GANDHI AND HIS DISCIPLES

For many westerners, and increasingly Indians as well, Gandhism stopped with the Mahatma. Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave are unknown or distantly remembered as Gandhi-following politicians or social reformers. Although many of the Mahatma's leading co-workers wrote autobiographies, or had biographies written about them, and Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan movement and Jayaprakash Narayan's Total Revolution have received considerable attention, especially by Indian scholars, books about, and studies of, the rest of the Gandhi-inspired post-Gandhians have been rare.

In 1977, highly successful books by Ved Mehta and V. S. Naipaul appeared in which Gandhi and his disciples were portrayed in most unsympathetic ways. Ten years later, American writer Mark Shepard produced an uplifting book on Gandhi's disciples. In this book, Gandhi Today, Shepard asked the question about the status of the Gandhian tradition in India, whether it had died away, and what had become of the constructive workers that Gandhi sent to the villages. He concluded that with the passing of Vinoba and JP, ‘it is unlikely that the Sarvodaya Movement will again be a major force on a national level’. He noted, however, that there are still Gandhians who are a ‘vital force’ in the communities they have settled in, and it is ‘in these enclaves … that the main strength of the Sarvodaya Movement is found today.