Anti-Christian Violence in India

It is reasonable to argue that the ascendancy of the Bharatiya Janata Party [hereafter BJP] to relative supremacy in Indian politics over the course of the last few years bears a direct relationship to the considerable, even dramatic,increase in violence against Christians and other minorities in India. In this short paper, I shall be furnishing a brief chronicle of the recent violence, besides foraying, again briefly, into such questions as the politics of conversion, the inaccuracy of claims regarding the alleged growth of the Christian population in India, and so on.
Christians in Modern India: A Brief Political and Social Survey

The history of Christianity in India goes back to a few decades after the birth of Christ, and there is evidence of Syrian Christians having established themselves in Kerala before 100 AD. India’s contacts with Christianity were renewed with the coming of the Portuguese in 1498: this was wholly inauspicious for the modern beginning of Christianity in India, since the conduct of the Portugese is without exaggeration described as barbaric. The Christian presence became more marked in some respects in the nineteenth century after British rule had been consolidated in India, though here again the pretense was often maintained that British rule had no association with Christianity. The sleight of hand is witnessed, for example, in James Mill’s fatal characterization of Indian history into three periods: Hindu; Muslim; and British.

Some of the anti-Christian sentiments harbored by contemporary Hindu extremists dwell on the time when India was under British colonial rule, and when a substantial number of Christian missionaries openly voiced crude anti-Hindu sentiments. There is also the widespread belief among advocates of a more militant Hinduism that the colonial state encouraged conversions of lower-caste Hindus and otherwise promoted Christianity as a state religion, but on the whole there is little to substantiate this view, though doubtless Christians were looked upon more sympathetically than they had been in India under Muslim or Hindu rulers. It is a remarkable fact that in 200 years when India was under British rule, the Christian population of India never exceeded 3% of the population. Though the sentiments of Hindus were often flagrantly wounded by Christian missionaries, whose insensitivity and arrogance come across in countless number of texts, missionaries today are nonetheless more often remembered for performing social work in both metropolitan centers and more remote parts of the country, and for establishing schools where the bulk of the Indian elites still receive their schooling (see Bhavana Pankaj, "India’s Christians Protest Persecution", Asian Week [7 January 1999]).

The reality faced by Christians in modern India is that they are a small minority and not noticeably present in public life. They are dwarfed by the Hindus (nearly 78% of the population) and Muslims (around 14% of the population). The much smaller Parsi population has had a far more tangible and far-reaching impact on Indian civilization as well as what is called "nation-building". The militant Hindus have spread a canard that the Christian population is increasing rapidly in India, and they have attempted to create the widespread impression that lower-caste Hindus are being forcibly converted in large numbers to Christianity. For instance, on the very day that Pope John Paul II arrived in India in late 1999, an advertisement in the form of an open letter addressed to the Pope was placed in Indian newspapers by the Citizens Committee of the Dharma Raksha Sammelan [Association for Protection of the Hindu Faith] in Chennai [Madras], which stated that "the Christian missionary activity in our nation is tearing apart families and communities in every strata of our society." The letter states that "religious conversion, which seems to be synonymous with papal work, is violence pure and simple." Purporting to speak on behalf of the nation, the letter concluded thus: "We Indians are deeply hurt by the spurt in the aggressive campaigning of the Church to convert the people of India by all available means" (see V. Sridhar, "A Numbers Game", Frontline [Madras], Vol. 16, no. 25 (27 November 1999). In fact, there have been many other similar calls for an end to conversion (for example, M. V. Kamath, "Mission Impossible: Putting an End to Conversion Activity", Times of India 13 October 1999), all implicitly based on one of more of the following assumptions, all patently false: (1) Christian missionary activity is illegal; (2) the Christian population is increasing dramatically; (3) and that conversions take place forcibly, or are otherwise inauthentic because the converts are seduced with offers of money or other forms of patronage.

The evidence to the contrary is ample. The Constitution of India (1950) recognizes the right to freedom of religious worship, and the Constituent Assembly, which drafted the Indian Constitution, recognized further that people have the right to "propagate religion". More importantly, the Census of India, which remains the most authoritative source for population statistics, clearly shows that the Christian community has stagnated and even registered a small decline in recent years. In an article published by Rajendra K. Chaddha in the magazine Organiser (31 October 1999), which is the mouthpiece for the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that has been governing India since March 1998, it was claimed that the Christian population had grown from 2.53% of the total population of India in 1981 to 2.61% of the total population. However, the Census of India tells a different, and obviously more reliable, story. While the rate of growth of the Christian population was higher than that of the population as a whole between 1921 and 1971, the gap narrowed and was eventually reversed. Thus, between 1981 and 1991, Christians declined from 2.45% to 2.32% of the entire population. Moreover, while the population of India increased by 23.79% between 1981 and 1991, the Christian population grew by only 16.89% in the same period. . The Justice Wadhava Commission of Inquiry appointed by the Government of India came to the same conclusion, and it adds the interesting fact that between 1991 and 1998 the Hindu population increased by 2.5%, while the Christian population increased by .008% (see V. Sridhar’s article in Frontline [above]; Rajeev Dhavan, "Christians in India", The Hindu (5 November 1999); and P. R. Ram, "To Be or Not To Be: The Conversion Debate", available through South Asia Citizens Wire).

In short, the most common rationale offered for violence against Christians in India, namely that the community is growing at an alarming rate through forced conversions, is absurd and has been decisively rejected by the print media and the world of scholarship. Even if the allegations made by Hindu extremists were true, they cannot be offered as an excuse for violence against another religious community. It is also the case, though the scholarly and popular literature on this question leaves much to be deisred, that recent converts to Christianity fare much worse than those Indian Christians who have been members of that faith for one or more generations. Recent converts are seen as traitors to Hinduism, as people who are against the tide of history and fail to recognize that India is -- as the Hindu militants would like to think -- a Hindu nation, and as people who are determined to weaken India in the face of opposition from hostile countries, including Pakistan. There may also be some resentment against the generally improved lifestyle of Christians: rates of literacy among both Christian men and women are higher than among Hindu men and women, and in the various indices that are used internationally to determine social and economic development, such as infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate, and death rate, Christians score better.

The Hindutva literature on conversion, finally, has entirely failed to enter into an engagement on the complex philosophical, political, and ethical questions surrounding conversion. Some of the Hindutva advocates, whose contempt for Gandhi is barely disguised, have brazenly furnished Gandhi’s views as justification for their opposition to conversion. Gandhi was not keen on conversion, partly because he held to the view that the convert had an inadquate understanding of his or her own faith; and Gandhi did not think that any one religion was superior to another. But absolutely nothing in Gandhi’s life, teachings, or writings can even remotely be summoned in support of the view that Gnadhi would have opposed a person’s right and desire to convert, and it is unthinkable that he would have countenanced the use of violence to prevent conversion. In this matter as in many others, the militant Hindus have shown themselves extraordinarily adept in abusing and manipulating Gandhi.

Anti-Christian Violence in India, 1997-2000


The media first actively began to report incidents of violence against Christians in 1997. As I have argued earlier, the increase of violence against Christians must be viewed in the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism and the ascendancy of the BJP to political power at the center of the nation. From 1964 to 1996, only 38 incidents of violence against Christians were registered in the country, though doubtless many incidents were not recorded at all; in 1997 alone, 24 incidents were noted by the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, and in 1998, the number had gone up to 90, though some Christian spokespersons have claimed that the true figure is several times higher. Hindu militants, one can safely conclude, see the rise of the BJP and other like-minded parties as an invitation to commit violence against Christians and other minorities with impunity.

Though incidents of violence against Christians have occurred in nearly all parts of India, the violence has been largely confined to north, central, and western India, to the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and the capital area of New Delhi -- not coincidentally, most of these areas have been under BJP rule in recent years. Some of the more gruesome incidents took place in eastern India, in the state of Orissa. Intimidation of Christians has extended to such acts as arson (the fire-bombing of Churches), the distribution of threatening literature, the forcible reconversion of recent converts back to Hinduism, the burning of Bibles; there have also been incidents, though much fewer in number, involving the rape of nuns and the murder of both Christian priests and missionaries. Cases of physical assault have also been recorded from various parts of the country: on 5 November 1999, 26 students -- not all Christians -- of St. Joseph’s Evening College, Bangalore, were attacked by 40 VHP activists for allegedly converting lower-caste Hindus (the Dalits) to Christianity (Walter Fernandes, "Caste as vested interest", The Hindu [4 January 2000]). In Gujarat alone, where the BJP grip over power is very strong, 22 churches were burnt or destroyed, and another 16 damaged, in 1997. In the following year, 1998, according to the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, 5 nuns were raped, 9 killed, and 25 subjected to physical abuse (see Ravi Arvind Palat, "Violence against Christians in India", New Zealand Herald [26 January 1999]; also V. Venkatesan, "A pattern of persecution", Frontline 15, no. 26 [19 December 1998]). In mid-June 2000, four churches in different parts of India were bombed, while in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, church graves were desecrated. In the same month, a church in Maharashtra was ransacked, and an evangelist working for the India Campus Crusade for Christ was found stabbed to death at his home (see Robert Marquand, "In India, a Pattern of Attacks on Christians", Christian Science Monitor ([29 June 2000]).

There have also been at least five widely known cases involving the murder of Christian clergymen, though perhaps as many as 20 priests and pastors may have been killed. Two might be mentioned by way of illustration. The entire country was shocked in January 1999 when an Australian Baptist missionary, Graham Staines, was murdered along with his two sons by being burnt alive inside a locked car. Staines had lived in India for the greater part of his life, and was working among lepers in Orissa, one of India’s most deprived regions (see the Human Rights Report and State Department Report, as cited below). His assailant, a Hindu militant by the name of Dara Singh, went around boasting about his deed, and even gave television interviews, while the police claimed that he could not be found. On 7 June 2000, the Catholic priest, George Kuzhikandam, was murdered in his sleep in a church in Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. The church cook, Vijay Ekka, who slept near the murdered clergyman and first reported the murder, was taken away by the police for interrogation, and himself died in police custody. Though the police claimed he had committed suicide, the autopsy indicated that he had been strangled. It is widely believed that the cook was silenced.

Anti-Christian violence in India has been widely noted, and in April 1999 Human Rights Watch visited the Dangs district in southeastern Gujarat, where over a period of 10 days, from 25 December 1998 to 3 January 1999, there were numerous violent and clearly premeditated attacks on Christians and their institutions. Their 1999 report on the violence perpretrated against Christians furnishes a detailed record of what they saw and heard, and provides the testimony of those victimized (it can be accessed at http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/indiachr/christians). A chronological record, as well as the historical background to the present spate of violence, can also be found in the U.S. State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999: India (released by the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Washington, DC, 9 September 1999). Shortly before dying in a car crash in Poland in the summer of 2000, Archbishop Alan de Lastic of New Delhi addressed a letter to Prime Minister Vajpayee, drawing his attention to the attacks upon Christians in all parts of the country, and stating that the thugs engaged in violent activity and attacks upon Christians "know no action will be taken [against them], and they can get away with any kind of violence" (Seema Mustafa, "Archbishop to PM: Your Silence Kills", The Asian Age (14 May 2000). The Archbishop noted that the Christian community was threatened with its worst crisis since India acquired independence in 1947 (see Pamela Constable, ‘The Burden of the Cross in India", Washington Post [3 July 2000]).


The evidence for violence against Christians in India is consequently incontrovertible. There are numerous compilations of atrocities perpetrated upon Christians, and they suggest an alarming pattern of violence: the intimidation of priests; threats placed against Christian schools; false allegations against Christian priests; the destruction of Christian institutions, such as the Damian Leprosy Hospital complex run by Catholic nuns for 31 years; attacks upon churches; assault upon Christian nuns and pastors, such as in the city of Jhansi on 2 May 2000; the distribution of scurrilous literature; and murder of Christians.

Nathuram Godse, the RSS, and the Murder of Gandhi

On 30 January 1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi, and to his countrymen and women as Bapu, the “Father of the Nation”, was shot dead by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a Chitpavan Brahmin from Pune. Much ink has been spilled on determining whether Godse was, at that time, a member of the RSS, or indeed of the Hindu Mahasabha, or perhaps of neither organization. Though Godse single-handedly carried out the execution of Gandhi, others were implicated in the assassination plot, and among those against whom the Indian government filed charges was Veer Savarkar. Godse, as investigations after Gandhi’s murder were to reveal, appears to have been close to Savarkar, a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha. Godse was certainly a frequent visitor to Savarkar’s residence, and he did not, in the time that intervened between his arrest on January 30 and his execution upon conviction of the charge of murder nearly two years later, ever disown his association with the Mahasabha.

The general consensus appears to be that Nathuram, who saw himself as a passionate and ardent defender of the Hindu motherland against the depredations of Muslims, was at one point active in the RSS but resigned his membership in the early 1930s. This mere fact, if fact it be, has been pounced upon by the RSS in the five decades following Gandhi’s assassination to argue that Godse had no association with the RSS, and curiously Nathuram’s younger brother, Gopal Godse, who was convicted of partaking in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi and served a fifteen-year jail term and still speaks in the most bitter terms of Gandhi as the betrayer of India, has himself on more than one occasion had to issue a strong rejoinder to the RSS, with whose ideological outlook he is otherwise in complete sympathy, for attempting to disguise his brother’s long-term association with the RSS. Thus, shortly after releasing Nathuram’s book, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, in December 1993, Gopal Godse in an interview with Frontline magazine stated: “All the [Godse] brothers were in the RSS. Nathuram, Dattatreya, myself and Govind. You can say we grew up in the RSS rather than in our home. It was like a family to us. Nathuram had become a baudhik karyavah [intellectual worker] in the RSS. He has said in his statement that he left the RSS. He said it because [Madhav Sadashiv] Golwalkar and the RSS were in a lot of trouble after the murder of Gandhi. But he did not leave the RSS.” [See issue of 28 January 1994]

Whether Godse formally remained a member of the RSS is much less important than the fact that though the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS had some ideological differences, both organizations were united in their extreme hostility to Gandhi as well as to Muslims. Golwalkar and Savarkar shared a platform in Pune in 1952, as Sitaram Yechury’s What Is This Hindu Rashtra (Madras: Frontline Publications, 1993) has recently documented, and it is a little-known fact that at one point the RSS, eager to foment the impression that it did not stand by the virulently anti-Muslim sentiments expressed in Golwalkar’s influential book, We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938), claimed that the author of the book was Babarao Savarkar, the brother of Veer Savarkar. Sardar Patel, the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet, was himself inclined to view the Mahasabha and the RSS as organizations that had together created an atmosphere in which, as he wrote on 18 July 1848 to the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, “such a ghastly tragedy [Gandhi’s assassination] became possible. There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in this conspiracy.” Yet, as Patel added, in terms that leave no room to doubt that from his standpoint the RSS also stood implicated in Gandhi’s assassination, “The activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of Government and the State. Our reports show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed, as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure.” Two months later, on September 11th, Patel was again unequivocal in his denunciation of the role played by the RSS in Gandhi’s assassination: addressing Golwalkar, Patel spoke about the “poison” spread by the RSS. Following Gandhi’s murder, “Even an iota of the sympathy of the Government or of the people no more remained for the RSS. In fact opposition grew. Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”

It scarcely matters, then, whether Nathuram Godse retained membership in the RSS when he shot Gandhi dead. Godse was involved in Hindu extremist organizations, including the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, his entire adult life, and the continuing attempts by RSS to evade responsibility for Gandhi’s assassination are characteristic of that extreme pusillanimity and tendency to falsehood which have always been the signal trademarks of an organization that is determined to bring the idea of Hindu Rashtra to fruition.


See also on MANAS website:

Mahatma Gandhi Home Page

“Hey Ram! The Politics of Gandhi’s Last Words”

Veer Savarkar: Ideologue of Hindutva

At a Glance...
HISTORY &
POLITICS

Veer Savarkar: Ideologue of Hindutvar

Nathuram Godse, the RSS, and the Murder of Gandhi




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ANCIENT INDIA

MUGHAL INDIA

BRITISH INDIA

GANDHI

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

INDEPENDENT INDIA

CURRENT AFFAIRS



Veer Savarkar: Ideologue of Hindutva

Vinay Lal

Vinayak Damodar (“Veer”) Savarkar can, with some justice, be described as the inspirational force behind the resurgence of militant Hinduism in contemporary India. His fame has been on the ascendancy since the Hindu right captured power in India less than a decade ago, and lately he has been lionized in the film “Veer Savarkar” by the filmmaker Sudhir Phadke, a fellow Maharashtrian. In May 2002, L. K. Advani spoke glowingly of Savarkar and Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS], as men who had “kindled fierce nationalistic spirit that contributed to India’s liberation.” Savarkar’s advocates view him as a luminous visionary, a supreme patriot who sacrificed much for the defense of Mother India, a great revolutionary and even social reformer; his opponents, who generally do not question his patriotism, nevertheless point to his political conservatism, his support of reactionary movements, and his advocacy of a communal-based politics verging on fascism.

Savarkar was born in Bhagur village in Nasik district of present-day Maharashtra on 28 May 1883 into a Chitpavan Brahmin family. His early exposure to the political activities of the Maharashtrian elite who were opposed to British rule may have come at the hands of his elder brother, Ganesh [Babarao], who is said to have been greatly inspired by the actions of Lokmanya Tilak, the Chapekar Brothers, and other revolutionaries. The Savarkar brothers were active in the Mitra Mela, a secret society formed with the aim of liberating, through the use of armed force, India from British rule. Veer Savarkar attended Fergusson College in Pune: his biographer, Dhananjay Keer, notes that Savarkar gathered around him a group of students who debated European political texts, discussed revolution, and championed swadeshi [self-reliance]. In 1906, Savarkar left for London to get credentialed in law; his passage was paid for by Shyam Krishnavarma, an Indian patriot settled in London who used his journal, The Indian Sociologist, to make a case for Indian independence. The journal was advocating violent revolution by 1909; but before then, in 1907, Savarkar had published a Marathi translation of Mazzini’s autobiography which did very well. By early 1909, according to the senior intelligence officer James Campbell Ker, author of Political Trouble in India 1907-1917 [1917, reprinted 1973 by Oriental Publishers, Delhi], Savarkar had taken charge of India House, the London headquarters of those Indians who claimed revolutionary credentials (p. 177). That year, on July 1, Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated Sir William Curzon-Wyllie at the Imperial Institute. This assassination, less than a month after Ganesh Savarkar was convicted on the charge of sedition and sentenced to transportation for life, is said to have been instigated by Savarkar’s orders; yet Savarkar himself never wielded any arms. His critics, quite rightly, describe this cowardice as typical of Savarkar’s conduct; and it is striking, of course, that nearly 40 years later Savarkar was again thought to have encouraged and instigated Nathuram Godse to murder Mahatma Gandhi, without himself having taken up arms. It is more than likely that Savarkar became a master at manipulating those who looked up to him, and sought to conduct his violent activities without explicitly implicating himself in gruesome deeds of murder.

A steady stream of publications emerged from Savarkar’s pen over a course of five decades, and his first substantial work, the Indian War of Independence, appeared in 1908, or fifty years after the rebellion of 1857-58 had been crushed. Though in this work Savarkar argued that Hindus and Muslims had stood together in resistance to the British, in later works he showed himself much less enamored of Hindu-Muslim unity, and for most of his adult life he would, in fact, become known for his advocacy of the rights of Hindus. Hindu Pad-Padashahi [1925], a treatise on Hindu Kingship, or more particularly on the glories of India under Maratha rule, showed as well the impact of political events on Savarkar’s thinking: both the Khilafat movement, as well as the Moplah Rebellion, doubtless played a part in turning Savarkar against Muslims. However, his signature piece, in this respect, was a “treatise” he penned in 1922, “Essentials of Hindutva”, a more elaborate version of which appeared in 1928 as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Nagpur, 1928). Savarkar vigorously set forth the idea that Hindus constituted a nation, bound together by common blood, and that Hindus were united “by the tie of a common heritage we pay to our great civilization -- our Hindu culture”. Savarkar eschewed the word “Hinduism”; to him, Hindutva represented the essence of the Hindu way of life. As he wrote, “If there be any word of alien growth it is this word Hinduism and so we should not allow our thoughts to get confused by this new fangled term.” The Hindus’ devotion to their motherland was supreme; indeed, whosoever was devoted to Hindustan, and considered it his or her holy land (punyabhoomi), was a Hindu.

The most elaborate legend, vigorously promoted by Savarkar’s friends and admirers, has developed around his supposed bravery. In 1910, as Savarkar was being taken to India after a warrant had been issued for his arrest on charges of sedition and treason, he escaped as his ship docked at Marseilles. Upon being recaptured, Savarkar challenged the legality of his arrest in France, but the international court at Hague, though it took the view that an illegality had been committed when Savarkar was handed over to the British police, nonetheless ruled against Savarkar. Savarkar was, at his trial in Bombay, sentenced to imprisonment for life, and transported to the Andamans. In 1922, he was sent back to India, but confined to Ratnagiri District until 1937. Yet, to put it mildly, there are serious reasons to doubt whether Savarkar was deserving of the epithet of “Veer” [brave] that was bestowed on him. The indisputable fact remains that throughout his political life, Savarkar showed himself perfectly capable of not merely negotiating with the British, but serving as an active collaborator. When confined to jail in the Andamans, Savarkar negotiated with the British to have himself set free. Moreover, when Congress refused to form a government in the Central Provinces and Bengal, the Hindu Mahasabha under Savarkar’s guidance opted to collaborate with the British. He thought it a God-given opportunity for the Mahasabha to flex its muscles while the Congress was in hibernation. Similarly, though the Congress declared itself opposed to offering the British any assistance during World War II, Savarkar was keen that Hindus should acquire experience in the use of firearms. Savarkar saw in World War II an opportunity for Hindus, who had been emasculated (in Savarkar’s view) by centuries of oppression under Muslim and British rule, and rendered incapable of even elementary knowledge in the discharge of firearms by virtue of legislation that forbid ownership of guns among Indians. to become versed in fighting strategies. Not only did the Hindu Mahasabha, whose presidency Savarkar assumed in 1937 upon the rescission of the order which confined him to Ratnagiri District, not oppose the British position in World War II, but the Mahasabha played no role in the Quit India movement and indeed even assisted the British in its suppression.

In the last analysis, Savarkar appears as an extraordinary embodiment of utter mediocrity. In the large corpus of his writings, there is barely anything to suggest a creative mind at work, and one searches in vain for any original idea. Savarkar imbibed the worst of Western political and social traditions, and his warped ideas about race superiority, the survival of the fittest, and the nation as a “blood entity”, so to speak, were derived from the most objectionable strands of Western thinking. In his avid desire to militarize the Hindus, he showed himself hostage to crude notions of realpolitik. He perfected the art of assassination and political intrigue by remote control, and his true disciple in this respect is Bal Thackeray. It is no surprise that he should appeal to the leadership of the present generation of Hindu extremists, who are similarly bereft of intellectual ideas, moral sentiments, and the barest standards of truth in public life, and whose idea of bravery entails murderous onslaught upon religious minorities. If Savarkar is at all to be remembered, let it not be forgotten that as Nathuram Godse plotted to take Mahatma Gandhi’s life, Savarkar blessed him and wished him success in his God-given task.


Further Reading:

Keer, Dhananjay. Veer Savarkar. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. The Indian War of Independence, 1857. New Delhi: Rajdhani Granthnagar, 1970; 1st ed., 1908.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Nagpur, 1928.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. Hindu Rashtra Darshan: A Collection of Presidential Speeches Delivered from the Hindu Mahasabha Platform. Bombay: Khare, 1949.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. Trans. and ed. S. T. Godbole. Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1985.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar. My Transportation for Life. Trans. V. N. Naik. Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1984; 1st ed., 1949.

Gandhi’s Not History

First published in Hindustan Times (24 August 2006), p. 10. Also published in Satyagraha 100 Years, 1906-2006: In Pursuit of Truth (Durban: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, 2006), pp. 29-33.

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In the immediate aftermath of the ferocious fighting that raged along the border between Lebanon and Israel for close to a month, and as the streets of Baghdad are daily strewn with the remains of bodies of innocent children and civilians, the 100th anniversary of one of the most significant events of recent human history is not likely to be remembered. In 1906, an Indian-born lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, not yet the Mahatma, encountered the draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance proposed by the Transvaal Government in the August 22nd issue of the government gazette, and at once decided that this legislation would have to be opposed. He saw, Gandhi later wrote, nothing “except hatred of Indians” in the proposed legislation, which, if passed, “would spell absolute ruin for the Indians in South Africa.” The Ordinance required all Indians in the Transvaal region of South Africa, eight years and older, to report to the Registrar of Asiatics and obtain, upon the submission of a complete set of fingerprints, a certificate which would then have to be produced upon demand. The Ordinance proposed stiff penalties, including deportation, for Indians who failed to comply with the terms of the Ordinance.

Fingerprints were then demanded only from criminals, and the subjection of women to such a requirement had no other objective but the humiliation of Indians. Gandhi understood well that the Ordinance effectively criminalized the entire community and must be challenged. He mobilized the Indians, who had first arrived in South Africa as indentured laborers in 1860, to offer resistance. At a meeting held in Johannesburg, 3000 Indians took an oath not to submit to a degrading and discriminatory piece of legislation, and Gandhi spoke at length on the obligation to never repudiate a pledge. Thus was born satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, and over the course of the next four decades, first in South Africa and then in India where Gandhi spent the last three decades of his life, he endeavored to perfect it, offering satyagraha not only to the British but to the world as a form of ethical politics and as a consummate lifestyle. Many in Gandhi’s own lifetime doubted its efficacy, and some claimed that satyagraha could only have succeeded against an allegedly gentlemanly opponent such as the British; many more have since claimed that the unspeakable cruelties of the twentieth century render nonviolent resistance into an effete if noble idea, and that though the world loves romantics there is little use for them in real life.

India’s resounding experiment with democracy, for all its shortcomings and the one major relapse of the mid-1970s, when an internal emergency was imposed and constitutional safeguards suspended, may owe much more to Gandhi than is commonly conceded. However, South Africa, which Gandhi claimed as his second home and which he left for good in 1914, may present a more complex case of the assessment of his legacy. The most pressing charge against Gandhi is that he did little to improve the situation of black Africans and did not draw them into the struggle against racism and the ideology of white supremacy. By what right Gandhi could have claimed to act as a spokesperson for black and colored Africans is a question that the critics have not adequately addressed. The Natal Indian Congress, in the founding of which in 1894 Gandhi had a hand, became the model for the African National Congress (ANC), and it is equally striking that black South African nationalists, from Chief Albert Luthuli to Nelson Mandela, have been forthright in pronouncing Gandhi as having exercised an incalculable influence on their thinking and on the moral tenor of the struggle against apartheid. The word satyagraha is derived from satya (truth) and agraha (firmness), and it is not implausible that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not only post-apartheid South Africa’s homage to Gandhi but a way of extending satyagraha into the twenty-first century.

If one of the first principles of Gandhian thinking is that a moral politics rests upon consideration of means rather than ends, then we are not even called upon to assess the consequences or efficacy of embracing nonviolent resistance and, more broadly, the entire worldview associated with satyagraha. The advocates of nonviolent resistance who are dismissed as woolly-headed idealists should, on the contrary, be more aggressive in requiring the proponents of violence to demonstrate that violence can produce enduring good. Just how far we have traveled in the last one hundred years is transparent from the ease with which fingerprinting, once demanded only of criminals, has now been normalized in most societies as part of the surveillance regime of the modern nation-state. There was some slight indignation when the Unites States, shortly after 9/11, began to require fingerprints from every adult visitor, but what was once seen as a form of oppression is now viewed as a routine activity. One of the least appreciated aspects of Gandhi’s worldview is his construal of deception, secrecy, and perpetration of falsehoods as forms of violence. The advocate of satyagraha may no more resort to secrecy than to violence, and it is remarkable that, before undertaking his famous salt satyagraha of 1930, Gandhi addressed a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him of his plans to resist an iniquitous piece of legislation and inviting Irwin to arrest him. Gandhi would have seen a long thread that not only ties the secret surveillance of American citizens and residents to American aggression in Iraq and the brutal culture of violence amidst which we are now living, but that knots together terrorists and their antagonists in mutual admiration for nefarious secrecy and violence. At the 100th anniversary of satyagraha, even a modicum of reflection on the debased state of our politics might assist in recuperating a place for nonviolent resistance.

Gandhi -- A Select Bibliographic Guide

A minimal familiarity with the outlines of Gandhi's life might be acquired by consulting any one of the following biographies: Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi (New York, 1969); Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (Yale, 1990): Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York, 1950); Dhananjay Keer, Mahatma Gandhi: Political Saint and Unarmed Prophet (Bombay, 1973); B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (1st ed., 1958; expanded edition, New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1981); and Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (Dutton, 1969). This list does not indicate my endorsement of any particular biography, and you can pick up some other biography of your choice. There are very short biographies of Gandhi as well, some of considerable merit, such as George Woodcock’s little study, Mohandas Gandhi, for the Modern Masters series (New York: Viking Press, 1971), Catherine Clement’s Gandhi: Father of a Nation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996); Bhikhu Parekh’s Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 1997); and Krishna Kripalani’s Gandhi: A Life (1968; reprint ed., New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1982) In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, a number of new studies of Gandhi’s life were released, but the more recent biographies of Gandhi are not demonstrably better than previous ones. For a more comprehensive account, see the 8-volume biography by D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (New Delhi, 1951), which has the advantage of reproducing many of Gandhi's speeches and writings, often in their entirety, and the 4 volumes of Pyarelal's biography, The Early Phase and The Last Phase (Ahmedabad, various years). But Tendulkar has few insights into Gandhi’s life and thinking and is predominantly a chronicler.

Reference Material and Scholarly Studies: A Brief Note

Constant use should be made of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 volumes (Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications Division, 1951-1995; this includes the supplementary volumes). Quite handy iis Index of Subjects to the Collected Works (1988). The three-volume anthology edited by Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and

Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (New York and Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989) is not only more manageable but is superbly edited, and except for specialists seeking to write on Gandhi at length, will suffice as a representative and thoughtful selection of Gandhi’s voluminous writings. There are, besides, literally hundreds of anthologies of Gandhi’s writings, and in his own lifetime Navajivan Press as well as other publishers brought out collections of Gandhi’s writings on particular subjects, such as nature cure, Hindu-Muslim relations, village reconstruction, non-violence, and so on. For a small sample, see the following booklets (and in some cases small books) of Gandhi’s thoughts on particular subjects released by Navajivan: The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism (1959); Woman’s Role in Society (1959); Trusteeship (1960); Medium of Instruction (1954); Bapu and Children (1962); Bread Labour [The Gospel of Work] (1960); and The Message of the Gita (1959). Among the more creative anthologies, the following readily come to mind: Pushpa Joshi, ed., Gandhi on Women (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1998, in association with Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi; cf. the selections found in Gandhi to the Women, ed. Anand Hingorani [Delhi, 1941]); Nehru on Gandhi (New York: John Day Company, 1942); Gandhi on Non-Violence, ed with introduction by Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions paperback, 1964 -- this is a thoughtful albeit much too brief introduction to the subject); What is Hinduism? (New Delhi: National Book Trust for Indian Council for Historical Research, 1994). An extremely useful survey on the anthologizing of Gandhi is to be found in Stephen Hay, “Anthologies Compiled from the Writings, Speeches, Letters, and Recorded Conversations of M. K. Gandhi”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 4 (October-December 1990), pp. 667-76.

There are numerous bibliographies on Gandhi, but all are severely dated. Among thousands of scholarly monographs on Gandhi, the following may be consulted with some profit and pleasure -- some are available in newer editions or reprints, even if not mentioned below:

Alter, Joseph S. Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Ambedkar, B. R. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. 1945, reprint ed., Lahore, 1977. For a contemporary rejoinder, see K. Santhanam's Ambedkar's Attack (New Delhi: Hindustan Times, 1946).

Bondurant, Joan. Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict. Rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Borman, William. Gandhi and Non-Violence. New York: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought. University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.

Dalton, Dennis. Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Dhavan, Gopinath. The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Bombay, 1946; reprint, Delhi, 1990. Extremely good for the ‘grammar’ of satyagraha.

Erikson, Erik H. Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Psychoanalytic interpretation.

Fox, Richard. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Green, Martin. The Challenge of the Mahatmas. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

Green, Martin. The Origins of Nonviolence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in their Historical Settings. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

Green, Martin. Gandhi: Voice of a New Age Revolution. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Hunt, James D. Gandhi in London. New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 1978.

Hutchins, Francis G. India’s Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1973.

Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973. Perhaps the single best study of a conventional sort of Gandhian thought.

Jordens, J. T. F. Gandhi’s Religion: A Homespun Shawl. New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan, 1998.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Fighting with Gandhi. New York, 1984.

Kapur, Sudarshan. Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Khanna, Suman. Gandhi and the Good Life. New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985.

Kishwar, Madhu. Gandhi and Women. Delhi: Manushi Prakashan, 1986. [First published in two successive issues of the Economic and Political Weekly 20, nos. 40-41 (1985).]

Nanda, B. R. Gandhi and His Critics. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1985.

Parekh, Bhikhu. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse. New Delhi: Sage, 1989.

Parekh, Bhikhu. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. London: Macmillan, 1989; reprint ed., Columbus, Missouri: South Asia Books, 1996.

Patel, Jehangir P. and Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi: The Gift of the Fight. Rasulia, Madhya Pradesh: Friends Rural Centre, 1987. Anecdotal rather than scholarly but very insightful.

Pinto, Vivek. Gandhi’s Vision and Values: The Moral Quest for Change in Indian Agriculture. New Delhi: Sage, 1998.

Pouchepadass, Jacques. Champaran and Gandhi: Planters, Peasants and Gandhian Politics. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1999. [Compare: Rajendra Prasad, Satyagraha in Champaran (2nd ed., Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1949) and D. G. Tendulkar, Gandhi in Champaran (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1957).]

Prasad, Nageshwar, ed. Hind Swaraj: A Fresh Look. Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1985.

Rao, K. L. Seshagiri. Mahatma Gandhi and Comparative Religion. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978.

Swan, Maureen. Gandhi: The South African Experience. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985. Critical of Gandhi but not wholly persuasive.

Terchek, Ronald J. Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. A study with a more expansive conception of Gandhian politics than ordinarily encountered in the literature.

Gandhi & the Nobel Peace Prize

Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, “the Great Soul”, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This has been a perennial source of unhappiness for those Indians inclined to view Gandhi as by far the most deserving candidate of the twentieth century, and the hand of Britain, and the imperial West more generally, is seen as having been instrumental in depriving Gandhi of this “great honor”. Many Nobel Laureates in Peace are themselves agreed that Gandhi should have been honored before they were honored. The Dalai Lama, in his acceptance speech in Oslo on 10 December 1989, described himself as accepting the award “as a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of non-violent action for change, Mahatma Gandhi, whose life taught and inspired me.” [See http://www.tibet.com/DL/nobelaccept.html] Many others besides Indians have pondered over Gandhi’s omission from the list of winners, and as Gwladys Fouché and Sally Bolton wrote in the Guardian not long ago, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has been “criticised for failing to honour Mahatma Gandhi” (“The Nobel Prize”, 11 October 2002). (The Peace Prize alone is conferred by a committee of the Norwegian Parliament; the other awards are handed out by a Swedish committee.) Some Indians imagine that racist sentiments prevented Gandhi from receiving this signal honor, and they are doubtless right -- to a degree. The feeling persists that this omission mars the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. When, in 2001, V S Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kofi Annan and the UN were conferred the peace prize, even a critic of the entire institution of the Nobel prizes such as the journalist Amit Gupta, who was correct to criticize both Naipaul and Annan, could not cease to mention the omission of Gandhi as one of the reasons why the Nobel Prizes stand discredited. [See Amit Sengupta, “Grateful Alive”, Hindustan Times (16 October 2001).]

When all is said and done, most middle-class Indians, the Indians who are keen on such forms of adulation from the West and believe that score-keeping in these arenas is a worthy way of measuring the progress made by nations and individuals alike, would be delighted to see Gandhi being awarded the peace prize posthumously. That would chalk up the number of Indians who have been conferred the Nobel Prize in any area. However, as I shall suggest, we should be relieved that Gandhi was not given the Nobel Peace Prize. Considering that its recipients have included naked imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt, a self-avowed terrorist such as Menachem Begin, and Henry Kissinger, the architect of the secret bombing of Cambodia, a war-monger and war criminal for whose arrest a warrant should be put out if there was any respect for the tens of thousands of the victims of Kissinger’s policies in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere, it would be doing Gandhi a discredit to place him in that company. There are, as we shall see, other compelling reasons why Gandhi is much nobler without a Nobel.

A little history on Gandhi and the Nobel Peace Prize is in order. Gandhi was nominated for the award five times -- in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and 1948. Under the rules governing the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, there was nothing to preclude the posthumous conferral of the award, though the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s own deliberations appear to have muddled the issue. On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse; that year, six nominations were received on Gandhi’s behalf. On November 18th, the committee, in a public pronouncement, declared that it had found “no suitable living candidate” for the award, thereby implying that that it was not empowered to confer posthumous awards. To be sure, there were practical questions as to who -- one or more of his sons, and their families; or Navajivan Publishing House, which was charged with publishing Gandhi’s writings; or any of the numerous institutions which received Gandhi’s blessings -- would inherit the award if it were given to Gandhi, who was on the shortlist in 1948; but this cannot have been a principal consideration in denying Gandhi the award. If, as is true, a posthumous award had never been conferred previously, here was certainly more than good cause to create a new precedent. There hadn’t been anyone quite of the stature of Gandhi before the committee’s considerations either, so in every respect the committee was called upon to be thoughtful and creative. That was, evidently, asking too much of the committee.

The first nomination of Gandhi for the Nobel Peace Prize took place in 1937. The nomination originated from among Europeans, a testament not merely to the fact that Gandhi had countless number of admirers outside India, but also to his belief that allies would never be found wanting in India’s endeavor to gain independence. Notwithstanding his critique of the modern West, Gandhi always recognized the “other” West, the marginalized, dissenting West within the West. Though Gandhi made it to the shortlist, the Committee’s advisor, a professor (now obscure) by the name of Jacob Worm-Muller, wrote of Gandhi that he is “frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.” Gandhi’s critics, among them British officials, held him responsible for the bouts of violence into which the nonviolent movement was thought to degenerate from time to time. A feeling persisted among some of his critics that Gandhi was preeminently an Indian nationalist, and that Gandhi himself was inclined to put the welfare of Indians before the good of humankind as a whole. As Worm-Muller observed, in obvious criticism of Gandhi, “One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse.” Ten years later, it was still held against him that he was a “patriot” before being an advocate of peace. In 1947, in any case, the conferral of the award upon Gandhi would have been nearly inconceivable. Mountbatten knew enough of what was transpiring in India to understand that Gandhi was the single largest force for peace in strife-ridden Calcutta, and like many others he waxed eloquent about the miracle of Calcutta. As he wrote in appreciation to Gandhi, “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large scale rioting is on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.” But many outside India, aware of the widespread killings that were taking place as India got partitioned and the new state of Pakistan came into being, might have been wondering whether India had been led astray under Gandhi’s leadership. Within India, of course, Gandhi had more than his share of detractors, and some of his opponents, not only among the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, even held him responsible for the partition and its bloodshed.

And so it is that Gandhi was never conferred the Nobel Peace Prize. But why should this be a matter of misgiving and regret, and why should we strive for such accolades? Anyone familiar with Gandhi’s life would at once recognize that Gandhi scarcely cared a jot for such forms of recognition, and it is in the fitness of thinking that Gandhi, who left this world with very little on him, and almost made a virtue of nakedness, should have been unadorned by any titles, awards, formal designations, and the like. The Nobel Prize would have made Gandhi small: as the historian Jens Arup Seip, acting as the committee’s advisor in 1947 and 1948, divined Gandhi had left such an immense ethical mark on the world that he could “only be compared to the founders of religions.” Moreover, even a cursory familiarity with Gandhi’s writings suggest that he understood that colonization of the mind is in many respects more far-reaching than economic colonialism and political domination, and one insidious and pervasive form of such colonization is the fact that Indians, as well as other people in the “developing” world, continue to look to the West to validate their lives and make them meaningful. Our obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize that was never conferred on Gandhi is not so much inspired by indignation that he was overlooked as by the feeling that we think of our lives as incomplete until we have been given proper recognition by the West. Above all, it behooves us to recall that Gandhi was deeply immersed in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Gita offers no more supreme teaching than the injunction that just duties must be pursued with detachment, without any expectation of compensation or rewards. It does Gandhi enormous discredit to continue to be agitated by an omission of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for which we should be grateful.

More Than a Man of Action

Dalton, Dennis. Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 279 pp. $29.50, cloth.

[Originally published in Gandhi Marg 16, no. 4 (Jan.-Feb. 1995):491-96.]

As India prepares to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, fatally christened the 'Mahatma', the ideas of the 'Father of the Nation' appear entirely to be in abeyance. A Sunderlal Bahuguna or a Medha Patkar may continue to derive inspiration from Gandhi's teachings and his practice of satyagraha, but for the most part the laying of floral wreaths at Gandhi's samadhi in Rajghat (and elsewhere), and the mantric and mindless invocation of his name on select occasions, appears to be the extent to which Gandhi is a presence in the minds of India's leaders and modernizing elites. With characteristic insight and premonition, and not without a touch of sadness, Gandhi was the first to pronounce upon his irrelevance in the India that was coming into shape before his eyes, and in October 1946 he went so far as to say, "I know that mine is today a voice in the wilderness" (CWMG 75:366). Intent upon doing blasphemous homage to the Mahatma, India's rulers have bid multinationals, some of them with incomes larger than the Gross Domestic Product of even some industrialized countries, to make this country once again a fair playground for profiteering and naked aggrandizement. Coca-Cola, once summarily ejected from the country's otherwise sacrosanct borders for its anti-national activities in the 1970s, accepted with alacrity an invitation to make its presence felt anew in thirsty India. When queried, India's rulers are bound to say that the Mahatma was a known advocate of prohibition, a sworn enemy of liquor, and would not have begrudged people a cool and refreshing drink, though if we may be permitted a hermeneutics of reading, it is just as certain that today Gandhi would have been more opposed to Coca-Cola and Pepsi than to alcohol.

Whatever the future of Gandhi's ideas, the scholarship on Gandhi has shown no like signs of diminishing. Dozens of books on Gandhi continue to appear every year, and hundreds if not thousands of mediocre university professors in India (and some abroad) continue to make their living as 'Gandhi specialists', peddling the teachers of a man they barely understand. The fundamental words in Gandhi's vocabulary, such as swaraj, satya, ahimsa, sarvodaya, swadeshi, satyagraha, and tapasya, have been analyzed in minute detail, and the conditions under which satyagraha can be applied if not imitated have been examined in innumerable works. Gopinath Dhavan, in a relatively early work entitled The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi (1951), set out boldly the grammar of satyagraha, and over the years a number of fairly authoritative studies, such as those by Raghavan Iyer, Joan Bondurant, and Gene Sharpe, have explored the moral and political contours of Gandhi's thought. The relationship of ends to means; the Gandhian distinction between satyagraha on the one hand, and duragraha and passive resistance on the other; Gandhi's formulations of satya and ahimsa, and their complex relation to each other -- questions like these have been the staple of scores of studies, and it is exceedingly doubtful that any fresh insights are to be gained in pursuance of these questions.

Regrettably the recent study by Dennis Dalton, who teaches political science at Barnard College, the sister institution of Columbia University, is unable to emancipate itself from the tedious burden of Gandhian scholarship. The book comes highly recommended by certain pillars of the American Indological establishment, but one has become accustomed to witnessing American scholars of Indian history and politics, members of a minuscule club, congratulating each other with avid fervor. Here and there Dalton does bring to light some hitherto ignored details of Gandhi's life, or otherwise provide a fresh interpretation of some Gandhian 'text', and the entire study suggests an extensive familiarity with the large corpus of Gandhi's writings. A case in point is Dalton's comments on Gandhi's prayer-meetings. Although others have commented on the syncretistic nature of these prayer-meetings, where texts representing a variety of religious sentiments were read, Gandhi's mode of dealing with dissenters, and his endeavors to draw them into the circle of reason and faith, have been overlooked. As Dalton notes, verses from the Koran and the Bible would be read alongside Hindu texts, unless there was some objection from a member of the audience; in that event, Gandhi would omit the prayers, and instead take as his text for the post-prayer message the subject of intolerance itself. This had the effect of inducing the audience to insist upon having the prayers read after all (p. 163). Dalton writes, then, with evident sympathy for his subject, and insofar as he remains confined to elaborating the nature of satyagraha, the relationship of swaraj to swadeshi, or any of those questions that have engaged two generations of scholars working on Gandhi, he writes with clarity and considerable discernment.

The difficulties with Dalton's book lie elsewhere, and are to be encountered from the outset, from the supposition, as the title of the book conveys, that preeminently Gandhi represents, or is about, "nonviolent power in action". The license to think so appears to have come from Gandhi himself: "I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain" (p. 1). Undoubtedly Gandhi was not a systematic philosopher, but that is a common enough observation; just as significantly, and perhaps more pointedly, he rarely told stories, a matter that has escaped the attention of scholars. Satyagraha is the name that Gandhi after much soul-searching gave to his movement and to the observance of non-violence in political life; and as it is his practice of non-violent resistance that seemingly provided the inspiration to Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Daniel Dolci, and others who have valiantly struggled for political reform and social justice, it has perforce become easy to think of Gandhi as belonging within the realm of action. It is Gandhi's translation of ideas into action that, to follow Dalton's own mode of reasoning, made him into a more revolutionary, lasting, and 'relevant' figure than Malcolm X, whose promises remained largely unfulfilled.

While recognizing that Gandhi authored the theory of satyagraha, and then launched a movement, even a mass movement, that he hoped to ground in the principles of satyagraha, Dalton allows the distinction between 'ideas' and 'action' to obtrude upon his understanding of Gandhi, and as a consequence the most enduring aspects of Gandhi's thought escape him. It is in his little tract of 1909, Hind Swaraj, that Gandhi first set out his critique of modern civilization and its pathologies, and to the end he remained dedicated to the ideas he had propounded in Hind Swaraj. In 1938, for example, Gandhi said of his little tract that "after the stormy thirty years through which I have since passed I have seen nothing to make me alter the view expounded in it" (p. 18). Dalton admits all this, but is nonetheless keen on paring away its excesses: "It is a brief polemical tract", he says of Hind Swaraj, "more than a logical development of a serious and measured argument: written hastily . . . it suffers from occasional disjointedness and egregious overstatement.." Since the brunt of Dalton's argument in his study of Gandhi is to suggest that Gandhi's achievement lay in embracing an 'inclusivist' vision, a philosophy devoid of a distinction between the 'Self and the 'Other' (see, for example, p. 6, 90, 162), he finds himself rejecting Hind Swaraj as a manifesto, at least partially, of the "exclusivist' variety, a work marked and bedeviled by a polarization of "us" and "them", Western materialism against Indian spirituality, and so forth.

Had Dalton inquired into Gandhi's conception of the 'Other', his argument might well have been tenable and persuasive. If Gandhi chose not to reject Hind Swaraj even in his declining years, when infirmity and the illnesses of old age would have been expected to make him less prone to a "sweeping denunciation of doctors and hospitals" that Dalton so deplores, even characterizing Gandhi's arguments as "lapses into pure fantasy", it is precisely because his manifesto heralded a critique of modernity. The 'Other', unlike what Dalton imagines, is scarcely the Englishman, or even Western civilization; and if it is the West, it is that predominant part of the West which had allied itself with the ambitions and project of modernity. As Ashis Nandy has so brilliantly argued in a number of works, with which Dalton appears to have no familiarity, and which have made Gandhi once more a figure to be reckoned with among many Indian intellectuals for whom the Mahatma was all but dead, Gandhi was engaged in a critique of modernity, and in offering that critique he wished to ally himself with the repressed, feminine side of the West, and with those elements in Western civilization which colonialism and conquest had rendered recessive. The very form in which Hind Swaraj is cast, as a dialogue between the "Reader" and the "Editor", is meant to reflect its dialogic and dialectic enterprise. Offering an essentially realist reading of Hind Swaraj, in which the tract is rendered as a "high-water mark of his [Gandhi's] exclusivist ideology", Dalton cannot account either for the special place that Hind Swaraj would continue to occupy in Gandhi's mind, or for its status as a foundational work of anti-Enlightenment ideology, or for its principled critique of historicism and instrumental rationality. If it is at all true, as Dalton maintains, that Gandhi in Hind Swaraj is guilty of "the depiction of social and political realities in antagonistic terms of unbridgeable dichotomies" (p. 20), he should have asked what the "us" and "them" signify. How could "them" have been Britons, or Western civilization, when Gandhi was certain that the mere substitution of Indians for the British without a fundamental alteration in the modes of governance was scarcely to be preferred to English rule? Gandhi was not without his sense of the 'Other', and while he had too much respect for persons and civilizations to render them into the 'Other', he was wholly prepared to render history and realpolitik into the 'Other'.

Similar confusions prevail in Dalton's discussion of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. The wretched life of Bakha, the hero of the novel who is condemned to removing garbage and human faeces for his likelihood, is certainly an apt and moving illustration of the manner in which an entire class of people in India have been systematically deprived of their rights and rendered into outcastes. The Christian missionary whom Bakha encounters speaks to him of the universal brotherhood of man and strikes a chord within him; and Gandhi, whose darshan Bakha seeks just as eagerly as any other villager, awakens him to a consciousness of his worth as a human being, and the inherent dignity of all human labor. Bakha is brought to the awareness that the brahman is no superior to the shudra, and that it is only by the contrivance of the upper castes that the shudras and untouchables have been systematically oppressed. But though Bakha may be consoled by Gandhi's attempts to make Indian society more inclusive, and though the nobility of the Mahatma's teachings on the equal worth of all human labor may leave its impress upon his mind, he is scarcely released from the necessity of having to undertake the removal of others' night soil. Thus, when by chance he happens to hear of the flush toilet, which holds out the promise of rendering obsolete the task of the scavenger, at long last hope swells within him. This is the irony of Anand's humanist reading of Gandhi: noble as are the teachings of the Mahatma, the immediacy and efficiency of the technological solution might well be more appealing. Dalton, however, appears to miss this irony; thus, according to him, "Anand saw in Gandhi's action a striking truth: that the practice of untouchability had divided Indian society with a persuasive sense of exclusiveness and against this Gandhi's inclusive spirit had spread unity and uplifted members of the harijan community" (p. 57). In this naive reading, the tension between the moral and the technological, which is assuredly one of the central problems in our engagement with modernity, disappears and Bakha is almost rendered into a convert to Gandhi's cause. There was, as Anand suggested through the figure of Bakha, almost an element of the archaic in Gandhi, but Dalton fails to interrogate this reading, instead satisfying himself here (and elsewhere) with some exceedingly long quotations. This is disappointing, for what is indeed most problematic about the Dalit movement today is its largely uncritical support of modernization and the regime of development, which owes a great deal, not unjustifiably, to the deep distrust with which Ambedkar viewed the structures of village India.

If Dalton's reading of Anand's Untouchable is unsatisfactory, he altogether ignores Ambedkar, which is all the more surprising in view of the fact that a chapter is given over to critiques of Gandhi emanating from Tagore and M. N. Roy. From almost no one else (apart from some Marxists) did Gandhi face such overt hostility as he did from Ambedkar, and Gandhi's endeavors to improve the conditions of untouchables, and draw them into the fold of Hindu society, continue to be matters of acute controversy, as some recent disparaging remarks by Mayavati and members of the Bahujan Samajvad Party suggest. Gandhi's complex relationship with Ambedkar is one that Dalton should not have overlooked, for it is only through a nuanced reading, such as that offered by D. R. Nagaraj in a recent study, that we can begin to appreciate how far, over a period of ten years and more, Gandhi and Ambedkar "had internalized each other.". If Ambedkar was brought around to the realization that Gandhi's dialectical method for the reform of Hinduism was not without merit, Gandhi came to appreciate Ambedkar's insistence on the material reform of social institutions. But this is not Dalton's insight: he sees, quite predictably, only enmity and contempt for Gandhi on Ambedkar's part (p. 64).

Dalton furnishes a similarly conventional reading of the complex relationship between Tagore and Gandhi. A great deal has been written on this, though a remark that Ashis Nandy attributes to the anthropologist Surajit Sinha is more suggestive than anything that Dalton or most other writers have to say on the subject: While "Tagore wanted to turn all Indians into Brahmans, Gandhi sought to turn them into Shudras." Tagore spoke from a lofty pedestal, while Gandhi worked in the slum of politics, but both shared a profound respect for Indian civilization. The brunt of Dalton's argument is that though Gandhi offered a critique of the Western nation-state system, he remained a staunch supporter of nationalism, and it is in this respect that Tagore and he had to part ways (pp. 67-78). "Nationalism is a great menace", wrote Tagore, adding for good measure: "It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India's troubles." Dalton concedes that Gandhi, like Tagore, recognized that India's problems were preeminently social rather than political, but in his view Gandhi remained an unremitting nationalist. As Gandhi himself was to write, "Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian." In Dalton's view, Gandhi not merely endorsed nationalism, he also "dismissed all attacks" on it (p. 75).

Without even explaining what Gandhi might have construed by nationalism, Dalton is unable to sustain his argument. His understanding of Tagore is less problematic, though a close reading of not only Tagore's political essays but also his novels on the subject of nationalism -- Gora, Ghare-Baire [The Home and the World], Char Adhyay [Four Chapters] -- suggests that Tagore, while critical of the cult of nationalism and the unthinking sacrifices it demanded of the youth of India, was quite sympathetic to nationalism insofar as it was congruent with both 'internationalism' and the ethos of Indian civilization. Failing to make a distinction between nationalism and patriotism, between nationalism of the western variety and a nationalism that sought to predicate itself on all that colonialism sought to suppress, Dalton is unable to get a grip on Gandhi, and thus it escapes him that for Gandhi "nationalism began to include a critique of nationalism." The "fear of nationalism" was common to both Tagore and Gandhi, and as Ashis Nandy has put it in his inimitable way, "They did not want their society to be caught in a situation where the idea of the Indian nation would supersede that of the Indian civilization, and where the actual ways of life of Indians would be assessed solely in terms of the needs of an imaginary nation-state called India."

While Dalton's book makes for easy reading, and is in some respects a good introduction to Gandhi's thought, besides being sympathetic to its subject, it does not offer a very imaginative reading of the Mahatma's life. In the chapter on Gandhi's march to the sea at Dandi, where he made salt in defiance of the laws of the land, Dalton is able to bring out the ambiguity in the official British response to him. As Dalton argues, it is the strength of satyagraha that it can evoke such ambiguity and draw the 'Other' into the circle of inclusivity, but this argument is scarcely novel. Indeed, as students of Gandhi's life are only too well aware, Gandhi was able to work on the feelings of General Smuts in South Africa in much the same way as he was able to bring the British to the negotiating table many years later in India. What Dalton might have paused to reflect on is that Gandhi chose to initiate his revolt by way of walking to the sea. For Gandhi, walking stood as a metaphor for an entire way of life, a mode of being in which one stayed within limits. As Gandhi had written in Hind Swaraj, one should only travel as far as one's hands and feet can carry one, and if modernity was construed by him as a plague, it was precisely because modernity had the fatal arrogance to transcend limits.

In the concluding part of his book, Dalton draws on some comparisons between Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and even Plato. On the subject of Plato, it appears to me that the comparison is too far-fetched to merit comment, and even faintly ludicrous. Dalton's rationale for viewing Gandhi from the Platonic 'angle' is that both were idealists and exponents of 'freedom', but so were a hundred other principal figures over the last two millennia, and any characterization of Plato as a philosopher of freedom is only possible if one altogether ignores the fundamentally totalitarian basis of his thought. In certain respects both were utopian thinkers, but what does Plato's ideal Republic share with Gandhi's Ramrajya? There has never really been a tradition of utopian thinking in India until recently, not if by utopia we mean technocracy and a blue-print for social engineering. As for the American associations with Gandhi, the 'influence' of Thoreau on Gandhi, and of Gandhi on King, is now a commonplace of works on nonviolent theory and action. Undoubtedly Martin Luther King did draw on the teachings of Gandhi, and nonviolence was the mainstay of the civil rights movement in the United States. But this is as far as the comparison can be carried, for almost nowhere in King is there a critique of modernity, or of the nation-state. Of course King was aware of the abuses of which a nation-state was capable, and it was his genius that made him link America's involvement in the unholy war in Vietnam to the repression unleashed upon African-Americans in the United States, but he was prepared to accept the modern world-system. Gandhi's views on masculinity and femininity, his eating habits, his recourse to spinning and abandonment of western dress, his advocacy of swadeshi: all this has as much to do with non-violence as his practices in the domain of political action. The same cannot be said for King, whose understanding of non-violence was less far-reaching, and who could not offer the kind of critique of the modern world-system that was so central a plank of Gandhi's thought. King might, in fact, be more accurately characterized as that singular 'man of action' that Gandhi appears to be in Dalton's interpretation.

Gambling on Gandhi
Vinay Lal
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
[Published as “Experiments with Truth: Gambling with Gandhi”, Times of India (2 October 2006). Also published as “Gambling on Gandhi”, Daily Star (Dhaka), 8 October 2006), and under the same title in Asia Media on 10 October 2006


It is that time of the year when, in a ritual invocation, many people find it necessary to proclaim that Mohandas Gandhi, in India also the ‘Father of the Nation’, is still ‘relevant’. There are those who, witnessing the continuing violence in Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan, or the recently ‘concluded’ blitzkrieg launched by Israel on Lebanon, or indeed the myriad other instances of acts of violence, terror, and aggression that comprise the daily news bulletins, aver that Gandhi has never been more necessary. Since the human addiction to violence scarcely seems to have diminished, the Gandhians view the Mahatma’s staying power as a self-evident truth; however, another class of his admirers read the same evidence rather differently, as an unfortunate sign of the fact that Gandhi’s teachings have been repudiated if not rubbished. The small voice of nonviolence, many agree, is seldom heard in the din of violence.

In 1907, the Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, published a book entitled What Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel Today? Croce knew better than to ask if Hegel was ‘relevant’, which is, to put it bluntly, a word strictly for the unintelligent, certainly for those who are apolitical. Nevertheless, if the more familiar variation of this question inescapably presents itself to anyone confronting the figure of Gandhi, we must surely ask what kind of Gandhi, and whose Gandhi, we seek to invoke when we wish to stress his relevance. One of the most enduring aspects of Gandhi’s life, one only infrequently understood by most of his disciples and admirers, is that he seldom allowed himself the comfort of platitudes, just he was quite mindless of established conventions, the protocols of social science discourse, and the known parameters of dissent. Around the same time that Croce had finished writing his book on Hegel, the young Gandhi, providentially ensconced in South Africa, was embarked on a novel political and moral experiment. Quite oblivious to history, he declared, in his seminal tract, Hind Swaraj, that ‘Nonviolence is as old as the hills’. At the same time, he was the first to recognize that where others had embraced nonviolence strictly from expediency, ahimsa was for him an inextricable part of his being. He was always the first to recognize that he was his own master and disciple and was unlikely to carry anyone alongside him.

Even many who openly admire Gandhi doubt the efficaciousness of satyagraha. In his own lifetime, many claimed that it could only have succeeded against an allegedly mild-mannered opponent such as the British. If Gandhi could not forestall his own violent death, if indeed his teachings appeared to have left little impression upon his own countrymen, should we at all expect the primacy of nonviolence to be recognized by actors in the modern nation-state system which was born of violence and, as contemporary politics more than adequately demonstrates, feeds on it at every turn? In his defense, Gandhi argued that nonviolence is not merely a weapon to be adopted or abandoned at random will, and that practitioners of nonviolence are ethically bound to understand that shortcomings in the application of nonviolence do not reflect upon any limitations inherent to nonviolence itself. Moreover, though it is commonplace to view Gandhi’s adherence to nonviolence as a measure of his alleged romanticism and failure to recognize the inescapably coercive nature of modern politics, it is telling that Gandhi did not construe himself as an uncritical proselytizer on its behalf. When asked by the American journalist Louis Fischer why he did not preach nonviolence to the West, Gandhi replied: ‘How can I preach nonviolence to the West, when I have not even convinced India? I am a spent bullet.’ However enthusiastic a missionary Gandhi may have been in the cause of ahimsa, he abided by the injunction that it is morally indefensible to propagate teachings that one is unable to observe in one’s own life or within the ambit of one’s own community.

On a recent visit to South Africa, I attended a special screening, cosponsored by the Indian Consulate-General, of Shyam Benegal’s ‘The Making of the Mahatma’ at a cinema complex in Durban on September 11th. Such is, of course, the American monopoly on world events that by far the greater majority of people will have to be reminded that September 11th marks not merely the fifth anniversary of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, but also the anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende’s government in Chile and, even more significantly, the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of satyagraha by Gandhi in Johannesburg. This cinema stands in the midst of the Suncoast Casino complex, and by way of refreshments invitees were offered free Coca-Cola and popcorn. Gandhians will doubtless take umbrage at this heady combination of junk food, sugared drinks, and the ultimate vice of gambling being put together at an ostensible homage to the Mahatma. It is certainly true that the well-intentioned admirers of Gandhi remain utterly clueless about Gandhi, and do not understand that Gandhi, engaged in the relentless pursuit of truth, would have been at least as vociferous an opponent of sugar, modernity’s preeminent mass killer, as he was of alcohol.

In truth, however, the casino may be the most apposite place to reflect on Gandhi. His followers might be reminded that Gandhi took a great gamble when he endeavored, as his assassin charged, to foist nonviolence upon India. Like that other troubled gambler and paragon of truth in Indian civilization, Yudhisthira, Gandhi gambled away everything and put his life on the spot. No more interesting gamble has perhaps ever been waged in contemporary history, and Gandhi’s critique of modern knowledge systems, his interrogation of received notions of politics, development, and dissent, and his suturing of nonviolence to mass resistance all stand forth as vivid testimony of his political genius and ethical probity. We should be immensely grateful that he took the gamble that he did.

The question for us, therefore, is just this: will we content ourselves with mindless discussions of his ‘relevance’, or are we willing to gamble ourselves on Gandhi?



Gandhian Ecology
Vinay Lal
It is tempting to think that Gandhi may have been an "early environmentalist", and yet there appear to be insuperable problems in embracing this view. His views on the exploitation of nature can be reasonably inferred from his famous pronouncement that the earth has enough to satisfy everyone’s needs but not everyone’s greed. Yet Gandhi appears to have been remarkably reticent on the relationship of humans to their external environment, and it is striking that he never explicitly initiated an environmental movement, nor does the word ‘ecology’ appear in his writings. The 50,000 pages of his published writings have relatively little to convey about trees, animals, vegetation, and landscapes, with the notable exception of pages devoted to the subject of cow-protection and the goat that Gandhi kept by his side.

It is also doubtful that he would have contemplated with equanimity the setting aside of tracts of land, forests, and woods as "wilderness areas", though scarcely for the same reasons for which developers, industrialists, loggers, and financiers object to such altruism. Though an admirer of Thoreau's writings, such as the essay on "Civil Disobedience", Gandhi would not have thought much of the enterprise, rather familiar to him from the Indian tradition, of retreating into the woods. He was by no means averse to the idea of the retreat, but Gandhi spent an entire lifetime endeavoring to remain otherworldly while wholly enmeshed in the ugly affairs of the world. The problems posed, for example, by the man-eating tigers of Kumaon, made famous by Jim Corbett, would have left less of a moral impression upon him than those problems which are the handiwork of men who let the brute within them triumph. It is reported that when the English historian Edward Thompson once remarked to Gandhi that wildlife was rapidly disappearing in India, Gandhi replied: "wildlife is decreasing in the jungles, but it is increasing in the towns."

Thus neither ‘ecologist’ nor ‘environmentalist’ seem to sit on Gandhi’s frame with ease. And, yet, few people acquainted with Gandhi’s life, or with environmental movements in India, would cavil at the suggestion that Gandhi has been the inspirational force behind the ecological awareness of contemporary Indians. It may be mistaken to speak of the Chipko movement and the Narmada Bachao Andolan ["Save the Narmada Movement"] as "Gandhian", since any such reading perforce ignores the traditions of peasant resistance, the force of customary practices, and the appeal of localized systems of knowledge, but the spirit of Gandhi has undoubtedly moved Indian environmentalists. Not only that: far beyond the confines of Indian environmental movements, exponents of deep ecology have spoken glowingly of the impress of Gandhi’s thought upon them. Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher with whose name deep ecology is inextricably intertwined, has testified that from Gandhi he learnt that the power of non-violence could only be realized after the awareness of "the essential oneness of all life."

To comprehend the ecological dimensions of Gandhian thinking and practice, we shall have to go well beyond the ordinary implications conveyed by the categories of ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’; indeed, we may not even find much in these words, as they are conventionally understood, to bring us close to Gandhi, unless we are prepared to concede that ethics, ecology, and politics were all closely and even indistinguishably interwoven into the fabric of his thought and social practices. If, for instance, his practice of observing twenty-four hours of silence on a regular basis was a mode of conserving his energy, entering into an introspective state, and listening to the still voice within, it was also a way of signifying his dissent from ordinary models of communication with the British and establishing the discourse on his own terms. Similarly, Gandhi deployed fasting not only to open negotiations with the British or (more frequently) various Indian communities, but to cleanse his own body, free his mind of impure thoughts, feminize the public realm, and even to partake in the experience of deprivation from which countless millions of Indians suffered. Gandhi deplored the idea of waste, and fasting was a sure means of ascertaining the true needs of the body and preserving its ecological equanimity.

The ecological vision of Gandhi’s life opens itself before us in myriad ways. First, as nature provides for the largest animals as much as it provides for its smallest creations, so Gandhi allowed this principle to guide him in his political and social relations with every woman and man with whom he came in contact. Gandhi’s close disciple and attendant, Mirabehn, wrote that while he worked alongside everyone else in the ashram, he would carry on his voluminous correspondence and grant interviews. "Big people of all parties, and of many different nations would come to see Bapu, but he would give equal attention to the poorest peasant who might come with a genuine problem." In the midst of important political negotiations with senior British officials, he would take the time to tend to his goat. Gandhi remained supremely indifferent to considerations of power, prestige, and status in choosing his companions; similarly, he was as attentive to the minutest details as he was to matters of national importance. One of his associates has reported -- and such stories proliferate -- that when news reached Gandhi of the illness of the daughter of a friend, he wrote to her a long letter in the midst of an intense political struggle in Rajkot, detailing the medicines that she was to take, the food that she was to avoid, and the precautions she was to exercise. His own grand-niece, pointing to the meticulous care with which Gandhi tended to her personal needs, all the while that he was engaged in negotiations for Indian independence, perhaps showered him with the most unusual honor when, in writing a short book about him, she called it Bapu -- My Mother.

Secondly, without being an advocate of wilderness as that is commonly understood today, Gandhi was resolutely of the view that nature should be allowed to take its own course. Arne Naess has written that he "even prohibited people from having a stock of medicines against poisonous bites. He believed in the possibility of satisfactory co-existence and he proved right. There were no accidents . . ." There is far more to these narratives than his rejection of modern medicine. Gandhi scarcely required the verdict of the biologist, wildlife trainer, or zoologist to hold to the view that nature’s creatures mind their own business, and that if humans were to do the same, we would not be required to legislate the health of all species. On occasion a cobra would come into Gandhi’s room: there were clear instructions that it was not to be killed even if it bit Gandhi, though Gandhi did not prevent others from killing snakes. "I do not want to live", wrote Gandhi, "at the cost of the life even of a snake." Gandhi was quite willing to share his universe with animals and reptiles, without rendering them into objects of pity, curiosity, or amusement.

Thirdly, Gandhi transformed the idea of waste and rendered it pregnant with meanings that were the inverse of those meanings invested in it by European regimes, which represented the lands that they conquered as ‘unproductive’ and ‘wasteful’, and requiring only the energy and intelligence of the white man to render them useful to humans. Gandhi, contrariwise, was inclined to the view that man was prone to transform whatever he touched, howsoever fertile, fecund, or productive, into waste. His close disciple and associate, Kaka Kalelkar, narrates that he was in the habit of breaking off an entire twig merely for four or five neem leaves he needed to rub on the fibers of the carding-bow to make its strings pliant and supple. When Gandhi saw that, he remarked: "This is violence. We should pluck the required number of leaves after offering an apology to the tree for doing so. But you broke off the whole twig, which is wasteful and wrong." Gandhi also described himself as pained that people would "pluck masses of delicate blossoms" and fling them in his face or string them around his neck as a garland.

Yet this alone was not wasteful: there was also human waste, around the disposal of which an entire and none too savory history of India can be written. While it was a matter of shame that Indian society had set apart a special class of people to deal with the disposal of human excrement, whose occupation made them the most despised members of society, Gandhi found it imperative to bring this matter to the fore and make it as much a subject of national importance as the attainment of political independence and the reform of degraded institutions. Unlike the vast majority of caste Hindus, Gandhi did not allow anyone else to dispose off his waste. His ashrams were repositories for endeavors to change human waste into organic fertilizer. Moreover, during the course of the last twenty years of his life, he was engaged in ceaseless experiments to invent toilets that would be less of a drain on scarce water resources. If Gandhi had done nothing else in his life, one suspects that he would still find a place in histories of sanitation engineering in India; he would also be remembered as one caste Hindu who did not hesitate to wield publicly the toilet broom.

Fourthly, and this is a point that cannot be belabored enough, Gandhi did not make of his ecological sensitivities a cult or religion to which unquestioning fealty was demanded. One writer credits him with the saying, "I am a puritan myself but I am catholic towards others". His attitude towards meat is illustrative of his catholicity in many respects: Gandhi was a strict vegetarian, some might say in the "unreflective" manner in which many Indians are vegetarians from birth. He was aware, as his writings amply demonstrate, of the cruelty to animals, but he may have been unaware of the argument, which is widely encountered in the ecological literature today, about the extreme pressures upon the soil and water resources induced by the meat industry. In this matter, as in many others bearing upon critical elements of his thought and ethical practices, the anecdotal literature is more revealing, more suggestive of the extraordinary notion of largesse which informed every action of his life. Once, when he had an European visitor at his ashram, where only vegetarian meals were prepared, Gandhi had meat served to him. This surprised everyone, but Gandhi, who had come to understand that his visitor was habituated to meat at every meal, construed it as unacceptable coercion to inflict a new diet upon him.

Gandhi himself partook of milk and milk products, unlike those who style themselves ‘vegans’ in the United States, and his reverence for life and respect for animals did not border on that fanaticism which is only another name for violence. Jehangir Patel, an associate of Gandhi, has written that one day his intimate disciple and attendant, Mirabehn, came running to him in an agitated state of mind. "Bapu [the affectionately respectful term for Gandhi] won't be able to eat his breakfast", she said. "Some one has put meat into the fridge where his food is. How could you allow such a thing?" The cook, Ali, explained that he had gotten the meat for the dogs, and offered to remove it at once. Jehangir asked him to let the meat remain there, and Gandhi himself was fetched. Jehangir then apologized to Gandhi: "I did not think of speaking to Ali. I did not realise that this might happen." Gandhi replied, "Don't apologise. You and Ali have done nothing wrong, so far as I can see." Gandhi took some grapes lying next to the meat, and popped them into his mouth; turning then to Mirabehn, he said: "We are guests in our friend’s house, and it would not be right for us to impose our idea upon him or upon anyone. People whose custom it is to eat meat should not stop doing so simply because I am present." Similarly, though Gandhi championed prohibition, he would not prevent anyone from drinking alcohol, and he condemned altogether the principle of drinking on the sly; as he told Jehangir, "I would much rather you were a drinker, even a heavy drinker, than that there should be any deceit in the matter."

Though Gandhi was, then, no philosopher of ecology, and can only be called an environmentalist with considerable difficulty, he strikes a remarkable chord with all those who have cared for the environment, loved flowers, practiced vegetarianism, cherished the principles of non-violence, been conserving of water, resisted the depredations of developers, recycled paper, or accorded animals the dignity of humans. He was a deep ecologist long before the term’s theorists had arisen, and one suspects that even the broadest conception of "deep ecology" is not capacious enough to accommodate the radically ecumenical aspects of Gandhi’s life. He wrote no ecological treatise, but made one of his life, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that he left us, in his life, with the last of the Upanishads or "forest books". This is one life in which every minute act, emotion, or thought was not without its place: the brevity of Gandhi’s enormous writings, his small meals of nuts and fruits, his morning ablutions and everyday bodily practices, his periodic observances of silence, his morning walks, his cultivation of the small as much as of the big, his abhorrence of waste, his resort to fasting -- all these point to the manner in which the symphony was orchestrated.

Note on publication: This article has been adapted from the much lengthier version published as Vinay Lal, "Too Deep for Deep Ecology: Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life", in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, eds. Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP for Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 2000), pp. 183-212; another version was published as "Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life: Thinking beyond Deep Ecology", Environmental Ethics 22, no. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 149-68.



Gandhi in London: The Law Student and the “Inner Temple”
Vinay Lal

Gandhi left India for the first time on 4 September 1888, when he was about a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, and arrived in London in late October. Like many other Indians of his class background who were able to equip themselves financially to undertake the expensive sea voyage to Britain, Gandhi sought to get credentialed in law. His biographer, Geoffrey Ashe, states that Gandhi had himself “enrolled” at the “Inner Temple” on November 6th, and that among the “four Inns of Court, Indians tended to prefer it as possessing social cachet” (p. 29). But Ashe, not unlike Gandhi’s other biographers, has precious little to say about Gandhi’s relationship to the “Inner Temple”, Gandhi’s institutional affiliation to the University of London, or indeed what is meant by the “Inner Temple”.

Readers of the main web page on Gandhi on MANAS [http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Gandhi/gandhi.html] would have noticed the following lines where I describe how Gandhi, having defied many of his elders in India who were opposed to his journey to Britain, set about pursuing an education in law in London:

Here, too, Gandhi showed determination and single-minded pursuit of his purpose, and accomplished his objective of finishing his degree from the Inner Temple. He was called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court of London; but later that year he left for India.

In October 2003, I received from a gentleman in Britain a communication advising me that the information conveyed in the lines above is wholly incorrect. Describing himself as a barrister, a graduate of the University College London (UCL), and as a member of the “Inner Temple”, this gentleman stated that the Inns of Court do not confer degrees, that Gandhi in fact earned his degree from UCL, and that there is no such thing as “enrolling” in a court in Britain. Though with respect to one of these points, namely the fact that the four Inns of Court -- Gray’s Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple, and Lincoln’s Inn -- do not confer degrees, this gentleman is entirely correct, so long as strict fidelity to empirical facts is the only criterion of what counts as “right” and “wrong”, it does not appear to me to stretch the point to suggest that the brief description offered by myself of Gandhi’s experience with the institutions peddling a law degree, so to speak, can stand as it is.

Let us delve into this question in somewhat greater detail. University College London claims Gandhi among its “famous alumni” on its website [www.ucl.ac.uk], and it is conceivable that university records will show that Gandhi took classes at UCL. But the declaration of “fact”, if “fact” this be, is much less interesting than the other observation that a careful reader of Gandhi’s autobiography is likely to reach: UCL left such little impression on Gandhi that he nowhere mentions it in his own autobiography, which down to the present day remains the most authoritative source of information about Gandhi’s years in London. Gandhi’s most notable biographers, for instance D. G. Tendulkar, Robert Payne, B. R. Nanda, and Geoffrey Ashe, make no mention of University College London, and it is striking that the short chapter on Gandhi’s London years in Nanda’s biography dwells exclusively on Gandhi’s friendships with vegetarians, theosophists, and other dissenters. About the time that Gandhi left London, he published in the Vegetarian (20 June 1891) an article where he felt bound to admit that in his stay of three years many things had been left unaccomplished. Nonetheless, added Gandhi, “I carry one great consolation with me that I shall go back without having taken either meat or wine, and that I know from personal experience that there are so many vegetarians” (quoted on pp. 30-31). In this respect, Nanda is only following the cues offered by Gandhi himself: as he left London, Gandhi could not be bothered to recount his experiences at the University of London.

There is no question that Gandhi was enrolled at the Inner Temple. Standing at the site of what was once perhaps a pagan temple, the “Inner Temple” was Gandhi’s conduit to the world of law and a legal education. Chapter 24 of Gandhi’s autobiography, the twelfth consecutive chapter devoted to his sojourn in Britain, begins with the observation that he has hitherto refrained from saying anything about the purpose for which he went to England, “viz., being called to the bar.” Other than passing examinations, being “called to the bar” entailed, Gandhi informs us, “keeping terms”. Gandhi further elaborates, “‘Keeping terms’ meant eating one’s terms, i.e. attending at least six out of about twenty-four dinners in a term. Eating did not mean actually partaking of the dinner, it meant reporting oneself at the fixed hours and remaining present throughout the dinner.” Though the British condemned India as a country that was stifled by arcane rituals and archaic social institutions, their own commitment to such preposterous practices seldom received comment. However, writing his autobiography in the 1920s, and looking back on his years in London, the irony of being installed at the “Inner Temple” did not escape Gandhi. “The institution had gradually lost all its meaning,” he wrote, “but conservative England retained it nevertheless.” Gandhi describes the books he went through in order to sit for the examinations, but there is no mention of any classes that he might have taken. Insofar as Gandhi had any education in Britain, one can say, with the usual liberties allowed by interpretation, that though the “Inner Temple” did not then, and does not now, confer any degrees, in a manner of speaking Gandhi earned his degree at an institution which socialized him into the life of those qualifying for the bar.

How, then, did Gandhi describe the aftermath of his legal education in Britain. A paltry two lines in a dense two-volume work address this question: “I passed my examinations, was called to the bar on the 10th of June 1891, and enrolled in the High Court on the 11th. On the 12th I sailed for home” (Chapter 24). If there is no such thing as enrolling in a High Court, as my correspondent from Britain so strongly avers, then we must either conclude that Gandhi didn’t know what he was doing, or that 30 years later he could not recall what exactly “enrolling” in Court entailed, or -- much more likely -- Gandhi had his name registered at the Court as someone who, having been called to the bar, was now entitled to practice law. But neither the autobiography nor the biographies are helpful on this point.

The story of Gandhi at the “Inner Temple” does not conclude with his departure from Britain in 1891. In 1922, as described elsewhere on the MANAS website, Gandhi was convicted of sedition. The “Honourable Society of the Inner Temple”, which includes Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the “Select List” of its “Famous Members” [see http://www.innertemple.org.uk/history/famous_members.html], then engaged in doubtless the most dishonorable action in its history in that it “disbarred” Gandhi. His name was struck from the rolls, and Gandhi, who had done the law the greatest honor in the speech that he offered in defense of himself, became an embarrassment to the Inner Temple and the legal establishment. The “Inner Temple” rightly describes Gandhi as the “architect of Indian independence”, but it is significant not until 1988 did the institution reinstate Gandhi as a member. Did it take 40 years after Gandhi’s assassination and Indian independence to recognize that Gandhi authored Indian independence and that, in disbarring Gandhi, the Inner Temple had mocked itself rather than Gandhi? None of this, to be sure, would have surprised Gandhi an iota.

References and Further Reading:

Ashe, Geoffrey. Gandhi. New York: Stein & Day, 1969.

Gandhi, M. K. An Autobiography. 1st ed. in 2 vols., 1927 & 1929. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1959.

Nanda, B. R. Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography. Unabridged ed., Delhi: Oxford UP, 1981.