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.