Mahatma Gandhi did not want to be a saint. Anguished, he knew his human incompetences. He desired no politician’s role, if he could not transform himself, how then transform the world? During all his acutely self-responsible life, he wanted one single experience: liberation. The sage is the liberated one, a being who has transcended both, the ego and the world—there is nothing to change, only discard what is unreal, as one peels off wet muddy clothes, when one has walked the monsoon countryside. To remove an obstacle is not to become something—you are what you always are, the ignorance dissolved—naked, liberated. There is no transformation. There is only rediscovery. One had never gone anywhere. One had always been where one is. And that is: Truth. Gandhi called his autobiography: My Experiments with Truth. In his introduction Gandhi said: Tradition declares, he only could be liberated, established in the Truth, who has met his Guru. ‘I believe in the Hindu theory of the Guru . . . True knowledge is impossible without the Guru.’ Gandhi never met his guru, so he confesses. Thus he failed himself.

Gandhi wanted to be a sage: but he remained despite himself a saint, and a politician. Yet, such was his sincerity, in trying desperately to change himself, he changed the map of the world. It’s Gandhi’s search for Truth that created the climate of India’s freedom. Without India’s freedom (‘the Crown Jewel of the British Empire’), Western imperialism might not have freed itself from large areas of Africa and Asia. From a world of some fifty or so nations, the world today has over 130 nations. But Gandhi himself not having discovered what he wanted—the Truth—he died a man not knowing where to lay his head. Had Gandhi found what he wanted, the face of the world may yet have been very different. Progress might have meant not only going outwards and forwards, but inwards into the wherelessness of where. Truth has no geography. Truth is India, Gandhi had said. The geography-less homeland, of course. He could just as well have said, Truth is America, or Algeria or Paraguay. But he lost his India, the one indivisible India. Non-violence had failed him, for he had failed himself.

Where had Gandhi failed? This is an important question to ask almost twenty-five years after his beautiful death—he died as he would have wanted, the last gesture of Gandhi was blessing his own assassin. Had he and the assassin been one—undivided one—death could not have been death, but resurrection and this India then, would have been India, the India of Gandhi’s dreams.

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