Principles and Practices of Gandhi’s Ashram Life

When Mahatma Gandhi established his ashrams – first at Sabarmati in 1917 and later at Sevagram in 1936 – he was not simply creating places to live. He was building what he envisioned as working models of a just society. At the heart of ashram life was a structured ethical framework: eleven vows, known in Sanskrit as the Ekadash Vrats, that every resident was expected to observe. These were not arbitrary rules. They were Gandhi’s attempt to forge individuals who could, through personal transformation, transform the world around them.

The ashram as a living experiment 🔗

Gandhi’s ashrams were intentional communities – spaces where residents lived together under shared principles, doing everything from farming and spinning to prayer and social service. As articulated in the mission statement of Sabarmati Ashram, the aim was for members to qualify themselves for service to the country, consistent with universal welfare. The ashram was not a retreat from society but a laboratory for it.

Sevagram Ashram, established in a small village near Wardha, Maharashtra, took this vision further. Gandhi deliberately chose a rural village setting and even hoped to convert the whole village into an ashram – a sign that his experiment was always meant to scale outward into ordinary Indian life. The inmates of Sevagram followed a lifestyle in accordance with the eleven vows prescribed by Gandhi, and the ashram hosted conferences and seminars for those seeking alternatives grounded in peace, nonviolence, and social justice.

What made the ashram framework unusual was its insistence that ethical living and social change were inseparable. Gandhi believed no one could work honestly for an equitable society while being dishonest, greedy, or fearful in their private life. The eleven vows were the bridge between personal conduct and political vision.

The five ancient vows – and why Gandhi extended them 🔗

Of the eleven vows, the first five – Truth, Non-violence, Celibacy, Non-stealing, and Non-possession – are found in most of the world’s religions and are collectively called the Pancha Mahavratas, or Five Great Vows. Gandhi retained these ancient ideals but reimagined them. He then added six more vows – Bread Labour, Control of the Palate, Fearlessness, Equal Respect for All Religions, Swadeshi, and Removal of Untouchability – to address the specific moral and social failures of his time.

Gandhi understood that traditional spiritual disciplines, if practiced only for personal liberation, fell short. His sadhana – his spiritual practice – had to include society. The six additional vows were not decorative supplements; they were responses to caste discrimination, economic exploitation, colonial subjugation, and communal tension.

The core vows and what they demanded 🔗

Satya – Truth 🔗

Gandhi famously declared that Truth is God, not the other way around. For the ashram resident, observance of truth was expected not only in speech but also in thought and in action. Truth was the foundation upon which every other vow depended. An ashramite who was dishonest in thought could not genuinely practice non-violence, celibacy, or any other principle. Satya was therefore not one vow among equals – it was the axis of the entire system.

Ahimsa – Non-violence 🔗

Non-violence, for Gandhi, went far beyond not striking another person. The active expression of Ahimsa was love – equal consideration for all life, from the smallest insect to the highest human being. At the personal level, it meant removing hatred, jealousy, and the desire to harm even those who caused harm. At the social level, the goal of Ahimsa was to build a society where anti-social behavior would have no cause to exist – which meant narrowing economic gaps and treating those who erred as brothers rather than criminals. Non-violence was simultaneously a personal discipline and a political programme.

Brahmacharya – Celibacy 🔗

Gandhi understood celibacy not in its narrowest sense but as a broad movement of the self toward truth – the literal meaning of Brahmacharya is “moving toward Brahma,” the ultimate reality. Even for married ashramites, this meant approaching one’s partner as a lifelong friend in a relationship of perfect purity, rather than as an object of desire. Gandhi believed that mastery over the senses, particularly sexual energy, freed the practitioner for sustained service to others. Crucially, he insisted that a genuine Brahmachari should not shun the company of women but should be capable of relating to them with complete purity – a progressive position for his time.

Asteya – Non-stealing 🔗

Gandhi broadened the concept of theft far beyond its ordinary meaning. Nature provides just enough for our daily needs, so possessing anything more than one’s minimum requirement amounts to theft from someone else. In the ashram, this principle meant strict avoidance of waste – food, water, clothing, even paper. Gandhi himself would write replies on the blank halves of letters he received, and reuse envelopes by turning them inside out. This was not mere frugality. It was a moral commitment to taking from society only what was truly necessary.

Aparigraha – Non-possession 🔗

Non-possession is the natural extension of non-stealing: one must not hold on to anything that is not truly needed, because doing so indirectly deprives others of what they need. Gandhi applied this principle not only to material possessions but also to thought – cluttering the mind with unnecessary information was itself a form of possession. He argued that if everyone observed Aparigraha honestly, there would be no poverty and no needy persons, because the divide between those who have and those who have not would gradually disappear.

The six vows that addressed the social crisis 🔗

Sharira Shrama – Bread Labour 🔗

Gandhi held that human beings can avoid injuring both society and themselves only if they sustain their physical existence through physical labour. Every able-bodied adult in the ashram was expected to do their own work – cooking, cleaning, farming, spinning – rather than being served by others. This principle directly challenged the caste assumption that certain kinds of work were degrading. If Gandhi himself spun cotton daily, the hierarchies that made manual labor seem shameful were undermined at their root.

Asvada – Control of the Palate 🔗

The food in the ashram’s common kitchen was kept as simple as possible – without condiments, sometimes even without salt. Gandhi saw control over appetite as essential to maintaining other vows, particularly celibacy. Eating only to sustain the body for service – rather than for pleasure – was a daily practice of self-discipline. Meat, liquor, tobacco, and intoxicants were excluded from the ashram entirely.

Abhaya – Fearlessness 🔗

Gandhi had been a timid child, and he knew firsthand that fear could paralyze moral action. The Bhagavad Gita places Abhaya – fearlessness – at the head of divine attributes. Gandhi trained himself into fearlessness consciously, and he expected the same of ashramites. Without fearlessness, none of the other vows could be sustained under pressure. A person afraid of social disapproval could not stand by truth; one afraid of violence could not practice non-violence under provocation. Fearlessness was the backbone that held all other virtues upright.

Sarva Dharma Samanatva – Equal respect for all religions 🔗

In a multi-religious country torn by communal tension, Gandhi made equal respect for all faiths a formal vow of ashram life. The ashram believed that the principal faiths of the world constitute a revelation of truth, though all are shaped by imperfect human beings. Prayer meetings at the ashram included texts from multiple traditions – the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, Christian hymns. This was not mere tolerance but active recognition that no single religion held a monopoly on truth or God.

Swadeshi – Duty toward the neighbour 🔗

Gandhi taught that man is not omnipotent, and therefore serves the world best by first serving his neighbour. Swadeshi meant preferring locally made goods over imported ones – but more broadly, it meant prioritizing the welfare of those closest to you over abstract, distant causes. The ashram put this into practice through spinning khadi and promoting village industries, ensuring that economic activity circulated within communities rather than being siphoned out to distant factories. At Sabarmati, all residents were expected to spin for at least one hour each day, and homespun cotton eventually became a symbol of the entire independence movement.

Asprishyata Nivarana – Removal of untouchability 🔗

This vow had perhaps the most radical social implications. Gandhi had already challenged caste exclusion in South Africa, and upon returning to India he accepted an untouchable family into the ashram – a decision so controversial that several residents, including Kasturba Gandhi, were deeply upset. He did not flinch from his decision. The ashram employed Harijans in the common kitchen specifically to break the caste barrier. Untouchability, in Gandhi’s view, was incompatible with Ahimsa – the ideas of superior and inferior status, and of pollution through contact, directly destroyed the spirit of non-violence.

Vows as a means of societal transformation 🔗

A critical question arises: why vows, rather than mere guidelines? Gandhi insisted that vows were not signs of weakness but symbols of strength – they remove the fatal loop-hole of doing something only “as far as possible,” which means succumbing to the very first temptation. A vow is an unconditional commitment. It removes the space for negotiation with one’s own convenience.

Gandhi understood that personal vows and social goals were not separate tracks. An individual who practiced non-possession contributed to dismantling the accumulation of wealth that perpetuated inequality. One who observed non-violence in thought helped create the cultural conditions in which collective violence became harder to sustain. One who rejected untouchability as a personal daily practice challenged the social structure that produced it. The philosophy of Aparigraha can address rising consumerism and environmental unsustainability; the concept of bread labour has been effectively applied to bring behavioral change in civic programs; and fearlessness is essential for the exercise of free speech and democratic dissent.

The ashram was, in this sense, a microcosm of Gandhi’s larger vision. Gandhi and his co-residents sought to bring to life a counter-world – a physical space where inhabitants engaged in self-control and communal labor in the pursuit of spiritual and social liberation. Each vow was a thread in a larger fabric: when woven together and lived sincerely, they pointed toward a society free of exploitation, fear, discrimination, and excess.

The continuing relevance of the vows 🔗

When asked whether Gandhi’s eleven vows are relevant today, Kurangi Desai – author of an essay on the vows published by Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya, the authoritative Gandhi museum in Mumbai – recounts her husband’s counter-question: “Is a lamp relevant in darkness?” The vows cover such a wide canvas of human life – truth-telling, nonviolence, simplicity, economic ethics, social equality, interfaith respect – that their relevance is not contingent on any particular historical moment.

Across the world today, the problems the vows were designed to address remain: economic inequality driven by unchecked accumulation, communal and sectarian violence, the exploitation of labor, environmental damage from consumerism, and the persistence of social hierarchies. Gandhi’s ashram framework does not offer quick political solutions. What it offers is something more fundamental: a way of living that, if practiced consistently, makes those problems progressively harder to reproduce.

What do you think? If the eleven vows were designed as a framework for both personal discipline and social change, which of them do you think is most urgently needed in contemporary public life – and why? Can a set of ethical commitments developed in one historical context still serve as a practical guide for individuals seeking to live and act justly today?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_vows
2. http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/blog/the-legacy-of-gandhis-ashrams
3. https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/
4. https://sevagramashram.org.in/index.php/about-us/
5. https://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/educational-resources/the-eleven-vows-of-gandhiji.html
6. https://www.mkgandhi.org/faq/q9.php
7. https://bcajonline.org/journal/aparigraha-non-possession/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabarmati_Ashram
9. https://www.drishtiias.com/mains-practice-question/question-376