Diversities of Gifts

Abstract

It is necessary to say straightaway that Gandhi was not concerned with ‘the problem of religious pluralism’ in the sense that Christian theologians wrestle with it today. His was not the task of assessing rival truth claims, of reconciling apparently disparate visions, of formulating an intellectual model wherein theology can somehow or other be conceived in a global form. Pluralism never presents itself as an intellectual problem for Gandhi. Anyone with a Jain background takes it for granted. It always puzzled him that those who professed to follow the man for whom all alike were the children of God should set up barriers of allegiance between man and man, between saved and unsaved, between one sect and another, between the Christian vis-à-vis men of ‘other faiths’. The Hindu takes it for granted that there are diversities of gifts but the same spirit, that the tree of mankind has many branches and each branch a myriad leaves. There has never been, throughout the long history of the Indian peoples, anything like (to borrow a phrase) a Ptolemaic standpoint. The danger, if at all, has been of the opposite kind, a tendency to find a sameness which can underplay the genuine differences which have been shaped by history, to proclaim an essence which does not sufficiently recognise the quiddity of traditions, all those elements that are not to be classified as accidental.