Emancipation without utopias
JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
ALMOST everyone seems to converge on a single point about the future salience of Gandhi’s thought: As long as there is violence and as long as there is dearth of peace on earth, Gandhi would be relevant. One hears his name invoked by Palestinians at the receiving end of Israeli soldiers, just as his name is invoked by people in strife-ridden parts of Africa. He has become a subject of scrutiny in the ever-expanding academic areas of conflict resolution and peace studies. His admirers invoke his name in the same breath as Mahavir, Buddha and Jesus. There are those who find his celebration of Indian villages problematic, those who find his experiments in sexual abstinence odd, and even those who find his views on caste and the issue of the dalits questionable. But even the worst skeptic would unhesitatingly endorse Gandhi’s uncompromising stress on ahimsa or non-harm.
For Gandhi, ahimsa was not non-violence alone. A more tenable translation of the word would be non-harm, but even this does not capture the full import of the complex of meanings unleashed by the word ‘ahimsa’. For a better understanding of the term, it would be useful to look at the word ‘himsa’, often blandly translated as violence, and more so physical violence. It means injury, harm, hurt, mischief and wrongdoing mentally, verbally and as acts of violence. Ahimsa, therefore, is not merely harmlessness, but also that which gives a sense of security, safety. A more significant meaning that emerges points towards gentleness.
In this cluster of meanings there is stress on the one hand on abandoning recourse to retaliatory violence, but also on actively engaging in promoting security, safety and gentleness. In the Gandhian universe, ahimsa is not a stand-alone value, but shares space with an entire constellation of values. But ahimsa emerges as the touchstone for all other values. How are we to judge whether knowledge will lead to safety, security, harmlessness and gentleness? Gandhi would put that knowledge to the litmus test of his expanded meaning of ahimsa and test its claims. How does one know that a certain action is right? The conventional way would be to indulge in seeking the validity of an action in rectitude (dharma-adharma test of action). Gandhi would seek to judge an action in terms of the amount of ahimsa it generates.
Despite its far-reaching implications and its ever-expanding salience, Gandhi’s ahimsa will not stand the test of time. It has always been mistakenly seen as a vehicle for lokasangraha (the preservation of society), but Gandhi intended ahimsa to be the trigger for atmasangraha (self-possession). Human beings forever shall remain red in tooth and claw and the Gandhian idea of ahimsa will be recalled intermittently during moments of extreme cruelty and bloodletting. The idea that would, however, flourish in the future is his attitude towards history and the result of his indifference to history.
There are two ways of looking at Gandhi’s attitude towards history. One is to look at obvious instances of his reaction to historical events, and the other is to see a set of deeper philosophical assumptions at work. In his seminal work, Hind Swaraj, written as a dialogue between a fictional ‘reader’ and a fictional ‘editor’, Gandhi makes the ‘reader’ ask if the memory of cruelty, murder and rivalry between Hindus and Muslims earlier, and subsequently the Hindus and Christians, could induce them to live together. The ‘reader’ wonders if these instances in the past were not much worse than what the ‘editor’ seems to be attributing to the modern scientific western civilization. This is how Gandhi, thinly veiled as the ‘editor’, replies:
‘Everybody understands that the cruelties you have named are not part of religion although they have been practised in its name; therefore there is no aftermath to these cruelties. They will always happen so long as there are to be found ignorant and credulous people.’
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n other words, the present had little to do with the past. Ignorant and credulous people inflicted cruelties on others and it would be equally ignorant and credulous for people to remember them and make a conscious attempt to recall unfortunate events of the past. Gandhi’s argument is based on consciously evading any discussion about the past and refusing to be drawn into any discussion about history. As cited above, the whole question of past animosity between Hindus and Muslims is deflected by stating that cruelties and violence of the past are neither part of Hinduism nor Islam but practised in the name of religion by those who are ignorant.
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odern nationalism, Gandhi argued, was steeped in a love of history. In turn, he considered modern nationalism as a vehicle for exhibition of force and violence. He says:‘Nations have in a sense, therefore, almost become gangs of robbers, whereas they should be a peaceful combination of men and women united for the common good of mankind. In the latter case, their strength will lie not in their skill in the use of gunpowder, but in the possession of superior moral fibre.’
2What makes modern nations beholden to violence? Gandhi has this to say:
‘It must not be forgotten that, after all, there is a philosophy behind the modern worship of brute force with a history to back it.’
3In fact, the role of history and the existence of violence were inextricable. Historical evidence was nothing but an unending chronicle of violence:
‘History is for most part a record of armed activities. Natural activities find very little mention in it. Only uncommon activities strike us with wonder.’
4Violence, therefore, was unnatural and uncommon. History only recorded violent events that had very little to do with the lives of ordinary people. Human civilization and the history of nations was not about providing historical evidence or proving the historical veracity of events.
‘Millions of people read these books [Ramacharitmanas and Bhagvadgita] and lead pure lives. They read them with a guileless heart and live in this world full of innocent joy. It never occurs to them even in a dream to ask whether or not Ravana was a historical figure or whether they might not kill their enemies as Rama killed Ravana. Even when face to face with enemies, they pray for Ramachandra’s protection and remain unafraid. Tulsidas, the author of Ramayana, had nothing but compassion by way of a weapon. He desired to kill none. He who creates, destroys. Rama was God; He had created Ravana and so had the right to kill him. When any of us becomes God, he may consider whether he is fit to have the power to destroy.’
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he Mahabharata, argues Gandhi, was similarly not a historical text.‘Even in 1888-89, when I first became acquainted with the Gita, I felt that it was not a historical work, but that, under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring. This preliminary intuition became more confirmed on a closer study of religion and the Gita. A study of the Mahabharata gave it added confirmation. I do not regard the Mahabharata as a historical work in the accepted sense. The "Adiparva" contains powerful evidence in support of my opinion. By ascribing to the chief actors superhuman or subhuman origins, the great Vyasa made short work of the history of kings and their peoples. The persons therein described may be historical, but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme.’
6What is this duel that constantly rages in the hearts of mankind in the guise of physical warfare? Gandhi answers this in his commentary on the first verse of the Gita, one in which Dhritarashtra asks Sanjaya about the forces of his sons, the Kauravas, and that of his brother’s sons, the Pandavas, assembled opposite each other and their actions on the battlefield. Gandhi imaginatively reduces the question to a moral one, but also defangs its historical import:
‘The human body is the battle-field where the internal duel between Right and Wrong goes on. Therefore, it is capable of being turned into the gateway to Freedom. It is born in sin and becomes the seed-bed of sin. Hence it is also called the field of Kuru. The Kauravas represent the forces of Evil, the Pandavas the forces of Good. Who is there that has not experienced the daily conflict within himself between the forces of Evil and the forces of Good?’
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t is here that Gandhi’s philosophical argument regarding history becomes significant. At a preliminary stage of the argument, Gandhi felt that nation, freedom, faith, belief and history had no meaning, as long as individuals and communities did not abide by the divine law. What was this divine law? It was to suffer pain before enjoying pleasure and subordinating individual self-interest to the good of all. In turn this meant that an individual ought to be ready to suffer and die for others – it meant not to kill for the sake of individual or collective self-interest.8 All abstractions, whether they be nation or law or history, had to be understood only after submitting them to the scrutiny of divine law. In other words, divine law was nothing but a set of moral and ethical values: keeping one’s word, the common good, honour, truth, right, sacrifice, suffering and above all, ahimsa.
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ut this was not sufficient reason to spurn history. Gandhi argued that self-regarding attachment was at the very foundation of violence in all its forms. But it is memory that causes attachment. Memory is nothing but remembrance of things past. History, therefore, is nothing but a memory of the past. Just as individuals get entrapped by the memory of the past and become boastful, vengeful and resentful, nations too have a historical memory, but it is mediated through various versions of that memory. People quarrel about the authenticity of their account of history as contrasted with someone else’s version of history. It is a spiral that never ends, and if it does, it results in bloodshed and violence. Peoples, nations, races and individuals vie with each other to see the triumph of their version of history.In the Gandhian world, it is futile to search for a golden age. Utopias cause grief. Even the notion of Ramarajya for Gandhi was merely a normative category rather than a utopia as it is often imputed. The best instance of Gandhi’s idea of an emancipatory vision without a utopia comes when he deals with the thorny question of Hindu identity. Writing in Young India in 1926, Gandhi seems to suggest that for him Hindu identity was not a question of choosing elements arbitrarily from the entity that people historically recognized as Hinduism or that he had come to identify as Hinduism. For him, the first logical step was to own and embrace every attempt across time and historical periods to define Hindu identity, straddle the orthodox and the heterodox elements within Hinduism, and yet refuse to be a prisoner of any historical moment in defining Hindu identity.
‘I call myself a sanatani Hindu, because I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and the writings left by the holy reformers. This belief does not require me to accept as authentic everything that passes as Shastras. I reject everything that contradicts the fundamental principles of morality. I am not required to accept the ipse dixit or the interpretations of pundits. Above all I call myself a sanatani Hindu, so long as Hindu society in general accepts me as such. In a concrete manner he is a Hindu who believes in God, immortality of the soul, transmigration, the law of Karma and moksha, and who tries to practise truth and ahimsa in daily life, and therefore practises cow-protection in its widest sense and understands and tries to act according to the law of varnashrama.’
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n essence, Gandhi seems to suggest that a Hindu is everything that he has evolved historically into and bears the weight of multiple layers of identity formation. And yet, this identity is meaningless as long as it does not conform to the fundamental principles of morality. What are these fundamental principles? They consisted of submission to the divine law, which, in the words of the saint-poet Narsi Mehta, was the ability to understand the pain of the other. It is submission to this version of the divine law that creates the religion that underlies all religion. This is a philosophy and a metaphysics far removed from the rivalry of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’, but one that suggests empathy with the pain of the ‘Other’.
Footnotes:
1. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10, p. 265.
2. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 36, pp. 418-19.
3. Ibid., p. 419.
4. Ibid., Volume 16, p. 12.
5. Ibid., pp. 63-64.
6. Ibid., Volume 46, p. 167.
7. Ibid., pp. 175-6.
8. Ibid., Vol. 7, p. 88.
9. Ibid., Vol. 36, pp. 398-99.