Breaking down the question
The question supplies its own three-part structure — moralist, ascetic and man of action — and anchors it in a single text, Hind Swaraj (1909). The task is to analyse, which means using each of the three descriptions as a lens on to that text rather than narrating Gandhi's life.
The unity of the three is the argument to reach for. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi's morality, his asceticism and his activism are not separate traits but expressions of one idea: that true swaraj is self-rule in the double sense of national independence and mastery over the self, and that the means of attaining it must be as pure as the end.
How to approach it
Treat each descriptor in turn, drawing evidence from Hind Swaraj, then show how they converge. As a moralist, Gandhi indicts modern civilisation and insists on the unity of means and ends. As an ascetic, he preaches restraint, simplicity and control of the appetites. As a man of action, he offers satyagraha, or soul-force, as the practical method of resistance. Close with a critical assessment that registers the objections — Ambedkar's, and the charge of romantic anti-modernism.
Model answer
Written in 1909 as a dialogue between an Editor and a Reader, Hind Swaraj is the concentrated statement of Gandhi's philosophy, and it displays him at once as moralist, ascetic and man of action.
Gandhi the moralist. The heart of the text is a moral indictment of modern civilisation, which Gandhi calls a disease that worships the body and multiplies wants without cultivating virtue. Railways, lawyers and doctors — his three notorious examples — are condemned not as technologies but as institutions that spread bondage, quicken exploitation and weaken self-control. Against this he sets a civilisation that teaches mastery over the passions and performance of duty. His deepest moral commitment is the unity of means and ends: swaraj won by immoral means would not be swaraj at all, for, in his image, the means are the seed and the end the tree. This refusal to separate ethics from politics is what makes him, first and last, a moralist.
Gandhi the ascetic. The moral vision rests on a personal discipline. Hind Swaraj prizes simplicity, restraint and the deliberate limitation of wants — what the tradition calls aparigraha, non-possession. The critique of modern civilisation is inseparable from an ascetic ideal: the free society is one of self-sufficient villages and modest needs, and the free individual is one who has conquered fear and appetite through brahmacharya and self-denial. Asceticism here is not withdrawal from the world but the inner condition of effective public action; only the person who rules the self can help to rule the nation.
Gandhi the man of action. Hind Swaraj is finally a manual of resistance. Gandhi rejects both the mendicancy of the moderates and the terror of the extremists, offering instead satyagraha — soul-force or truth-force — the disciplined, non-violent confrontation of injustice through suffering willingly borne. Passive resistance, he insists, is the weapon of the strong, not the weak, demanding greater courage than violence. The moralist's unity of means and ends becomes here a technique of struggle: a just end pursued by the just means of non-violence.
Convergence. The three descriptions are aspects of a single conception. Swaraj, for Gandhi, is self-rule; the ascetic disciplines the self, the moralist supplies the ethical law, and the man of action deploys satyagraha to realise both in the political world. Remove any one and the others collapse — asceticism without action is mere renunciation, action without morality is mere power.
Assessment. The synthesis is powerful but not beyond criticism. Ambedkar found Gandhi's idealisation of the self-sufficient village a sentimental screen over caste oppression. Others read the wholesale rejection of modern civilisation as a romantic anti-modernism that no independent nation could sustain. Yet as Bhikhu Parekh and Partha Chatterjee argue, Hind Swaraj endures less as a programme than as a moral critique of a civilisation organised around unlimited want — and on that ground its moralist, ascetic and activist strands remain a single, coherent whole.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner wants the three labels handled through the text, so answers that drift into a general biography of Gandhi lose ground. The best scripts quarry Hind Swaraj itself — the critique of railways, lawyers and doctors, the unity of means and ends, the defence of passive resistance as the weapon of the strong.
Credit is given for showing that the three descriptions cohere in the idea of swaraj as self-rule, and for a critical close that admits Ambedkar's objection and the charge of anti-modernism. British spelling and a tight tripartite structure carry the answer into the higher band.