Hriday Kunj, the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, India

Hriday Kunj, the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, India

MK Gandhi’s Indian nationalism was based on swaraj (self-rule), but his was also an internationalist vision of peace and nonviolence. He was not an ardent anti-imperialist. Rather he wanted the nations with the British empire to choose to associate together freely, brought together by mutual self-interest and friendliness. Gandhi trained his followers in these traits at ashrams (spiritual settlements) across India, most notably the Sabarmati Ashram. Participants would focus on spinning cloth, prayer, bodily discipline and good neighbourliness. Here satyragrahis (those trained in the force of truth) would be developed who would lead the fight against social inequality and against political oppression. But these ashrams also became sites of international pilgrimage, including for Muriel Lester, a British pacifist and social reformer, who had established the Kingsley Hall community centre in Bow, East London. She visited the Sabarmati Ashram, including Gandhi’s residential quarters (Hriday Kunj), where she stayed with over 200 others, and later wrote of Sabarmati and her Kingsley Hall in East London as ‘the two ashrams’. In both, she claimed, ‘there was the same sharing of the housework, the same absence of class distinctions, the same ignoring of sectarian labels, the same sleeping out of doors, the same gaiety that voluntary poverty brings, the same joy that comes from breaking down all national barriers, the same sure hold on reality that comes from constant prayer’ (Lester 1932, 2). Gandhi stayed in the latter during his London visit for the Round Table Conference, finding in the poverty of the east more evidence of the incivility of imperialism.

Reproduced with permission of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad.