This aspiration to relate the spirit, not the forms, of religion to the problems of everyday life runs like a thread through Gandhi's career. All of this is seen in his uneventful childhood, the slow unfolding and the near failure of his youth, his reluctant plunge into the politics of Natal, the long, unequal struggle in South Africa, and the journey into the Indian struggle for freedom, which under his leadership was to culminate in a triumph not untouched by tragedy.
Gandhi was in himself a legacy of philosophy. The long-term impact of the man warrants every comment on him in its own right. If all those individuals and movements that have been influenced by Gandhian ideals were to be listed it would read like a roll call of the great moralists of the twentieth century, and of its great crusades. The careers of men, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., or the numerous civil rights campaigns and peace movements were inspired by the ideal of passive disobedience and non-violence. Gandhi's philosophic ideas are relevant to the world and were to those two countries with which he was mainly concerned, South Africa and India.
It is often assumed that within India Gandhi suffered the fate of all political saints, which was to be placed on a pedestal and forgotten. This is untrue. The ideas of Gandhi continued to be debated among his followers, his opponents, especially the Indian communists, and the ruling elite, particularly during the rule of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Vinoba Bhave took over the Gandhian constructive movement, giving it a more radical edge through his attempt in the Bhoodan Movement to bring about a voluntary redistribution of land to the poorer peasantry, above all, to the landless. He was to be strongly supported by Jayaprkash Narayan, whose socialism took on an increasingly Gandhian complexion, and who began to devise sophisticated programs for the modernization of Indian villages but still inspired by the Gandhian anarchist vision of decentralization and self-sufficiency.
