Introduction

1Between February 24 and November 27, 1926, at Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, Gandhi withdrew from mass political activity and devoted much of his time and energy to translating the Gita from Sanskrit into his native Gujarati². Probably like his original listeners, today Gandhi’s readers in search for spiritual guidance are also used to find inspired pages full of a half-Christian eclecticism – the word “God”, for example, is recurrent – that helps to put the verses from the Gita in an often broader as well as challenging perspective. When they get to about the middle of the text, however, what they find is a surprisingly unique and deeply revealing commentary:

“(9-10) Who, at the time of death, with unwavering mind, with devotion, and fixing the breath rightly between the brows by the power of yoga, meditates on the Sage, the Ancient, the Ruler, Subtler than the subtlest, the Supporter of all, the Inconceivable, Glorious as the Sun beyond the darkness – he goes to that Supreme Celestial Being.
At the moment of departing, that is, when dying, one should think on that Purusha [soul] Who is beginningless, Who rules the world, and Who is, in essence, finer than the finest we can conceive.
In the sixth century BC, there ruled in Lydia a king named Croesus. He had immense wealth. The Greek saint and lawgiver, Solon, once went to see him. Croesus asked him whether anyone could be happier than he himself was. Solon’s reply was that only after a man has died can we say whether he had been happy. This same Croesus was afterwards attacked and defeated by King Cyrus of Persia. He was sentenced to be hanged. As he was being taken to the gallows, he shouted Solon’s name thrice. On being asked by Cyrus why he did that, he repeated Solon’s reply to his question. Cyrus freed him and kept him as his adviser. When the King died, he left his son in the care of Croesus. In much the same way, it is only after a man’s death that we can say whether he has passed into a higher world”³.

2The above-quoted snippet comprehends two shlokas from Gita’s chapter 8 and the full text of Gandhi’s talk addressed specifically to these lines. All of a sudden, the mention to Solon and Croesus breaks through the commentary, and immediately after disappears to not returning anymore. Gandhi, of course, was not a classicist, not even someone who qualifies as directly interested in Herodotus’ Histories for the sake of studying Greek historiography anyway: his acquaintance with the legendary interview between Croesus and Solon quite probably derived from the reading of Tolstoi’s Croesus and Solon, not necessarily from a direct work upon Herodotus’ text nor even Plutarch’s⁴. Apparently like Gandhi, Tolstoi had previously adapted the story quite freely, either by relying on the Plutarchean version – Plutarch summarizes its capital points – or directly on the Herodotean one.

3There are, however, at least two intriguing details in Gandhi’s version that seem to point to a different elaboration, and most probable to a different source, if not to a personal interpretation: the first one, that Croesus was sentenced to be hanged, appears neither in Tolstoi, nor in Plutarch, nor even in Herodotus; the second, that Cyrus, when dying, left his son in Croesus’ care, is an information that only Herodotus adduces (Hdt. 1.208)⁵. Gandhi’s version is, therefore, more complex and deeply informed than its straightforwardness displays at first sight: on the one hand, quite probably he has relied on another source, or even quoted by heart, hence somehow incorrectly, another version of the story. Or it is just a plain and simple free recreation by himself. On the other hand, if there is some dependence from Tolstoi and probably also from Plutarch, it cannot be excluded a priori a direct acquaintance with Herodotus, either. So this text will primarily investigate the probable link Gandhi-Herodotus and focus on Plutarch and Tolstoi only for the sake of clarity in establishing a probable chain when necessary.

4That Gandhi was not a classicist nor even someone to whom one might consider attributing a penchant for employing Greek texts to discuss religious or philosophical matters is not what strikes the readers most. It is the cultural crisscrossing, on the one hand, and the sharp acuteness of such a creative appropriation, on the other hand, what impresses us even today, especially when one realizes that the audience Gandhi was addressing to was not made up of scholars and perhaps nor even of literate people, but quite the opposite. Or, to phrase it differently, the kind of literary and cultural reception put into practice by Gandhi is something that anticipates what would be theorized almost a century later by C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas⁶, for example. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on two points: first, it discusses the appropriateness of the parallel spotted by Gandhi, that is, how adequate can be the use of an eventual Herodotean passage to argue a point from the Gita; and second, why such a procedure could be said to constitute a paradigm of a genuine reception theory, and how it can still be useful for contemporary studies on ancient historiography.

Gandhi on Herodotus?

5Gandhi’s commentaries summarize in a correct and orderly way many famous traits from King Croesus’ life as dramatized by Herodotus between paragraphs 30 and 91 of his Book 1. The enormous section presents, however, two high points very cleverly explored by Gandhi, the imaginary interview between Croesus and Solon (Hdt. 1.30-34)⁷, and the king’s dialogue with Cyrus after the defeat (Hdt. 1.86-91). In the first section, Croesus asks the Athenian philosopher and lawgiver who would be the happiest man on Earth, and is thrice deceived by him: Tellus would have been that happiest man, followed by the brothers Cleobis and Biton; to the king’s third question, Solon replies that being rich was not necessarily the equivalent to being happy, because Croesus’ life had not yet ended and consequently could not be properly evaluated. The conclusion of Solon’s thoughts seems to be precisely the lines Gandhi had in mind when commenting on the Gita (Hdt. 1.32.9-34.1):

“‘no one person is self-sufficient: he has some things, but lacks others. The person who has and retains more of these advantages than others, and then dies well, my lord, is the one who, in my opinion, deserves the description in question. It is necessary to consider the end of anything, however, and to see how it will turn out, because the god often offers prosperity to men, but then destroys them utterly and completely’.
33. These sentiments did not endear Solon to Croesus at all, and Croesus dismissed him as of no account. He was sure that anyone who ignored present benefits and told him to look to the end of everything was an ignoramus.
34. After Solon’s departure, the weight of divine anger descended on Croesus, in all likelihood for thinking that he was the happiest man in the world”.

6The king should still suffer the consequences of his own presumption before coming to fully meditate and understand Solon’s words. After a series of vicissitudes and mistakes that culminate in Croesus being attacked by Cyrus, almost dying in a fire, and definitely losing his empire, the former Lydian king is said to have had an interview with the conqueror. In the same position of “wise advisor”⁸ once occupied by Solon toward himself, because now deeply experimented in both sides of human affairs, Croesus became Cyrus’ adviser. The snippet – of which Gandhi has abridged several concatenated steps – is not as famous as the previous one about the interview, and so deserves to be quoted in full (Hdt. 1.86-90.1):

“86. So the Persians took Sardis and captured Croesus himself. His rule had lasted fourteen years, the siege had lasted fourteen days, and as the oracle had foretold he had put an end to a great empire – his own. The Persians took their prisoner to Cyrus, who built a huge funeral pyre and made Croesus (who was tied up) and fourteen Lydian boys climb up to the top. Perhaps he intended them to be a victory-offering for some god or other, or perhaps he wanted to fulfil a vow he had made, or perhaps he had heard that Croesus was a god-fearing man and he made him get up on to the pyre because he wanted to see if any immortal being would rescue him from being burnt alive. Anyway, that is what he did. Meanwhile (the story goes), although Croesus’ situation up on top of the pyre was desperate, his mind turned to Solon’s saying that no one who is still alive is happy, and it occurred to him how divinely inspired Solon had been to say that. This thought made him sigh and groan, and he broke a long silence by repeating the name ‘Solon’ three times.
When Cyrus heard him, he told his translators to ask Croesus who it was he was calling on. The translators went up and asked him. At first Croesus made no reply, but then, when he was coerced, he said, ‘Someone whom I would give a fortune to have every ruler in the world meet’. This was meaningless to them, of course, so they repeated their question. When they persisted and crowded around him, he told them how Solon had arrived at his court in the first place, all the way from Athens, how he had seen all his wealth and dismissed it as rubbish (or words to that effect), and how in his case everything had turned out as Solon had said it would, although his words applied to the whole of mankind – and particularly to those who thought themselves well off – just as much as they did to him. Now, the pyre had been lit, and as Croesus was telling his story, flames were licking around its edges. But when the translators relayed the story to Cyrus, he had a change of heart. He saw that he was burning alive a fellow human being, one who had been just as well off as he was; also, he was afraid of retribution, and reflected on the total lack of certainty in human life. So he told his men to waste no time in dousing the flames and getting Croesus and the others down from the pyre. When they tried, however, they found it was too late – the fire was out of control.
87. What happened next, according to the Lydian account, was this. Croesus realized that Cyrus had changed his mind. When he saw that it was too late for them to control the fire, despite everyone’s efforts to quench it, he called on Apollo. ‘If any gift of mine has pleased you,’ he cried, ‘come now and rescue me from this danger’. Weeping, he called on the god, and suddenly the clear, calm weather was replaced by gathering clouds; a storm broke, rain lashed down, and the pyre was extinguished.
As a result of this, Cyrus realized that Croesus was in the gods’ favour and was a good man. So once he had got Croesus down from the pyre he asked him who had persuaded him to invade his country and be his enemy rather than his friend. ‘My lord,’ Croesus replied, ‘it was my doing. You have gained and I have lost from it. But responsibility lies with the god of the Greeks who encouraged me to make war on you. After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose the god must have wanted this to happen.
88. That is what Croesus said. Cyrus untied him and had him seated near by. He was very impressed with him, and he and his whole entourage admired the man’s demeanour. But Croesus was silent, deep in thought. Then he turned and at the sight of the Persians looting the Lydian city he said, ‘My lord, shall I tell you what just occurred to me or is this an inappropriate time for me to speak?’.
Cyrus told him not to worry and to say whatever he wanted, so Croesus asked, ‘What are all these people rushing around and doing so eagerly?’
‘They are sacking your city’, Cyrus replied, ‘and carrying off your property’.
‘No’, Croesus replied. ‘It’s not my city and property they are stealing; none of it belongs to me any more. It is your property they are plundering’.
89. Cyrus was intrigued by Croesus’ words, so he dismissed everyone else and asked Croesus what, in his opinion, the situation held for him. Croesus answered, ‘Since the gods have given me to you as your slave, I consider it my duty to pass on to you any special insights I have. Persians are naturally aggressive, and they are not used to possessions. So if you just stand by and let them loot and keep all this valuable property, you should expect the one who gets hold of the most to initiate a coup against you. However, I have a suggestion to make, which you might like. Put men from your personal guard on sentry duty at all the city gates and have them take the spoils away from those who are trying to bring them out of the city, on the pretext that a tenth of it has to be offered to Zeus. Under these circumstances, you won’t be hated for the forcible removal of their property; they will appreciate the rightness of what you’re doing and willingly hand it over’.
90. Cyrus was delighted with what Croesus was saying; he thought the suggestion was excellent. He was full of praise for Croesus and told his personal guards to put Croesus’ idea into practice. Then he said to Croesus, ‘Your royal background, Croesus, has not affected your ability to do good deeds and offer sound advice. Whatever you would like me to give you will be yours straight away; you have only to ask’”.

7The underlined passages show that Gandhi was fully aware of what he was paraphrasing. His summary was pretty accurate and pinpointed the cardinal items of both passages, what makes it difficult to believe that he actually had not a direct acquaintance with Herodotus’ text. On the other hand, the summary is extremely sketchy – one may discard whatever idea that Gandhi’s chief interest was to establish any kind of Herodotean criticism. Regardless of Gandhi having or not a direct acquaintance with Herodotus, since he could have known the story from whatever other authors or media, what indeed is still waiting for a careful demonstration though is why to put the Gita and Herodotus in parallel: it is not clear at first sight which is – whether there is some – the relation between the shlokas and Herodotus’ Croesus and Solon, be such a strictly thematic relation (i.e. Gandhi was interested in Croesus’ or Solon’s characters) or merely conjectural (i.e. he evoked the story because in search of an allegorical meaning with which to crown his commentary on the verses). Perhaps a plausible explanation could derive from a direct glance at the original Sanskrit text (romanized):

kaviṃ purāṇam anuśāsitāram
aṇor aṇīyāṃsam anusmared yaḥ
sarvasya dhātāram acintyarūpam
ādityavarṇaṃ tamasaḥ parastāt
prayāṇakāle manasācalena
bhaktyā yukto yogabalena caiva
bhruvor madhye prāṇam āveśya samyak
sa taṃ paraṃ puruṣam upaiti divyam.

8The text of the Gita has many peculiarities in its astoundingly misleading simplicity. In a translation, say, a bit cleaner than Gandhi’s (Mahadev Desai’s actually), these shlokas would sound as

9 9

“One should meditate
on the ancient one,
the poet and ruler,
smaller than the atom,
the supporter of all,
whose shape is unknowable,
and whose colour is the sun,
beyond the dark”.

10 10

“At the time of departure,
with a motionless mind,
joined to devotion
through the strength of yoga,
after making the breath enter
between the two eyebrows,
one goes to
this divine, highest spirit” (transl. Patton 2008).

11Nothing in this text authorizes the first conclusion Gandhi extracted from Herodotus’ Solon (and alleged to have been repeated by Croesus to Cyrus, what actually cannot be found in Herodotus’ text) that “only after a man has died can we say whether he had been happy”. On the other hand, Gandhi’s final conclusion, that “it is only after a man’s death that we can say whether he has passed into a higher world” is perfectly manifested in those shlokas, however not necessarily consistent with Herodotus’ text nor even with the historian’s intentions: the subtly understated equation between “being happy” and “having passed into a higher world” is something that satisfies Gandhi’s eclecticism (philosophical and religious as well), but that one cannot spot in Herodotus’ thought. On the contrary, the notion of happiness implied by the historian is a very worldly one, more akin to what one may call a tranquil and satisfied life (like Tellus’), or a brief and glorious one (like Cleobis’ and Biton’s), with no relation at all to any sort of afterlife in whatever other world. Gandhi, to sum up, try to back the Gita with a proverbial conclusion – he cleverly does not refer explicitly the authorship of Croesus’ story – supposedly akin to the poem’s intentions, but which is actually not. Each apparent similarity seems to give rise to an analogous and precise difference.

12Gandhi’s approach to the texts or problems he is dealing with share with every narrative practice the same fundamental core concerns: how to create and weave meanings instead of simply trying a chimerical description of something taken as reality. Its main concern is how to articulate different means rather than to how most quickly address himself straight to the most useful tele: to this approach, full awareness of means are far more important than endpoints. It brings clear thinking to the foreground, not reality or a supposed correspondence between the former and the latter. Gandhi’s chief interest was on what a man should do at the moment of death to be able to meditate on the kavi-divinity and so to go straight to this kavi’s realm: Solon (when still alive), then Croesus (when almost dead), then Cyrus (when dying) would qualify, according to this reading, as men like the one the Gita suggests as the perfect one.

13If this premise is right, one can notice that there are two common grounds between the Gita, Herodotus, and Gandhi’s conclusions. The first and explicit one is the fact that the moment of death has a particular importance in human life. That such a moment is a sort of door to somewhere else which could be a happier place depending on someone’s thoughts at the moment of dying is something to be found in the Gita and in Gandhi’s thoughts only. In Herodotus, on the other hand, the moment of dying defines the sole point from which someone’s past life could be judged in hindsight. In other words, while the Gita and Gandhi are concerned about the future afterlife, it is the past the target of Herodotus’, Solon’s, or even Croesus’ meditations.

14The thematic similarities between both Herodotus and Gandhi stop here, but the kind of reception Gandhi put into practice becomes even more interesting. However apparently fortuitous, it shows, on the other hand, a striking affinity to the same kind of consciousness such as theorized by W. Pater (1839-1894), a literary critic contemporary to Gandhi. Pater’s meditations on Michelangelo’s poetry and its reception by W. Blake and V. Hugo are revealing:

“[t]he old masters indeed are simpler; their characteristics are written larger, and are easier to read, than the analogues of them in all the mixed, confused productions of the modern mind. But when once we have succeeded in defining for ourselves those characteristics, and the law of their combination, we have acquired a standard or measure which helps us to put in its right place many a vagrant genius, many an unclassified talent, many precious though imperfect products of art. It is so with the components of the true character of Michelangelo. The strange interfusion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in those who claimed to be his followers; but it is found in many of those who worked before him, and in many others down to our own time, in William Blake, for instance, and Victor Hugo, who, though not of his school, and unaware, are his true sons, and help us to understand him, as he in turn interprets and justifies them”⁹.

15C. Martindale calls this kind of reception “a work [that] can operate across history obliquely in unexpected ways”¹⁰, a definition that perfectly fits Gandhi’s eventual reading of Herodotus too. Besides, the second common ground that structures this kind of reception is perfectly adequate to be so labeled. The Gita evokes a figure said to be a “poet” or a “sage” (kavi), here identified as a transcendent divinity responsible for keeping this world as it is by meditating (upon) it permanently. If Solon, and later Croesus, cannot be said divinities in Herodotus at all, they play however a very similar role as “wise advisors” to the people they address themselves to, precisely because they constantly meditate upon human life and its possible real meanings on its very endpoints (Croesus, it is true, only after his meeting with Solon and because of his personal misfortunes).

16The kind of reception theorized by W. Pater and endorsed by C. Martindale presupposes a strongly intentional effort to preserve an original datum in a new context, no matter whether a consciously one or simply because this datum is comprised by what was once called – and I will use the word just for practicality’s sake – Weltanschauung. I am currently understanding “intentional” in the sense advocated by C. Romano and M. Jay¹¹, rather than in the one formulated by T. Crane and endorsed by D. Matravers¹²: Gandhi’s form of reception applies to be qualified “intentional” because it seems the result of a voluntary procedure concerned with present-oriented developments, not because of any indistinct attribute to be purportedly ascribed to objects¹³. The narrator invites his receivers to take part in bridging the gap between what they conceive as reality and the very act of receiving something else, thus demanding an active and cooperative role in determining not only how believable his own narration is, but consequently what remains truthful in it, too.

Reception and historiographical studies

17Gandhi’s reception of Herodotus, either direct or not, and regardless of he not being a professional historian, is no less full of insights to the historian’s work: it helps one to better understand how the textual dimension of history (i.e. historiography) is also a component part of a broader human effort we could call creative narrativity. To narrate the past is a form of instilling meaning in thoughts, precisely what every historian partakes with every other narrator. It is at the crossroads between history, narrative studies and cultural studies as well that there seems to be much still to be learned¹⁴.

18Both C. Martindale and W. Batstone, for example, make a series of points against a simplistic positivistic reception theory, what is illuminating to the case of Gandhi as well. From the first, it is worth retaining that “[m]ost versions of reception theory stress the mediated, situated, contingent (which of course does not mean the same as arbitrary) character of readings, and that includes our own readings quite as much as those of past centuries. There is no Archimedean point from which we can arrive at a final, correct meaning for any text” (p. 3-4). Also, the opinion he identifies in J. Gaisser, to whom “classical texts are not only moving but changing targets” (p. 4), or the qualification of H. Jauss’ perspective: “[g]iven the stress, within reception, on the situatedness and mediated character of all readings, there is no necessary quarrel between reception and “history’”, p. 5). Or even ponderations like “[m]y own view is that reception, on a Jaussian model, provides one intellectually coherent way of avoiding both crude presentism (‘the reading that too peremptorily assimilates a text to contemporary concerns’) and crude historicism. Antiquity and modernity, present and past, are always implicated in each other, always in dialogue – to understand either one, you need to think in terms of the other” (p. 5-6), and “we are not doomed either to a narrow and relentless presentism or to any form of historical teleology” (p. 9).

19From the second, some reflections are full of implications like “[a]ll meaning is constituted or actualized at the point of reception” (p. 14), “[w]e are always shaping and being shaped by the questions we are asking; we are always, as Heidegger likes to say, ‘underway’” (p. 16),
“[i]t is not a contradiction to say, on the one hand, that all understanding is self-understanding, made possible only by the foreknowledge and prejudices of our being in the world, and, on the other, that a text can change one’s life” (p. 18).

20The propositions of C. Martindale and W. Batstone, which transpose to the work upon classical texts contributions such as those by H. R. Jauss, W. Iser, and H. G. Gadamer, achieve a valuable complement in the criticism of T. Eagleton. The Irish critic highlights the reception theory’s contribution to the understanding of literary texts while exposing the social perspective of his practice. On the one hand, that theory has the merit of seeing reading not as a natural occurrence like breathing, but as a theoretical problem, as the orchestration of a set of strategies perhaps more complex than writing itself, because it conceives readers as co-creators, in permanent cooperation with the author, of an ever-developing project: the text. On the other hand, the critic pinpoints three risks that can undermine, if not the practice, its orientation: first, the excess of potentially infinite requirements to be fulfilled during a reading practice; second, the eventual conversion of the link between author and reader in an asymmetrical relation, similar to the one between bosses and employees in the corporate world, a kind of relation in which the Sisyphean work of fulfilling all the uncertainties of the text should be done by the latter; and finally, specifically arguing against W. Iser, the danger that such a proposal be converted into a solipsist ideology if it does not take into account the historicity of the texts it examines¹⁵.

21Historiography properly speaking, the very act of uncovering, examining, and narrating the past, is also a kind of reception: it always has to cope with interconnected narratives or even with someone else’s own narratives, either explicitly or not. When introducing himself into a long chain of kavis like the one from the Gita, or of sages like Solon, then Croesus and – why not? – Herodotus, perhaps even Plutarch and Tolstoi, Gandhi subtly reasserts his own sapiential as well as historiographic authority without the onus of converting himself into an erudite among his listeners. The parallels here intentionally suggested between two authors from so different contexts and imbued with very different concerns are not capricious ones: by using analogous narrative tenets when narrating, both showed receivers how to attain extra-textual truths through the conscious use of an intentional tool. In a post-truth world where the reverse is by far the most common to happen (i.e. the creation of fictions through rearrangements of real facts), such a tool is more than a narrative checker; it also defines a real effort at an ethical commitment to something aspiring to an empirical truth – like Gandhi’s ethical beliefs, for instance.

22The notion of history advanced here displays a curious analogy to the notion of fiction as an ontological category, not as a literary genre – “a question of how texts behave, and of how we treat them”¹⁶, according to Eagleton’s approach to literary theory. A perception like this has a profound impact not only on how fiction is to be understood; it also shifts history from a metaphysical realm to a cognitive set of relations within which coherence and creative autonomy play a completely different role from reaching an ideal historical past “wie es eigentlich gewesen”. Additionally, from D. Kahneman’s cognitive psychology one is supposed to bear in mind the notion of hindsight bias, especially for its acting as a controlling device against temptations to see truth as simply a byproduct of rationalizations that any narrator is able to forge, no matter what kind of experiences they have either lived or inquired into¹⁷. In this sense, if history is not a metaphysical realm to be discovered but the product of a human perception among several different others, it is not anything else, either. Here the notions of “event” and “signification du texte” from M. Jay and C. Romano shall be taken into account: they are the elements that configure the domain of possibilities to the writing of history and its reception as well. The best possible story built with available information can frequently behave so convincingly to the point of being entirely misleading: “it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance”¹⁸. The narratively conveyed balance between creative autonomy and controlled coherence permeates the Gandhian snippets I have been discussing so far; and the notion of reception to be extracted from them will be therefore the result of an absolutely free creative act eventually depurated by concrete data and necessary coherence, not a strict or faithful reproduction of actual readings.

23The most important contribution one can derive from Gandhi’s approach to Herodotus lies perhaps elsewhere. Understood either as a historiographical, or as a not so easily circumscribable type of reading, the kind of reception he puts into practice is worth noticing especially for not fomenting polarizations, but for trying to conciliate and integrate apparent differences into deeper shared beliefs. Either by choosing to intertwine the Gita to Herodotus – or two texts currently seen at the very roots of the cultures they supposedly emblematize; or by choosing to draw parallels between the significances of a traditional kavi and quasi-mythical characters like Solon and Croesus – and thus expanding on the same strategy once put into practice by the Greek historian, that is, putting side by side a native and a foreign paradigmatic character as well; or even by implicitly and eclectically mixing authors with so distinct ethical concerns like the anonymous poet of the Gita, Herodotus, Plutarch and Tolstoi to his own ethical beliefs, as if in search for a deeper chain of thought, Gandhi suggests that promoting mutual comprehension matters more than rejoicing in sterile or even divisive analytic distinctions. And by choosing to find points of contact between sides with so huge and distinct cultural implications, in order to put them in a mutually illuminating perspective to be framed by a unified narration, thus taking them as part of a larger picture, displays a necessary first step toward solutions for day-by-day problems, too: we should always bear in mind that Gandhi was talking to fellows who were eager for urgent spiritual as well as practical guidance during a decisively tense conjuncture in Indian history; and that now his fellows have a richer repository of paradigms with which to illuminate their own context. Choosing to remain alert to observable phenomena, deciding to instill meaning in situations which otherwise would remain whimsical or forgotten, in order that others may be able to reflect and thus improve their own lives in a continuous chain of creative solidarity, is also a way to resist collectively – precisely what Gandhi was perhaps trying to do at Satyagraha.