Parenting & Family Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi slips a quiet grenade into the era’s favorite alibi: blood. “Evil inheritance” nods to the thick late-19th and early-20th century obsession with heredity - caste assumptions, colonial race “science,” and the fatalistic idea that a person’s moral fate is stamped at birth. His claim that he has “seen” children overcome it is doing rhetorical work: experience outranks theory, and the witness stand beats the laboratory. He’s not arguing from abstraction; he’s asserting moral evidence.

The hinge is the word “purity,” which in Gandhi’s vocabulary is less Victorian prudishness than spiritual discipline: the capacity for self-rule, for choosing truth over impulse. Calling it “an inherent attribute of the soul” is a direct challenge to determinism. It implies there is something in a person untouched by lineage, trauma, or social contamination - not a blank slate, but a stubborn core that can be trained into freedom.

The subtext is political as much as devotional. A nationalist movement needs recruits who believe they are redeemable and responsible, even under brutal structures. If colonialism and caste both thrive on the story that some people are born degraded, Gandhi counters with an anthropology of dignity. Still, the phrasing carries risk: “purity” can echo the very hierarchies he fought, and it can slide into moral policing. Yet its intent is unmistakable: to relocate agency from inherited stigma to inner discipline, and to make moral transformation a public fact rather than a private miracle.