![]() ![]() Still, Orwell points out that Gandhi’s critics hold him to an impossibly high standard, and as a result his better qualities often go unobserved. ![]() ![]() By the time Gandhi's non-violence succeeded in achieving Indian independence, Orwell claims that British officials still seemed to like and admire him. This was due not only to Gandhi’s vegetarianism and clothes of “home-spun cotton” (210) that Orwell finds distasteful it was also because of how convenient a political figure Gandhi was, at the time, for the British: he wasn’t waging an actual physical fight, which British imperialists appreciated. Orwell recalls that at the time the autobiography first appeared, Gandhi didn’t make a very good impression on him. This honesty about one's human qualities is paradoxically, for Orwell, testament to "saintliness." Orwell feels that, according to the autobiography, Gandhi’s saintliness holds up insofar as Gandhi speaks openly about his humanness, or degenerate qualities. Orwell discusses Gandhi’s character as it comes across from Gandhi’s autobiography, which Orwell recalls having read in serial form "in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper" (209). ![]() In Gandhi's case, Orwell feels that the questions that need to be asked center around Gandhi's self-consciousness and performance of asceticism, as well as the possible compromise that his political life imposed on his ascetic commitments. " Reflections on Gandhi" begins by stating, with Orwell's signature irony, that “all saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved to innocent” (209) and all saints, he claims, need to be evaluated by their particular case of saintliness. ![]()
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