Reflections on Gandhi: Summary

Mahatma Gandhi

"Reflection on Gandhi" was an essay written by George Orwell. In this essay he analyse Gandhi's life. The essay is a reflection on Gandhi's life.

Orwell tried to understand Gandhi by reading his autobiography called "My Experiments with Truth". The book impressed him but Gandhi was not not an impressive person to him. He pointed out some reasons for his dislike of Gandhi;

1. Gandhi believed in mind power.
2. Gandhi supported vegetarian food.
3. Gandhi believed in the Khadi or homemade clothes.
4. Gandhi believed in the old fashioned village-based economics, which is not suitable for a big country like India. 
5. Gandhi was not a saint but a very shrewd person.

However, Orwell did not consider Gandhi as a bad person. He says "even Gandhi's worst enemy would also admit that he is an interesting and unusual man, who enriched the world simply being alive".

Reflections on Gandhi

By George Orwell

SAINTS should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity - by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power - and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.

Reflections on Gandhi: Analysis

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi is a man who is often considered a saint, and even though he made enemies, "I believe that even Gandhi's worst enemies would admit he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive." This is a commentary on George Orwell's "Reflections of Gandhi", which will analyze and discuss the text and the commentators reactions to the piece. Not only does this essay give some back ground on Gandhi's life, but also shows the contradictory feelings his message could incite in a person. While it seems that Gandhi did naught but promote peace, the measures from which this peace was to come from makes a person wonder if he truly cared for people, if this radical approach to peaceful resistance was only to please a god, or if Orwell is imposing some new information on the "saint" which has questionable truth (which, he himself states he originally found the autobiography "...in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper.")

George Orwell

• Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. 

• His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and belief indemocratic socialism.

• Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemicaljournalism. 

• He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. 

• His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, languageand culture. 

• In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

• Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and social practices.