CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM The statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in front of the Honolulu Zoo was sculpted by Stephen C. Lowe.

Statue outside zoo shows
vigorous Gandhi

You can call him Mahatma, but Gandhi never called himself that. It's an honorific, not a name, and Gandhi, in all things, was modest. The Sanskrit term for "Great Soul," Mahatma was assigned to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1915 by a chap named Rabindranath Tagore -- the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature -- after Gandhi started calling him Gurudev, or "Great Teacher." So, Gandhi could dish out greatness, but he couldn't take it.

A great fellow, nonetheless; few 20th-century figures had as much impact on the philosophy of confrontation than Gandhi, whose creed of nonviolence to root out colonial racism came along about the same time mass media did, and so it worked.

How great? While there likely aren't as many statues of Gandhi as there are streets named for Martin Luther King, they're worldwide. Statues of Gandhi exist in Tavistock Gardens, London, near University College London, where he studied law; in downtown Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, where he was first ejected from a first-class train; outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco; in Houston's Hermann Park; in Union Square Park in New York City; at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta; near the Indian Embassy in Washington; in Moscow, Paris, the Dutch capital Amsterdam; Barcelona, Spain; Lisbon, Portugal; Canberra, Australia; San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago; and Winnipeg, Canada.

And outside the Honolulu Zoo in Kapiolani Park, in a location that makes it a favorite rendezvous spot for walking tours of the park. Appropriately, Gandhi is walking in this rendition, swinging a hiking stick and bursting with vitality.

Installed in 1990 by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation and the Jhamandas Watumull Fund, it's the work of Staten Island, N.Y., sculptor Stephen C. Lowe. In fact, a good number of Gandhi statues around the world are the work of Nepal and India fanatic Lowe. He also sculpted busts of Gandhi that were presented to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.