals of Gandhi such as one finds in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, and with Gandhi's own depiction of himself in his Autobiography and other writings. In doing so, I will try to understand, not just what was involved in Gandhi's saintliness, but the urge to sanctify in general, and why it persists even in the modern day.

By using the term saint to describe the Gandhi of popular veneration, I mean to suggest that his image carries with it the two characteristics that have defined saintliness in the Christian tradition: the possession of extraordinary power and the ability to convey that power to others. At the root of the word saint is the Latin word sanctus, indicating the power of holiness that the first saints, the Christian martyrs, were thought to possess, and that they demonstrated by their ability to give their lives to the faith. The saints' power could be witnessed and received by those who venerated them. One accessible residue of saintly potency was to be found in the bones and relics of saints who died. And not only in Christianity was this the case: relics of holy persons have been revered in such disparate settings as traditional China, Southeast Asian Buddhism, and North African Islam. In the Europe of Late Antiquity the very names of saints were thought to be purveyors of strength. Parents would give their children names of saints with the hope that the very appellation would provide the child with a saintly guardian spirit.

To my knowledge, Gandhi's bones are nowhere venerated: They were incinerated and the ashes have long ago floated down the River Jumna into the Ganges. And the number of Mohandases among the population of male children has not risen appreciably in India or abroad. Yet the underlying characteristics of saintliness—the possession of a purifying power and its transmission to others either by emulation or by a more direct transfer of gifts—may be detected in the several images of the Mahatma that Gandhi's disciples have projected. A look at these images will tell us something about the modern search for power and the way in which people of our generation think power can be transmitted.

The canonization of Gandhi by those who admired him occurred rather early in his public life, but it would be difficult to assign it a definite date. One milestone, certainly, was the moment when he was first called a mahātmā, a "great soul," but it is not clear exactly when that was. The title is often said to have been granted him by Tagore when Gandhi arrived in India in 1915. A letter from Tagore to Gandhi in February of that year would seem to provide the evidence substantiating that legendary event. The curious thing about the reference, however, is that the letter in which it is found was written several months before Tagore actually met Gandhi. It was Tagore's welcoming letter, so it is probable that he had heard the Mahatma being given that name on an earlier occasion by someone else. Much of what Tagore knew about Gandhi came from a mutual friend: C. F. Andrews, the former Anglican missionary who for some time had been a disciple of Tagore's and had met Gandhi in South Africa early in 1914. Andrews quickly became as much a devotee of Gandhi's as of Tagore's, for both Andrews and his traveling companion, Willy Pearson, were struck with the sanctity of the man on their very first meeting. Pearson, in an article he wrote for The New Republic in 1921, recalled the moment that he met the one whom he came to know as "an Indian saint": "I remember my first glimpse of him.…He was dressed in simple homespun, had no hat on his head and was barefoot. He is not striking in appearance … but I was forcibly reminded of St. Francis of Assisi."

The term mahātmā was by no means a specifically Gandhian coinage. Before Tagore took it up and applied it to Gandhi, the name had been used to characterize other saintly figures in India, and in Britain and America the term had been adopted by the Theosophists, who used it to describe mysterious masters of wisdom from the East. It is a matter of record that before 1914 members of the Theosophical movement in South Africa, including Hermann Kallenbach, who befriended and supported Gandhi, had used the word to address Gandhi himself. Andrews and Pearson may well have reported this fact in letters they wrote to Tagore while living in Gandhi's ashram near Durban in the early months of 1914. Naturally enough, even as sheer politeness, Tagore may have repeated the name when writing to Gandhi a year later.

The term was to stick with Gandhi for the rest of his life, and it probably does not make a great deal of difference how it was originally applied, or by whom. Yet it is interesting that the first recognition of Gandhi as a saint, and even the epithet in terms of which he was canonized, may have come not from his compatriots but from Westerners. Perhaps this should occasion little amazement. The intellectual and spiritual circles of which Gandhi was a part in England and South Africa prior to his return to India at age forty-five were composed largely of Westerners. Although he did take part in the movement to protect the rights of the Indian community in South Africa (but was not the sole leader of it, as is often supposed), Gandhi was largely surrounded by Westerners in the two communities that he founded, the Phoenix Farm and the Tolstoy Farm. To some of these Westerners, including those with Theosophical leanings, Gandhi must have appeared a mysterious Indian sage, and to his Christian admirers he was apparently even more. To Charlie Andrews and Willy Pearson he was a saint, and from them the rumor spread to the wider world.

Andrews's writings about Gandhi were circulated in England, and in 1918 the Oxford classicist, Sir Gilbert Murray, made brief references to a remarkable Indian named Gandhi in an article he published in the Hibbert Journal on the concept of the soul. This article provided an American clergyman, John Haynes Holmes, with his first knowledge about Gandhi, and stirred Holmes to search out a pamphlet containing a selection of the Indian activist's writings. Reading Gandhi had an enormous impact on Holmes, as he recalled in a subsequent reflection:

Instantly I seemed to be alive—my vision clear, my mind at peace, my heart reassured. Here was the perfect answer to all my problems.… Something clicked within me, like the turning of a lock. Before I knew it, the supreme moment of my life had come. [My Ghandhi]

At the time he discovered Gandhi, Holmes was the pastor of the Community Church of New York City and one of the leaders of the liberal Protestantism of his day. So when he announced that he would give a sermon in the Lyric Theater in New York on 10 April 1921 on the topic "Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?" it aroused a fair amount of public curiosity. Who would it be? Lenin? Sun Yat-sen? Lloyd George? Woodrow Wilson? The overflow crowd that attended the lecture heard Holmes indeed extol the merits of Lenin, but he soon passed on to other luminaries. Next among his candidates for greatness was the novelist Romain Rolland, but the name that crowned the list was one that most members of the audience had never heard: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Holmes said that Lenin may have been his generation's Napoleon, and Rolland its Tolstoy, but, said Holmes, "when I think of Gandhi, I think of Jesus Christ. He lives his life; he speaks his word; he suffers, strives, and will some day nobly die, for his kingdom upon earth."

Tarak Nath Das, a professor at Columbia, and other Indian nationalists living in the United States were eager to use this unexpected publicity for their own political purposes and saw to it that Holmes's sermon was quickly reprinted and circulated throughout the country. It received much attention in India as well. Thus was launched a lifetime career for Holmes, who became dedicated to interpreting and advertising Gandhi for American audiences; he is sometimes credited with being "the discoverer of Gandhi." Holmes's efforts to spread the gospel of Gandhi took him beyond his own publication, however. In 1924, he arranged for an entire issue of the influential pacifist journal The World Tomorrow to be devoted to Gandhi. It included articles by C. F. Andrews, E. Stanley Jones, and, of course, Holmes himself. Although Holmes had no personal acquaintance with Gandhi until 1931, when they met in London, he held a clear image of the Mahatma in his mind. Gandhi was an example of moral integrity that gave him "incalculable help and guidance" as he faced life's trials.

Holmes, perhaps more than any other person outside India, was responsible for broadcasting the saintly image of Gandhi throughout the world, but there were also other admirers. The rather sizeable American circle included Richard Gregg, Kirby Page, and Clarence Marsh Case, all of whom kept a stream of articles and books flowing throughout the 1930s and 1940s. This Gandhian coterie had much in common with a similar English circle that included Henry Polak and, when he was not in India, C. F. Andrews. Both groups had as prominent members leading liberal Christians who had been outspoken pacifists during World War I and whose political sympathies were with rapid social reform—in some cases, with socialism. Gandhi appealed to liberal Christians such as these because he presented in the political arena what seemed to many of them a perfect combination of religion and social concern. As one Christian pacifist writer put it, Gandhi like Jesus demonstrated "the political power of love."

Liberal Christianity, with its promise of creating the kingdom of God on earth through love and social service, had reached a high water mark in the later decades of the nineteenth century with the hopeful theology of Walter Rauschenbusch and the Christian socialism of such religious visionaries as Tolstoy—who had, incidentally, a powerful influence on Gandhi during his years as a student in London. But exponents of the religious path to social progress had trouble finding a hearing in the years that followed World War I, when much of the optimism of the previous decades vanished. Christian theologians such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr began to discover instead the biblical exposition of the darker side of human existence—everything associated with the notion of original sin, and especially the self-serving and destructive character of human pride. The pessimistic view of human nature that lay at the heart of their so-called neo-orthodox theology increasingly put the pacifist liberal Protestants on the defensive, and made them keenly receptive to the example of someone whose piety and moral power seemed to work, and who was actually able to effect social change by evoking the brighter side of human nature.

"What we have under Gandhi's leadership is a revolution," Holmes explained in his 1921 sermon, "but a revolution different from any other of which history has knowledge." Here was a man who was "shaking the British Empire … to its foundations." Whatever imperfections Gandhi's revolution and its leader may have had were blurred in the distant vision of their American admirers. To Holmes and his circle, Gandhi was a citadel of moral power.

The image of moral force that Gandhi projected was not one that appealed exclusively to religious people, since it fit well with a certain strand of pragmatic idealism that has always been attractive to the secular American mind. For example, in an article that appeared in Asia magazine in 1924, the columnist Drew Pearson found it possible to compare Gandhi with Henry Ford. Pointing out that both members of this unlikely pair were "practical idealists," Pearson concluded that Gandhi and Ford were essentially 'on the same road."

Many Christians, however, compared the Mahatma with a more exalted figure, for Gandhi provided something that the aniconic heritage of Puritan Protestantism could never supply: the image of a saint, or to some pious minds, a vision of Christ himself. The emotion that Holmes reported experiencing at his first reading of Gandhi, which he likened to the feeling that Keats had when he first read Homer, was like a conversion experience. And for C. F. Andrews, to know Gandhi was tantamount to knowing Christ. As he observed Gandhi during the Mahatma's twenty-one day fast in 1924, Andrews described a "frail, wasted, tortured spirit" on the terrace by his side, a man who bore "the sins and sorrows of his people." For Andrews the comparison was obvious: "With a rush of emotion," he said, "I knew more deeply … the meaning of the Cross."

For liberal Protestants like Holmes who would have been embarrassed by the superstitious trappings and cultural parochialism of Christianity's own complement of saints, Gandhi served as the consummate exemplar: "a perfect and universal man." In a reminiscence entitled My Gandhi, Holmes described the Mahatma as "my saint and seer." Gandhi's impact on Holmes—rationalist Unitarian though he was—was enough to make him sound like a pious Baptist speaking about his Lord. "I carried Gandhi in my heart," Holmes proclaimed. And Holmes was not the only one inspired to such language. When Gandhi encountered difficulties with the British, the liberal Protestant press reported the events in words taken straight from the gospels. One headline in The Christian Century depicted the event as "Gandhi Before Pilate." "Gandhi Lifts the Cross," proclaimed another. The fact that this second coming did not manifest itself in an overtly Christian form seemed to matter little. E. Stanley Jones dismissed the discrepancy this way: "Just because Gandhi is a Hindu it does not mean that he could not be Christian in the very springs of his character."

Actually, the cultural distance between India and America was of great help in fitting Gandhi to his biblical role, and many American writers emphasized the disparity by beginning their descriptions of Gandhi with his clothes, or lack of them. The fact that he wore "simple homespun" or appeared "unclad but for a loin cloth" made him look a great deal like what many Americans expected in a Messiah. This image was enhanced by the dark (yet not Negroid) skin that made him, as the title of one book put it, "that strange little brown man." And behind his wizened appearance was the awesome cultural backdrop of India, which seemed to Gandhi's American admirers as distant from the modern age as Jesus' Galilee. Richard Attenborough's recent film about Gandhi capitalizes on just such preconceptions, and his image of a white-robed Gandhi radiating calm in the center of a restless mob has more than a little to do with the Christs who moved through biblical epics in films produced in the decades preceding Gandhi.

What made Gandhi truly a Christ figure for Westerners from Andrews to Attenborough, however, was not just that he looked the part. He acted the part, too—or at least his actions were amenable to that interpretation. He was regarded as a man who exhibited saintly qualities, and it is a matter of some fascination to see just what qualities were singled out for praise. They indicate the sort of Messiah that Gandhi's modern observers would have welcomed.

The descriptions of Gandhi that flooded European and American books and journals in the 1930s and 1940s were often based on firsthand visits to Gandhi's ashram near Wardha, which was as much an international guest house for Gandhian pilgrims as it was the experimental community that it has usually been portrayed. In books such as A Week With Gandhi [by Louis Fischer, 1943] and My Host the Hindu [by M. Lester, 1931], these visitors recorded the seemingly idyllic existence of the Mahatma in his meticulously constructed Indian village, carefully blocking out the fact that the number of foreign admirers in residence there often rivaled the number of Indians.

The focus of these accounts, however, is not so much the life of the ashram as the life of Gandhi. Almost all of them refer to his social and political power—either obliquely, by describing him as a "leader" or "statesman," or more directly, by describing his ability to sway the masses. Long before he had met Gandhi, Holmes was impressed that "great throngs come to him," and Kirby Page, in answering affirmatively the question "Is Mahatma Gandhi the Greatest Man of the Age?" reported an American bishop as having observed that Gandhi "appeals to the hearts of the Indian people as no other man has done, probably since the days of Buddha."

Invariably reports of Gandhi's popular and political strength were balanced with observations of what seemed to be a contradictory fact: his weak and ineffectual physical appearance. "The majestic personality of the man," Henry Polak explained, "overshadows his comparatively insignificant physique." Kirby Page seemed almost to dwell on the Mahatma's physical imperfections, noting that "with wretched teeth, large ears, prominent nose and shaved head, he is physically one of the least impressive of men." Robert Bernays, a British member of Parliament who regarded Gandhi as "the true Messiah," nevertheless observed that he did not have "the traditional appearance of a Messiah." In fact, Bernays thought he was "ugly to the point of repulsion."

How could someone so homely and unimpressive be so powerful? In 1933, an English physician, Dr. Josiah Oldfield, puzzled over the paradox and supplied an answer:

What is it that has raised a man of comparatively obscure birth, of no family influence, of small financial means, of no great intellectual capacity and of delicate constitution to such a pinnacle as Gandhiji has reached? My answer is character, and again, character.

Unfortunately, Oldfield was wrong on virtually every count. There was nothing obscure about the family line into which Gandhi was born—they were prime ministers in the princely state of Porbandar—nor did they lack any influence in the region. Gandhi's own salary as an attorney in South Africa came to some six thousand pounds a year by 1902, which amounted to a small fortune by the standards of the day; he was bright enough to secure a law degree at London; and his health was sufficient to weather the most bizarre diets and abusive schedules over a seventy-seven-year life span. Character he may have had, but it was only in Oldfield's imagination that this moral strength contradicted the putative weaknesses of other aspects of Gandhi's existence. Oldfield and the others clearly wanted Gandhi to be weak in worldly terms, and so they skewed the facts a bit to make it possible. The question is, why?

One answer is obvious: Gandhi was portrayed as weak so that his moral power would appear all the grander by contrast. But Gandhi's weakness was also consonant with a specific strand in Christian messianic expectation. As Jesus' own sayings on the subject proclaim, "the last shall be first" and "the Son of Man will come at the time you least expect him." It is in fact quite appropriate for a Messiah to lack "the traditional appearances of a Messiah," if one means by that a regal mien. Messiahs should surprise. So it is understandable that Oldfield wanted Gandhi to be born in something approximating a Palestinian stable and to live like a simple carpenter, even if history had ample evidence to the contrary. Of course, to many Western eyes any specific efforts to weaken and impoverish Gandhi would have been beside the point. For them, all of India is a stable, and the mere fact that Gandhi came from a land of poverty, wore that culture's skimpy clothing, and boasted a physique no sturdier than that of the average Gujarati was enough to strip him of "the traditional appearances of a Messiah."

The last becoming first, David defeating Goliath—such reversals of roles, in which worldly weakness is countermanded by supernatural strength, are the stuff of myth and legend, and occupy a central place in the saintly icon that has been superimposed on Gandhi. In many religious traditions the logical dilemma presented by such paradoxes—apparently weak persons doing powerful things—is often resolved in an almost miraculous way. What makes it possible for weak constitutions to produce strong deeds is the ability to tap into a power that exceeds the normal sources of supply. Just as Moses' shyness indicated that his leadership skills came from above, and Muhammad's illiteracy seemed as proof that the Qur'an was written by a divine hand, so Gandhi's alleged weaknesses are to his admirers clear manifestations of the extraordinary character of the moral power that gave him the social and political strength he possessed.

To have access to such a special source of strength is to be freed from the need to rely on mundane powers, and freed from the temptation to misuse and overindulge such ordinary agents of potency as food, sex, money, material goods, status, dependent relationships, and the like. So one would expect a saint to be in some significant measure an ascetic, a renunciant—and that not so much by choice but as in consequence of a saintliness already attained. Gandhi's famous acts of self-abnegation were not requirements he had to fulfill before he could be perceived as a saint but expressions of a saintliness already affirmed. And for that reason the marks of his renunciant personality were often cited with an enthusiasm and repetition that exceeded what the realities of the situation would have warranted.

Take sex, for example. Celibacy is not such an awesome achievement, even in the West. Thousands of Roman Catholic priests and members of religious orders practice it to no great public acclaim. And Gandhi's celibacy seems on the face of it rather less heroic than theirs. He chose it somewhat late in life—at age thirty-seven—after he had fathered four children and after he had lived what Gandhi himself reports to have been an enjoyably sensuous existence. Yet Gandhi's vow of celibacy is often reported in the most hushed of tones and offered as certain proof of his sanctity. C. F. Andrews proclaimed that Gandhi's "body and soul" were thereby "kept clean from all sensual passion," and Robert Bernays believed that his sexual abstinence "mortified the flesh." Andrews offered Gandhi's absence of sexuality as evidence that his love was "pure," and Bernays found in it proof that Gandhi had "that abundant love for humanity of the true Messiah." For a variety of reasons, then, Gandhi's victory over sexual desire was something inspiring awe.

Much the same sort of admiration was shown for Gandhi's attitude toward food. It is true that Gandhi was obsessed with diets, and that his normal eating habits were spartan, but to many Western observers even a typical Indian meal would seem evidence of gastronomical stringency. For instance, Robert Bernays believed that "Gandhi's sainthood was perfectly genuine" because, among other things, "the naked faquir" he admired refused to "dine out." The fact that Gandhi ate regularly at a vegetarian restaurant in London seems to have escaped Bernays's notice, as did the knowledge that in Hindu India, where prohibitions against commensality are strong, the custom of dining out is practically nonexistent. The important point, for Bernays, was that a saint like Gandhi had no need of such frills and easy pleasures as might have occupied a British gentleman.

Money and material possessions were also the sorts of things a saint should not require, and Gandhi was praised for his simplicity and parsimony. Again, however, the facts of the matter make one wonder how much praise was justified. It is true that he abandoned gainful employment rather early in what promised to be a lucrative career, and that he relied on donations from well-wishers to supply his needs. He showed no interest in amassing wealth for the pure pleasure of it. He even disdained life insurance. But for all that, he never lacked sufficient funds for food, travel, shelter, secretarial staff, or postage. His telegraph bills alone must have cost a small fortune, judging by the number of cables and telegrams reproduced in Gandhi's Collected Works. And compared with the millions of hungry, penniless poor in India, Gandhi's much-touted poverty seems a comfortable life indeed. Nonetheless one often hears it cited as another indication of his sanctity: "He embraced poverty," Mr. Bernays reported, "as deliberately as did the Carpenter of Nazareth."

According to Herryman Mauer, who wrote a book-length tribute to the man just after Gandhi's death in 1948, the external features of his life—that he "dressed poorly," "renounced material wealth," and was "not smart philosophically"—were all to be expected of a "Great Soul" who "knew the presence of Truth as sharply as if it were something he could touch and see and hear." And Marc Edmund Jones, in a similar eulogy written in the same year, concluded that Gandhi's frailty and poverty were entirely appropriate to "the greatest figure since Jesus."

There seems little doubt by now that Gandhi satisfied criteria for saintliness that were widely shared by Western Christians of his own day and that have continued to have their proponents in the years since. He was a prime example of divine power acting through a seemingly weak and faulty human vessel. But we should not assume that this Western point of view was universally shared, and that Gandhi's Indian admirers saw him in the same light. Gandhi was and is greatly admired in India: he is seen as a hero, a legend, a father of the country, even as something of a holy man. But in India Gandhi is not quite a saint.

This failure to elevate Gandhi in his homeland did not come about because Indians hesitate to find saints in their midst. On the contrary, they easily embrace saints of all shapes and sizes, accepting it as axiomatic that certain persons are endowed with a spiritual weightiness that ordinary people do not possess. Such godly people are not just confined to mythology. Almost every village in India contains the bones of saints, or, better yet, the saints themselves, sitting beneath banyan trees and dispensing blessings. Ardent devotees of such holy men and women place pictures of these gurus on the family altar and offer them prayers and praise.

There are rumors that some people in India have treated Gandhi's picture this way, but I have not seen it myself, nor is there any evidence that the practice is widespread. A taxi-driver in Delhi told me that he had attended the movie version of Gandhi's life in order to receive his darian—the power that is conveyed through seeing a holy image—but this is usually as pious as the veneration gets. It is not much different from the awe that was accorded Indira Gandhi by the masses that crowded to receive darian from her. No shrines have been erected for either Gandhi—Indira or Mohandas—nor are rituals or offerings performed in front of their pictures, and in India that is the sort of thing one would expect for those who are regarded as saints.

The prominent Indian admirers of Gandhi—Indian counterparts to John Haynes Holmes, Robert Bernays, and C. F. Andrews—seldom mentioned Gandhi's supernatural powers, nor did they dwell on his physical infirmities or efforts at self-abnegation. Rather, they laid emphasis on his moral qualities. One of Gandhi's first Indian supporters, the great Indian nationalist leader G. K. Gokhale, proclaimed to the Lahore seio n of the Indian Congress in 1909 that Gandhi was "a man among men" and that he was "without doubt made of the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made." Rajendra Prasad, in his reminiscence, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, written after Gandhi's death, praised Gandhi as an exemplar: "not only helping us in our material well-being by showing us the way to political independence, social justice and economic prosperity, but also [helping us] to catch a glimpse of the moral and spiritual heights." Even the most fawning tributes to Gandhi, such as those crafted by Sarojini Naidu, the Indian poet who likened Gandhi to Buddha and Christ, emphasized Gandhi's human virtues rather than his ascetic and saintly ones. It was his worldly wisdom, courage, love, and humor—"the loftiest and loveliest qualities of the human mind and spirit"—that most impressed her, not his other-worldly asceticism.

To Hindus there was nothing strange about what Westerners regarded as Gandhi's acts of renunciation. What impressed the Indians was that someone like Gandhi, who appreciated and acted out the traditional Hindu roles and virtues, was also such a modern man—well educated and articulate in English, and at ease with politicians and journalists and Protestant pilgrims from the West. In the opening pages of his published correspondence with Gandhi, G. D. Birla, the wealthy industrialist, praised the Mahatma as a social reformer—not a saint but a "real man" who had a religious vision of a just and egalitarian society. Birla credited Gandhi with bringing Hinduism into the twentieth century; and it is true that he did much to reconcile Hindu concepts with the egalitarian values shared by many in the urban, mercantile, and administrative class from which Gandhi himself came. So to his fellow modern Hindus, Gandhi was widely respected as offering a model for progressive Hinduism and helping to achieve "the modernity of tradition," as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have described it.

Gandhi himself seemed to be content with this view of him and was willing to be seen as an example of someone who seriously attempted to live a righteous life in the modern world. In his remarkable Autobiography, written in 1925, which amounts to a sort of gospel of Gandhi according to Gandhi, he lays out his moral successes and errors in dispassionate terms, describing them as "experiments with Truth." Most of these "experiments" concern what may appear to be trivial matters—how he dealt with the temptation of being offered a cigar by boyhood friends, or yielded to irresponsibility in the face of obligations to his parents—and are trials with which all of us can easily identify. The interesting thing, however, is that Gandhi saw them as more. He lifted the minutiae of everyday life—from eating to making love—into the realm of serious moral discourse, and made it appear that the moral life is not a general attitude but a constant daily struggle.

The Autobiography portrays Gandhi as being morally powerful, but that power was attained only with a great deal of effort and testing. According to Gandhi's own testimony, he achieved moral awareness only gradually, only by practiced attention. His was not an inborn, intuitive saintliness. It was, as he implied in the title of his book, a science, not a gift, and because it was learnable, it was available to all. For that reason, it was something not to be admired but practiced. Elsewhere I have argued that Gandhi's most enduring contribution to the annals of saintliness has very little to do with the image projected on him by his admirers. It is rather his devotion to moral experimentation and his technique of satydgraha, both measures that can be adopted by anyone who wishes to bring a measure of saintliness into his or her own life.

Yet for many Westerners neither Gandhi's view of himself nor the view of him held by his Indian admirers was enough. Gandhi as an exemplar of a socially conscious, progressive Hinduism or as an advocate of a technique of moral experimentation fell far short of the messianic expectations they had in mind. Dr. Josiah Oldfield, writing in 1933, proclaimed that "there is no saint that has been placed in Christian hagiology since the time of the Apostles who could be invoked to mould men's actions today to the extent that Mahatma Gandhi can." And the author of the introduction to the volume in which Oldfield's remarks appeared went so far as to suggest that "perhaps Gandhism may one day be a recognized religion." Oldfield, as if in anticipation of the reaction such excesses of piety might earn, explained: "The idea of a man being worshipped in his lifetime seems almost ludicrous to the Western mind. But why not?"

Yet we might well turn Oldfield's question around and ask: why? Why did the Oldfields and the Holmeses of the 930s and 1940s need to worship a man like Gandhi?

Any answer we give to this question will be based on speculation more than on irrefutable evidence, but several answers immediately come to mind. One is that the image of Christ and the saints that Christian tradition has supplied is inadequate for the global, rational, modern point of view. The old portrayals are culture-bound, and since they seem more mythical than real, they lack credibility. Yet, as Robert Bellah has said, even modern persons need symbols of transcendence that "integrate the whole, known and unknown, conscious and unconscious." Gandhi, the English-speaking, London-trained Hindu is intercultural in his appeal—"a universal saint," as Holmes put it—and enjoys the credibility that comes from being a present day political actor as well as a religious mentor, someone whose multifaceted social and spiritual interests appear to have "integrated the whole" as few other people are perceived to have done. For these reasons many Christians, especially those of a liberal theological bent who shy away from an other-worldly view of Christ, feel that Gandhi fills that role as adequately as Jesus did.

Like Jesus, Gandhi was a symbol of power. The characteristics of the Gandhian image that we earlier observed indicate what diverse kinds of potency he was thought to possess: on one hand, he laid claim to social and political power, and, on the other hand, he had the power to renounce worldly things. These powers may seem to be contradictory, but both features of the powers ascribed to him testify to his ability to command the elements around him rather than be subject to them. Gandhi the social organizer and Gandhi the ascetic have in common the ability to assert control over those forces—external and internal to the self—that buffet the best intentions of ordinary folk. In society at large and in many personal lives the fear of disorder is a deep and terrifying reality. So it is no surprise that some of Gandhi's contemporaries should want to put on a pedestal a man whom they perceived to have mastered the social and personal forces, someone who, as Andrews said, was propelled solely by "inner self-discipline and a desire for purification."

The themes of mastery and self-control that inspired witnesses of Gandhi in his own time remain central features in the heroic image one finds in the enormously popular film of Gandhi's life that was produced by Richard Attenborough in 1982. The appeal of the movie—which must have been one of the most watched films in history, considering its combined Indian and Western audiences—came, not simply from a moving story, richly filmed, but from the image that it projected of an extraordinary human being. In short, the movie was an advertisement for a global saint, and it succeeded for a time in rekindling the flame of Gandhiolatry.

Attenborough's film was an authentic recreation of the hagiography of Andrews, Holmes, and Oldfield. Like them, Attenborough fastened onto Gandhi's Christ-like charisma and his masterful actions. On the social plane we see Gandhi commanding vast and potentially unruly crowds, and challenging the authority of the organizational might of the British Empire with all its bureaucratic panoply. On a personal level we see the ever-disciplined Mahatma abjuring sex, food, and possessions, and creating around himself a simple and orderly allocation of time and space. He spins, for example, to utilize the idle moments of the day.

This image of mastery has great appeal for anyone who feels debilitated by indiscipline and the absence of self-control, which is to say, just about everyone. Anyone who has felt lost and pushed around in a crowd, or powerless and dehumanized after an encounter with some massive, insensitive bureaucracy, is apt to applaud Gandhi's apparent powers of social control. Anyone who has felt demoralized and numbed by an easy access to pleasurable things, enslaved by passionate desires, or frustrated by the untidy indiscipline of daily life will be impressed by Gandhi's display of control over himself and the events with which he was surrounded.

The film Gandhi presents a picture of someone who lives a full, simple, integrated, intentional existence, a life quite unlike the messy, complicated ones that most of us lead. For that reason, its image of Gandhi has the potential to judge us and make us wonder why we cannot live up to the standard that he achieved with such apparent ease. Why, then, doesn't this image of Gandhi make us feel inadequate and guilty? The answer lies, I think, in Gandhi's alleged sanctity. Because he is portrayed as essentially different from us, endowed with a spiritual power to which ordinary mortals are not privy, we can laud his moral achievements without feeling the necessity to live up to all of them ourselves. Gandhi's peculiarities, especially from a Western point of view, heighten this distance and make it even less likely that viewers of the Gandhian film—or readers of Andrews, Holmes, and Bernays's literary tributes—will feel challenged to emulate such a life or castigate themselves for falling short. They might be impressed by Gandhi's renunciation of sex, food, clothes, and other material things, but they will not expect such extreme virtues to serve as guides in the quandaries of ordinary life.

Reinhold Niebuhr observed some years ago that the virtues of Jesus are dazzling precisely because they are not emulable. They are extremes of selfless love that provide ordinary Christians with a noble but ultimately unobtainable goal. Gandhi's saintliness is similar: though close enough to reality to be credible, it is ultimately unattainable. And in Gandhi's case there is an additional element. Although it does not come across in Attenborough's idealized portrait of a sober and lonely leader, there was in many people's perception a sort of sublime wackiness that set Gandhi apart from others of his station and from other human beings generally. This too played a role in protecting Gandhi's admirers from condemning themselves too much for not measuring up to the master's example. He was so obviously different, his admirers thought—even odd.

Regardless of what Gandhi's real virtues may have been, the saintly role that was and still is thrust upon him demands a more powerful, a purer, and perhaps even a more idiosyncratic person than we encounter in daily experience. The Gandhi of faith is necessarily different from and more luminous than the Gandhi of history. He has taken on "subtler and more lasting shapes," as Forster put it, in the saintly image that endures.