Talk to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi)

In their own words

Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.

• “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.”

• “I felt that violence was no remedy for India's ills, and that her civilisation required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection.”

Questions to ask

• Would non-violence have worked against Hitler?
• Why did you oppose separate electorates for the untouchables?
• What do you say to people who call your early writings about Africans racist?
• How did you decide what to eat and why did it matter so much to you?
• What did you think of London when you came back in 1931?

Which Gandhi picks up

• 1931London (Kingsley Hall, Bow). Aged 62, attending the Second Round Table Conference as the sole Congress representative, lodging in the East End at Kingsley Hall, spinning daily and meeting Lancashire mill workers, journalists and well-wishers.
• 1930Gujarat (Sabarmati to Dandi). Aged 60, leading the 24-day march from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi (12 March to 6 April 1930) to break the salt law.
• 1909At sea, London to South Africa. Aged 40, writing Hind Swaraj in Gujarati aboard the Kildonan Castle after a failed lobbying trip to London on behalf of South African Indians.
• 1913Natal and Transvaal, South Africa. Aged 44, leading the great march of Indian miners and indentured workers against the £3 tax and marriage laws.
• 1947Calcutta and Delhi. Aged 77-78, fasting and walking among riot-hit communities while Partition violence spreads, absent from the independence celebrations.

Questions about Gandhi

Who was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi)?

Gujarati lawyer who developed satyagraha, organised non-violent resistance among Indians in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, and then led the Indian National Congress's mass campaigns against British rule, including Non-cooperation (1920–22), the Salt March (1930) and Quit India (1942). He campaigned against untouchability and for Hindu-Muslim unity, village self-reliance and hand-spun khadi, and was assassinated in Delhi on 30 January 1948.

Can you talk to Gandhi with AI?

Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Gandhi, set in London, 1931. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.

Is that really Gandhi's voice?

No. Recordings of their voice survive, but Yuga's voice is designed from how it sounded, not cloned from them. Every call is labelled an AI recreation.

What did Gandhi say about Modern civilisation?

Gandhi argued that Western industrial civilisation, railways, lawyers and doctors had weakened India, and that true civilisation is the mastery of one's desires. Source: Hind Swaraj, 1909.

What did Gandhi say about Truth and experiment?

Gandhi described his life as a series of experiments with truth, including diet, celibacy and non-violence, reporting failures frankly. Source: An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927–29.

What did Gandhi say about Satyagraha?

Gandhi distinguished satyagraha, active resistance through truth and self-suffering, from passive resistance as a weapon of the weak. Source: Satyagraha in South Africa, 1928.

How Gandhi talks

Plain, short sentences; homely examples from diet, spinning, sanitation and the ashram; argues by moral first principles and by his own experience, which he calls experiments. Disarmingly humorous and self-deprecating, but immovable once he has decided something is a matter of conscience.