Mahatma Gandhi - His Life, Writings, and Speeches

"It is only India that knows how to honour greatness in rags" said a friend to me one day as we watched Mahatma Gandhi cleaving his way through the surging enthusiasm of a vast assembly at Lucknow last year. For, surely the sudden appearance of Saint Francis of Assisi in his tattered robe in the fashionable purlieus of London or Milan, Paris or Petrograd to-day were scarcely more disconcerting or incongruous than the presence of this strange man with his bare feet and coarse garments, his tranquil eyes, and calm, kind smile that disclaims even while it acknowledges a homage that emperors cannot buy. But India, though she shifts and enlarges her circumference age after age keeps true to her spiritual center and retains her spiritual vision undimmed and eager to acclaim her saints. Let us not follow the conventional mode of the world and wait for a man to be dead to canonize him; but rather let our critical judgment confirms the unerring instinct of the people that recognize in Mahatma Gandhi a lineal descendant of those great sons of compassion who became the servants of humanity-Gautama Buddha, Chaitanya, Ramanuja, Ramakrishna. He lacks, may be, the breadth and height and ecstasy of their mystical attainment: but he is not less than theirs in his intensity of love, his sincerity of service and a lofty simplicity of life which is the austere flower of renunciation and self-sacrifice." - Mrs. Sarojini Naidu.