Today, October 2, is Gandhi Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
So seductive is the concept of the Indian avatar of freedom-swaraj, that it continues to hold political imaginations in thrall.
Yet no one seems to be entirely sure what they speak of when they speak of swaraj. Three preliminary points before I proceed with the argument may be in order.
One, in colonised countries swaraj is a necessary precondition of individual freedom. It is a collective and indivisible right.
Two, an individual cannot be free if his psyche and actions are dominated by ignoble passions such as greed, corruption, lust, absence of compassion, or cruelty. What is the point of acquiring freedom if all that newly minted citizens want to do is to go their own way, and do little except swig feni on the beaches of Goa as the flower children of the late 1960s and 1970s did? A free society demands the right sort of citizens.
Witness the paradox. Colonialism disciplined society. A free society also has to discipline citizens, because indiscipline can wreck a carefully cultivated social order and neutralise civicness. If liberty degenerates into licence, it destabilises society. It has to be contained.
Three we are, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested, bound in chains, we break the fetters of one chain and others strike us in the face. Freedom is a constant struggle to overcome unfreedom. Freedom is a process it is not statis because it constantly has to confront unfreedom.
What does Swaraj mean?
At the turn of the 20th century a more substantive meaning of swaraj had began to be articulated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Swami Vivekananda at the end of the 19th century, and Aurobindo Ghosh and Gandhi in the first decade of the 20th century. They, according to Dennis Dalton constructed their political and social thought on certain religious beliefs concerning the nature of man and the Absolute. For each of them, the individual is a part of the absolute. The highest aim of man is therefore to discover his own nature and become one with the absolute pursuit and the attainment of this goal that they called self-realisation or spiritual freedom. These beliefs were connected to how men should conduct themselves, how society should be constituted, and how the spiritual freedom of the individual could be reconciled with social harmony.
Gandhi transformed transcendental theories of individual freedom into political strategy. He, in effect, forged swaraj as
(a) mobilisational technique,
(b) the objective of the mass movement for liberation,
(c) as the highest form of freedom that individuals aspired through self-discipline and transcendence of immoderate passions, and
(d) an ideal society that reconciles individual freedom and social harmony.
Notably from the beginning, the introduction of a distinctive political vocabulary was embedded in the metaphysics of religious texts. Gandhi used religious vocabularies to create unique forms of political struggle based on ahimsa or non-violence, and establish the supremacy of satyagraha during the process of struggle. The satyagrahi did not emerge episodically into the public domain to commit acts of violence and then disappear. He or she prepared himself for the task through rigorous training. Political struggle was for Gandhi not only a form of politics by any means, it was ethical both in form and in spirit. This was satyagraha.
At different times Gandhi focused on different, albeit related, dimensions of swaraj. He admitted that the meaning of the concept cannot be frozen in time. The term is all embracing, and includes complete independence. “Let the content of swaraj grow with the general growth of national consciousness and aspirations…Swaraj without any qualifying clause includes that which is better than the best one can conceive or have today.”
Note that the concept of swaraj had to evolve along with the freedom struggle and the struggle had to evolve around the principle of swaraj. In 1931 after the Salt Satygraha, Gandhi wrote:
“The outward freedom therefore that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is the correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated upon achieving reform from within…When this reform takes place on a national scale no outside power can stop our onward march.”
On another occasion he said:
“I hope also to achieve the end by demonstrating that real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, swaraj is to be attained by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority”.
Swaraj is resistance.
As early as the Champaran satyagraha, Gandhi spelt out the importance of fearlessness. ‘I,” he wrote, “have been collecting descriptions of Swaraj.” One of these is the abandonment of the fear of death. “A nation which allows itself to be influenced by the fear of death cannot attain swaraj, and cannot retain it if somehow obtained.”
Freedom did not stop at emancipation from colonialism, it had to be replaced by ethical life as the only form of life worth living. Freedom must come to a people who have been transformed through the process of struggle, otherwise Indians would witness the same sort of politics based on materialism and the rank pursuit of power and resources as they saw during the phase of colonial rule.
Also read: Why India Is the Land of Many Gandhis
Engaging with Gandhi
Most writings on Gandhian thought tend to be exegetical. Gandhi’s admirers, and they are many, quote him passage after passage, as if the text in question was some holy tract that can be elaborated and interpreted, but not critiqued. Yet, any study of the political discourse of the freedom movement, and Gandhian studies in particular, need to do precisely this: to critically engage with political languages, notions of righteous political action, theories of emancipation, and reflections on the nature of postcolonial society for at least two reasons.
For one, Gandhian language continues to resonate and spark off political imaginations till today.
Two, a nation that is unable to examine its past reflectively is unable to understand where we came from and where we are possibly headed, whether the politics of today has furthered the ideals of the leaders of the freedom movement, whether we are diminished and lesser human beings because we failed to meet the standards established by our leaders, and whether some of the ideals were too idealistic and impossible to achieve given the vagaries of human nature. The past shapes our present. William Faulkner writes in his Requiem for a Nun, ‘The past is never dead. It is not even past’.
The past continues into the present sometimes as memory, as continuity, as warning, and always as wisdom. We must live with the past, we must accept it, but there is no reason to treat it with such reverence that it becomes immune to informed critique. Jawaharlal Nehru summed up the predicament of the critical observer when he wrote in 1920,
“That we should encourage honest criticism, and have as much public discussion of our problems as possible. It is unfortunate that Gandhiji’s dominating position has to some extent prevented this discussion…This is obviously wrong, and the nation can only advance by reasoned acceptance of objectives and methods, and a cooperation and discipline based on them and not on blind obedience. No one, however great he may be, should be above criticism.”
It is time that we engage critically with Gandhi the way we would engage with any political philosopher, and bring out the implications and contradictions of his thought. Otherwise, we will land up with hagiography, and not informed encounters with Gandhian thought.
The suggestion that we must engage with past thought, and in particular Gandhian ideas critically, does not emerge from disenchantment with Gandhi. Gandhi was a man of the political moment. He could judge with amazing insight what was required at that moment, and design and implement appropriate strategies or even withdraw them. He taught us that politics without ethics is shallow. He taught us that we should eschew violence because it harms both the victim and the perpetrator. And he was a man who walked his own talk. In that sense for him there was no division between the public and the private. He shared his thoughts and opinions, his dietary preferences, and his sexual needs or control of them, with astonishing frankness. And he was ready to take on suffering as Christ did rather than inflict suffering on others.
Never has a man like Gandhi walked the earth of India since the Buddha, so self-sacrificing, so ethical, and so inspirational. But for critical political theorists he should not be the Mahatma. He was a political philosopher in the sense of someone who critically reflected on the political condition, and because of the distinction he drew between what is.
Also read: In Photos: The Life, Work and Death of Mahatma Gandhi
Often criticism of Gandhi, for example by Jawaharlal Nehru, is dismissed on the ground that critics approach his thought through the lens of western political theory. Gandhi himself was influenced by Western thought from Greek mythology to anarchism, and from Plato’s Socrates to Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and Henry David Thoreau. Take Gandhi’s commitment to civil disobedience, this immediately brings to mind Antigone. He transformed an act of individual protest against an unjust law that according to Antigone is violative of the laws of Zeus, into a justification of collective action. Gandhi translated Plato’s Apology that dealt with the judgement of Socrates into Gujarati. He took from Socrates’ speech before the ‘wise men’ of Athens that he is wise who knows that he does not know and forged a theory of tolerance from it.
He drew upon Leo Tolstoy’s interpretation of the ‘turn the other cheek’ principle in the Sermon on the Mount, by his focus on non-violent resistance to evil, passive resistance and Utopia. Gandhi, like Tolstoy, considered that the principles that underlaid these values were so eminently reasonable that they would persuade others. He was influenced by Edwin Arnold’s writings on the Buddha, and by his translation of the Bhagwad Gita. He took from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last the staples of his ideal state-bread labour, anti-industrialisation, and seeking the good of the individual through the good of all. Gandhi knew his liberal and Marxist thought; he drew upon writers from across the globe as much as he learnt from Hindu and Jain scriptures. He was a cosmopolitan.
Anthony Parel has elaborated this aspect of Gandhi in his essay on ‘Bridging the Secular and the Spiritual.’ Notwithstanding his criticism of several aspects of modern civilisation writes Parel, Gandhi integrated many modern ideas such as individual liberty, civic nationalism, equality, and rights. His critique focused on modernity, an ethos that gave primacy to reasoned skepticism over blind belief. This became clear when Gandhi critiqued religious practices that were embedded in discrimination and rank superstition.
The problem does not lie in Gandhi’s advocacy of swaraj. The problem crops up when we recollect that his advocacy of Hindu concepts as politics was made in the public domain of a multireligious society. It is ironic that Gandhi, a man who would have laid down his life to save the life of a Muslim, deployed a language and an imaginary that excluded the mass of non-Hindus. He fought against the flaws of Hinduism, but his vocabulary was that of a metaphysical, abstract, Sanskitised and Brahmanical Hinduism.
He was committed to Hindu-Muslim unity but his principles of political transformation did not resonate with the sounds or the signifiers of a shared culture, of a society that was the product of multiple conversations between different languages, or the production of a new language Urdu that was forged by the coming together of Hindi and Persian. Over the centuries, and particularly during Mughal rule, distinct cultures had borrowed from and given to each other, and in the process created multilayered and intersecting linguistic conventions, systems of meaning, ways of life and worship, and an expansive notion of aesthetics. This culture can be termed Sanjhi Virasat.
Admittedly Gandhi’s approach to Indian society was inclusive and egalitarian. But his mobilisation techniques, his reflections on what politics should be and his insistence that Indians can be ready for swaraj only when they subject themselves to self-discipline, invoked the religious idiom whether swaraj or Ram Rajya. His politics spoke the language of Hinduism and indeed he could conceive of no other form of politics except through the religious idiom. Certainly this contributed a great deal to this popularity among the people and his success in mobilizing them. To many he appeared as a saint.
“Like a poet”, writes Dennis Dalton, “he used his past with affection, drawing from the Indian classics old words-ahimsa, Karma Yoga, Ram Raj.
Gandhi’s intentions and his reasons for deploying a religious idiom cannot be doubted. In politics however, good intentions can lead to unanticipated consequences. We have to conclude sadly that howsoever democratic be the public sphere, the use of languages can ensure that minorities do not have easy access to its defining languages, practices and symbolism which is that of the dominant group. This is particularly true of the public sphere in times of the freedom struggle when nothing less than the control of the nation was at stake. The spiritualisation of freedom did not draw the required response from the non-Hindu communities that Gandhi had sought to weld together in the name of swaraj and Ram Rajya. His brave attempt to create a coalition and avoid Partition was also fated to disappointment.
Neera Chandhoke was professor of political science at Delhi University.
