Beginning a fast

May 2, 2023

It was on this day in 1914 that Gandhi began a 14-day fast. It was his last few months in South Africa, and he and most of his family were living at the Phoenix Settlement, an intentional community where people took vows of simplicity. However, Gandhi’s activism had him traveling extensively, and one business trip, he received a letter from Manilal, his son who had been a mere infant when he left India in 1893.

Gandhi was crushed to learn that Manilal was having a relationship with the young wife of a friend and fellow barrister. He raced back to confront the pair, and his own failure as a father and a guardian. Gandhi undertook a week long fast as penance, and pledged to eat only one meal a day for the rest of the year. However, the following year the same issue arose again, and this time, on May 2, 1914, Gandhi began an even longer fast - two weeks this time.

Three months earlier, in February, Gandhi had also begun a fast to the death. He didn’t write about it in his autobiography, but there’s a reference to it in the Collected Works. A young teacher had violated the community rules on diet — she and some students had eaten some onion fritters — and then denied it. Gandhi announced he would stop eating until she confessed, and the next day, the woman did so. The few skipped meals were a mere blip compared to the three-week fast he would undertake a decade later.

I relate this story because it’s possible that the young teacher and the woman involved with Gandhi’s son are the same person. There’s a single reference that implies it, but all of the details are vague, and some have been deliberately obscured. But if that reference is correct, you can see the logical progression here; the incident in February served to whet his appetite for a longer fast of purification.

It’s also worth calling out the coercion involved in starting a hunger strike to get a person to confess. What would she tell her husband when they were reunited if his friend starved to death? I go back and forth on defining this type of coercion; there’s an aspect of physical coercion, in that Gandhi might end up dead through inaction. There’s maybe an aspect of economic coercion, in that the community might fall apart if Gandhi’s income suddenly stopped. Or maybe it’s a moral coercion; to create such a crisis of conscience within the person that failure to act would be unthinkable. Whatever the case, I suspect Gandhi left this fast out of his autobiography because he recognized that it wasn’t up to his usual standards.

How would you react if a person began an indefinite fast to get you to change your mind?