Only a heart purified and cleansed by prayer could be filled with the presence of God, where life became one long continuous prayer, an act of worship. Prayer was for him the final reliance upon God to the exclusion of all else. He knew that only when a person lives constantly in the sight of God, when he or she regards each thought with God as witness and its Master, could one feel Rama dwelling in the heart every moment. Such a prayer could only be offered in the spirit of non-attachment, anasakti. Moreover, when the God that he sought to realise is Truth, prayer, though externalised, was in essence directed inwards. Because Truth is not merely that we are expected to speak. It is that which alone is, it is that of which all things are made, it is that which subsists by its own power, which alone is eternal. Gandhi’s intense yearning was that such Truth should illuminate his heart.

Both satyagraha and swaraj proceed from this. Satyagraha is not only insistence upon Truth but it is an act performed with God as witness. It is swaraj, he said, when we learn to rule ourselves. To rule oneself is to attain mastery over our mind and passions, so doing we know ourselves. Swaraj is a mode of self-recognition, satyagraha is a means to that knowledge. Prayer was a constant preparation for this awareness as also a reminder of that goal, an expression of this desire. Satyagraha and swaraj gave Gandhi’s longing universality, it not only made prayer congregational, but accorded his yearning a societal and political dimension. His quest did not make him a lonely seeker or even a seer but a man who lived in the world, experienced its pain, suffering and joys with intensity, albeit with a desire to remain unaffected by it. He knew that no one can be called a mukta, free from all attachments and longings, so long as one is alive. It allowed him to place daridranarayan on the same spiritual plane as satyanarayana. It allowed him to construe search for Truth as an act of service, as a sacrificial act, as a yajna.

... contd.