Racist Gandhi?

Recently, I invited a Donald Trump admirer (who has the honesty to admit that she would have voted for certain elected dictators had she lived in those times) to read Gandhi's 'The Story of My Experiments with Truth'. But she said it was too long for her. So she tried German Wikipedia instead. Soon I received a text message from him: "Hey Dhruv, I have read the part where he is in South Africa - he seems to be a thorough racist."  She followed it up by some corroboratory evidence in an email which said: "They must have read Wilipedia: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882".

The article is essentially a report on a book called 'The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire', and claims that Gandhi - albeit in his 20s - was racist.

[I am not going to write my thoughts the article, (and surely not the book, as I have not read it), but I found this friend's reaction most facinating. 

I invited this friend to read up on Gandhi's life and philosophy, but she was only trying to find ex post facto controversies, without context, or taking into account later changes in the individual. I wondered why. Perhaps this is because one expects thought leaders to have been born enlightened and perfect. 

Unfortunately, thought leaders are not, and many like Gandhi, do not claim to be perfect embodiments of enlightenment. They are lead by thought, constantly challenging their own views and beliefs. They too do evolve as their thoughts lead them to the discovery of the world and themselves.

It is a quite useless (and might I say unintelligent) pursuit to measure anyone who lived in different time with the present value-yardstick, especially based on an isolated incident or period. This incident or period may actually represent that person’s struggle to unshackle oneself off the now past values that society no longer subscribes to. The word racism, in this case, was not so much as coined (1902/1903, OED 2008) when Gandhi arrived in South Africa (1893), and had surely not occupied collective consciousness in society until much after he had left(1914). Had there been no Gandhi, whose philosophy anti-racism icons like Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela subscribed to, perhaps the collective rejection of racism may have taken longer than it has.     

But perhaps one is only interested in mud slinging on another’s character, not being interested in what that other’s character truly was.

The latter is quite likely doing the latter. The more interesting question, however, is: why?