The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate

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Economic & Political Weekly EPW october 4, 2008 55
The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate
Vinay Lal
Gandhi has legions of admirers, but he has also been the
target of severe, even virulent, criticism from numerous
perspectives. Though Gandhi still commands veneration
from many, he is also someone everyone loves to hate.
Some critics fault him for particular positions, such as his
support of the Khilafat movement, his inexplicable views
on the Bihar earthquake, his deployment of Hindu
imagery or idioms of speech such as ‘Ram Rajya’, and so
on. Other critics, arguing from specific ideological
positions, are inclined to find systemic shortcomings in
Gandhi’s views.
This paper, focusing in the latter half to a greater extent
on modernist and especially feminist readings of Gandhi,
suggests that the feminist reading is fraught with more
ambivalence than is commonly recognised, and in
somewhat unexpected ways. It is argued that though
Gandhi may not have been his own best critic, his critics
have also not done him the justice of attempting to
understand how he negotiated the various critical
worldviews that he encountered.
This paper is a revised version of a lecture that was first delivered as an
invited lecture on October 2, 2005 at Emory University, Atlanta, and I
am grateful to Deepika Bahri for the invitation and her friendship over
the last decade. A year later, I read out portions of it at a seminar at the
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg.
Vinay Lal (vlal@history.ucla.edu) teaches history at the University of
California, Los Angeles and is presently with the University of California
Education Abroad Programme in India.
Uniquely among the major public figures of the modern
world, Mohandas Gandhi attracted an extraordinarily
wide and diverse following and, perhaps oddly for someone
who is customarily thought of in terms of veneration, an
equally if not more diverse array of often relentlessly hostile
critics.1 The first part of this story is better known than the latter
part of the narrative around which this paper is framed,2 though
much remains to be understood about the manner in which Gandhi,
notwithstanding his rather strident views on modernity, industrial
civilisation, materialism, sexual relations, indeed on everything that
is ordinarily encompassed under the rubric of social and political
life, drew to himself people from very different walks of life.
Among his most intimate disciples, who, it is no exaggeration
to say, surrendered their life to the Mahatma, one thinks of the
daughter of an English admiral, raised on the music of Beethoven
in the lap of luxury and immense privilege; a Tamilian Christian,
trained as an accountant and economist, who was among the first
Indians to earn a degree in business administration; a Gujarati
villager, son of a schoolteacher, who was embraced by Gandhi
when they first met in 1917 as something like a long-lost son; and
an Anglican clergyman, arriving in India from Britain on what
was destined to become a one-way ticket, who came to the realisation
that Gandhi was a better Christian than many who call
themselves Christians.3
Indeed, the phenomenon – registered as a fact but never quite
unravelled – of Gandhi’s followers, has been of extraordinarily
great interest to his detractors, such as Vidya Naipaul, who are
certain that the alleged mediocrity of the master’s disciples suggests
that the source itself radiated much less light than is commonly
imagined. To be sure, one does not have to search far and
wide to find ready explanations for Gandhi’s ability to draw people
to one or more of his causes and passions. There is the supposed
fact of Gandhi’s “charisma”,4 which public commentators
and political scientists seize upon much as Indologists seized
upon caste or the village community when they sought to explain
the social structures of Indian life. By the 1920s and 1930s, that is
in Gandhi’s own lifetime, it had also become something of an
article of faith to pronounce that Gandhi’s message was resonating
with tens of millions around the world who were weary of
materialism and violence. This was before most of the atrocities
of a violence-filled century, from the Holocaust down to Bosnia
and Rwanda, had been perpetrated. Since there is, apparently, no
end to our weariness, Gandhi’s “charisma” should continue to be
drawing people into the ambit of his worldview. If one wished to be
more inventive, one could adopt the view of one venerable Indian
writer who, regretful that even a once manly race such as the
British had succumbed to the myth of the Mahatma, attributed
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Gandhi’s success in luring countless number of innocents to the
fact that humankind is contemptibly fickle and unable to sustain
the rigorous demands of a reasoned worldview.5
Interesting as is the subject of leaders and followers, I shall
leave aside those ruminations and turn instead to Gandhi’s critics.
The most obvious reason for doing so, I wish to suggest, is that
Gandhi appears to be a more, not less, compelling figure in the
face of criticism. The media was much less pervasive in Gandhi’s
lifetime than it is in ours, but it is not often appreciated that every
aspect of Gandhi’s life was scrutinised in excruciating detail ever
since he became burdened with Mahatmahood.
An Open Book
Since Gandhi himself never much abided by the distinction
between the private and the public, he also opened himself up to
criticism. It is doubtful, for example, that anyone would have
known anything of that very small heap of indiscretions which he
describes in his autobiography and later writings – the theft of a
few gold coins from the family home; the visit to a brothel from
where he emerged, predictably, with his virginity intact; the
wretched encounter, which commenced and ended in his mind via
the belly, with a dead goat; the lust that drove him to Kasturba’s
bed while his father lay dying; and the immense disappointment
he experienced in his 60s when he was painfully brought to the
awareness that he had not yet mastered the sexual instinct –
had Gandhi not himself rendered his life, in his words, into
an open book.
If Mahatmahood can only be tested in slums and the spaces
carved out by modern politics, then no extenuating circumstances
can be pleaded in an endeavour to create a hermetic
space for the notion of a saintly life without blemishes. Writing
on March 5, 1925 to the prominent Muslim clergyman Maulana
Zafar Ali Khan, who had objected to Gandhi’s description of
punishment by stoning as something that could not be defended
on the mere ground of its purported sanction in the Koran, Gandhi
unhesitatingly declared that “even the teachings themselves of
the Koran cannot be exempt from criticism. Every true scripture
only gains by criticism. After all we have no other guide but our
reason to tell us what may be regarded as revealed and what may
not be” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) 30:336).6 If
Gandhi was prepared to accept that even scripture gains from
criticism, there is every warrant for supposing that he would have
taken a similar view of criticism directed at his own life.
We can entertain, as well, a more political reading of the idiom
of criticism. One of the most endearing images of Gandhi is of
someone who nursed the wounded, nurtured the young, and furnished
solace to those who appear to have been defeated by life.
The particular conception of rights (and corresponding duties) to
which he held in the early stretches of his political life led him to
raise an ambulance corps during the Boer War and subsequently
the Zulu Rebellion.7 He was always present to provide, in the sentimental-
laden jargon of the day, “the healing touch” on the various
occasions when the streets in one town or another were
rocked by communal conflict. “We will not run to him for advice
and seek solace from him”, said Nehru over All-India Radio, hours
after Gandhi’s life had been extinguished, and yet the light that
had illumined the country would continue to “give solace to
innumerable hearts”.8 His grand-niece has furnished what is perhaps
the most touching portrait of Gandhi’s tenderness when, in
a book called Bapu, My Mother, she described how the old man
attended to her daily needs and never for a moment let her think
about how she had been orphaned. But if we are thus inclined to
think of how Gandhi rendered comfort to the afflicted, attentiveness
to Gandhian hermeneutics requires that we should pay heed
to his political and moral ambition to afflict the comfortable. In
saying this, I do not, of course, intend to reduce him to a gadfly or
mere irritant, or suggest that he is most productively viewed as a
slayer of dragons and mocker of all pretensions.
My contention is that Gandhi furnishes no solace or anchor
to those who are accustomed or inclined to view the world in
Manichaean categories, and that one of the many reasons why
Gandhi creates a profound uneasiness among the many constituencies
which had to deal with him – Brahmins and Sudras, Sanatanists
and Dalits, Indians and the English, Hindus and Muslims,
liberals and Marxists, feminists and patriarchs, communalists
and secularists, modernisers and traditionalists, developmentalists
and ecologists, even militarists and pacifists – is that he came
to embrace the idea of an open-ended conversation even as he
stood unequivocally for certain moral, political, and epistemological
positions. Many people concur that Gandhi gifted, not as a
mere abstraction but as a political practice, the idea of ahimsa
(non-violence) to the modern world; others have spoken of
Gandhi’s gift of the fight.9 No more profound gift did Gandhi
bestow than the gift of being able to live with ambiguity. It may
well be this sensibility that Gandhi inherited from the myth-laden
world of the epics and the puranas.
To enter into Gandhi’s world is to come to the awareness that
paradoxes leap from every page of his life. If one were to place
Gandhi within the framework of analytical philosophy, one might
perhaps productively distinguish between several kinds of paradoxes,
for example those generated by his own moral and political
practices, those imposed upon him by the act of interpretation,
and those arising from the disjunction between orthodoxy
and orthopraxy. Let me dwell upon some of these without discrimination.
One cannot think of any biographical note ever
penned on Gandhi, for example of the kind routinely encountered
in encyclopaedias, that does not somewhere describe him
as an Indian nationalist. Supposing that he were, as he is often
and not unjustly, described as the chief architect of the Indian
independence movement, it is striking that alone among Indian
nationalists he had almost nothing invested in the ideology of the
nation state. The politics of the nation state is inextricably bound
to a zero-sum game, and the vocabulary of “winners” and “losers”,
which has an absolute stranglehold on modern politics, is one that
Gandhi entirely disowned. The 1920s and 1930s, notwithstanding
the rifts and dissensions within the Congress party, were the
days of the Gandhi Congress. Yet he was not even a due-paying
member of the Congress. With the arrival of independence, the
Congress was finally in the position of being able to taste the
fruits of power. However, in his so-called last will and testament,
written a mere few days before his death, Gandhi advocated the
dismemberment of the Congress party as a political organisation
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– a view not calculated to earn him the goodwill of politicians
who, as Gandhi had predicted 40 years earlier in Hind Swaraj,
were desirous of having English rule without the English.
As many others before me have observed, Nathuram Godse
engaged in what may be called a permissive assassination.10 The
aftermath of Gandhi’s death was equally drenched in irony.
Many people knew Gandhi as a Hindu, a point underscored by
his political antagonist, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who at Gandhi’s
death sent a carefully crafted condolence message to the Indian
government expressing his sorrow at the death of “Mr Gandhi”,
“one of the greatest men”, as Jinnah put it, “produced by the
Hindu community”. The supreme irony of that message is better
relished if one recalls that Gandhi’s assassin was a Hindu
ideologue who strenuously objected to Gandhi’s alleged betrayal
of the Hindus. But Jinnah was certain that “there can be
no controversy in the face of death”.11
It is, of course, quite possible to argue that Gandhi’s lofty conception
of a moral politics was not incompatible with his understanding
that power is sometimes never more effectively wielded
than when one appears to have disowned it. Much has been written
on this subject apropos the Indian past and Hindu prototypes of
the Brahmin and the Kshatriya, albeit from a largely Indological
standpoint. In India, it is alleged, the renouncer is rather sui
generis, exercising a mesmerising hold over his or her flock: he,
rather than the warrior, exemplifies the true model of masculine
power in the temporal realm. Churchill’s (in)famous invocation
of Gandhi as a half-naked fakir of a type frequently encountered
in Oriental nations, purporting to parley on equal terms with the
representative of the king-emperor, which is almost always read
as an expression of the sheer contempt that an arrogant Englishman
had for an effeminate specimen of a subject race, calls to
mind this particular conception of political power that cannot
quite be embraced under the various categories through which
power generally operates.
Churchill saw in Gandhi’s exercise of power a particularly
Oriental variety of chicanery; nor could he countenance the
thought that a modern democracy does not necessarily have the
last word on the legitimate exercise of power. Yet even this much
may be more of a concession to Gandhi’s critics than is warranted,
since Gandhi was both close to, and distant from, power. The
revolutionary’s dream of capturing power did not interest him;
and yet, despite being deeply wedded to democratic sentiments, he
wielded control over errant members of the Congress party as
well as his own personal entourage like a stern autocrat. We
should perhaps multiply the layers of the anomalies that Gandhi’s
life presents to us, thus viewing him with considerable justification
as a warrior who forsook arms, and as an advocate of ahimsa
who was desirous of forging the satyagrahis under him into a
highly disciplined force that would have been the envy of a general.
It is in the domain of religion, nonetheless, that the paradoxes
in Gandhi’s life appear in the starkest terms. He described himself
as a devotee of Ram, and venerated the Ramacaritmanas of
Tulsidas, but he unequivocally rejected passages in Tulsidas that
he found offensive or degrading to women and the lower castes.
Though he viewed himself as much of a Hindu as anyone else,
Gandhi seldom visited temples and, it is safe to say, he did not
generally view temple worship as intrinsic to Hinduism: if anything,
considering the care with which he tended to the body,
he would have agreed with the 11th century Virasaiva saint
Basavanna: “My legs are pillars,/the body the shrine, the head a
cupola of gold”.12 One can doubtless find passages in his voluminous
writings which are contrary to what I am suggesting – and
let me underscore “voluminous” here, not merely because his collected
writings run to 98 large volumes, but because the whole is
comprised largely of pieces that are characterised by their pithiness
and brevity. “Some form of common worship, and a common
place of worship”, Gandhi wrote in the early 1920s, “appear to be
a human necessity” (CWMG 28: 432). Much stronger is this passage,
from an article he wrote in the early 1930s: “Just as human
beings cannot think of the atman without the body, similarly they
cannot think of religion without temples. The Hindu religion
cannot survive without temples” (CWMG 54: 128). However, in the
same article, he wrote in a rather matter-of-fact tone: “I feel no
need to go to temples; hence I do not visit them” (CWMG 54: 127).
Lest anyone should think that Gandhi merely viewed visits to
temples as necessary for the masses, while quite unnecessary for
people of elevated spirituality such as himself, it is necessary to
add that he commenced the same article with the observation
that “I do not consider it a mark of greatness that I do not visit
temples”. It is in this context that his sharp differences with the
Dalit leader, B R Ambedkar, over the question of temple-entry
take on a rather different hue than one customarily finds in the
literature, where the conflict is largely presented as one over the
politics of representation and as an attempt by a bourgeois Hindu
leader to prevent Dalits from embracing more radical positions.
While deploring the immense disabilities under which Dalits
laboured, and mindful of the fact that they were prohibited from
entering many Hindu temples, Ambedkar nonetheless viewed
the entire question of temple-entry as peripheral to their lives.
Any gains made by the Dalits were purely symbolic, and even
then transitory: as Ambedkar was to write in a trenchant critique
in 1945, “after a short spurt of activity in the direction of removing
untouchability by throwing open temples and wells the Hindu
mind returned to its original state.”13 On his part, for someone
who never experienced any need to go to a temple, Gandhi
emerged as a remarkably strong advocate of the right of others to
worship at temples. His antagonists within the Dalit community
have continued to view Gandhi as the great imposter, as someone
who falsely claimed to speak on their behalf and in their language,
though it is hard to resist the view that his position on
temple-entry betokened his ability to embrace the religious view
on the ground.
Object of Hate?
Having, I think, furnished a lengthy preamble to this paper, let
me advert to its title and commence with the proposition that
Gandhi was someone who everyone loved to hate. There is,
needless to say, no singular Gandhi that everyone loved to hate,
and the advocates of many critical worldviews on Gandhi have
all authored their own Gandhi. This is far from being as
unreasonable
as it sounds, for if environmentalists, pacifists,
conscientious objectors, non-violent activists, nudists, naturopaths,
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vegetarians, prohibitionists, social reformers, internationalists,
moralists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, hunger
strikers, anarchists, luddites, celibates, anti-globalisation activists,
pluralists, ecumenists, walkers, and many others have at one
time or another claimed Gandhi as their patron saint, or at least
drawn inspiration from him, then one is also free to choose the
Gandhi that one dislikes. It may even come as a surprise to many,
who know of Gandhi only as a prophet of non-violence, a beacon
light to a beleaguered humanity, and an instigator of change
through peaceful means, three among other sentiments which
have ceaselessly circulated about him, to discover that Gandhi
provoked, and continues to provoke, considerable resentment,
and often sharper reactions, among a wide swathe of his and
our contemporaries.
The fear that Gandhi’s reputation for saintliness would eclipse
public memory of his shortcomings and failures has been a tremendous
motor driving Gandhi’s critics, and equally Gandhi’s own
proclivity towards detail, attentiveness to which he considered as
important as immersion into large political questions, has been
effectively turned against him. As the two volumes of Nirad
Chaudhuri’s autobiography amply demonstrate, his virulent
criticism of Gandhi, fully enabled by the author’s mastery over
the satirical mode, pivots around such things as the hard and unforgiving
countenances on the faces of Gandhi’s assistants, his
costly and quirky attachment to his goats, and the allegedly
picnic-like atmosphere that surrounded Gandhi’s funeral. All of
these enriching details lead Chaudhuri to ask, “Will the hand of
truth at any time reduce the vile myth of Gandhi to the putrid
mass it deserves to be?”14 In a simpler vein, and in an idiom more
characteristic of the United States, where even supposed star
academics write books with titles such as Telling the Truth about
History, the critic Richard Grenier, something of a lesser Thomas
Friedman (if one could imagine such a thing) in his own time,
furiously set about trying to demolish the hagiographic portrait
of Gandhi that emerged from Attenborough’s film with a book
entitled, The Gandhi Nobody Knows.15
Gandhi’s critics, one might say, divide into two groups. The
usual tack among the greater majority of them has been to focus
on particular positions that he adopted, or on certain phenomena
and issues on which he is alleged to have held views that are construed
as inadequate if not outrageous. By way of illustration, the
briefest mention of Gandhi’s pronouncements on the Bihar earthquake
of 1934, his support of the Khilafat movement, and his
oft-expressed longing, especially in the twilight of his life, for
“Ram Rajya” will suffice.
On Bihar Earthquake
When an earthquake devastated northern Bihar in 1934, Gandhi
publicly described it as a form of God’s chastisement of Hindus for
their oppression of Harijans.16 It is not only his friend Tagore, gravely
puzzled why Bihar had to bear the brunt of God’s displeasure,17
who was scandalised by Gandhi’s open invitation to the people to
be superstitious enough to believe that a law of compensation
prevails at all times.18 Down to the present day, Gandhi’s views
on the earthquake are adduced as evidence of his disdain for
modern science and his readiness to harness blind faith.
The objections to his resort to religious idioms of expression
have been equally strenuous, if different in some respects, and
partake of the view that Gandhi erred grievously in dragging religion
into the political domain. Gandhi embraced the demand,
which first originated with the All India Khilafat Conference, to
preserve the Turkish ruler in his position as the Muslim world’s
Khalifa (or Caliph) as his own as the British set about dismembering
the Ottoman empire following the conclusion of the first
world war. Even those not wholly indisposed towards Gandhi,
such as the writer Mukul Kesavan, have denounced Gandhi’s
“bad faith” and “opportunism” in acting as an overly enthusiastic
proponent of a lost and reactionary cause. Kesavan argues, as
many before him have done so, that Gandhi plunged into the
Khilafat movement because he “saw it as a quick, cheap way of
getting the Muslims on board” and because it permitted him a way
to capture the Congress party at a critical stage in the nationalist
movement.19 Gandhi, on this narrative, proved incapable of controlling
the passions he had stirred, and he was never wholly able
to abandon the temptation to appeal to the religious sensibilities
of people whom he knew to be easily excitable. He might have
claimed that Ram Rajya was only an expression of a utopian
dream about India whose citizens would be self-governing
according to the highest principles of moral and political life, but
did not his frequent invocations of Ram Rajya signify his anxiety
that he should be seen as being beloved of the masses?
To each of these criticisms, a rejoinder is certainly possible.
However indefensible appear to be Gandhi’s pronouncements on
the Bihar earthquake, any criticism which posits a stark opposition
of faith and reason, superstition and science, seems hardly
any more satisfactory. A geologist might offer a compelling account
of how tectonic plates move and under what circumstances
they crash into each other, but the craving we have for meaning,
for reading acts of nature in the light of human experience and
the language of poetry, is not so easily exhausted. In a spirited
response that Gandhi offered to Tagore in the pages of Harijan,
he appears to have worked in the Indian philosophical mode of
‘purvapaksha’, anticipating the objections to his own argument.
“Visitations like droughts, floods, earthquakes and the like”,
wrote Gandhi, “though they seem to have only physical origins,
are, for me, somehow connected with man’s morals. Therefore, I
instinctively felt that the earthquake was a visitation for the sin
of untouchability”. Crucially, with an awareness of how his own
argument might be turned against him, he adds: “Of course, Sanatanists
[that is, adherents of an orthodox conception of Hinduism]
have a perfect right to say that it was due to my crime of preaching
against untouchability”.20 Moreover, though the doctrine of
karma rests on the notion of individual responsibility, Indian
social theory had never offered any account of collective responsibility.
Gandhi’s reading of the Bihar earthquake can be seen as
an unprecedented effort in that direction.
Similarly, it may be that our conception of the gift is so impoverished,
if the gift is always impossible and every political transaction
has to be construed as some form of exchange that we cannot
but think of Gandhi’s politics as also bereft of altruism. It is
not at all clear to me that, in supporting the Khilafat movement,
Gandhi sought in exchange a promise among Muslims to support
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“cow protection”. I do not say that Gandhi did not hope, through
his championing of the Khilafat movement, to bring Muslims
into the mainstream of national political life, but that is quite
different than the conception of him as an opportunist waiting to
extract his pound of flesh.
There are many other criticisms of Gandhi along these lines,
always riveted on certain events, particular shortcomings, or
political and cultural practices with which he was associated.
Much critical scrutiny, for example, has been directed lately on
the tumultuous relations that he, the Father to a nation but
apparently much less so to his own family, had with his own
sons, his unabashed description of himself as a believer in both
‘sanatan dharma’ and ‘varnashrama’, and his sexual puritanism.
But a second group of critics, whose views are most recently recapitulated
and interpreted in a collection called Indian Critiques of
Gandhi,21 have been less fixated on particular issues and have
been animated rather by specific world views. Gandhi’s thoughts
on trusteeship, to take one example, were viewed as repellent by
his Marxist critics, but these same critics were just as likely to
note that Gandhi never lacked bourgeois patrons, that while
critical of materialism he lacked a critique of the world system
of capitalism, that his repugnance for violence made him averse
to class warfare, and that Gandhi, enamoured of some ideal
conception of the Indian village, was shockingly insensitive to
the travails of urban India.
In the remainder of this paper, then, I shall turn to a very brief
consideration of some of the critical perspectives brought to bear
upon Gandhi by those who describe themselves as feminists,
Marxists, secularists, and developmentalists, or as proponents of
some other encompassing world view.
Feminist Reading
Let me turn first to the feminist reading of Gandhi, a reading
fraught with considerable ambivalence and shared in part by others
who, even if they may not be feminists, consider Gandhi’s
views on women as unspeakably retrograde. The publisher and
writer S Anand has recently written of Gandhi’s Ram Rajya as a
charter for the oppression of women. Anand commences with
Rama: “At the drop of a bow, Rama is suspicious of Sita’s honour.
He repeatedly tries what we today call ‘honour killing’”, and
proceeds to argue that women who are today accused of infidelity
and branded as witches or beaten up mercilessly experience an
oppression similar to what Sita had to undergo at the hands of
Rama, rather mysteriously held up as the paragon of mankind.
Such was Ram Rajya, “a reign of social terror” for “women, Shudras
and untouchables”. Anand then moves seamlessly to Gandhi:
“This is also Gandhi’s Ram, for Gandhi’s attitude towards women
was no different”.22 He adduces as evidence an incident from
Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farm days, where the harassment of two young
girls by a boy then led Gandhi to the conclusion that if the young
women were shorn of their fine long hair, it would “give them a
sense of security and at the same time sterilise the sinner’s eyes”.
Anand concludes provocatively, “Dump Gandhi’s ‘Tolstoy Farm’;
give me Osho’s commune any day”.
Not everyone who has written on Gandhi and his relation to
women has been similarly unhindered by subtlety of thought or
interpretation; indeed, feminist readers of Gandhi have generally
displayed ambivalence, which can be charted in various registers,
rather than outright hostility. Some commentators have argued
that Gandhi did not merely have difficult relations with his wife,
a common enough occurrence in marriages, but also that his relationship
with Kasturba was laced with violence and consequently
puts a significant damper on his claim that in all his thoughts and
actions he only allowed himself to be governed by the principles
of satya and ahimsa. Thus Erik Erikson, in his study of “Gandhi’s
Truth”, points to the disjunction between the non-violent struggle
that Gandhi waged against the British and the psychological
violence to which Kasturba and the inmates of Sabarmati Ashram
were subjected.23 Following Erikson’s cue that Gandhi may have
sacrificed people to truth, Carol Gilligan, in her acclaimed work
In a Different Voice, likens Gandhi to the “biblical Abraham”.
Against the patriarchs Gandhi and Abraham, both of whom
were prepared to sacrifice their sons in the name of some higher
truth, Gilligan posits the woman who appeared before Solomon
and “verifies her motherhood by relinquishing truth in order to
save the life of the child”.24 Nor is it a small matter, so goes the
argument, that whatever the ease with which he conducted
himself around women, Gandhi may have found it difficult to
achieve intimacy with his wife, and that in the last three decades
of his life Gandhi may have been closer emotionally to women
other than Kasturba.
Many feminists, Indians more so than those in the west, are
appreciative of his efforts in bringing women into the struggle for
freedom, and they have understood that Gandhi’s recourse to
non-violent struggle facilitated their participation in it.25 Their
investment in the political life also furnished them with freedom
from the stranglehold of marriage, as the autobiographies of
many middle class women testify. But if one of feminism’s greatest
struggles has been to resist the ascription of qualities and virtues
as purely (or even largely) feminine or masculine, then clearly
Gandhi’s thinking appears to pose insurmountable problems.
Gandhi did not doubt, and he is amply on record in this respect,
that women, partly as mothers of the human race and nurturers,
were naturally more inclined towards non-violence; in a much
stronger version of this argument, he wrote that they scarcely required
any training in non-violent resistance, as nature had
equipped them with all the necessary advantages.
Women could be leaders of a non-violent struggle, Gandhi
averred, and variations of this argument, and appeals to men to
learn from women, appear everywhere in his writings. But the
indubitable fact remains that in handpicking several dozen companions
to accompany him to Dandi in defiance of the salt law,
Gandhi failed to include a single woman in that august group.
The omission was far from being accidental, and is rooted both in
Gandhi’s distinction between non-violence of the weak and nonviolence
of the strong and in a certain notion of what, for lack of a
better word, we might call chivalry. The inclusion of women in
his group, Gandhi was to state, would have been calculated to
deter the British from retaliating; but any advantage so gained
was no test of adherence to ahimsa, since the non-violent resister
must withstand, even invite, the gravest provocations. To the extent
that women are non-violent from instinct, habit, or custom, they
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exemplify non-violence of the weak – much as does a nation that,
like India, had been forcibly disarmed. Only those who have the
capacity to resist, but desist from pursuing that course of action,
can claim the mantle of non-violence.
Feminists have also been profoundly troubled, even enraged,
by Gandhi’s insistence that men and women were to occupy different
if “complementary” spheres in life. He thought it unlikely
that a woman would want to be the bread winner of the family,
and was quite certain that, as he stated in his answer to a query
he had received in 1935 about a woman’s role in maintaining the
family, “the duty of a woman is to look after what in English is
called the hearth and home”.26 It cannot be said that most other
men, whether among elites or the working class, whether in
England, India, or elsewhere, would at that time have thought
any differently from Gandhi, but it is imperative that Gandhi not
be sheltered behind the argument that he was, at least in this
respect, very much a creature of his times. If we should accept
that Gandhi was well ahead of his times in most matters,
from his prescient outlook about perniciousness of ecological
devastation to his understanding that violence breeds more
vicious cycles of violence, why should we settle for the claim
that Gandhi ought to judged by his times when his views on
women are in question?
The various anthologies of Gandhi’s writings on women – and
anthologies of Gandhi’s writings, I might add parenthetically, are
something of a cottage industry – are full of his homilies on what
ought to be their position in society. But here, as in so many other
critical domains, my submission is that Gandhi is much more elusive
than is suggested by the critiques directed at him. Let me return
to the passage previously cited, where the duty of a woman
to home and hearth is delineated. Gandhi continues, “Man has
never performed this task. He has been content to build forts and
ramparts for protection. Will he come forward to protect the
home? And even if he does so, what sort of protection will he
offer?” As man looks outward to society, woman looks inward
to her family.
But just as there is no reason to suppose that satyagraha directed
at the nation state is more difficult or ennobling than satyagraha
at the level of the family and the community, so there is
no compelling reason at all why we should be seduced into thinking
that the builders of forts engage in more constructive or significant
work. Indeed, men are so impoverished and trapped by
their social conditioning that the militarist metaphors come to
occupy an inescapable place in their family lives. “Even in a
home”, the passage continues, “he will build fortresses and walls.
He will make holes within these to fire bullets from and put glass
and nails on walls. In the end, the children of the house will meet
their death by climbing upon these” (CWMG 67: 125).
One would be quite justified in thinking that Gandhi, whose
intimate familiarity with prisons did not extend to the high-security
prisons of the modern type, and whose acquaintance with cities
did not extend to the gated enclaves of exclusive communities in
Delhi, Los Angeles, Washington, New York, or Johannesburg, had
nonetheless been able to provide an accurate cartography of the
security-stricken modern city. However uneasy many are likely
to feel at his strict demarcation of the respective duties of men
and women, it is clear that he took a starkly dim view of men
filled with their own self-importance. Men who turn their own
homes into forts that trap their children have scarcely anything
to teach women. If in Gandhi’s estimation the work of a bhangi
added at least as much to a society’s worth as the work of doctors,
lawyers, or pandits, the work of women at home was likewise
worth not any less than the work of men. Nor did Gandhi, crucially,
adopt the position that different duties had some relation to differential
rights: thus, in the same piece, he avers that while their
duties may be different, “their rights are the same. If a woman
sets out in shirt and trousers with a gun in her hand, a man has
no right to stop her. In such matters men and women enjoy equal
rights.” A woman’s duty did not demand of her that she take up
the political life, but she had every right to do so. Consequently,
Gandhi had no difficulty in reconciling the representation of women
as guardians of the home and hearth with the political reality, to
which women such as Sarojini Naidu, Vijayalakshmi Pandit,
Sucheta Kripalani, Usha Mehta and Aruna Asaf Ali gave vibrant
expression that they may be at the helm of political movements.
Gandhi had, then, a deep aversion to double standards so
rampant in every culture, and one can extend this argument to
sexual relations, another domain where his views are infused
with notoriety. While scornful of Gandhi’s puritanism, and his
(as Jawaharlal Nehru and many others after him have put it) unnatural
repugnance towards the sexual life, feminists may nonetheless
perhaps take heed of the fact that, in insisting that men
were to forswear sexual relations as much as women, Gandhi did
not at least endorse varying standards of sexual conduct for men
and women. Nothing in Gandhi’s writings or actions even remotely
lends itself to the view that he insisted on sexual probity
among women but turned his face the other way when it came to
the sexual conduct of men.
At least one prominent Indian feminist has argued that Gandhi’s
pronouncements, even if they do not bring cheer to most women,
may be read in a very different light when viewed against the
backdrop of the vibrant possibilities that Gandhi’s conduct
created for women.
Gandhi, unlike people who usually enter politics, was typically
much more radical in conduct than in his speech – indeed more
radical than even most reformers who claim to treat women on
an equal basis.27 Like many feminists and activists, Madhu Kishwar
and Ketu Katrak, among others, are also prepared to concede
that Gandhi feminised the nationalist struggle.28 While I am persuaded
by these arguments, none of them bring us sufficiently
close to a very different layer of readings, which I have addressed
at length in my writings and will therefore not take up at any
length at this juncture,29 that would alert us to Gandhi’s own
femininity. To take one instance, the women who partook of the
sexual experiments that Gandhi conducted late in his life, joining
him in bed naked, were unquestionably inclined to view him as
womanlike. The supposition that behind the Mahatma there was
an old man with dirty thoughts, or that his experiment, considering
his exceptional position in Indian life and the, contrariwise,
highly impressionable age of young women living in awe of him,
constituted naked sexual exploitation is one that his critics have
eagerly entertained, even if the women who shared his bed with
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him or others who were intimately familiar with his life and
thoughts never adopted anything remotely close to that view.
Whatever one’s scepticism about Gandhi’s varied relationships
with women, or his views about the sexual division of labour, it is
important to recognise that there are significant feminist thinkers
who have been attracted by Gandhi’s femininity. Phyllis Mack,
following the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner, has
argued that Gandhi, much like the Quakers and Franciscans,
derived his very model of radical action from “feminine behaviour”,
from what Turner termed anti-structure: so feminine humility
and chastity were to be used in the interest of a spiritualised
politics, and “the tasks of daily life”, which almost invariably fall
upon women, were to be elevated, as indeed they were, “to a
holy discipline”. Mack rightfully concludes that the example of
Gandhi shows that “‘feminine’ domestic habits of thought and
activity may be transposed into the public sphere and transformed
into highly effective forms of activism by both women
and men”.30 The work of other feminist thinkers, though they may
not have drawn explicitly on Gandhi, extends Mack’s insights
further and suggests why a “rehabilitation” of Gandhi in feminist
thinking may yet take place. Gandhi’s life was wedded to an ethic
of care: however flawed his political judgments, and however unattractive
some of the ideas by which he stood, it is transparently
clear that Gandhi retained an extraordinary ability to nurse the
wounded, minister to the sick, nurture the young, and bring into
the orbit of everyday life those, such as victims of leprosy, who had
been shunned by society.31 As some feminist writers have argued,
moral issues are to be approached not only through the language
of justice, which conceives of the individual as the bearer of
rights, but also through the ethic of care, which posits the primacy
of a social self and the interdependence of human beings.
Marxists’ Critique
Having, I think, sufficiently hinted at some of the principal contours
of the feminist engagement with Gandhi, let me turn, in the
concluding part of this paper, to a succinct consideration of some
of the difficulties that Marxists, developmentalists and modernisers
have had with Gandhi. Their criticisms are legion – and, it is
necessary to add, utterly predictable. They run the gamut from
observations on Gandhi’s own lifestyle, the cult-like following
that he supposedly attracted, his disempowering and impractical
attachment to non-violence, and his failure to recognise class as
the pre-eminent category of social, economic and political relations,
to his unstinting opposition to industrial civilisation, his
inability to carry a mass movement to a successful conclusion, his
inadequate comprehension of economic institutions, his defence
of obscurantist or oppressive social practices and institutions,
and – most of all, as his assassin outlined in his own defence
at his trial – the utter disjunction and bulging gap between
Gandhi’s world view and the nature of modern politics. Though
well-intentioned people continue to this day to be animated by
the subject of Gandhi’s relevance, Nathuram Godse had already
declared Gandhi to be a complete irrelevance. Had Godse permitted
Gandhi to die a natural death, one suspects that he would have
been more effective in fulfilling his ambition of consigning
Gandhi to near oblivion. But that is another story. In justifying
his assassination of Gandhi, Godse sought to explain that “Indian
politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able
to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces…[The]
nation would be free to follow the course founded on reason
which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building.”32
At the lower end of the left-Marxist spectrum are arguments
that converge on the personality of Gandhi. It has been argued
that Gandhi was too friendly with the captains of industry and
allowed himself to be patronised by rich industrialists who subsidised
his ashrams and pet projects. This sentiment is most
famously, if inadvertently, captured in the quip attributed to one
of his greatest admirers and followers, Sarojini Naidu, “It costs a
lot of money to keep Gandhiji in poverty”.33 Saumyendranath
Tagore mocked the idea of the “happy family” that was said to
emerge from Gandhi’s readiness to engage capitalists in conversation,
and did not doubt that the bourgeois leaders of Indian
industry were thrilled at the ease with which they could exploit
“the prophet of the bourgeoisie”, and, more importantly, the
workers who were susceptible to Gandhi’s charm. “Whenever
there is unrest among the workers”, wrote Saumyendranath in
the 1920s, “the millowners of Ahmedabad are in the habit of
requisitioning Mahatma Gandhi to use his influence to settle the
disputes. With the consent and support of Gandhiji, some of his
followers had taken upon themselves the task of organising the
workers into unions. The poor workers, unconscious of their class
interests, have readily fallen prey to this clever move”.34
Nearly every argument in this vein eventually moves
towards the expression of the sentiment that Gandhi became
the chief agent of false consciousness. In the colourful words of
Saumyendranath’s more famous compatriot, M N Roy, Gandhi
fed a hungry people “spiritual moonshine”. As he elaborates,
the “cult of non-violence”, running rampant through Indian
nationalism, “is the clever stratagem of the upper class to head
off a revolutionary convulsion, without which nationalism will
never come into its own…”35 Thanks to Gandhi, we, the pitiful
people of India, never had a Lenin or Mao to lead us to a glorious
revolution – nor, I might add, to the resplendent deaths of millions,
all in the name of development and modernisation. If only we
had had a revolution of the French or Bolshevik type, we might at
least have been a fulfilled people; but that dream and aspiration
need not be altogether relinquished, as there is still time to emulate
Mao’s successors. This enlightened view, to which three generations
of Marxist historians and commentators have given their
generous assent, passes for criticism among Gandhi’s detractors.
Never mind the millions slaughtered in Stalin’s kulaks, or in
Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’: the god of development must
perforce be appeased.
There is, of course, much more to be said about why Marxists
and the fond advocates of modern civilisation have been so dismissive
of Gandhi, but much of that would be an elaboration of
the cues that I have already offered. Some critiques of Gandhi
will not go away, and in closing let me summon two points I have
only made in passing. It has been an article of faith for those who
view Gandhi as having had a deleterious effect on civil society to
argue that, in failing to keep religion and politics apart, and in
frequently resorting to Hindu idioms in his public speeches,
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Gandhi forever contaminated, communalised, and fragmented
the public sphere. The Bahujan Samaj Party leader, Mayawati,
doubtless a paragon of the idea of unity, recently charged Gandhi
with dividing society along caste lines.36 Another critic harps on
Gandhi’s Hinduness with these words: “Whereas Gandhi statues
always depict him with the Gita, Ambedkar statues always have
him holding the Constitution, a modern text that espouses
equality. Ram Rajya is a dystopian relic. Bahujan Samaj should
be our utopian ethic.”37 Gandhi died on January 30, 1948, and the
Constitution of India did not then exist: so much for the fidelity to
facts among the scientific-minded modernisers of our times! Had
statues of Gandhi shown him with the Constitution, we can be
certain that his detractors would have complained bitterly of the
abuse of history and the Hindu’s tendency to trade in myths.
However, it is also true that having over the course of the last
two decades witnessed the remarkably swift ascendancy of
the Hindu right, and come to the realisation that Gandhi’s
Hinduism may be best calculated to steer the faith’s more militant
advocates away from the fulfilment of their political ambitions,
at least a few Marxist and secularist critics are suddenly
discovering in Gandhi a figure of ecumenism, sanity, and religious
harmony. Since the proponents of a highly masculinised
Hinduism have openly derided Gandhi as, in their own language,
an eunuch who preferred castrated Muslims to wholesome
Hindus,38 his critics infer that Gandhi’s soft Hinduism is about
as close as one can get to no Hinduism at all in a man who
clearly held himself to be a Hindu.
Modernisers’ Critique
A similarly complete disavowal of Gandhi has become difficult to
sustain on the part of those who are unrepentantly committed to
modernisation and industrial civilisation. Once wholly contemptuous
of Gandhi’s critique of industrial society, and prone to rubbish
him as a relic of a bygone period of human evolution, some
modernisers are now viewing Gandhi as someone who was unusually
sensitive to what E P Thompson characterised as the “moral
economy of the peasant”. Now that the dam of development has
broken, figuratively and otherwise, Gandhi is being brought back
through such ideas as “sustainable development”, “development
with a human face”, and “alternative technologies”. The time
may not be very far when even Gandhi’s idea of “trusteeship”,
which all but the obdurate and true-blooded Gandhians have
completely obscured, is resuscitated – not, I might add, as some
kind of formula for keeping the peace between the owners and
tillers of land, or between capitalists and workers, but as a way
of enhancing our ecological awareness that we are morally
obligated to act as the trustees of the multiple inheritances
bequeathed to us by previous generations. I wonder if Gandhi’s
oft-stated desire to reduce his life to zero, or his full-bodied
embrace of near nakedness, also did not arise in part from his
desire to himself act as a trustee of nature: “The earth provides
enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed”.
Though it has become a commonplace among those who style
themselves as public commentators and even scholars of Gandhi
to diminish him with the observation that he was more a man of
action than a thinker, one doubts that very many of them would
have been capable of the nuanced notion of trusteeship that
Gandhi brought into the dialectic by keeping dissenting strands
of western thought for which the west itself then had little
appetite in safe custody for use by future generations of Europeans
more receptive to divergent histories of their past. Even as India’s
colonisers were documenting, recording, interpreting, and most
significantly inventing an Indian past, Mohandas Gandhi was
acting as an archivist and trustee of European intellectual traditions
that Europe had all but trashed.
And so to the coda. It is neither necessary nor desirable to aver
that Gandhi was his own best critic as it would endow him with a
self-sufficiency that he would have disowned. But it is nonetheless
palpably true that his conception of the truth remained
hermeneutic, dialectical and dialogical. This is just as much as
the case with his vegetarianism and his advocacy of prohibition
as it is with the political choices that he exercised. His vegetarianism,
for example, has been inspirational for many, and it is his
reverence for all living beings that has made him important to
Indian environmentalists and the members of the German Green
party alike. However, unlike many vegans in postindustrial
nations, Gandhi readily served meat to his meat-eating guests,
even to those who knew him as an extraordinarily devout vegetarian.
The critics often rest their case on a static Gandhi, but it is
very likely that, had he been alive today, he would, keeping in
mind the immense toll that obesity has taken of modern lives and
the levels of saturation achieved by the popular media, have been
more opposed to Coca Cola, sugared drinks, super-sized meals,
and the culture of fast food than to alcohol.39 “The philosophy of
Coca Cola”, Ashis Nandy has written, “is the archetypal social
philosophy of our times”; Coca Cola “is the ultimate symbol of the
market”, “a way of thinking rather than a thought”.40 In opposing
Coca Cola, Gandhi would not merely have been making a futile
gesture against the market; he would have signalling his alarm at
the totalising nature of modern knowledge systems.
Many Possibilities
Gandhi’s life opens up many possibilities that we should be prepared
to entertain and to which the Gandhians, whose own readings
of Gandhi have rendered him into a museum piece even
while they shout themselves hoarse over his “increasing relevance”,
should perhaps be more attentive. Had Gandhi allowed
the British to frame his choices for him, he would not merely have
been consigned to deploying those modes of “resistance”, whether
that be constituted as the recourse to arms or the adoption of
parliamentary and polite procedures of redress, which the British
considered to be legitimate expressions of dissent; rather, his
entire moral and cognitive framework would have been captive
to a colonial epistemology which had firm notions about the
“self”, the “other”, and social relations in an unequal world. The
gift of the Gandhian mode of play is that in it there are no winners
and losers, not even, let me hasten to add, what are today
described by management gurus, cheerleaders, policymakers,
and “people-friendly” consultants as “win-win situations”. The
task of the next generation of scholars and thinkers will surely be
to devise an epistemological critique more commensurate with
the world view that Gandhi came to inhabit.
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Notes
1 B R Nanda has attempted to capture both constituencies
in his work: ‘The Master and the Disciples’,
Gandhi Marg 15, 2, July-September 1993,
pp 154-73, and Gandhi and His Critics, Oxford
University Press, New Delhi, 1985.
2 I would like to allude, if only briefly, to the two
sets of disjunctions which in part, and only in
part, led to this paper. In the staunchly middle
class circles of west Delhi in which I grew up and
from which my family drew the greater bulk of its
acquaintances, the respect for Gandhi was commingled
with deep suspicion, foreboding, and
even hatred of the “Father of the Nation”. Many of
the people who lived through the Partition held
Gandhi responsible for their own misfortunes,
and among the family elders and some of our
guests the sentiment that Gandhi had often blundered
in politics ran deep. Owing to my sustained
interest in Gandhi over nearly three decades, his
name came up in conversations often, and there
was frequent mention of his appeasement of
Muslims and his inability to understand the
modern world. If he was nonetheless referred to
as Gandhiji, it was not only out of habit, but also
from the recognition that Gandhi had been a
patriot, if a misguided one, and from an acknowledgment
that the state-sanctioned version of
Gandhi could not be entirely rubbished. As young
teenagers, my friends and I wondered why a
national holiday had been set aside in the memory
of a rather backward-looking old man who
wandered about scantily dressed, but the received
textbook versions spoke of him in such unambiguously
hagiographic language that the instinct to
laugh at the old man was somewhat contained. In
recent years, it appears to me, the reaction against
him has hardened, and one cousin who is a doctor
casually referred to Gandhi as a scoundrel
(Gandhi to kamina tha). I suspect that the disjunction
between the authorised version of Gandhi
and that encountered in middle class homes is
one which is familiar to many.
As a graduate student in the United States in the
1980s, I became aware of another kind of disjunction.
In those heady days of post-colonial theory
and cultural studies, when anti-racism, antiimperialism,
and nationalism spawned immense
number of studies and it was argued that finally
“the empire was writing back”, there was barely a
mention of Gandhi among internationally known
thinkers except in the writings of a few Indian
scholars, notably Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee,
and Shahid Amin. None of the post-colonial
critics or cultural studies advocates had any use
for Gandhi, not even Henry Louis Gates, Homi
Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, or, most significantly,
Edward Said. In the voluminous writings
of Said, Gandhi appears as a rare footnote; on the
other hand, a cultish attachment to Fanon is everywhere
evident. One would have thought that
Bhabha, over whom the shadow of Lacan looms
large, might have sensed something of an affinity
between psychoanalysis and satyagraha, or that
the post-colonial critics with their stated intention
of defying master narratives and signifying
their solidarity with the downtrodden might
have found Gandhi an intellectually and ethically
engaging figure. The silence which surrounded
Gandhi at a time when colonialism was the
principal subject of a supposedly dissenting body
of work might itself be construed as a critique of
Gandhi, one that did not even do him the service
of taking him seriously.
At the conclusion of my talk at Emory in 2005,
Gyanendra Pandey made two interesting arguments
to suggest why Gandhi has drawn, so to
speak, a near blank among major figures in the
academies in the US and the United Kingdom,
though I remain unconvinced by either argument.
Pandey suggested that the insularity of the Indian
intellectual tradition, while not recognised by
Indians, is deeply experienced among scholars
of India in the US, Japan, and elsewhere. For
insularity of intellectual traditions, I would think
that one could turn more profitably to the US
itself, where most debates appear to be conducted
without any reference to anyone except godblessed
Americans. As someone with a fair
share of experience of the American academy,
stretching back to my first undergraduate days at
a US university in 1978, I find it all but implausible
that the US academy should be viewed as an example
of intellectual ecumenism or cosmopolitanism.
Moreover, in the case of Gandhi, his alleged
indigenism or nativism, his repudiation of the
modernist aesthetic, the unsexiness of non-violence,
the moralist tone of much of his work,
among other phenomena, appear to me to furnish
better grounds for understanding why he has
been marginalised by the progressive or radical
elements of the academy.
Secondly, Pandey argued that Africa and the
Atlantic world, far more so than India, have registered
an intellectual and political presence in
American life. There is no gainsaying this fact,
and the story stretches from the early presence
of the slave trade through the Civil War to the
traditions of jazz, blues, rap, and hip-hop. Indian
studies, in comparison to studies of the Atlantic
world or African-American Studies, occupy a
minuscule if rapidly growing place in the American
academy. However, by an irony of history, in no
community did Gandhi have a more magisterial
role than among African-Americans. Everyone is
aware of Martin Luther King’s full-throated embrace
of Gandhian ideas of non-violent resistance, but
many other important if not supreme figures
of African-American history, such as Bayard
Rustin, James Farmer, A Philip Randolph and
James A Lawson, had a deep engagement with
Gandhi’s ideas. Sudarshan Kapur’s study, Raising
Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter
with Gandhi, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992,
amply documents Gandhi’s presence in the African
American political imagination, as does
John D’Emilio’s superb biography, Lost Prophet:
The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, The Free
Press, New York, 2003.
This paper also provides, I believe, some cues that
might help us to understand the relatively marginal
note Gandhi has played even in supposedly
progressive, liberal, radical, or dissenting elements
of the academy in the US, Britain, and elsewhere
where recent theoretical trajectories have
informed much of the work on nationalism, colonialism,
racism, and the like. Gandhi has a considerable
presence in peace studies or conflict
resolution programmes, though a “theorist” of
non-violent resistance such as Gene Sharp takes
precedence in most such programmes; moreover,
the institutionalisation of Gandhi has robbed his
thinking of its most radical and potentially emancipatory
elements. See also Vinay Lal, ‘Gandhi,
the Civilisational Crucible, and the Future of
Dissent’, Futures 31 (1999), pp 205-19, and idem,
‘Gandhi and the Social Scientists: Some Thoughts
on the Categories of Dissent and Possible Futures’
in Arif Dirlik (ed), Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge
in the Human Interest, Paradigm Publishers,
Boulder and London, 2006, pp 275-97.
3 The literature on Gandhi’s followers is reasonably
voluminous, if extremely uneven and on the
whole not especially insightful. The profiles in
Jayant Pandya, Gandhiji and his Disciples, National
Book Trust, New Delhi, 1994, are useful; much
more complex, if still handicapped by a notion of
“influence”, is Thomas Weber, Gandhi as Disciple
and Mentor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2004. Mark Lindley, J C Kumarappa:
Mahatma Gandhi’s Economist, Popular Prakashan,
New Delhi, 2007, introduces new material into
the discussion.
4 Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I Rudolph,
Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma, Orient
Longman, Hyderabad, 1983, originally published
as Part 2 of The Modernity of Tradition: Political
Development in India, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1967.
5 Nirad Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown
India, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1973 [1951].
6 M K Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Publications
Division, New Delhi, 1961, hereafter cited
in the body of the paper as CWMG. The 100-volume
set is now available online at www.gandhiserve.
org in PDF format.
7 Vinay Lal, Gandhi, Citizenship, and the Idea of a
Good Civil Society, Mohan Singh Mehta Memorial
Lecture 2008, Seva Mandir, Udaipur, 2008.
8 Jawaharlal Nehru, Nehru on Gandhi, John Day,
New York, 1948, pp 127-28.
9 Jehangir P Patel and Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi: His
Gift of the Fight, Friends Rural Centre, Rasulia,
Madhya Pradesh, 1987.
10 This argument was advanced by Robert Payne,
The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi, Dutton,
New York, 1968, and finds reaffirmation in
J L Kapur, Report of the Commission of Enquiry
into the Conspiracy to Murder Mahatma Gandhi,
6 vols in 2, Government of India, New Delhi,
1970.
11 Message of January 30, 1948, online at: http://
pakistanspace.tripod.com/48.htm
12 A K Ramanujan (ed) and trans, Speaking of Siva,
Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1973, p 88 [Vacana
no 820].
13 B R Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have
Done to the Untouchables, Thacker and Co, Bombay,
1945, p 114.
14 Nirad C Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch!
India 1921-1952, Chatto and Windus, London,
1987; Addison-Wesley Publishing Co, New York,
1988, p 885. The other “episodes” can be referenced
at pp 436, 439, and 874.
15 Richard Grenier, The Gandhi Nobody Knows, Thomas
Nelson, New York, 1983, was first published
as a lengthy film review in Commentary. From
political and cinematic standpoints, there is
much to criticise in Attenborough’s film, though
the hostility it provoked, particularly in Britain,
arises from very different grounds that can adequately
be gauged by the reception given to the
film in the tabloid and conservative press. The
much acclaimed Paul Johnson, advising the readers
of the Daily Telegraph, April 16, 1983, that
“Gandhi Isn’t Good For You”, described Gandhi
as a “consummate sorcerer’s apprentice”; and
likewise John Vincent, a historian at Bristol
University, nonchalantly held Gandhi responsible
for the “shedding of innocent blood during the
massacres” that followed in the wake of Partition
(‘We Must Not Feel Guilty Over Gandhi’, Sun
[London], April 21, 1983.
16 “Speech at Public Meeting, Tinnevelly”, January 24,
1934 and “Speech at Public Meeting, Tuticorin”,
January 24, 1934, both in CWMG 63:34, 40.
17 Gandhi’s piece on “Bihar and Untouchability” in
Harijan on February 2, 1934 adverts to this matter:
“I am not affected by posers such as ‘why punishment
for an age-old sin’ or ‘why punishment to
Bihar and not to the South’ or ‘why an earthquake
and not some other form of punishment’. My answer
is: I am not God. Therefore I have but a limited
knowledge of His purpose”. See CWMG 63:82.
18 See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, compiler and ed,
The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates
between Gandhi and Tagore 1915-1941, National
Book Trust, New Delhi, 1997, p 156.
19 Mukul Kesavan, ‘Gandhi’s Bad Faith: The Opportunism
of the Khilafat Movement Alienated Muslims’,
Telegraph, June 26, 2005, online at: http://www.
telegraphindia.com/1050626/asp/opinion/story_
4915438.asp (accessed on September 15, 2008).
20 Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet, p 160;
also CWMG 63:164-66.
21 Harold Coward (ed), Indian Critiques of Gandhi,
State University of New York Press, Albany, 2003.
speciAl article
october 4, 2008 EPW Economic & P 64 olitical Weekly
22 S Anand, ‘To Thee Thy Kingdom’, Tehelka, October
27, 2007, also online at: http://www.tehelka.
com/story_main34.asp?filename=hub271007
Tothee.asp
23 Erik H Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of
Militant Non-violence, W W Norton, New York,
1969, pp 230-31.
24 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women’s Development, Harvard UP,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, pp 104-05.
25 See, for example, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay,
Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces, Navrang, New
Delhi, 1986, who is forthright in her assessment
that “to those of my generation the real political
history of India begins with the Gandhi era”
(p 147).
26 CWMG 67:125; also in Puspha Joshi (ed), Gandhi
on Women, Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 1988, p 294.
27 Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi and Women’, Economic
& Political Weekly 20, Nos 40 (October 5, 1985)
and 41 (October 12, 1985), pp 1691-1702 and
1753-58, respectively; reprinted as Gandhi and
Women, Manushi Prakashan, Delhi, 1986.
28 Ketu Katrak, ‘Indian Nationalism, Gandhian
‘Satyagraha’, and Representations of Female
Sexuality’ in Andrew Parker, May Russo, Doris
Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (eds), Nationalisms
and Sexualities, Routledge, New York, 1992,
pp 395-406.
29 Vinay Lal, ‘Nakedness, Non-violence, and Brahmacharya:
Gandhi’s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality’
in idem, Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi:
Essays on Indian History and Culture, Seagull,
Calcutta, 2003; Penguin Books, New Delhi, 2005,
pp 114-53.
30 Phyllis Mack, ‘Feminine Behaviour and Radical
Action: Franciscans, Quakers, and the Followers
of Gandhi’, Signs 11, No 3 (Spring 1986), pp 457-77
esp p 477.
31 Joseph Kupfer, ‘Gandhi and the Virtue of Care’,
Hypatia 22, no 3 (Summer 2007), pp 1-21. The
focus in this article is on Attenborough’s Gandhi
(1982), but the author’s questionable embrace of
the film need not detract from the argument in
general. One wonders if the day of Gandhi’s
assassination is also celebrated as anti-leprosy
day from sheer sentiment, or whether critics
such as S Anand, who resolutely adhere to the
position that Gandhi’s life remains singularly
unattractive in every respect, have any idea of
the vast array of activities in which Gandhi’s
life was enmeshed, many of them not calculated
to earn Gandhi profit in the material world,
political power, or even an army of followers.
Cynicism, however, is infinitely inventive: somewhere
someone will pronounce that, in working
with leprosy patients, Gandhi sought to derive
cultural capital.
32 Nathuram Godse, May It Please Your Honor, Surya
Prakashan, Delhi, 1987, pp 154-55.
33 Sarojini Naidu’s quip is encountered in numerous
variations: the most likely story has it that while
waiting for a third-class railway coach to be
brought from a considerable distance to Gandhi
so that he could travel alongside the poor, she
remarked: “If Gandhi only knew how much it
costs us to keep him in poverty!” In other variants,
the story even goes beyond Naidu. The American
poet Gary Snyder, recalling his commitment to
non-violence and a simple way of life, says that he
remembered “reading that Gandhi’s great supporter,
the Indian industrialist Tata, once said, ‘It
costs me a fortune to keep Gandhi simple.’” See
Catherine Ingram, In the Footsteps of Gandhi:
Conversations with Spiritual Social Activists, Rupa
& Co, New Delhi, 1997, p 247.
34 Saumyendranath Tagore, ‘Gandhism and the
Labour-Peasant Problem’ in idem, Sudarshan
Chattopadhyay (ed), Against the Stream, 2 vols,
Saumyendranath Memorial Committee, Calcutta,
1:19-21.
35 M N Roy, ‘The Cult of Non-Violence: Its Socio-
Economical Background’ in idem, Selected Writings,
3 vols, Oxford UP, Delhi, 1989, 2:153, 156.
36 Sarabjit Pandher, ‘Charge against Mahatma’,
Hindu, October 28, 2007.
37 S Anand, ‘To Thee Thy Kingdom’, Tehelka, October
27, 2007.
38 This viewpoint is frequently encountered in the
public speeches of prominent ideologues of
Hindutva, such as Praveen Togadia, Uma Bharati,
and Sadhvi Ritambhara. See also Sudhir Kakar,
The Colours of Violence, Viking Penguin, New
Delhi, 1995.
39 On sugar as history’s mass killer, see Ashis Nandy,
‘Sugar in History: An Obituary of the Humble
Jaggery’, Times of India, June 16, 1994; for the
wider canvas, see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and
Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin,
1986.
40 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Philosophy of Coca Cola’ in
Vinay Lal (ed), Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures:
The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations
of Ashis Nandy, Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, 2000, pp 201-04.
INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI ENCLAVE,
NORTH CAMPUS, DELHI - 110 007
The Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) plans to appoint a Junior Consultant in the Population Research
Centre of the Institute on contract on a consolidated salary in the range of Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 22,000 per
month for a period of one year from the date of appointment.
Essential Qualifications:
The candidates should have good academic record with Master’s degree in Economics (preferably with
econometrics), population studies or social anthropology with a M.Phil degree in areas related to economic
demography, health, population and its regional dimensions or programme evaluation. A strong background
in handling various computer packages, and good experience of planning and directing of field based
studies, sample selection, compilation and analysis of field data is essential along with report writing
skills.
The Institute may consider suitable candidates who may not have applied. Only short-listed candidates
will be called for interview. The Institute reserves the right not to fill up the position, if circumstances
so warrant. Other things being equal, SC/ST/OBC candidates will be preferred.
Interested persons may send their Bio-data with names of three referees to the Academic Programmes
Officer, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi Enclave, North Campus, Delhi - 110 007,
within four weeks of publication of this announcement. Employed candidates must route their applications
through proper channels.
director