Gopal Krishna Gokhale Quotes

Perhaps the attitude for us to take towards our many failures is the one adopted by Gopal Krishna Gokhale towards those of the Moderate nationalists: Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.9

It is conventionally believed that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who first called Gandhi ‘Mahatma’. But the ascription is incorrect. As early as 1910, Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’ in a letter he wrote to Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Mehta’s was a private declaration. The first public occasion on which the title may have been used was in the Kathiawari town of Gondal, which Gandhi and Kasturba visited shortly after their return to India. On 27 January 1915, the citizens of Gondal organized a reception for the Gandhis, to mark their return to the homeland and to honour their work in South Africa. At this reception, a locally respected priest named Jivram Kalidas Shastri presented Gandhi with a scroll which referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’. By the time of the Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919, the honorific ‘Mahatma’ was being widely used by Gandhi’s admirers across India. And sometimes misused. In January 1921, the bearer of the title was told that a brand of ‘Mahatma Gandhi Cigarettes’ was being marketed and sold. Gandhi was appalled, for in his view smoking was an ‘expensive vice’ which ‘fouls the breath, discolours the teeth and sometimes even causes cancer’. Through the columns of Young India, he urged the errant firm to withdraw the labels bearing his name from the market.