Orwell on Gandhi: Probing an Icon Anonymous College

George Orwell’s ‘Reflections on Gandhi’was published in Partisan Reviewa year after Gandhi’s assassination, in January, 1949. There is an undeniable admission of admiration with which Orwell writes about his reception of Gandhi’s writings and life, while offering a reproach that undermines his association with sainthood by ascribing it as “anti-human and reactionary”, by claiming that it was hardly that. On the other hand, Orwell also goes so far as to assert that “there was nothing in his [character] that you could put your finger on and call bad”, as he wallows in his efforts to navigate and categorize a balanced account of this man. As an influential and praised social and political commentator, George Orwell, who has largely been treated as a critic of Gandhi, first shared this work in a time when thoughts of memories of the man as a political activist and a liberator of the Indian people, were still fresh in the minds of many. It would be difficult to claim that despite his many reservations about the man, Orwell himself was not moved and intrigued by the character that was Mahatma Gandhi.

Orwell claims, in the very beginning, that “all saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent”. This seems...