First, before a more general comment on Gandhi’s reasons for supporting Varnashram, one sentence should be underlined: “This performance of one’s hereditary function is done as a matter of duty, though it naturally carries with it the earning of one’s livelihood.”

Gandhi held –in what was perhaps a stubborn clinging to an imaginary ideal village in the face of all the real misery he knew and saw—that in a well-organized society (which, obviously, no actually existing society was) producing the basic necessary material requirements of life for everyone would be easy to do. (7) He also held that to have more would be an impediment to the good life. These two premises favor the conclusion that one should not waste time and effort on a minor question (i.e. on what would be a minor question in a well-organized society), namely the question how one is going to earn one’s livelihood, but should instead get on with the major business of life, the spiritual quest for Moksha, for seeing God face to face. The premises do not imply the conclusion, but they make it more eligible than it otherwise would be. The conclusion exemplifies Gandhi’s belief that what is really important is moral progress, and it also exemplifies Gandhi’s belief that moral progress will bring as a logical consequence the solution to material problems.

Someone who holds the common belief that traditional India devoted too much attention to the religious and esthetic aspects of life, and now must emphasize the economic and material aspects in order to overcome poverty, and who wishes to find texts in Gandhi to support, or at least not oppose, such a view, might cite a hundred passages where Gandhi says things like to the famishing man God takes the form of a piece of bread, or that the reason for being of the Congress Party is to struggle against poverty, and so on. My reading is that in such passages Gandhi is not saying that for the poor material progress must come before moral progress. His whole philosophy was to the contrary. Rather, in social relationships to which poor people are parties material progress is moral progress. (7A)