SIDELIGHTS : : The man who does his work, any work, conscientiously, must always be in one sense a great man.—Mulock.

Gandhi wrote wistfully in a recent issue of Harijan of an ashram built in Nellore district and of great hopes of social work throuogh it that happened not to materialize. The reference is to the ashram situate at Pallipad. In the early days of non co-operation, ashrams were the abode of the elect among Gandhian disciples. They practiced Gandhism as if it was a new religion. In the ashrams abstemiousness was carried to very zealous heights. Young India, predecessor of to-day’s Harijan, was scanned for guidance, and the gospel of exaltation through sacrifice that it preached gave rise to competition in a process of giving things up.

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The Satyagrahis measured virtue in terms of giving things up. It started with food. Chillies and tamarind were first sacrificed. The next step was to discard salt. Then as the tempo rose, other wants were cast away ranging from shirts to the physical needs of married life. Among a list of rules that Gandhi published for the observance of Satyagrahis, the place of  honour was given to the one that enjoined on husbands and wives to sleep in separate rooms. The inmates of ashrams strove therefore to build their lives round celibacy.

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The soul of the Pallipad Ashram was the late Digumarti Hanumantha Rao. He, C.V. Krishna and K. Punniah were the foundation members of the ashram. Three more dis-similar persons I have rarely come across. Hanumantha Rao was a truly great man. He gave his first love to the Servants of India Society. Discontent over the failure of the Society to respond to the strenuousness of political action called for by the changing times cast him into the Gandhian camp. He called himself an atheist, but in many ways he was godlike. God is in a sense a product of human imperfections. The avaricious turn to God for luck; the nervous for fortitude; the adventurous for a blessing; the deceitful and the profiteering for immunity from discovery; the penitent for forgiveness; and belligerents for victory. Hanumantha Rao had none of the fears or ambitions or excitements that make the existence of the Divine a necessity for common people.

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He made no difference between little and great. He resolved all life into a series of principles and pursued them with unwavering conscientiousness, giving no quarter to anything contradicting them in any particular. In most men there is an element of the uncertain, an unpredictable yielding to impulse, circumstance, pressure or persuasion in deviation from previously enunciated attitudes. But of him those who knew him could always be sure—sure of what he would do and what he would not do, in any foreseeable context. Hence he was trusted and believed in by one and all that had occasion to know him.

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He was a puritan who found delight in being hard on himself without getting soured with others. The abstemiousness of the initial urges of Gandhian Puritanism is generally not pleasant to neighbours. Its tendency is to exact attention. Giving up wants proceeds apace with aggressive advertisement and clamour for appreciation, so that in the placeof a supposed discipline of the spirit you are confronted with a nuisance. The repressions that the puritans practice on themselves often pave the way for later fatal reactions in the form of excesses with compound interest—and while they puritanise, they seem to go about, strained and tight-lipped, with a sense of grievance against the world in general. While the imperfect are perfectly content and companionable, seeing themselves as one with their fellowmen and beloved in proportion to the allowances they make for the faults of others, the quest for perfection is wont to give rise to a species of hard, intolerant, self-obsessed bores. Virtue has to be redeemed from severity before it can become socially beneficial, and the late Hanumantha Rao was that rarest of beings, a puritan with social charm and love in his heart for erring sinners.  

  

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His untimely death led to the disintegration of the Pallipad Ashram. C.V. Krishna, of the survivors, had considerable local influence with rich families and had enough of resourcefulness to carry on if executive ability was all that was needed. He had a very kind and benevolent disposition under a misleading rough temper. But his agonized concern for standards commanding his allegiance made him continually angry with whomsoever dared to violate them. What with remonstrances against breaches, periodsof real rest and relaxation were to him few and far between. The requirements of vigilance for preventing profane inroads by the inmates of the ashram on the approved pattern of Satyagrahic conduct, particularly in the matter of food and celibacy, taxed his energies excessively and eventually impelled him to doubt the all-sufficingness of Gandhism and seek refuge in Yoga.

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Punniah, the last of the trio, was indefatigable in clearing the ashram precincts of prickly pear. He would be found, at all hours of the day, armed with a long pole provided with a pronged contraption at the end, doing unceasing battle with the wilderness of thorns and shrubs that then filled the ashram compound. Irritations that would move Krishna to exasperation made him lugubrious. He was a figure of portentous gravity immersed at all times in a sea of routine tasks. He loved to make himself an example of the dignity of manual labour until, with the decline of the ashram, social reform claimed his affection.

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Gandhian ashrams are meant to provide illimitable scope for social service to aspirants content to live frugally and work for their keep with the labour of their hands. They have yet to realize their founder’s dream of economic self-sufficiency. They have still to exist on the bounty of donors. For eliciting donations, an attractive figure, endowed with sanctity in public estimation, is necessary. Round such figures in the ahsrams, coteries of workers engaged in perfecting themselves through institutional practice of Satyagraha have been established throughout the country for over quarter of a century. The time seems ripe for due stock being taken of the total of achievement to the credit of the ashrams in all these years—(March 30, 1946) S A K A.