In jail or out of jail, by now in every hearth and on every altar Gandhi began to be worshipped as a saint, a Mahatma. He hated the title, not only because it was inappropriate, but also because it made the work harder. The saint was to perform miracles. Gandhi wanted everyone to perform miracles, the miracles of non-violence and truth. Gandhi wanted only to help himself find the truth. Indian nationalism had just come by the way. Also, if others wanted to become non-violent and truthful, non-violence and truth will conquer even the freedom of India. ‘If freedom had to be won by one untruth,’ he said, ‘it were better to be under the British for a thousand years.’ Only a saint could say that.

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Sainthood is an inconvenient thing. The alogical facing the convenient—and society loves the convenient—the convenient which becomes the comfortable, and ultimately ends in the luxury of the seeming ‘eternal’, the tombstone of man—society which searches for the permanent becomes the sole strength of the forces of impermanence. In a changing universe the permanent is the principle, the principle of change itself—which seen as principle, loses the quality of change, that is to say the impermanent seen as impermanent releases the permanent, in the way that an artist seeing an object sees what is behind the object, the permanence of the object, and the permanent behind impermanence therefore becomes art. The artist too is a saint, in some ways—Michelangelo or Cezanne were both saints of a sort. So was Blake. So too Walt Whitman. And they were disturbing factors to contemporary society, or the authority behind that society.

The British who were trying to build up a stable empire, were often devoted men and women, who saw stability and good administration in terms of themselves. They felt if the Indian once was well fed and well housed, the railways linking city with town, and the town with the countryside, and the officials just and responsible, the British Empire would last forever. They forgot only one philosophic factor: that all things are mutable. Man seeks that something beyond himself, otherwise wealth and happiness would go together. If wealth were well-being man could easily be happy, especially today when technology can bring such abundance in goods to everyone. The administrator thinks this and he is not quite wrong. The saint however comes and says, the real wealth is the wealth inside man, the light within one is brighter than any sun outside. If the saint becomes stronger than the king, then all empires are lost. And that is what happened to the British Empire.