What is ‘happiness’ and what made Mahatma Gandhi happy ? Rajmohan Gandhi writes

On Nov. 7, 1947 (i.e. less than three months before he was killed, and less than three months after India’s Partition), a 78-year-old Gandhi, resting on his back in Birla House, New Delhi -- with a mudpack on his stomach -- looked “cheerful” to visitors from Indonesia.

Aware that Gandhi had been shattered by the carnage that had accompanied Partition, one of the visitors asked him to explain his bright spirits. This was the reply:
I look after my health with care… I have decided to live cheerfully even in this atmosphere of darkness and inhumanity. Moreover, I consider no one as my enemy… I also resort to certain outward remedies. You see that even while guests such as you are visiting here, I lie with a mudpack on me. Do please forgive me for my lack of manners. As the visitors rose, expressing thanks that he “had given them his valuable time,” Gandhi remarked:

The pleasure is mutual. I have also been very happy to meet you. If you have occasion to come this way [again], and I am still alive, do come and see me. I am neither a great saint nor a Mahatma such as you describe me. I am a humble servant, I am only human, as you are. In this conversation, some may locate halfa-dozen components of Gandhi’s “happiness”. There were additional ingredients. In October 1928, a 59-year-old Gandhi wrote in his weekly, Young India:

In the midst of death, life persists; in the midst of untruth, truth persists; in the midst of darkness, life persists. Hence, I gather that God is life, truth, light. He is love. He is the supreme good. (Young India, Oct. 11, 1928)

Fourteen years earlier, shortly before he left South Africa for good, a 45-year-old Gandhi, stirred because he was about to separate himself from associates and comrades with whom he had worked, struggled and gone to prison, asked them to pray that “the approbation of his own conscience would be my first, second, and last concern.” Was that where a (or the) source of his satisfaction lay?

Much later, in August 1947, the month when his dream of independence was realized, Gandhi, responding to someone wanting a message, wrote out, in Kolkata, his now-famous talisman:

I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

(A historian and biographer, Professor Rajmohan Gandhi divides his time between India and the United States, where he serves as Research Professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign)

Republished with correction. The Happiness Report was wrongly attributed to Kennedy School, Harvard. It has been brought out by Dr Rajesh K Pillania from MDI.