SOURCE: "Saint Gandhi," in Saints and Virtues, edited by John Stratton Hawley, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 187-203.

In the following essay, Juergensmeyer considers Gandhi's lasting public image within the traditional Christian and Indian views of saintliness.

In a reminiscence entitled "Saint, Patriot and Statesman," Henry S. L. Polak writes that when he first visited Gandhi he felt that he was "in the presence of a moral giant, whose pellucid soul is a clear, still lake, in which one sees Truth clearly mirrored." Writing in the same anthology, Gandhii as We Know Him, published in 1945, the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu unleashes a burst of adjectives likening the Mahatma to the Buddha and the Christ. In her mind they are each

richly endowed with the loftiest and loveliest qualities of the human mind and spirit: an exquisite courtesy of heart, a wisdom at once profound and luminous, an unconquerable...