Behold Gandhi the Hindu: How Sanatana Dharma Shaped India’s Independence Movement and Nationalism

INDIA’S INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT in the 20th century was a fascinating saga. A very interesting and less talked about aspect of it is the Hindu cultural and religious influ­ence on it. Adversaries like Jinnah openly challenged it describing the Indian National Congress as a “Hindu party”. Fellow travel­lers like BR Ambedkar acknowledged it. And, finally, insiders like Jawaharlal Nehru abhorred it. But it remained an important undercurrent of the movement until the end.

The “extremist” leaders of the Indian National Congress in the early 20th century, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghosh, were all traditionalists committed to the supremacy of Hindu culture and customs. Their anti-imperial­ism was blended with Hindu nationalism. Tilak was the leading light of this faction, who firmly believed that religion could unite people and Indian nationalism should draw inspiration from an­cient Hindu culture and traditions. He started public celebration of festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi and Shivaji Jayanti, transforming those household religious events into massive public festivals. He sought to invoke a strong sense of identity and stir up patriotism and anti-colonialism in the masses through these festivals. In his famous commentary on the sacred Hindu text of Bhagawad Gita, Gita Rahasya–The Inner Meaning of Gita, Tilak presented duty, activ­ism and sacrifice for the nation as the core message of the Gita, thus kindling nationalist spirit using religious symbolism.

Tilak’s ardent supporter and colleague in Punjab and a mem­ber of the extremist faction, Lala Lajpat Rai, came from a strong Arya Samaj background and committed to Hindu cultural identity as enunciated by Dayananda Saraswati. Lajpat Rai op­posed Khilafat Movement and openly criticised Gandhi for championing it. He was also critical of the Moplah Rebellion—a tragic violent movement by Moplah Muslims in Kerala in 1921. He remained an active leader of the Hindu Mahasabha faction of Congress and presided over it in 1925.

The third important leader of the extremist faction was Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal. Born in a Vaishnava Hindu family in Sylhet (in Bangladesh now), Pal was initially influenced by the Brahmo Samaj. He joined the extremists in Congress and insisted that self-respect and self-reliance should be the way and Swarajya should be demanded, not begged. The role played by the extremist trio of Lal-Bal-Pal during the historic Vande Mata­ram Movement was an important page in the annals of the story of Independence.

Another important leader, who enhanced the “Hindu flavour” of the Congress movement, was Aurobindo Ghosh. Soon after his release from jail in the Alipore bomb case, he delivered the historic “Uttarpara Address” on May 30, 1909, with a profound message about nationalism that became a mantra for many na­tionalists in the following decades of the freedom movement. “I say no longer that nationalism is a creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatana Dharma, with it, it moves and with it, it grows. When the Sanatana Dharma declines, then the nation declines, and if the Sanatana Dharma were capable of perishing, with the Sanatana Dharma, it would perish. The Sanatana Dharma, that is nationalism.”

MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND GANDHI entered the Indian political scene in 1915, a few years after the with­drawal of Aurobindo into spiritual sadhana in 1910 and played a crucial role in the Independence movement. Gandhi, too, was seeped in religion and described himself as a Sanatani Hindu several times. In an earlier article in Young India, he declared, “Every fibre of my being is Hindu.”

Through the years of struggle for independence, Gandhi had three interesting encounters when his belief in Hinduism came to be directly challenged. The first was during his encounters with Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah used to constantly taunt Gandhi that he was just a leader of the Hindus. Responding to this accu­sation, Gandhi said, “My Hinduism is not sectarian. It includes all that I know to be the best in Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. I approach politics as everything else in a religious spirit. The truth is my religion and Ahimsa is the only way of its realisation.” This very inclusive approach of Gandhi made him more Hindu in the eyes of Jinnah and his colleagues. “In his efforts to appeal to Muslim opinion, Gandhi only increased his Hindu image. For example, he often claimed to be as much a Muslim or a Jew as a Hindu, because his faith embraced all reli­gions. Such a contention unmistakably reflected the absorptive and transcendent characteristics typical of Hinduism but largely absent in Islam. Thus, the very nature of his attempts to gain Mus­lim sympathy marked Gandhi as a Hindu,” observed American author Alan Hayes Merriam.

Gandhi dissected and demolished Jinnah’s contention that Muslims of India constituted a separate nation by arguing that the ancestors of Indian Muslims were Hindus only. “Millions of Mus­salmans in this country come from Hindu stock. How can their homeland be any other than India? My eldest son embraced Islam some years back. What would his homeland be—Porbandar or the Punjab? I ask the Mussalmans: ‘If India is not your homeland, what other country do you belong to?’” he argued.

In his letter to Jinnah in September 1944, Gandhi rebuked his theory saying, “I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from parent stock. If India was one nation before the advent of Islam, it must remain one in spite of the change of faith of a very large body of her children.” He told the American journalist Louis Fischer, “Ev­ery Muslim is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam,” adding, “every Muslim will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history.”

GANDHI’S NEXT DEBATE was with BR Ambedkar, as the leader of the depressed classes. Ambedkar was born into a family of the so-called untouchables and faced severe discrimination during the early decades of his life. On the other hand, Gandhi was born into a so-called upper-caste family but rebelled against social evils like untouchability right from his childhood. He once narrated his childhood experience at a Suppressed Classes Conference in Ahmedabad. “I was hard­ly yet 12,” he recounted, “when this idea had dawned on me. A scavenger named Uka, an ‘untouchable’, used to attend our house for cleaning latrines. Often, I would ask my mother… why I was forbidden to touch him? If I accidentally touched Uka, I was asked to perform the ablutions, and though I naturally obeyed, it was not without smilingly protesting… I often had tussles [with my parents] on this matter.”

After his return to India in 1915, the cause of the untouchables became the mission of his life. When he faced attacks from the orthodox Hindus, his response was forthright. “I shall continue to be my own guru… It is no good quoting verses from Manu Smriti and other scriptures in defence of this orthodoxy. A number of verses are apocryphal, a number of them quite meaningless,” he told his orthodox critics warning that scriptures should not be above reason and morality.

These convictions made Gandhi initially see Ambedkar’s efforts like the Mahad Satyagraha of March 1927 in a positive light. During the Mahad Satyagraha, when hundreds of people of the depressed classes entered Chavdar Tank in Mahad town of Maharashtra to drink water, they were attacked by some orthodox sections of the Hindu society. Ambedkar asked his followers not to react or resist, winning Gandhi’s appreciation. In an article published in Young India a month later, Gandhi praised the “exemplary self-restraint” of the agitators and criticised the “orthodox party” for indulging in “sheer brute force.” “Dr Ambedkar was fully justified in advising the so-called untouchables to go to the tank to quench their thirst,” he wrote, urging “every Hindu opposed to untouchability” to publicly defend the courageous action of the depressed classes of Mahad, “even at the risk of getting his head broken.”

But this bonhomie was to remain short-lived. The status of “un­touchables” became the main bone of contention. For Ambedkar, it was essentially a political question, and he was dismissive about the social dimensions of the problem. “The untouchables have become so conscious of the fact that temple-going is of no consequence at all,” he insisted, and believed that there were “other things which are far more important, namely, they should have the same status in the country and they should have the opportunity to hold high office.” Not only would this enhance their “dignity”, but they would also get “strategic positions”, he argued. In essence, while Ambedkar wanted political action to ameliorate the sufferings of the “untouch­ables”, Gandhi advocated social and soul reform.

Ambedkar wanted that philosophical foundation, in the form of the four-fold segregation of society, sanctioned by the Hindu scrip­tures, to go. But Gandhi, at least in principle, was more inclined to go with Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj in 1875. “Caste, insofar as it is based on untouchability, is an institution of the devil, and we must get rid of it at any cost. But I have explained repeatedly that caste expressed as varna dharma is an eternal law which we may not break except at our own risk …. The law of varna was discovered by our ancestors ages ago; and … it has appeared to me a wholly beneficent law,” Gandhi wrote in 1934.

Ambedkar was not convinced. He believed that the varna dhar­ma was at the root of the problem. He demanded that the Hindus produce some “sacred authority” for removing it, not just superficial changes like temple entry or co-dining. He told the depressed classes to not regard Gandhi as their friend since he “wishes to retain caste [varna] and abolish untouchability.” “The underlying idea that caste and untouchability are two different things is founded on a fallacy. The two are one and inseparable,” he insisted.

At the Third Round Table Conference in 1932 in London, Gandhi and Ambedkar had their famous disagreement over the issue of separate electorates for the untouchables. Ambedkar had consistently pushed for it and argued that if Sikhs, Muslims and Europeans in India could secure them, why not the depressed classes? Gandhi firmly rejected both the proposal and the argu­ment. “Sikhs may remain as such in perpetuity, so may Moham­medans, so may Europeans. Will untouchables remain untouch­ables in perpetuity?” was his counterargument.

When the British government announced the Communal Award under which separate electorates were promised to the de­pressed classes, Gandhi entered into a fast unto death. Gandhi’s fast did have an impact. “Across India, goaded by Gandhi’s fast, temples closed for centuries to the ‘untouchables’ opened their doors. Brah­mins invited Dalits to meals in their homes. The empire, on its part, opened the doors of Yeravada prison, and Ambedkar went in to con­fer with Gandhi,” writes Rajmohan Gandhi.

A compromise formula, known as the Poona Pact, was worked out. Gandhi agreed to separate electorates at the primary level, while Ambedkar agreed to reserved seats for “untouchable” castes un­der joint electorates for the Assemblies. Ambedkar was not fully satisfied, but he saw it as the first major political concession pend­ing a major reform in the Hindu caste system. A close scrutiny of the discussions leading to the Poona Pact reveals that while there were significant and fundamental differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar, a certain optimism drove both to conclude the matter.

On October 13, 1935, in an emotional address at Yeola in Na­shik district, Maharashtra, when Ambedkar told his audience that while he was born a Hindu, “I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu,” Gandhi was rattled. Describing Ambed­kar as “high-souled” and “highly educated”, Gandhi urged him to reconsider the decision because “despite isolated events”, un­touchability was “on its last legs”. He also insisted that Ambedkar should examine “his ancestral religion” on its own merits, and not through the weaknesses of its “unfaithful followers”.

Ambedkar disagreed with Gandhi on that fundamental prem­ise. While Gandhi blamed the faithful, Ambedkar blamed the teachings of Hinduism. For him, as long as caste and varna existed, there was no freedom for “untouchables”.

ALONGSIDE THE POLITICAL dialogue he had with Jinnah and the social dialogue with Ambedkar, Gandhi also ran an intense religious dialogue with the Christian missionaries during the same period. Gandhi’s face-off with the missionaries began very early in life. He confessed that he “de­veloped a sort of dislike” for Christianity as a school student at Rajkot. “In those days, Christian missionaries used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their gods. I could not endure this. I must have stood there to hear them once only, but that was enough to dissuade me from repeating the experience,” he wrote. Another early experi­ence that put him off was the news about the well-known Hindu convert who ate beef and drank liquor at the time of baptism and started wearing clothes like a European.

In England, Gandhi devoured religious literature, among which was the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount went straight to my heart, he confided. But he also developed some firm views about the Christian doctrine. “It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were his sons. If Jesus was like God or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, as an embodiment of sacrifice and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born,” he wrote. “Philosophically, there was nothing extraordi­nary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions,” he noted.

Gandhi raised serious objection over the proselytising activities of the Christian missionaries. When a student from the US sought his frank opinion on the work of the Christian missionaries in In­dia, Gandhi replied, “In my opinion, Christian missionaries have done good to us indirectly. Their direct contribution is probably more harmful than otherwise. I am against the modern method of proselytising. Years of experience of proselytising, both in South Africa and India, has convinced me that it has not raised the general moral tone of the converts who have imbibed the superficialities of European civilisation and have missed the teaching of Jesus.”

When an American evangelist John R Mott suggested that Christian missionaries could be of great help in building a mass movement for the eradication of untouchability, Gandhi said, “I distrust mass movements of this nature. They have as their object not the uplift of the untouchables, but their ultimate conversion. This motive of mass proselytisation lurking at the back in my opinion vitiates missionary effort.”

Gandhi held radical views on the future of missionary activity in India after Independence. At a media interview in March 1931, a journalist asked him whether he would favour the retention of foreign missionaries in India after Independence. Gandhi’s forthright reply was: “If instead of confining themselves purely to humanitarian work and material service to the poor, they do pros­elytising by means of medical aid, education etc, I would certainly ask them to withdraw. Every nation’s religion is as good as any other. Certainly, India’s religions are adequate for her people. We need no converting spirituality.” In an interview given to a mis­sionary nurse, published in Harijan, dated May 11, 1935, Gandhi categorically stated, “If I had power and could legislate, I should certainly stop all proselytising.” Gandhi’s objection to conver­sion was based on his perception that “Christianity has become synonymous with Western culture”, which “may be fittingly described as Christian culture.” He added that “Indian culture would certainly be described as Hindu culture.”

But Gandhi had always upheld the principle of equal respect to all religions. He was respectful towards the Christians always. The evening before Christmas, on December 24, 1947, he addressed a prayer meeting in Delhi. “Tomorrow is Christmas. I offer greet­ings to Christians in India and abroad. I want that all the Chris­tians in and outside India should become free in the true sense. Let them exercise self-restraint and pursue the path of sacrifice and martyrdom shown by Jesus Christ. Let them be free and increase the area of freedom in the world,” he said.

BRITISH ADMINISTRATOR AND writer Edward Pend­erel Moon opined that Gandhi promoted and symbolised “Hinduising of the national movement”, adding, “His ba­sic concepts, his moral values and ideals, even his fads and foibles, were of Hindu origin; in his writings and speeches, he constantly employed language, imagery and symbolism undisguisedly de­rived from Hindu sources; and he often appeared to evince as much interest in the reform of Hinduism as in the attainment of independence, and indeed more or less to equate them.”

Gandhian ideals, which were a continuation of the political ideals of earlier leaders like Tilak, Rai and Aurobindo, were a great influence on a section of the Congressmen, including Sardar Patel. But soon they found a challenger in Jawaharlal Nehru, who open­ly confessed to his disagreement with, if not disrespect, to those ideals. Nehru prevailed over Gandhi after Independence. And the mantle of Tilak-Rai-Aurobindo-Gandhi was to be carried forward by some other political force in the post-Independence era. That was the premise on which the Hindu nationalist movement had emerged in the country after Independence and occupied the national centrestage seven decades later.

(The article was originally published in OPEN Magazine on August 14, 2026)