HIND SWRAJ and EXPERIMENT with UNTRUTH!
Hind Swaraj written by MK Gandhi is being debated once again by Gandhians and Socialists as a tool of Resistance against Macdonaldisation in India!
The Indigenous Production system and Livelihood related to caste System Inherent and unchangeable unto Death, is the BASE of Gandhian Economic Thoughts which Never deal with Imperialism or Industrialisation, fascism or Zionism! In fact, Gandhian thought and His EXperiments with UNTRUTH is the solid base of HINDUTVA and Hindurashtra Corpotarised in India!
Gandhi enacted to Poona Pact and pleading Autonomous Rural Indian Society , he was in fact justifying the Feudal Set Up and Manusmriti Rule. This pattern may be well understood in the NOVELS of Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya who is responsible for the Human Documentation of hatred and treated as the spokesperson of Social Realism in Bengal. tarashankar had been a Gandhian and Never rose above his Class and Caste Interests!
Gandhi ENABLED the Power Transfer for Brhmin bania Raj, amusingly disapproving and disassociating with partition for which he had been Responsible!
Gandhi rejected the demand of equal REPRESENTATION of SC, ST, OBC, Minorities including Muslims and Sikhs, it worked STIMULUS for Two nation theory! RSS was nowhere in the scene while Gandhi and bal Gangadhar Tilak coined RAM Rajya and Gandhi NEVER Changed his HINDUTVA Version of Econmy and Society!
Since 1990, as Dr manmohan Singh and gang were INSERTED into Indian parliamentary system by Zionst Corporate Imperialism, HINDUTVA has been GLOBALISED. Imperialism has no contradiction with Hindutva . On the other hand, Indiscriminate Industrialisation and Urbanisation introduced Genocuide Culture and Ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous , Aboriginal and Minority Communities all over the Sub Continent!
Strategic realliance in US and israel lead only did oust the RSS from the HINDUTVA Ruling Hegemony as the India Incs directly took over the Governance with Parliamentary Forgery and Political Human face!
In the same way, gandhi had been the most HUMAN face of fascist Imperialist Brahamin bania Raj manipulated by GANDHI NEHRU PATIL AXIS and supported by RSS and Hindu Mahasabha. This alliance was RESHAPED in 1984 after and during Operation Blue Star and SIKH Genocide!
It worked once again to make Indian Polity as well as Economy the Colonial Peripherry of United satates of America.
RSS is trying hard to hold on the HINDUTVA Platfarm which had been TRADITIONALLY the Property of Congress and Gandhi!
Gandhi is said to be EXPERIMENTING with TRUTH while he always had been Hypocrite as much as the Marxists in India. Gandhi and marxists oppose caste system and do EVERYthing to sustain the Manusmriti Rule!
Gndhi`s way was NON Violence but he jsutified the Hindutva ways of Society which is based on Untouchability, Alienation, Discrimination, Inequality, Injustice,Apartheid and FULL of Violence!
Gandhi used the BUDDHIST Philosophy to Condemn the British raj which had no interest to SUSTAIN Manusmriti Rule in the Colony and VIOLATED the Brahamin Culture as the British Rulers gave the RIGHT to EDUCATION, Right to Work, Right to Arms, right to Movement to the DEPRIVED Sections in Indian Caste Ridden Society.
In fact, the Gandhian School of Freedom Struggle had nothing to do with ANTI Imperialism, they were trying hard to hold on Fascist and Feudal HINDUTVA!
HInd Swaraj is the basic document whcih made the base Of BRAHMIN Raj in India which eventually turned into AMERICANISATION Absolute!
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Gandhi & the black Untouchables
As opposed to the popular perceptions, here you will see Gandhi's image from the eyes of a very famous untouchable leader, named, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1893-1956). Born and raised as an untouchable, Dr. Ambedkar received his masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University, which later on also conferred upon him the Doctor of Law. Dr. Ambedkar also received a D.Sc. degree from London School of Economics, and the Bar-at-Law from the Grays Inn, London. Suffice to say, Dr. Ambedkar's sharp intellect has provided us an insight into Gandhi, some of which we will like to share with you all. We recommend the following:1. Nichols, Beverley. Verdict on India. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944.
A book we highly recommend. Beverley Nichols, a famous novelist, musician, playwright, essayist, reporter, and a journalist visited British India. During this visit, he met Dr. Ambedkar, who told him:
"Gandhi is the greatest enemy the untouchables have ever had in India."
So what did Ambedkar mean? Mr. Nichols explained it as follows:
[We can best explain it by a parallel. Take Ambedkar's remark, and for the word "untouchable" substitute the word "peace." Now imagine that a great champion of peace, like Lord Cecil, said, "Gandhi is the greatest enemy of peace the world has ever had." What would he mean, using these words of the most spectacular pacifist of modern times? He would mean that passive resistance--which is Gandhi's form of pacifism--could only lead to chaos and the eventual triumph of brute force; that to lie down and let people trample on you (which was Gandhi's recipe for dealing with the Japanese) is a temptation to the aggressor rather than an example to the aggressed; and that in order to have peace you must organize, you must be strong, and that you must be prepared to use force. Mutatis mutandis, that is precisely what Ambedkar meant about the untouchables. He wanted them to be recognized and he wanted them to be strong. He rightly considered that the best way of gaining his object was by granting them separate electorates; a solid block of 60 million would be in a position to dictate terms to its oppressors. Gandhi fiercely opposed this scheme. "Give the untouchables separate electorates," he cried, "and you only perpetuate their status for all time." It was a queer argument, and those who were not bemused by the Mahatma's charm considered it a phoney one. They suspected that Gandhi was a little afraid that 60 million untouchables might join up with the 100 million Muslims--(as they nearly did)--and challenge the dictatorship of the 180 million orthodox Hindus. With such irreverent criticisms were made to him, Gandhi resorted to his usual tactics: he began to fast unto death. (As if that altered the situation by a comma or proved anything but his own obstinacy!) There was a frenzy of excitement, ending in a compromise on the seventh day of the fast. The untouchables still vote in the same constituencies as the caste Hindus, but a substantial number of seats are now reserved for them in the provincial legislatures. It is better than nothing, but it is not nearly so good as it would have been if Gandhi had not interfered. That is what Doctor Ambedkar meant. And I think that he was right.]
2. Ambedkar, B.R. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. Bombay: Thacker & Co., Ltd, 2nd edition, 1946. Excerpts from this book were published in: Gandhi: Maker of Modern India? Edited by Martin Deming Lewis. Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1965. Here is the report which you must read in its entirety:
Mr. Gandhi's views on the caste system--which constitutes the main social problem in India--were fully elaborated by him in 1921-22 in a Gujrati journal called Nava-Jivan. The article is written in Gujrati. I give below an English translation of his views as near as possible in his own words. Says Mr. Gandhi:
(1) I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because it is founded on the caste system.
(2) The seeds of swaraj are to be found in the caste system. Different castes are like different sections of miliary division. Each division is working for the good of the whole....
(3) A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization.
(4) Caste has a ready made means for spreading primary education. Each caste can take the responsibility for the education of the children of the caste. Caste has a political basis. It can work as an electorate for a representative body. Caste can perform judicial functions by electing persons to act as judges to decide disputes among members of the same caste. With castes it is easy to raise a defense force by requiring each caste to raise a brigade.
(5) I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity. That dining together creates friendship is contrary to experience. If this was true there would have been no war in Europe.... Taking food is as dirty an act as answering the call of nature. The only difference is that after answering call of nature we get peace while after eating food we get discomfort. Just as we perform the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking food must also be done in seclusion.
(6) In India children of brothers do not intermarry. Do they cease to love because they do not intermarry? Among the Vaishnavas many women are so orthodox that they will not eat with members of the family nor will they drink water from a common water pot. Have they no love? The caste system cannot be said to be bad because it does not allow interdining or intermarriage between different castes.
(7) Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as interdining and intermarriage.
(8) To destroy caste system and adopt Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder. I have no use for a Brahmin if I cannot call him a Brahmin for my life. It will be a chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin.
(9) The caste system is a natural order of society. In India it has been given a religious coating. Other countries not having understood the utility of the caste system, it existed only in a loose condition and consequently those countries have not derived from caste system the same degree of advantage which India has derived. These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.
In 1922, Mr. Gandhi was a defender of the caste system. Pursuing the inquiry, one comes across a somewhat critical view of the caste system by Mr. Gandhi in the year 1925. This is what Mr. Gandhi said on 3rd February 1925:
I gave support to caste because it stands for restraint. But at present caste does not mean restraint, it means limitations. Restraint is glorious and helps to achieve freedom. But limitation is like chain. It binds. There is nothing commendable in castes as they exist to-day. They are contrary to the tenets of the Shastras. The number of castes is infinite and there is a bar against intermarriage. This is not a condition of elevation. It is a state of fall.
In reply to the question: What is the way out? Mr. Gandhi said:The best remedy is that small castes should fuse themselves into one big caste. There should be four big castes so that we may reproduce the old system of four Varnas.
In short, in 1925 Mr. Gandhi became an upholder of the Varna system.The old Varna system prevalent in ancient India had the society divided into four orders: (1) Brahmins,whose occupation was learning; (2) Kshatriyas, whose occupation was warfare; (3) Vaishyas, whose occupation was trade and (4) Shudras,whose occupation was service of the other classes. Is Mr. Gandhi's Varna system the same as this old Varna system of the orthodox Hindus? Mr. Gandhi explained his Varna system in the following terms:
(1) I believe that the divisions into Varna is based on birth.
(2) There is nothing in the Varna system which stands in the way of the Shudra acquiring learning or studying military art of offense or defense. Contra it is open to a Kshatriya to serve. The Varna system is no bar to him. What the Varna system enjoins is that a Shudra will not make learning a way of earning a living. Nor will a Kshatriya adopt service as a way of learning a living. [Similarly a Brahmin may learn the art of war or trade. But he must not make them a way of earning his living. Contra a Vaishya may acquire learning or may cultivate the art of war. But he must not make them a way of learning his living.]
(3) The Varna system is connected with the way of earning a living. There is no harm if a person belonging to one Varna acquires the knowledge or science and art specialized in by persons belonging to other Varnas. But as far as the way of earning his living is concerned he must follow the occupation of the Varna to which he belongs which means he must follow the hereditary profession of his forefathers.
(4) The object of the Varna is to prevent competition and class struggle and class war. I believe in the Varna system because it fixes the duties and occupations of persons.
(5) Varna means the determination of a man's occupation before he is born.
(6) In the Varna system no man has any liberty to choose his occupation. His occupation is determined for him by heredity.
* * *
The social life of Gandhism is either caste or Varna.Though it may be difficult to say which, there can be no doubt that the social ideal of Gandhism is not democracy. For, whether one takes for comparison caste or Varnaboth are fundamentally opposed to democracy....
That Mr. Gandhi changed over from the caste system to the Varna system does not make the slightest difference to the charge that Gandhism is opposed to democracy. In the first place, the idea of Varna is the parent of the idea of caste. If the idea of caste is a pernicious idea it is entirely because of the viciousness of the idea of Varna. Both are evil ideas and it matters very little whether one believes in Varna or in caste.
* *
* Turning to the field of economic life, Mr. Gandhi stands for two ideals. One of these is the opposition to machinery... evidenced by his idolization of charkha (the spinning wheel) and by insistence upon hand-spinning and hand-weaving. His opposition to machinery and his love for charkha are not matter of accident. They are a matter of his philosophy of life....
The second ideal of Mr. Gandhi is the elimination of class war and even class struggle in the relationship between employers and employees and between landlords and tenants....Mr. Gandhi does not wish to hurt the propertied class. He is even opposed to a campaign against them. He has no passion for economic equality. Referring to the propertied class Mr. Gandhi said quite recently that he does not wish to destroy the hen that lays the golden egg. His solution for the economic conflict between the owners and the workers, between the rich and the poor, between the landlords and the tenants and between the employers and the employees is very simple. The owners need not deprive themselves of their property. All they need do is to declare themselves trustees for the poor. Of course, the trust is to be a voluntary one carrying only a spiritual obligation.
Is there anything new in the Gandhian analysis of economic ills? Are the economics of Gandhism sound? What hope does Gandhism hold out to the common man, to the down and out? Does it promise him a better life, a life of joy and culture, a life of freedom, not merely freedom from want but freedom to rise, to grow to the full stature which his capacities can reach?
There is nothing new in the Gandhian analysis of economic ills, insofar as it attributes them to machinery and the civilization that is built upon it. That machinery and modern civilization help to concentrate management and control into relatively few hands, and with the aid of banking and credit facilitate the transfer into still fewer hands of all materials and factories and mills in which millions are bled white in order to support huge industries thousands of miles away from their cottages, maimings and cripplings far in excess of the corresponding injuries by war, and are responsible for disease and physical deterioration due directly and indirectly to the development of large cities with their smoke, dirt, noise, foul air, lack of sunshine and outdoor life, slums, prostitution and unnatural living which they bring about, are all old and worn-out arguments. There is nothing new in them. Gandhism is merely repeating the views of Rousseau, Ruskin, Tolstoy and their school.
The ideas which go to make up Gandhism are just primitive. It is a return to nature, to animal life. The only merit is their simplicity. As there is always a large corps of simple people who are attracted by them, such simple ideas do not die, and there is always some simpleton to preach them. There is, however, no doubt that the practical instincts of men--which seldom go wrong--have found them unfruitful and which society in search of progress has thought it best to reject.
The economics of Gandhism are hopelessly fallacious. The fact that machinery and modern civilization have produced many evils may be admitted. But these evils are no argument against them. For the evils are not due to machinery and modern civilization. They are due to wrong social organization, which has made private property and pursuit of personal gain, matters of absolute sanctity. If machinery and civilization have not benefited everybody, the remedy is not to condemn machinery and civilization but to alter the organization of society so that the benefits will not be usurped by the few but will accrue to all.
In Gandhism, the common man has no hope. It treats man as an animal and no more. It is true that man shares the constitution and functions of animals, nutritive, reproductive, etc. But these are not distinctively human functions. The distinctively human function is reason, the purpose of which is to enable man to observe, meditate, cogitate, study and discover the beauties of the Universe and enrich his life and control the animal elements in his life. Man thus occupies the highest place in the scheme of animate existence. If this is true what is the conclusion that follows: The conclusion that follows is that while the ultimate goal of a brute's life is reached once his physical appetites are satisfied, the ultimate goal of man's existence is not reached unless and until he has fully cultivated his mind. In short, what divides the brute from man is culture. Culture is not possible for the brute, but it is essential for man. That being so, the aim of human society must be to enable every person to lead a life of culture, which means the cultivation of mind as distinguished from the satisfaction of mere physical wants. How can this happen?
Both for society as well as for individual[s] there is always a gulf between merely living and living worthily. In order that one may live worthily one must first live. The time and energy spent upon mere life, upon gaining of subsistence detracts from that available for activities of a distinctively human nature and which go to make up a life of culture. How then can a life of culture be made possible? It is not possible unless there is sufficient leisure. For, it is only when there is leisure that a person is free to devote himself to a life of culture. The problem of all problems, which human society has to face, is how to provide leisure to every individual. What does leisure mean? Leisure means the lessening of the toil and effort necessary for satisfying the physical wants of life. How can leisure be made possible? Leisure is quite impossible unless some means are found whereby the toil required for producing goods necessary to satisfy human needs is lessened. What can lessen such toil? Only when machine takes the place of man. There is no other means of producing leisure. Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute, and for providing him with leisure and for making a life of culture possible. The man who condemns machinery and modern civilization simply does not understand their purpose and the ultimate aim which human society must strive to achieve.
Gandhism may well be well suited to a society which does not accept democracy as its ideal. A society which does not believe in democracy may be indifferent to machinery and the civilization based upon it. But a democratic society cannot. The former may well content itself with a life of leisure and culture for the few and a life of toil and drudgery for the many. But a democratic society must assure a life of leisure and culture to each one of its citizens. If the above analysis is correct then the slogan of a democratic society must be machinery, and more machinery, civilization and more civilization. Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people....
Gandhism insists upon class structure. It regards the class structure of society and also the income structure as sacrosanct with the consequent distinctions of rich and poor, high and low, owners and workers, as permanent parts of social organization. From the point of view of social consequences, nothing can be more pernicious.... It is not enough to say that Gandhism believes in a class structure. Gandhism stands for more than that. A class structure which is a faded, jejune, effete thing--a mere sentimentality, a mere skeleton is not what Gandhism wants. It wants class structure to function as a living faith. In this there is nothing to be surprised at. For, class structure in Gandhism is not a mere accident. It is its official doctrine.
The idea of trusteeship, which Gandhism proposes as a panacea and by which the moneyed classes will hold their properties in trust for the poor, is the most ridiculous part of it. All that one can say about it is that if anybody else had propounded it the author would have been laughed at as a silly fool, who had not known the hard realities of life and was deceiving the servile classes by telling them that a little dose of moral rearmament to the propertied classes--those who by their insatiable cupidity and indomitable arrogance have made and will always make this world a vale of tears for the toiling millions--will recondition them to such an extent that they will be able to withstand the temptation to misuse the tremendous powers which the class structure gives them over servile classes....
Mr. Gandhi sometimes speaks on social and economic subjects as though he was a blushing Red. Those who will study Gandhism will not be deceived by the occasional aberrations of Mr. Gandhi in favor of democracy and against capitalism. For, Gandhism is in no sense a revolutionary creed. It is conservatism in excelsis. So far as India is concerned, it is a reactionary creed blazoning on its banner the call of Return to Antiquity. Gandhism aims at the resuscitation and reanimating of India's dread, dying past.
Gandhism is a paradox. It stands for freedom from foreign domination, which means the destruction of the existing political structure of the country. At the same time, it seeks to maintain intact a social structure which permits the domination of one class by another on a hereditary basis which means a perpetual domination of one class by another....
The first special feature of Gandhism is that its philosophy helps those who want to keep what they have and to prevent those who have not from getting what they have a right to get. No one who examines the Gandhian attitude to strikes, the Gandhian reverence for caste and the Gandhian doctrine of Trusteeship by the rich for the benefit of the poor can deny that this is an upshot of Gandhism. Whether this is the calculated result of a deliberate design or whether it is a matter of accident may be open to argument. But the fact remains that Gandhism is the philosophy of the well-to-do and the leisure class.
The second special feature of Gandhism is to delude people into accepting their misfortunes by presenting them as best of good fortunes. One or two illustrations will suffice to bring out the truth of this statement.
The Hindu sacred law penalized the Shudras (Hindus of the fourth class) from acquiring wealth. It is a law of enforced poverty unknown in any other part of the world. What does Gandhism do? It does not lift the ban. It blesses the Shudra for his moral courage to give up property. It is well worth quoting Mr. Gandhi's own words. Here they are:
The Shudra who only serves (the higher caste) as a matter of religious duty, and who will never own any property, who indeed has not even the ambition to own anything, is deserving of thousand obeisance...The very Gods will shower flowers on him.
Another illustration in support is the attitude of Gandhism towards the scavenger. The sacred law of the Hindus lays down that a scavenger's progeny shall live by scavenging. Under Hinduism scavenging was not a matter of choice, it was a matter of force. What does Gandhism do? It seeks to perpetuate this system by praising scavenging as the noblest service to society! Let me quote Mr. Gandhi: As a President of a Conference of the Untouchables, Mr. Gandhi said:
I do not want to attain Moksha. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them, in order that I endeavor to free myself and them from that miserable condition. I, therefore prayed that if I should be born again, I should do so not as a Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra, but as an AtiShudra.... I love scavenging. In my ashram, an eighteen-years-old Brahmin lad is doing the scavenger's work in order to teach the ashram scavenger cleanliness. The lad is no reformer. He was born and bred in orthodoxy.... But he felt that his accomplishments were incomplete until he had become also a perfect sweeper, and that, if he wanted the ashram sweeper to do his work well, he must do it himself and set an example. You should realize that you are cleaning Hindu Society.
Can there be a worse example of false propaganda than this attempt of Gandhism to perpetuate evils which have been deliberately imposed by one class over another? If Gandhism preached the rule of poverty for all and not merely for the Shudra the worst that could be said about it is that it is mistaken idea. But why preach it as good for one class only?... In India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a scavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question whether he does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavenging is a noble profession with the object of inducing those who refuse to engage in it, one could understand it. But why appeal to the scavenger's pride and vanity in order to induce him and him only to keep on to scavenging by telling him that scavenging is a noble profession and that he need not be ashamed of it? To preach that poverty is good for the Shudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for the Untouchables and for none else and to make them accept these onerous impositions as voluntary purposes of life, by appeal to their failings is an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr. Gandhi can perpetrate with equanimity and impunity....
Criticism apart, this is the technique of Gandhism to make wrongs done appear to the very victim as though they were his privileges. If there is an "ism" which has made full use of religion as an opium to lull the people into false beliefs and false security, it is Gandhism. Following Shakespeare, one can well say: Plausibility! Ingenuity! Thy name is Gandhism.
Such is Gandhism. Having known what is Gandhism the answer to the question, "Should Gandhism become the law of the land what would be the lot of the Untouchables under it?" cannot require much scratching of the brain.... In India even the lowest man among the caste Hindus--why even the aboriginal and the Hill Tribe man--though educationally and economically not very much above the Untouchables. The Hindu society accepts him claim to superiority over the Untouchables. The Untouchable will therefore continue to suffer the worst fate as he does now namely, in prosperity he will be the last to be employed and in depression the first to be fired.
What does Gandhism do to relieve the Untouchables from this fate? Gandhism professes to abolish Untouchability. That is hailed as the greatest virtue of Gandhism. But what does this virtue amount to in actual life? To assess the value of this anti-Untouchability which is regarded as a very big element in Gandhism, it is necessary to understand fully the scope of Mr. Gandhi's programme for the removal of Untouchability. Does it mean anything more than that the Hindus will not mind touching the Untouchables? Does it mean the removal of the ban on the right of the Untouchables to education? It would be better to take the two questions separately.
To start wit the first question. Mr. Gandhi does not say that a Hindu should not take a bath after touching the Untouchables. If Mr. Gandhi does not object to it as a purification of pollution then it is difficult to see how Untouchability can be said to vanish by touching the Untouchables. Untouchability centers round the idea of pollution by contact and purification by bath to remove the pollution. Does it mean social assimilation of the Untouchables with the Hindus? Mr. Gandhi has most categorically stated that removal of Untouchability does not mean interdining or intermarriage between the Hindus and the Untouchables. Mr. Gandhi's anti-Untouchability means that the Untouchables will be classes as Shudras instead of being classed as AtiShudras [i.e., "beyond Shudras"]. There is nothing more in it. Mr. Gandhi has not considered whether the old Shudras will accept the new Shudras into their fold. If they don't then the removal of Untouchability is a senseless proposition for it will still keep the Untouchables as a separate social category. Mr. Gandhi probably knows that the abolition of Untouchability will not bring about the assimilation of the Untouchables by the Shudras.That seems to be the reason why Mr. Gandhi himself has given a new and a different name to the Untouchables. The new name registers by anticipation what is likely to be the fact. By calling the Untouchables Harijans, Mr. Gandhi has killed two birds with one stone. He has shown that assimilation of the Untouchables by the Shudras is not possible. He has also by his new name counteracted assimilation and made it impossible.
Regarding the second question, it is true that Gandhism is prepared to remove the old ban placed by the Hindu Shastras on the right of the Untouchables to education and permit them to acquire knowledge and learning. Under Gandhism the Untouchables may study law, they may study medicine, they may study engineering or anything else they may fancy. So far so good. But will the Untouchables be free to make use of their knowledge and learning? Will they have the right to choose their profession? Can they adopt the career of lawyer, doctor or engineer? To these questions the answer which Gandhism gives is an emphatic "no." The untouchables must follow their hereditary professions. That those occupations are unclean is no excuse. That before the occupation became hereditary it was the result of force and not volition does not matter. The argument of Gandhism is that what is once settled is settled forever even it was wrongly settled. Under Gandhism the Untouchables are to be eternal scavengers. There is no doubt that the Untouchables would much prefer the orthodox system of Untouchability. A compulsory state of ignorance imposed upon the Untouchables by the Hindu Shastras made scavenging bearable. But Gandhism which compels an educated Untouchable to do scavenging is nothing short of cruelty. The grace in Gandhism is a curse in its worst form. The virtue of the anti-Untouchability plant in Gandhism is quite illusory. There is no substance in it.
What else is there in Gandhism which the Untouchables can accept as opening a way for their ultimate salvation? Barring this illusory campaign against Untouchability, Gandhism is simply another form of Sanatanism which is the ancient name for militant orthodox Hinduism. What is there in Gandhism which is not to be found in orthodox Hinduism? There is caste in Hinduism, there is caste in Gandhism. Hinduism believes in the law of hereditary profession, so does Gandhism. Hinduism enjoins cow-worship. So does Gandhism. Hinduism upholds the law of karma, predestination of man's condition in this world, so does Gandhism. Hinduism accepts the authority of the Shastras. So does Gandhism. Hinduism believes in idols. So does Gandhism. All that Gandhism has done is to find a philosophic justification for Hinduism and its dogmas. Hinduism is bald in the sense that it is just a set of rules which bear on their face the appearance of a crude and cruel system. Gandhism supplies the philosophy which smoothens its surface and gives it the appearance of decency and respectability and so alters it and embellishes it as to make it even more attractive....
What hope can Gandhism offer to the Untouchables? To the Untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors. The sanctity and infallibility of the Vedas, Smritis and Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and the senseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritable instruments of torture which Hinduism has forged against the Untouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated, blasted and blighted the life of the Untouchables are to be found intact and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism. How can the Untouchables say that Gandhism is a heaven and not a chamber of horrors as Hinduism has been? The only reaction and a very natural reaction of the Untouchables would be to run away from Gandhism.
Gandhists may say that what I have stated applies to the old type of Gandhism. There is a new Gandhism, Gandhism without caste. This has reference to the recent statement of Mr. Gandhi that caste is an anachronism. Reformers were naturally gladdened by this declaration of Mr. Gandhi. And who would not be glad to see that a man like Mr. Gandhi having such terrible influence over the Hindus, after having played the most mischievous part of a social reactionary, after having stood out as the protagonist of the caste system, after having beguiled and befooled the unthinking Hindus with arguments which made no distinction between what is fair and foul should have come out with this recantation? But is this really a matter for jubilation? Does it change the nature of Gandhism? Does it make Gandhism a new and a better "ism" than it was before? Those who are carried away by this recantation of Mr. Gandhi, forget two things. In the first place, all that Mr. Gandhi has said is that caste is an anachronism. He does not say it is an evil. He does not say it is anathema. Mr. Gandhi may be taken to be not in favor of caste. but Mr. Gandhi does not say that he is against the Varna system. And what is Mr. Gandhi's Varna system? It is simply a new name for the caste system and retains all the worst features of the caste system.
The declaration of Mr. Gandhi cannot be taken to mean any fundamental change in Gandhism. It cannot make Gandhism acceptable to the Untouchables. The untouchables will still have ground to say: "Good God! Is this man Gandhi our Savior?"
2.) Gandhi & Racism
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Gandhi's Ambedkar
'Inside every thinking Indian there is a Gandhian and a Marxist struggling for supremacy,' says noted historian and biographer RAMACHANDRA GUHA in the opening sentence of this publication, which has just been released. A significant portion of the book expands on this salvo. In short, it examines and discusses all those who comprise the life of thinking Indians today. Exclusive extracts from the book released yesterday .
MAHATMA GANDHI was not so much the Father of the Nation as the mother of all debates regarding its future. All his life he fought in a friendly spirit with compatriots whose views on this or that topic diverged sharply from his. He disagreed with Communists and the bhadralok on the efficacy and morality of violence as a political strategy. He fought with radical Muslims on the one side and with radical Hindus on the other, both of whom sought to build a state on theological principles. He argued with Nehru and other scientists on whether economic development in a free India should centre on the village or the factory. And with that other giant, Rabindranath Tagore, he disputed the merits of such varied affiliations as the English language, nationalism, and the spinning wheel.
In some ways the most intense, interesting and long-running of these debates was between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Gandhi wished to save Hinduism by abolishing untouchability, whereas Ambedkar saw a solution for his people outside the fold of the dominant religion of the Indian people. Gandhi was a rural romantic, who wished to make the self-governing village the bedrock of free India; Ambedkar an admirer of city life and modern technology who dismissed the Indian village as a den of iniquity. Gandhi was a crypto-anarchist who favoured non-violent protest while being suspicious of the state; Ambedkar a steadfast constitutionalist, who worked within the state and sought solutions to social problems with the aid of the state.
Perhaps the most telling difference was in the choice of political instrument. For Gandhi, the Congress represented all of India, the Dalits too. Had he not made their cause their own from the time of his first ashram in South Africa? Ambedkar however made a clear distinction between freedom and power. The Congress wanted the British to transfer power to them, but to obtain freedom the Dalits had to organise themselves as a separate bloc, to form a separate party, so as to more effectively articulate their interests in the crucible of electoral politics. It was thus that in his lifetime, and for long afterwards, Ambedkar came to represent a dangerously subversive threat to the authoritative, and sometimes authoritarian, equation: Gandhi = Congress = Nation.
Here then is the stuff of epic drama, the argument between the Hindu who did most to reform caste and the ex-Hindu who did most to do away with caste altogether. Recent accounts represent it as a fight between a hero and a villain, the writer's caste position generally determining who gets cast as hero, who as villain. In truth both figures should be seen as heroes, albeit tragic ones.
The tragedy, from Gandhi's point of view, was that his colleagues in the national movement either did not understand his concern with untouchability or even actively deplored it. Priests and motley shankaracharyas thought he was going too fast in his challenge to caste - and why did he not first take their permission? Communists wondered why he wanted everyone to clean their own latrines when he could be speaking of class struggle. And Congressmen in general thought Harijan work came in the way of an all-out effort for national freedom. Thus Stanley Reid, a former editor of the Times of India quotes an Indian patriot who complained in the late thirties that "Gandhi is wrapped up in the Harijan movement. He does not care a jot whether we live or die; whether we are bond or free."
The opposition that he faced from his fellow Hindus meant that Gandhi had perforce to move slowly, and in stages. He started by accepting that untouchability was bad, but added a cautionary caveat - that inter-dining and inter-marriage were also bad. He moved on to accepting inter-mingling and inter-dining (hence the movement for temple entry), and to arguing that all men and all varnas were equal. The last and most far-reaching step, taken only in 1946, was to challenge caste directly by accepting and sanctioning inter-marriage itself.
The tragedy, from Ambedkar's point of view, was that to fight for his people he had to make common cause with the British. In his book, Worshipping False Gods, Arun Shourie has made much of this. Shourie takes all of 600 pages to make two points: (i) that Ambedkar was a political opponent of both Gandhi and the Congress, and generally preferred the British to either; (ii) that Ambedkar cannot be called the "Father of the Constitution" as that implies sole authorship, whereas several other people, such as K. M. Munshi and B. N. Rau, also contributed significantly to the wording of the document. Reading Worshipping False Gods, one might likewise conclude that it has been mistakenly advertised as being the work of one hand. Entire chapters are based entirely on one or other volume of the Transfer of Power, the collection of official papers put out some years ago by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The editor of that series, Nicholas Mansergh, might with reason claim co-authorship of Shourie's book. In a just world he would be granted a share of the royalties too.
Practised in the arts of over-kill and over-quote, Shourie is a pamphleteer parading as a historian. He speaks on Gandhi only as "Gandhiji" and of the national movement only as the "National Movement", indicating that he has judged the case beforehand. For to use the suffix and the capitals is to simultaneously elevate and intimidate, to set up the man and his movement as the ideal, above and beyond criticism. But the Congress' claim to represent all of India was always under challenge. The Communists said it was the party of landlords and capitalists. The Muslim League said it was a party of the Hindus. Ambedkar then appended a devastating caveat, saying that the party did not even represent all Hindus, but only the upper castes.
Shourie would deny that these critics had any valid arguments whatsoever. He is in the business of awarding, and more often withholding, certificates of patriotism. The opponents of the Congress are thus all suspect to him, simply because they dared point out that the National Movement was not always as national as it set out to be, or that the Freedom Struggle promised unfreedom for some. But how did these men outside the Congress come to enjoy such a wide following? This is a question Shourie does not pause to answer, partly because he had made up his mind in advance, but also because he is woefully ill-informed. Consider now some key facts erased or ignored by him.
That Ambedkar preferred the British to the Congress is entirely defensible. Relevant here is a remark of the 18th-Century English writer Samuel Johnson. When the American colonists asked for independence from Britain, Johnson said: "How is it that we hear the greatest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" Untouchability was to the Indian freedom movement what slavery had been to the American struggle, the basic contradiction it sought to paper over. Before Ambedkar, another outstanding leader of the lower castes, Jotiba Phule, also distrusted the Congress, in his time a party dominated by Poona Brahmins. He too preferred the British, in whose armies and factories low castes could find opportunities denied to them in the past. The opening up of the economy and the growth of the colonial cities also helped many untouchables escape the tyranny of the village. The British might have been unwitting agents of change; nonetheless, under their rule life for the lower castes was less unpleasant by far than it had been under the Peshwas.
Shourie also seems unaware of work by worthy historians on low- caste movements in other parts of India. Mark Juergensmeyer has documented the struggles of untouchables in Punjab, which under its remarkable leader Mangu Ram, rejected the Congress and the Arya Samaj to form a new sect, Adi-Dharm, which was opposed to both. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has written of the Namasudras in Bengal, who like Ambedkar and his Mahars, were not convinced that a future Congress government would be sympathetic to their interests. And countless scholars have documented the rise of the Dravidian movement in South India, that took as its point of departure Brahmin domination of the Congress in Madras: the movement's founder, E. V. Ramaswami "Periyar", also fought bitterly with Gandhi.
The leaders of these movements, and the millions who followed them, worked outside the Congress and often in opposition to it. Enough reason perhaps for Shourie to dismiss them all as anti- national. Indeed, Shourie's attitude is comparable to that of White Americans who question the patriotism of those Blacks who dare speak out against racism. For asking Blacks to stand up for their rights, men of such stature as W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson were called all kind of names, of which "anti-American" was much the politest. Later, the great Martin Luther King was persecuted by the most powerful of American agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, equated patriotism with acquiescence to White domination.
Much of the time, Shourie writes as if there is a singular truth, with him as its repository and guarantor. Time and again he equates Ambedkar with Jinnah as an "accomplice of Imperial politics". He dismisses all that Ambedkar wrote about Hinduism "caricature" and "calumnies". Not once does he acknowledge that there was much truth to the criticisms. There is not one admission here of the horrendous and continuing sufferings of Dalit as the hands of caste Hindus that might explain and justify Ambedkar's rhetoric and political choices. For Shourie, the fact that Ambedkar disagreed long and often with Gandhi is proof enough that he was anti-national. He even insinuates that Ambedkar "pushed Gandhi to the edge of death" by not interfering with the Mahatma's decision to fast in captivity. Of the same fast other historians have written, in my view more plausibly, that by threatening to die Gandhi blackmailed Ambedkar into signing a pact with him.
Somewhere in the middle of Worshipping False Gods, the author complains that Ambedkar's "statues, dressed in garish blue, holding a copy of the Constitution - have been put up in city after city." However, this aesthetic distaste seems rather pointless. For the background to the statues and the reverence they command lies in the continuing social practices of the religion to which Shourie and I belong. If caste lives, so will the memory of the man who fought to annihilate it. The remarkable thing is that 50 years after independence, the only politician, dead or alive, who has a truly pan-Indian appeal is B. R. Ambedkar. Where Gandhi is forgotten in his native Gujarat and Nehru vilified in his native Kashmir, Ambedkar is worshipped in hamlets all across the land. For Dalits everywhere he is the symbol of their struggle, the scholar, theoretician and activist whose own life represented a stirring triumph over the barriers of caste.
Shourie's attacks on Dalits and their hero follow in quick succession the books he has published attacking Communists, Christians and Muslims. Truth be told, the only category of Indians he has not attacked - and going by his present political persuasion will not attack - are high-caste Hindus. Oddly enough, this bilious polemicist and baiter of the minorities was once an anti-religious leftist who excoriated Hinduism. To see Shourie's career in its totality is to recall these words of Issac Deutscher, on the communist turned anti-communist.
He brings to his job the lack of scruple, the narrow-mindedness, the disregard of truth, and the intense hatred with which Stalinism has imbued him. He remains sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in black and white, but now the colours are differently distributed ... The ex- communist ... is haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society ... He then tries to suppress the guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frantic aggressiveness. He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of all. He may no longer be concerned with any cause except one - self- justification.
Ambedkar is a figure who commands great respect from one end of the social spectrum. But he is also, among some non-Dalits, an object of great resentment, chiefly for his decision to carve out a political career independent of and sometimes in opposition to Gandhi's Congress. That is of course the burden of Shourie's critique but curiously, the very week his book was published, at a political rally in Lucknow the Samajvadi Party's Beni Prasad Verma likewise dismissed Ambedkar as one who "did nothing else except create trouble for Gandhiji". This line, that Ambedkar had no business to criticise, challenge or argue with Gandhi, was of course made with much vigour and malice during the national movement as well.
I think, however, that for Ambedkar to stand up to the uncrowned king and anointed Mahatma of the Indian people required extraordinary courage and will-power. Gandhi thought so too. Speaking at a meeting in Oxford in October 1931, Gandhi said he had "the highest regard for Dr. Ambedkar. He has every right to be bitter. That he does not break our heads is an act of self- restraint on his part." Writing to an English friend two years later, he said he found "nothing unnatural" in Ambedkar's hostility to the Congress and its supporters. "He has not only witnessed the inhuman wrongs done to the social pariahs of Hinduism", reflected this Hindu, "but in spite of all his culture, all the honours that he has received, he has, when he is in India, still to suffer many insults to which untouchables are exposed." In June 1936 Gandhi pointed out once again that Dr. Ambedkar "has had to suffer humiliations and insults which should make any one of us bitter and resentful." "Had I been in his place," he remarked, "I would have been as angry."
Gandhi's latter-day admirers might question Ambedkar's patriotism and probity, but the Mahatma had no such suspicions himself. Addressing a bunch of Karachi students in June 1934, he told them that "the magnitude of (Dr. Ambedkar's) sacrifice is great. He is absorbed in his own work. He leads a simple life. He is capable of earning one to two thousand rupees a month. He is also in a position to settle down in Europe if he so desires. But he does not want to stay there. He is only concerned about the welfare of the Harijians."
To Gandhi, Ambedkar's protest held out a lesson to the upper castes. In March 1936 he said that if Ambedkar and his followers were to embrace another religion, "We deserve such treatment and our task (now) is to wake up to the situation and purify ourselves." Not many heeded the warning, for towards the end of his life Gandhi spoke with some bitterness about the indifference to Harijan work among his fellow Hindus: "The tragedy is that those who should have especially devoted themselves to the work of (caste) reform did not put their hearts into it. What wonder that Harijan brethren feel suspicious, and show opposition and bitterness."
The words quoted in the preceding paragraphs have been taken from that reliable and easily accessible source: the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The 100 volumes of that set rest lightly on my shelves as, going by other evidence, they rest on the shelves of the man who compiled Worshipping False Gods. Perhaps the most perverse aspect of an altogether perverse book is that Shourie does not once tell us what Gandhi said or wrote about his great adversary. A curious thing or, on reflection, a not-so-curious thing: for if that scholarly courtesy was restored to, the case that Ambedkar was an anti-national careerist would be blown sky- high.
One of the few Gandhians who understood the cogency of the Dalit critique of the Congress was C. Rajagopalachari. In the second half of 1932, Rajaji became involved in the campaign to allow the so-called untouchables to enter the Guruvayoor temple in Kerala. The campaign was led by that doughty fighter for the rights of the dispossessed, K. Kelappan Nair. In a speech at Guruvayoor on December 20, 1932, Rajaji told the high castes that it would certainly help us in the fight for Swaraj if we open the doors of the temple (to Harijans). One of the many causes that keeps Swaraj away from us is that we are divided among ourselves. Mahatmaji received many wounds in London (during the Second Round Table Conference of 1931). But Dr. Ambedkar's darts were the worst. Mahatmaji did not quake before the Churchills of England. But as repressing the nation he had to plead guilty to Dr. Ambedkar's charges.
As it was, the managers of temples across the land could count upon the support of many among their clientele, the suvarna Hindus who agreed with the Shankaracharyas that the Gandhians were dangerous revolutionaries who had to be kept out at the gate. Unhappily, while upper-caste Hindus thought that Gandhi moved too fast, Dalits today feel he was much too slow. The Dalit politician Mayawati has, more than once, spoken of the Mahatma as a shallow paternalist who sought only to smooth the path for more effective long-term domination by the suvarna. Likewise, in his book Why I am Not a Hindu Kancha Illiah writes of Gandhi as wanting to "build a modern consent system for the continued maintenance of brahminical hegemony" - a judgment as unfair as Shourie's on Ambedkar.
Whereas in their lifetime Gandhi and Ambedkar were political rivals, now, decades after their death, it should be possible to see their contributions as complementing one another's. The Kannada critic D. R. Nagaraj once noted that in the narratives of Indian nationalism the "heroic stature of the caste-Hindu reformer", Gandhi, "further dwarfed the Harijan personality" of Ambedkar. In the Ramayana there is only one hero but, as Nagaraj points out, Ambedkar was too proud, intelligent and self- respecting a man to settle for the role of Hanuman or Sugreeva. By the same token, Dalit hagiographers and pamphleteers generally seek to elevate Ambedkar by diminishing Gandhi. For the scriptwriter and the mythmaker there can only be one hero. But the historian is bound by no such constraint. The history of Dalit emancipation is unfinished, and for the most part unwritten. It should, and will, find space for many heroes. Ambedkar and Gandhi will do nicely for a start.
An Anthropologist Among The Marxists And Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha, Permanent Black 2001, New Delhi, Rs. 450.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian, biographer and cricket writer. Once a visiting professor at Stanford University, Oslo University and the University of California at Berkeley, he is now a full- time writer based in Bangalore. His books include The Unquiet Woods and Environmentalism: A Global History. He is the editor of the forthcoming Picador Book of Cricket.
http://www.ambedkar.org/research/GandhiAmbedkar.htm
'Almost every Muslim was with Gandhi when Jinnah left the Congress'
History might be better understood if we did not treat it as a heroes-and-villains movie, says eminent journalist and author M J Akbar, elucidating the Jinnah factor in pre-Independent India. "Well, young man. I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria."
The young man was a journalist, Durga Das. The older man was Mohammad Ali Jinnah [ Images ]. The reference is from Durga Das's classic book, India from Curzon to Nehru and After. Jinnah said this after the 1920 Nagpur session, where Gandhi's non-cooperation resolution was passed almost unanimously.
On October 1, 1906, 35 Muslims of 'noble birth, wealth and power' called on the fourth earl of Minto, Curzon's successor as Viceroy of India. They were led by the Aga Khan and used for the first time a phrase that would dominate the history of the subcontinent in the 20th century: the 'national interests' of Indian Muslims. They wanted help against an 'unsympathetic' Hindu majority.
They asked, very politely, for proportional representation in jobs and separate seats in councils, municipalities, university syndicates and high court benches. Lord Minto was happy to oblige. The Muslim League was born in December that year at Dhaka, chaired by Nawab Salimullah Khan, who had been too ill to join the 35 in October. The Aga Khan was its first president.
The Aga Khan wrote later that it was 'freakishly ironic' that 'our doughtiest opponent in 1906' was Jinnah, who 'came out in bitter hostility towards all that I and my friends had done... He was the only well-known Muslim to take this attitude… He said that our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself.'
On precisely the same dates that the League was formed in Dhaka, Jinnah was in nearby Calcutta with 44 other Muslims and roughly 1,500 Hindus, Christians and Parsis, serving as secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, president of the Indian National Congress.
Dadabhai was too ill to give his address, which had been partially drafted by Jinnah and was read out by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Sarojini Naidu, who met the 30-year-old Jinnah for the first time here, remembered him as a symbol of 'virile patriotism'.
Her description is arguably the best there is: 'Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emancipation, languid and luxurious of habit, Mohammad Ali Jinnah's attenuated form is a deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman's, a humour gay and winning as child's... a shy and splendid idealism which is of the very essence of the man.'
Jinnah entered the central legislative council in Calcutta (then the capital of British India) on January 25, 1910, along with Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and Motilal Nehru. Lord Minto expected the council to rubber stamp 'any measures we may deem right to introduce.' Jinnah's maiden speech shattered such pompousness.
He rose to defend another Gujarati working for his people in another colony across the seas, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi [ Images ]. Jinnah expressed 'the highest pitch of indignation and horror at the harsh and cruel treatment that is meted out to Indians in South Africa' [ Images ]. Minto objected to a term such as 'cruel treatment'. Jinnah responded at once: 'My Lord! I should feel much inclined to use much stronger language.' Lord Minto kept quiet.
On March 7, 1911 Jinnah introduced what was to become the first non-official Act in British Indian history, the Wakf Validating Bill, reversing an 1894 decision on wakf gifts. Muslims across the Indian empire were grateful.
Jinnah attended his first meeting of the League in Bankipur in 1912, but did not become a member. He was in Bankipur to attend the Congress session. When he went to Lucknow [ Images ] a few months later as a special guest of the League (it was not an annual session), Sarojini Naidu was on the platform with him. The bitterness that divided India did not exist then.
Dr M A Ansari, Maulana Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan attended the League session of 1914, and in 1915, the League tent had a truly unlikely guest list: Madan Mohan Malviya, Surendranath Banerjea, Annie Besant, B G Horniman, Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma Gandhi [ Images ].
When Jinnah joined the League in 1913, he insisted on a condition, set out in immaculate English, that his 'loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated' (Jinnah: His Speeches and Writings, 1912-1917, edited by Sarojini Naidu).
Gokhale that year honoured Jinnah with a phrase that has travelled through time: it is 'freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him (Jinnah) the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity'.
In the spring of 1914 Jinnah chaired a Congress delegation to London [ Images ] to lobby Whitehall on a proposed Council of India Bill.
When Gandhi landed in India in 1915, Jinnah, as president of the Gujarat Society (the mahatmas of both India and Pakistan were Gujaratis), spoke at a garden party to welcome the hero of South Africa. Jinnah was the star of 1915.
At the Congress and League sessions, held in Mumbai [ Images ] at the same time, he worked tirelessly with Congress president Satyendra Sinha and Mazharul Haque (a Congressman who presided over the Muslim League that year) for a joint platform of resolutions.
Haque and Jinnah were heckled so badly at the League session by mullahs that the meeting had to be adjourned. It reconvened the next day in the safer milieu of the Taj Mahal Hotel [ Images ].
The next year Jinnah became president of the League for the first time, at Lucknow. Motilal Nehru, in the meantime, worked closely with Jinnah in the council. When the munificent Motilal convened a meeting of fellow legislators at his handsome mansion in Allahabad in April, he considered Jinnah 'as keen a nationalist as any of us. He is showing his community the way to Hindu-Muslim unity'.
It was from this meeting in Allahabad that Jinnah went for a vacation to Darjeeling and the summer home of his friend Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit (French merchants had nicknamed Dinshaw's small-built grandfather petit and it stuck) and met 16-year-old Ruttie. I suppose a glorious view of the Everest encouraged romance. When Ruttie became 18 she eloped and on April 19, 1918 they were married.
Ruttie's Parsi family disowned her, she separated from Jinnah a decade later. (The wedding ring was a gift from the Raja of Mahmudabad.)
As president, Jinnah engineered the famous Lucknow Pact with Congress president A C Mazumdar. In his presidential speech Jinnah rejoiced that the new spirit of patriotism had 'brought Hindus and Muslims together... for the common cause'. Mazumdar announced that all differences had been settled, and Hindus and Muslims would make a 'joint demand for a Representative Government in India'.
Enter Gandhi, who never entered a legislature, and believed passionately that freedom could only be won by a non-violent struggle for which he would have to prepare the masses.
In 1915, Gokhale advised Gandhi to keep 'his ears open and his mouth shut' for a year, and see India. Gandhi stopped in Calcutta on his way to Rangoon and spoke to students. Politics, he said, should never be divorced from religion. The signal was picked by Muslims planning to marry politics with religion in their first great campaign against the British empire, the Khilafat movement.
Over the next three years Gandhi prepared the ground for his version of the freedom struggle: a shift from the legislatures to the street; a deliberate use of religious imagery to reach the illiterate masses through symbols most familiar to them (Ram Rajya for the Hindus, Khilafat for the Muslims); and an unwavering commitment to the poor peasantry, for whom Champaran became a miracle.
The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 provided a perfect opportunity; Indian anger reached critical mass. Gandhi led the Congress towards its first mass struggle, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921.
The constitutionalist in Jinnah found mass politics ambitious, and the liberal in him rejected the invasion of religion in politics. When he rose to speak at the Nagpur session in 1920, where Gandhi moved the non-cooperation resolution, Jinnah was the only delegate to dissent till the end among some 50,000 'surging' Hindus and Muslims. He had two principal objections.
The resolution, he said, was a de facto declaration of swaraj, or complete independence, and although he agreed completely with Lala Lajpat Rai's indictment of the British government he did not think the Congress had, as yet, the means to achieve this end; as he put it, 'it is not the right step to take at this moment... you are committing the Indian National Congress to a programme which you will not be able to carry out'.
Gandhi, after promising swaraj within a year, withdrew the Non-Cooperation Movement in the wake of communal riots in Kerala [ Images ] and, of course, the famous Chauri Chaura incident in 1922. The Congress formally adopted full independence as its goal only in 1931. His second objection was that non-violence would not succeed. In this Jinnah was wrong.
There is a remarkable sub-text in this speech, which has never been commented upon, at least to my knowledge. When Jinnah first referred to Gandhi, he called him 'Mr Gandhi'. There were instant cries of 'Mahatma Gandhi'. Without a moment's hesitation, Jinnah switched to 'Mahatma Gandhi'.
Later, he referred to Mr Mohammad Ali, the more flamboyant of the two Ali Brothers, both popularly referred to as Maulana. There were angry cries of 'Maulana'. Jinnah ignored them. He referred at least five times more to Ali, but each time called him only Mr Mohammad Ali.
Let us leave the last word to Gandhi. Writing in Harijan of June 8, 1940, Gandhi said, 'Quaid-e-Azam himself was a great Congressman. It was only after the non-cooperation that he, like many other Congressmen belonging to several communities, left. Their defection was purely political.'
In other words, it was not communal. It could not be, for almost every Muslim was with Gandhi when Jinnah left the Congress.
History might be better understood if we did not treat it as a heroes-and-villains movie. Life is more complex than that. The heroes of our national struggle changed sometimes with circumstances. The reasons for the three instances I cite are very different; their implications radically at variance. I am not making any comparisons, but only noting that leaders change their tactics.
Non-violent Gandhi, who broke the empire three decades later, received the Kaiser-I-Hind medal on June 3, 1915 (Tagore was knighted the same day) for recruiting soldiers for the war effort.
Subhas Chandra Bose, ardently Gandhian in 1920, put on a uniform and led the Indian National Army with support from the Fascists.
Jinnah, the ambassador of unity, became a partitionist.
The question that should intrigue us is why.
Ambition and frustration are two reasons commonly suggested in India, but they are not enough to create a new nation.
Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed.
What happened, for instance, to the Constitution that the Congress was meant to draft in 1928?
On the other hand, Congress leaders felt that commitments on the basis of any community would lead to extortion from every community. The only exception made was for Dalits, then called Harijans.
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who remained opposed to Partition even after Nehru and Patel had accepted it as inevitable, places one finger on the failed negotiations in the United Provinces after the 1936-37 elections, and a second on the inexplicable collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which would have kept India united -- inexplicable because both the Congress and the Muslim League had accepted it.
The plan did not survive a press conference given by Nehru. Jinnah responded with the unbridled use of the communal card, and there was no turning back.
A deeply saddened Gandhi spurned August 15, 1947 as a false dawn (to quote Faiz). He spent the day not in celebrations in Delhi [ Images ] but in fasting at Calcutta. Thanks to Gandhi -- and H S Suhrawardy -- there were no communal riots in Calcutta in 1947.
Facts are humbling. They prevent you from jumping to conclusions.
Buy Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah at the Rediff Bookshop
http://news.rediff.com/special/2009/aug/20/almost-every-muslim-was-with-gandhi-not-jinnah.htm
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Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule |
HIND SWARAJ
AND
INDIAN HOME RULE
Interpreting Gandhi's Hind Swaraj
Rudolf C. Heredia
Interpreting Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
Economic and Political Weekly
June 12, 1999
I Gandhi’s Critique of the Modern West
II Relevance of Gandhi’s Critique Today
III Gandhi’s Affirmation of Indian Culture
VI Conclusion: Partners in Dialogue
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is not rejection of the liberative contribution of modernity. Rather his effort can be interpreted as an attempt to integrate these positive elements with a liberating re-interpretation of tradition. With his critique from within the tradition, Gandhi becomes the great synthesiser of contraries within and across traditions.
GANDHI’s Hind Swaraj (HS) is surely a foundational text for any understanding of the man and his mission. In dialogue with the text in its context, with the author and among ourselves, we hope to locate the text within it’s own horizon of meaning and then interrogate it from within our own contemporary. For Gandhi’s text is "a proclamation of ideological independence" [Dalton 1993:61] he never compromised, his "confession of the faith" [Nanda 1974:66] he never abandoned, "a rather incendiary manifesto" [Erikson 1969:217] to enkindle his revolution. No wonder it was banned by the colonial government in 1910 for fear of sedition.
I Gandhi’s Critique of the Modern West
ForGandhi civilisation was by definition a moral enterprise: "Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty" (HS, Ch 13). Hence it is the very basic ethos of this modern west that Gandhi sets himself against. For he finds two unacceptable and unethical principles at its very core: ‘might is right’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’. The first legitimated the politics of power as expounded earlier by Machiaveli; the second idealised the economics of self-interest as proposed by Adam Smith. In the west "with rare exceptions, alternatives to western civilisation are always sought within its own basic thought system" [Saran 1980:681].
The three recurrent themes in Hind Swaraj which we will discuss here are: colonial imperialism, industrial capitalism, and rationalist materialism.
Colonial imperialism:
Gandhi categorically insisted that "the English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength: but because we keep them" (HS, Ch 7). He was one of the earliest to realise that colonialism was something to be overcome in our own consciousness first [Nandy 1983:63]. Unless this ‘Intimate Enemy’ was exorcised and exiled, unless we addressed this ‘Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism’ (ibid), we would always be a people enslaved by one power or another, whether foreign or native. Certainly, Gandhi would not want to exchange an external colonialism for an internal one, a white sahib for a brown one, or compensate the loss of ‘Hindustan’ with ‘Englistan’ (HS, Ch 4).
British India colonialism was first justified by a supposedly Christianising mission, but very soon this was articulated in terms of a civilising one. In rejecting this modern civilisation, Gandhi is subverting the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise at its core. For there could be no colonialism without a civilising mission [Nandy 1983:11] since it could hardly be sustained in India by brute force.
Industrial capitalism:
Gandhi sees capitalism as the dynamic behind colonial imperialism. Lenin too had said as much, and like Marx, Gandhi’s rejection of capitalism is based on a profound repugnance to a system where profit is allowed to degrade labour, where the machines are valued more than humans, where automation is preferred to humanism.
It was this that moved Gandhi to his somewhat hyperbolic claim: "Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilisation; it represents a great sin" (HS, Ch 19). However, by 1919 his views on machinery do begin to change right up to 1947, as he gradually comes to concede some positive aspects like time and labour saving, even as he warns against the negative ones of concentrating wealth and displacing workers [Parel 1997:164-70]. He was acutely sensitive to how machinery can dehumanise and technology alienate, and he extends his critique to the professions of medicine and law (HS, Chs 11, 12). The poor hardly benefit from these professional services, though they are often their victims. He backs up his criticism of these professions in Hind Swaraj with a later suggestion for their nationalisation (CW, 68:97).
Rationalist materialism
: Technology is but the expression of science, which in modern civilisation becomes an uncompromising rationalism. For Gandhi this is but a dangerously truncated humanism. His incisive remark is much to the point: "Just as dirt is matter misplaced, reason misplaced is lunacy! I plead not for the suppression of Reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason itself’ (CW, 6:106). Certainly, Gandhi is right in insisting on the unreasonableness of not setting any limits to reason.
More recently a post-modern world has emphasised the aggressive and destructive march of this ‘age of reason’. However, Gandhi would test his faith with his reason, but he would not allow his reason to destroy his faith. What makes such technological rationalism even more destructive in Gandhi’s view, is its flawed materialism. That is, the negation of the spiritual, the transcendent, or in other words, the denial of a religious worldview.
For Gandhi truth, was much more than could be grasped by science or reason. For him there was a reality beyond that perceived by the senses. It is this transcendent reality that gave meaning and value to our present one. In this Gandhi is very much in the mainstream of Hindu tradition. Indeed, most religious traditions would be similarly sensitive to such a transcendent world, even when it is not perceived as wholly other-worldly. In a more secular world today we may not be sympathetic to such a worldview. And yet a materialism that is deterministic leaves no scope for human freedom and hope. Gandhi emphasises this reaching out to a beyond, that gives this freedom and hope its dynamism and a reach beyond its grasp.
II Relevance of Gandhi’s Critique Today
Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation does overlook many of its strengths; its scientific and critical spirit of inquiry; its human control over the natural world; its organisational capacity. Such achievement would imply a certain ‘spiritual dimension’ that Gandhi seems to have missed [Parekh 1997:35]. However, the focus of his criticism is modern civilisation of a specific period; his condemnation of colonialism focuses on its imperialistic inspiration; his rejection of industrialism derives mostly from its capitalist context; his apprehensions about rationality regard its truncation by materialism.
However, once the real limitations of Gandhi’s critique are acknowledged, then we can better contextualise and interpret his relevance for us today, whether this be with regard to politics in our neo-colonial world, or technologies in our post-industrial times, or culture in our post-modern age. These will now be some of the issues on which we must allow Gandhi to interrogate us. For "the kinds of questions Gandhi asked nearly eight decades ago are the ones which now face both the underdeveloped and the post-industrial societies caught up in a deep upsurge of confusion and disillusionment" [Sethi 1979:3].
Neo-colonialism:
Gandhi’s rejection of the supposedly civilising mission of colonialism brings into question the whole legitimacy of colonial rule, at a fundamental ethical level. He would have India unlearn much that she has from the modern west. For if Indians "would but revert to their own glorious civilisation, either the English would adopt the latter and become Indianised or find their occupation in India gone" (HS, Preface to English edition).
Thus, he opens up a host of ethical issues between the coloniser and the colonised, the dominant and the dominated, the oppressor and oppressed. The post-colonial era brought such issues into sharper focus across the world. Now with globalisation leading to a unipolar world, such concerns with empowerment and disempowerment, dependency and interdependency, have gained, not lost their urgency. Moreover, closer home this widening divide bears down on us more decisively than ever before.
Our new economic policy increasingly represents a whole new vision of society, that takes for granted the internal colonialism we are experiencing today, as for instance between Bharat and India, the bahujan and the twice-born jatis, the avarna and the savarna castes, the toiling masses and the privileged classes, the oppressed people and the oppressor groups, the minority traditions and the majority one.
Thus, our post-colonial world can only be described as a neo-colonial one, internationally divided into developed and developing nations, as also intra-nationally between privileged and underprivileged citizens. Moreover, these divisions are mutually reinforced, not just economically and politically but culturally and socially as well.
Moreover, the west is still the centre of our world for we have not the self-respect, the self-reliance, the self-sufficiency to centre ourselves and so we condemn ourselves to remain on the periphery of someone else’s centre. For the colonial masters had stripped our collective identity of any intrinsic dignity by denigrating us as a cowardly and passive people. Gandhi sought to reverse the damage to our collective psyche by his "redefinition of courage and effective resistance in terms of, or through non-violence" [Roy 1986:185].
The issue then of our identity as a nation and a people still remains to be resolved. Such identities are only viable in a genuinely multicultural world. Gandhi’s urging in this regard is certainly relevant today in our own society where the propagation of a cultural nationalism is growing every day. Yet "nothing could be more anti-Indian than attempts to make an ideology of Indianness and to fight, instead of incorporating or bypassing non-Indianness" [Nandy 1980:112].
Post-industrialism:
With the new technologies there was much hope for a new freedom from degrading and monotonous work. However, what seems to have come in to replace this degrading monotony is not a new dignity of labour but rather a compulsive consumerist society, which is but dehumanising in newer ways. This should hardly surprise us since the ethic underlying post-industrialism is the same as that which underpinned industrial capitalism, namely, the profit motive and the market mechanism.
Gandhi’s critique was precisely a condemnation of these. If we find his ideas of trusteeship a little naive and impractical, we still have no alternative answer to humanising a system that seems to have betrayed what possibilities it might have had of bringing freedom and dignity to the toiling masses. Moreover, technology has its own intrinsic dynamism, that instrumentalises our world and inevitably leads to a disenchantment that bring us to the ‘iron cage’, as Weber warned long ago.
Our environmental crises are surely a manifestation of this loss of innocence, even to the point when we want newer technologies to repair the damage already done by the older ones. Gandhi was precisely rejecting such a naive "nineteenth century optimism which sought for the positive sciences the liberation of humanity" [Nandy 1986:102]. But such anti-modernism then was ahead of its time!
Post-modernism:
The excessive and aggressive rationalism of the age of reason, now seems to have turned on itself with the post-modem revolt. But this has thrown up its own irrationalities. It seems to have lost the liberating project that was implicit in modernity. For the kind of relativising and subjectivising of ethics that post-modernism has led to, undermines the claims of any justice. For there can hardly be any mutually accepted legitimacy to arbitrate conflicting claims, when consensus irrevocably breaks down. So, might becomes right, and the power its own legitimation.
Gandhi’s trenchant critique of modernity was focused on modernist rationalism, but it was equally opposed to a post-modern rejection of rationality. What Gandhi was pleading for is a richer concept of rationality and a meta-theory of rationalism [Parekh 1995:165-66]. He wanted to contain excessive rationality within reasonable bounds without an irrational revolt against reason itself, but he would emphatically reject any forced choice between totalising rationalism and relativising subjectivism.
III Gandhi’s Affirmation of Indian Culture
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj presents us with an idealised version of Indian culture that is completely counterpunctal to the ‘modern west’. Here we pick out three seminal themes: swaraj, swadeshi and satya.
Swaraj:
Gandhi radically re-interprets ‘swaraj’ and gives it a dual meaning. The original Gujarati text uses ‘swaraj’ in both senses. Gandhi’s English translation makes the duality explicit: swaraj as ‘self-rule’ and as ‘self-government’. The first as self-control, rule over oneself, was the foundation for the second, self-government. In this second sense, local self~government was what Gandhi really had in mind. Gandhi very decidedly gives priority to self-rule over self-government, and to both over political independence, swatantrata.
Essential to both meanings swaraj, was a sense of self-respect that is precisely Gandhi’s answer to colonial rule. For Gandhi freedom in its most fundamental sense had to mean freedom for self-realisation. But it had to be a freedom for all, for the toiling masses, and the privileged classes, and most importantly for the least and last Indian. In this sense, sarvodaya was precisely the patriotism that Gandhi espoused. It focused on people’s welfare not on national pride: "By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and, if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow down my head to them" (HS. Ch 15). So he could write: "my patriotism is for me a stage on my journey to the land of freedom and peace" (Young India, April 13, 1924, p 112). And yet swaraj was not something given by the leaders, Indian or British, it was something that had to be taken by the people for themselves.
Clearly, the foundation of swaraj in both its senses had to be threefold: self-respect, self-realisation and self-reliance. This is what Gandhi tried to symbolise with the chakra and khadi, both much misunderstood symbols today. For Gandhi khadi "is the symbol of the unity of Indian humanity, of its economic freedom and equality and therefore ultimately in the poetic expression of Jawaharlal Nehru, the livery of India’s freedom" (CW75:146-66). Today the chakra and khadi have not retained this powerful multivalent symbolism.
Yet the ethic that Gandhi was trying to introduce and inscribe into Indian political life was that "real swaraj will not be the acquisition of authority by a few but the acquisition of the capacity of all to resist authority when it is abused" [Prabhu 1961:4-5]. For Gandhi "Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path duty" (HS, Ch 13). The basis then of his swaraj could not be just rights, it had to be duties as well. For Gandhi real rights are legitimated by duties they flow from, for both are founded on satya and dharma. The modern theory of rights reverses this priority and founds rights on the dignity and freedom of the individual. But comprehensive morality can never be adequately articulated or correctly grasped in terms of rights alone.
Swadeshi:
Swadeshi is the means for Gandhi’s quest for swaraj. Fundamentally it meant ‘localism’. This was not an isolated localism of the "deserted village", that Goldsmith romanticed, or the degradation of caste oppression that Ambedkar revolted against, but rather the local neighbourhood community, the village as the node in a network of oceanic circles that over-lapped and spread out in its ever widening embrace. It is this commitment of the individual to his ‘desh’ that was Gandhi’s Indian alternative to western nationalism [Parekh 1995:56-57].
Gandhi perceived that power in India was inevitably monopolised by the urban elite, at the expense of village folk, and was trying to reverse this dependency to make the state serve the weaker sections. His was an egalitarian, not just a romantic, inspiration. Mao attempted as much in China. But the village Gandhi idealised was not just a geographic place, or a statistic, or a social class. It was an event, a dream, a happening, a culture. As he used "the term ‘village’ implied not an entity, but a set of values" [Sethi 1979:23]. It brought together his three basic themes of swaraj: self-respect, self-realisation and self-reliance.
In privileging the rural over the urban, Gandhi was arguing for a minimal state, since he saw the state essentially as an instrument of violence. It was only in the communal cauldron at the time of partition, that he began to see the need of state power to contain and end the violence. And yet our experience of the post-colonial state in this hod of dialogue that would bring two disagreeing parties not just into mutual agreement, but into the realisation of a deeper truth together. The dichotomy between the oppressor and the oppressed is transcended in this ‘heightened mutuality’, but even beyond this "satyagraha ruptures the tricotomy among the oppressor, oppressed and emancipator" [Pantham 1986:179], for it seeks to involve all three in this quest f greater self-realisation of the truth. From the satyagrahi as the initiator, this required a demanding discipline.
But satyagraha was also a politic strategy. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi defines ‘passive resistance’ as he called it then as "a method of securing rights by person suffering"(HS, Ch 17). Clearly, "Gandhi’s satyagraha then was an ingenious combination of reason, morality and politics; it appealed to the opponent’s head, heart and interests" [Parekh 1995:156].
This was a "vernacular model of action [Parekh 1995:211] that the people understood. But it was Gandhi who first used it so effectively to moblise them and to appeal to their oppressors. In fact he was the first leader to bring non-violence to centre stage in the struggle for freedom with the British. He was well aware that adopting "methods of violence to drive out the English" would be a "suicidal policy"(HS, Ch 15). And his HindSwarg was precisely intended to stymie such a soul-destroying venture.
Gandhi’s re-interpretation:
Gandhi locates himself as an insider to mainstream Hinduism, the ‘sanathan dharma’. Hence, the radicality of his re-interpretation goes unnoticed. Gandhi does not reject, he simply affirms what he considers to be authentic, and allows the inauthentic to be sloughed off. For "Gandhi’s Hinduism was ultimately reduced to a few fundamental beliefs: the supreme reality of God, the ultimate unity of all life and the value of love (ahimsa) as a means of realising God" [Nanda l985:6]. His profound redefinition of Hinduism gave it a radically novel orientation. In sum, "Gandhi’s Hinduism had a secularised content but a spiritual form and was at once both secular and non-secular" [Parekh1995:109].
Thus one of the most remarkable and yet unremarked re-interpretations of Hinduism that Gandhi effected was that of the Gita, a text intended to persuade a reluctant warrior on the legitimacy and even the necessity of joining the battle. Gandhi reworks its ‘nishkamakarma’ to become the basis of his ahimsa and satyagraha!
We have only to contrast Gandhi’s Hinduism with V D Savarkar’s hindutva to see how starkly contrapunctal they are! Hence, in spite of its pretensions to be nationalist and modern, its militant chauvinism and authoritarian fundamentalism make hindutva the very antithesis of Gandhi’s Hinduism. Hindutva is in fact but a contemporary synthesis of brahmanism! This is why in the end the Mahatma is vehemently opposed by the traditional Hindu elite, who felt threatened by the challenge he posed.
But precisely because he presents himself as a Hindu in his interpretation of Indian culture, he was seen as too inclusive by traditional Hindus, and at the same time as not ecumenical enough by contemporary non-Hindus. Hence his appeals for Hindu-Muslim unity were rejected, by the Muslims as being too Hindu, and questioned by the Hindus for not being Hindu enough.
Gandhi’s failure to bridge the religious divide between Hindu and Muslim, was matched in many ways by his failure to bridge the caste divide between dalits and others. He never quite understood Jinnah, or his appeal to Muslim nationalism. One could say the same in regard to Ambedkar and dalits, who have never forgotten or forgiven Gandhi for the imposition of the Pune Pact. We can only wonder now whether separate electorates for dalits then would have made reservations for them unnecessary now. What we do know is that the caste divide has only deepened with increasing conflict and indeed the same can be said about the religious divide and religious conflict in this country.
Yet for Gandhi the unity of humankind was premised on the oneness of the cosmos, which was a philosophical principle that was ontologically prior to diversity. Once the legitimacy of religious diversity is rooted in the fundamental Jaina principle of ‘anekantavada’, the many sidedness of truth, then religious tolerance is a necessary consequence — not a negative tolerance of distance and coexistence, but rather one of communication and enrichment [Heredia 1997].
In cultural matters, Gandhi wanted all cultures to be enriched by each other without losing their identity. But such cultural assimilation, was opposed by political revivalists and religious nationalists. Yet for Gandhi open and understanding dialogue must precede, not follow, a free and adaptive assimilation. Thus, an enriched diversity would then contribute to a more invigourated pluralism and an enhanced unity. This was precisely Gandhi’s understanding of Indian culture and civilisation, and he had, indeed, grasped its fundamental strength and the secret of its survival.
We must now situate ourselves with regard to the critical issues of our world today to enter into dialogue with him. Here we have chosen three such issues as being the most fruitful for this encounter: the collapse of socialism and the crisis of capitalism, gobalisation in an interdependent world, and the unresolved violence of our atomic age.
Post-socialism:
In our present world, the socialist ideal is being discredited as a god that failed, when it is rather the once socialist states that have collapsed. Moreover, today the crisis of capitalism is everyday more apparent, with the collapse of the much acclaimed Asian tigers as the new model for the cornucopia of development and progress; and the growing unemployment in the west cannot but presage further crises there as well. With liberalisation and privatisation as accepted policy in our country today, the Bharat verses India divide, that Gandhi had intuited long ago, is, if anything, rapidly and disastrously growing. Only now the elite of Bharat seems to have been co-opted by the privileged of India, even as the refugees of India have been forced into an urbanised Bharat.
Much has been made about the disagreements between Gandhi and Nehru. But in the exchange of letters in 1945 [Parel 1997:149-56], it is quite clear that the axis of their reconciliation was precisely around this quest for equality. Their paths may have been different but Nehru’s socialism and Gandhi’s swaraj were both oriented to this quest for equity and equality across all the divides, of caste, class, region, etc.
Gandhi was quite radical in urging equality, even more so than the communists. He would have equal wages and bread labour for all. In his ‘Constructive Programme’ (CW, 75:146-66), Gandhi’s concept of equality is not grounded in impersonal and competitive individualism, as it seems to be in the west, but in cooperative and compassionate non-violence, on ‘fraternity’ not just ‘liberty’. In the beginning, he saw no contradiction between such fraternal equality and the idealised hierarchy of varna. But in his later years he reversed himself to urge that "classless society is the ideal, not merely to be at aimed at but to be worked for" (Harijan, February 17, 1946, p 9). By now he was promoting inter-caste marriages and hoping "there would be only one caste known by the beautiful name Bhangi, that is to say the reformer or remover of all dirt" (Harijan, July 7, 1946, p 212).
But if Gandhi’s quest for equality is something that our complex world cannot accommodate, we seem to have given up not just this ideal of equality, but even the quest for equity in the distribution of the rewards and burdens of our society. And yet today Gandhi’s proletarian ‘levelling down’ certainly seems to be much more viable that Tagore’s elitist ‘levelling up’. In such a scenario the relevance of Gandhi’s idea of sarvodaya as the goal of swaraj is something we need to re-examine. Certainly, a decentralised participative democratic and humane society, is a more attractive, and one may dare say, a more vialable ideal today, than the kind of consumerism and inequitous divisions that the new economic policy in our country seems to welcome.
Indeed, the principle of subsidiarity seems to be the only viable solution to national governments that are too large to address local problems, while being too small to cope with global ones. Today the 73rd and 74th amendment to the Constitution once again affirm panchayati raj and tribal self-rule. We are coming back to a devolution of powers that Gandhi had urged in his ideal of swaraj and had tried to have written in to our Constitution. Hopefully this will be a presage of more to come.
Globalisation:
Globalisation and the alienating homogeneity that it must inevitably promote, is the very opposite of the localism and the celebration of diversity that Gandhi’s swadeshi was meant to encourage. However, Gandhi’s principle of swadeshi, "simply means that the most effective organisation of social, economic and political functions must follow the natural contours of the neighbourhood," thus affirming "the primacy of the immediate community" [Roy 1985:1l4]. Gandhi’s "goodness politics" as it has been called [Saran 1980:691], could only really operate on such a scale. For "Gandhi decentralisation means the creation of parallel politics in which the people’s power is institutionalised to counter the centralising and alienating forces of the modern state... Thus the Gandhian decentralised polity has a built-in process of the withering away of the state" [Sethi 1986:229].
But before this is dismissed as too naive or impractical for our sophisticated and complicated world, we might pause to think of the kind of politics our centralised states have in fact spawned. The very hegemonic homogeneity it promotes succeeds less at obliterating difference than at alienating minorities and enkindling their resentment. On the contrary, to take a lesson from ecology, micro-variability is needed for macro-stability in political and economic systems as well.
Gandhi’s swadeshi could never mean ethnocentrism. Unlike some Hindu and Muslim ‘nationalists’ Gandhi never used ‘nationalism’ for narrow sectarian purposes. He mobilised his people as ‘Indians’ not as Hindus or Muslims. His nationalism was anti-imperialistic not chauvinistic, a struggle for political justice and cultural dignity [Nandy 1994:3]. He was a patriot who wanted "Indian nationalism to be non-violent, anti-militaristic and therefore a variant of universalism" [Nandy 1995:14]. He was only too aware of the number of ‘nationalities’ that could be moblised in India, once the genie was out of the bottle!
An ecological understanding is now propelling us to a new and deep realisation of our interdependence. We have only one earth, we must learn to share and care. We are but a contingent part of the cosmos, debtors born, whose proper response to life must be the ‘yagna’, service-offering of our lives for others [Parekh 1995:88]. Thus, with regard to the economy and polity, Gandhi would have the village as his world; but with regard to culture and religion, it was the world that was his village! Surely, here we have a viable example of thinking globally and acting locally. Indeed, our global ecological crisis has begun to press on us anew the relevance of Gandhi’s paradoxical ideas. For the institutional individualism that seemed to be the very foundation of the democratic quest in the west seems quite inadequate to the ecological crises of today. For it privileges individual rights over the common good. But even enlightened self-interest has no answer to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ accept an external coercion.
However, for Gandhi, "individuality" must be "oriented to self-realisation through self-knowledge... in a network of interdependence and harmony informed by ahimsa" [Roy l986a:84]. Nor was this to be an interdependence of dominant-subservient relationships so prevalent in our local communities and global societies. His swadeshi envisaged a more personalised and communitarian society on a human scale, yet extending to include both the biotic and even the cosmic community. This was the logical extension of the Jaina doctrine of ‘syadvada’, that everything is related to everything in the universe in ‘a great chain of being’.
However, the Gandhian ideal was a community modelled on the joint family and on varna as a non-competitive division of labour. Later in his life his own promotion of inter-caste marriages testifies to a change in his views. Yet even as we critique such Gandhian ideas, we must discover in dialogue what value and relevance they have for us today. For ultimately Gandhi insists on both: that the community is not a mere means for the self-interest of the individual and that the individual in not a mere resource for the concerns of the community. And this would go for the community of communities, that our global community must be.
Violence:
There can be no negating the liberation that modernity has brought in our post-modern world to vast masses of people. But for all its much vaulted ‘rationality’ some would rather say because of it, modernity has failed to cope with this endemic irrationality of violence. If Gandhi’s ahimsa seems impractical, what are the alternative we have trapped ourselves in? If Gandhi was right that "to arm India on a large scale is to Europeanise it," (HS, Ch 15) then what would nuclear arms do? Americanise us? And this is an initiative being pushed by our cultural nationalists! But then in a globalised world it is surely only the elite that will get to strut and fret upon this global stage, while the masses of our people are a passive and manipulated audience to this theatre of the macabre.
The whole effort of the modern world in dealing with violence has r with the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and reads one into the other. In fact, if he has Christianised Hinduism he has certainly also presented us with a Hinduised Christian spirituality.
Precisely as a re-interpretation from within, Gandhi can so much to more effectively and authentically integrate into his synthesis elements from without. Thus he reconciles meaningful faith and reasonable modernity. In the best traditions of this land he combined both faith and reason, for each is implicated in each other. Gandhi would constantly critique faith to ascertain whether it was meaningful and reasonable in terms of basic human value commitments. And so too he would demand of reason the same fidelity to these values as well.
However, the ascetic dimension of Gandhi’s integration at times loses the aesthetic one. A criticism of Gandhi’s ashrams was that it grew only vegetables not flowers [Parekh 1995:209]. Growing vegetables represented more than the Gandhian pre-occupation with vegetarianism and bread-labour. But in rightly emphasising the need for renunciation, certainly a message that our consumerist and self-indulgent world needs more than ever today, the Gandhian ashram seemed to miss out on the need for celebration, which our tired and alienated, dis-spirited and pessimistic world needs almost as much.
A re-interpretation of Gandhi would precisely allow such a celebration. While Gandhi’s understanding of ‘moksha’ as service is a seminal breakthrough, even this can be enriched by affirming, not negating the other dimensions of life. It is only thus that we will be able to bring some wholeness to, in Iris Murdoch’s unforgettable phrase, the "broken totality," of our modern world.
VI Conclusion: Partners in Dialogue
Gandhi’s life was a continuing series of controversies and contestations with those in power on behalf of the powerless. He never lacked opponents, among the British and even the Indian elites, and often found himself isolated and alone particularly at the end of his life, which was far from being one long triumphant procession. Yet one of the great contributions of Gandhi was precisely his centring of the periphery: in politics with ‘anthyodaya’; in religion by de-brahamising Hinduism, de-institutionalising practice and personalising belief; in education by his proposal for ‘nai talim’ or basic education as it came to be called; in the economy by symbolically urging khadhi. Not all of these efforts were successful or perhaps even practical, but they did make a contribution which is still valid today. And all Gandhi’s original ideas can be found seeded already in his Hind Swaraj.
Today we need a new developmental model, and increasingly people are beginning to see that. it has to begin by "Putting the Last First" [Chambers 1983], to come back to the last Indian that Gandhi would have as the talisman of our social planning. No one can claim that Gandhi’s reformist appeal has fulfilled the ‘revolution of raising expectations’ of our masses. This only underscores the need for a more fine-tuned analysis and a wider dialogue in our society for constructive change given the limits of reformism and the constraints on revolution. If we are looking for a new synthesis for a counter-culture, we must take Gandhi as a dialogue partner in this project but first we must redefine and re-interpret him. Such an encounter will help us to re-examine and reconstruct ourselves as well.
Gandhi has been severely criticised as impractical, as someone who took out an impossible overdraft on human moral resources. But this is to claim that human beings are not capable of a metanoia, a radical change of heart, that can open up new perspectives, not just for individuals and groups, but for entire societies and whole cultures as well. We need organic intellectuals and transformative activists who can articulate and precipitate such a social movement. The cascading crises that our society and our world is experiencing, only underlines more emphatically the need to find new ways of redefining ourselves and understanding our problems, before we can begin to respond to the situation.
[This paper is based on a presentation made at department of Philosophy, Pune University for a seminar on ‘Rethinking Swaraj’, June 25-27,1998. My thanks to Mahesh Gavaskar and others for their comments on an earlier draft.]
References
Chambers, Robert (1983): Rural Development: Putting the Last First. Longman, London.
Dalton, Dennis (1993): Mahatma Gandhi: NonViolent Power in Action, New York.
Erikson, Erik H, (1966): Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence, Norton, New York.
Heredia, Rudolf C (1997): ‘Tolerance and Dialogue as Responses to Pluralism and Ethnicity’, Social Action, Vol 47, No 3, pp 346-64.
Iyer. Raghavan (1973): The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Nanda, B R (1985): Gandhi and His Critics, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
Nandy, Ashish(1980): At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture, Oxford
University Press, Delhi.
(1983): The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
— (1986): From Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural Critique of the West in Ramashray Roy (ed), Contemporary Crisis and Gandhi, pp 89-126.
(1994): The Illegitimacy of Nationalism, Oxford University Press. Delhi.
— (1995): ‘Unity in Nationalism: Pitfalls of Imported Concepts’, The Times of India, October 4, Mumbai.
Nehru, Jawaharlal(1958): A Bunch of Old Letters, London.
Pantham, Thomas(1986): ‘Proletarian Pedagogy. Satyagraha and Charisma: On Gramci and Gandhi’ in R Roy (ed), Contemporary Crisis and Gandhi, op cit, pp 165-89.
Parekh, Bhikhu (1995): Gandhi’s Political Philisophy: A Critical Appreciation, Ajanta, Delhi.
Parel. Anthony J (ed)(l997): Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Foundation Books, New Delhi.
Prabhu, R K (1961): Compiler, Democracy: Real and Deceptive, Navajivan Publication, Ahmedabad.
Roy, Ramashray (ed)(l986): Contemporary Crisis and Gandhi. Discovery Publishing House, Delhi.
— (1986a): ‘Modern Predicament and Gandhi’ in Contemporary Crisis and Gandhi, op cit, pp
44-88.
(1984): Gandhi: Soundings in Political Philosophy. Chanakya Publications, Delhi.
— (l984a): Self and Society: A Study of Gandhian Thought. Sage Publication, New Delhi.
Saran, A K (1980): ‘Gandhi and the Concept of Politics: Towards a Normal Civilisation’, Gandhi Marg, Vol I. No 11, February, pp 682-83.
Sethi, J D (1979): Gandhian Values and 20th Century Challenges. Government of India Publication, Division, New Delhi.
(1986): ‘Gandhi and Development: A European View’ in R Roy (ed) Contemporary Crisis and Gandhi, op cit, pp 190-231.
What is Swaraj? Reader: I have now learnt what the Congress has done to make India one nation, how the partition has caused an awakening, and how discontent and unrest have spread through the land. I would now like to know your views on Swaraj. I fear that our interpretation is not the same as yours.
Editor: It is quite possible that we do not attach the same meaning to the term. You and I and all Indians are impatient to attain Swaraj, but we are certainly not decided as to what it is. To drive the English out of India is a thought heard from many mouths, but it does not seem that many have properly considered why it should be so. I must ask you a question. Do you think that it is necessary to drive away English if we get all we want?
Reader: I should ask of them only one thing, that is: "Please leave our country." If, after they have complied with this request, their withdrawal from India means that they are still in India. I should have no objection. Then we would understand that, in their language, the word "gone" is equivalent to "remained".
Editor: Well then, let us suppose that the English have retired. What will you do then?
Reader: That question cannot be answered at this stage. The state after withdrawal will depend largely upon the manner of it. If, as you assume, they retire for the asking we should have an army, etc., ready at hand. We should, therefore, have no difficulty in carrying on the Government.
Editor: You may think so; I do not. But I will not discuss the matter just now. I have to answer your question, and that I can do well by asking you several questions. Why do you want to drive away the English?
Reader: Because India has become impoverished by their government. They take away our money from year to year. The most important posts are reserved for themselves. We are kept in a state of slavery. They behave insolently towards us and disregard our feelings.
Editor: If they do not take our money away, become gentle, and give us responsible posts, you would still consider their presence to be harmful?
Reader: That question is useless. It is similar to the question whether there is any harm in associating with a tiger if he changes his nature. Such a question is sheer waste of time. When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs. This is not possible, and to believe it to be possible is contrary to human experience.
Editor: Supposing we get Self-Government similar what the Canadians and the South-Africans have, will it be good enough?
Reader: That question also is useless. We may get it when we have the same powers; we shall then hoist our own fag. As is Japan, so must India be. We must own our navy, our army, and we must have our own splendor, and then will India's voice ring through the world.
Editor: You have drawn the picture well. In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englishtan. This is not the Swaraj I want.
Reader: I have placed before you my idea of Swaraj as I think it should be. if the education we have received be of any use, if the works of Spencer, Mill and others be of any importance, and if the English Parliament be the Mother of Parliaments, I certainly think that we should copy the English people, and this is to such an extent that, just as they do not allow others to obtain footing in their country, so we should not allow them or others to obtain it in ours. What they have done in their country has not been done in any other country. It is, therefore proper for us to import their institutions. But now I want to know your views.
Editor: There is need for patience. My views will develop of themselves in the course of this discourse. It is as difficult for me to understand the true nature of Swaraj as it seems to you to be easy. I shall therefore, for the time being, content myself with endeavoring to show that what you call Swaraj is not truly Swaraj.
How can India become free? |
Reader: I appreciate your views about civilization. I will have to think over them. I cannot take them in all at once. What, then, holding the views you do, would you suggest for freeing India? |
Passive Resistance |
Reader: Is there any historical evidence as to the success of what you have called soul-force or truth-force? No instance seems to have happened of any nation having risen through soul-force. I still think that the evil-doers will not cease doing evil without physical punishment. |
To The Reader |
I would like to say to the diligent reader of my writings and to others who are interested in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned, with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, lie would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject. M. K. GANDHI Harijan, 29-4-'33, P. 2 |
Preface |
When Lord Lothian was at Segaon he asked me if I could give him a copy of Hind Swaraj, for, as he said, all that Gandhiji was teaching now lay in the germ in that little book which deserved to be read and re-read in order to understand Gandhiji properly. Wardha, 2-2-38 Mahadev Desai |
A Word of Explanation |
It is certainly my good fortune that this booklet of mine is receiving wide attention. The original is in Gujarati. It has a chequered career. It was first published in the columns of the Indian Opinion of South Africa. It was written in I908 during my return voyage from London to South Africa in answer to the Indian school of violence and its prototype in South Africa. I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I felt that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India's ills, and that her civilization required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection. The Satyagraha of South Africa was still an infant hardly two years old. But it gad developed sufficiently to permit me to write of it with some degree of confidence. What I wrote was so much appreciated that it was published as a booklet. It attracted some attention in India. The Bombay Government prohibited its circulation. I replied by publishing its translation. I thought it was due to my English friends that they should know its contents. In my opinion it is a book which can be put into the hands of a child. It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force. It has gone through several editions and I commend it to those who would care to read it. I withdraw nothing except one word of it, and that in deference to a lady friend. The booklet is a severe condemnation of 'modern civilization'. It was written in I908. My conviction is deeper today than ever. I feel that if India will discard 'modern civilization'. she can only gain by doing so. But I would warn the reader against thinking that I am today aiming at the Swaraj described therein. I know that India is not ripe for it. It may seem an impertinence to say so. But such is my conviction. I am individually working for the self-rule pictured therein. But today my corporate activity is undoubtedly devoted to the attainment of Parliamentary Swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people of India. I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilization. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral stature of a nation. Nor am I aiming at a permanent destruction of law courts, much as I regard it as a 'consummation devoutly to be wished'. Still less am I striving to destroy all machinery and mills. It requires a higher simplicity and renunciation than the people are today prepared for. The only part of the program which is now being carried out is that of non-violence. But I regret to have to confess that even that is not being carried out in the spirit of the book. If it were, India would establish Swaraj in a day. If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics, Swaraj would descend upon India from heaven. But I am painfully aware that that event is far off as yet. I offer these comments because I observe that much is being quoted from the booklet to discredit the present movement. I have even seen writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it. A portion of the whole theory of life described in Hind Swaraj is undoubtedly being carried into practice. There is no danger attendant upon the whole of it being practiced. But it is not right to scare away people by reproducing from my writings passages that are irrelevant to the issue before the country. Young India, January,1921 M. K. Gandhi A Message I welcome your advertising the principles in defense of which Hind Swaraj was written. The English edition is a translation of the original which was in Gujarati. I might change the language here and there, if I had to rewrite the booklet. But after the stormy thirty years through which I have since passed, I have seen nothing to make me alter the views expounded in it. Let the reader bear in mind that it is a faithful record of conversations I had with workers, one of whom was an avowed anarchist. he should also know that it stopped the rot that was about to set in among some Indians in South Africa. The reader may balance against this the opinion of a dear friend, who alas! is no more, that it was the production of a fool. Seagaon, July 14,1938 M. K. Gandhi |
The Partition of Bengal |
Reader: Considering the matter as you put it, it seems proper to say that the foundation of Home Rule was laid by the Congress. But you will admit that this cannot be considered a real awakening. When and how did the real awakening take place? Editor: The seed is never seen. It works underneath the ground. is itself destroyed, and the tree which rises above the ground is alone seen. Such is the case with the Congress. Yet, what you call the real awakening took. place after the Partition of Bengal. For this we have to be thankful to Lord Curzon. At the time of the Partition, the people of Bengal reasoned with Lord Curzon, but in the pride of power he disregarded all their prayers. He took it for granted that Indians could only prattle, that they could never take any effective steps. He used insulting language, and in the teeth of all opposition partitioned Bengal. That day may be consider- ed to be the day of the partition of the British Empire. The shock the British power received through the Partition has never been equaled by any other act. This does not mean that the other injustices done to India are less glaring than that done by the Partition. The salt-tax is not a small injustice. We shall see many such things later on. But the people were ready to resist the Partition. At that time feeling ran high. Many leading Bengalis were ready to lose their all. They knew their power; hence the conflagration. It is now well-nigh unquenchable; it is not necessary to quench it either. The Partition will go, Bengal will be reunited, but the rift in the English barque will remain; it must daily widen. India awakened is not likely to fall asleep. The demand for the abrogation of the, Partition is tantamount to a demand for Home Rule. Leaders in Bengal know this. British officials realize it. That is why the Partition still remains. As time passes, the Nation is being forged. Nations are not formed in a day; the formation requires years. Reader: What, in your opinion, are the results of the Partition? Editor: Hitherto we have considered that for redress of grievances we must approach the throne. and if we get no redress we must sit still, except that we may still petition. After the Partition, people saw that petitions must be backed up by force and that they must be capable of suffering. This new spirit must be considered to be the chief result of the Partition. That spirit was seen in the outspoken writings in the Press. That which the people said tremblingly and in secret began to be said and to be written publicly. The Swadeshi movement was inaugurated. People. young and old, used to run away at the sight of an English face. it now no longer awes them. They do not fear even a row. or being imprisoned. Some of the best sons of India are at present in banishment. This is something different from mere petitioning. Thus are the people moved. The spirit generated in Bengal has spread in the north to the Punjab, and in the south to Cape Comorin. Reader: Do you suggest any other striking result" Editor: The Partition has not only made a rift in the English ship but has made it in ours also. Great events always produce great results. Our leaders are divided into two parties: the Moderates and the Extremists. These may be considered as the slow party and the impatient party. Some call the Moderates the timid party. and the Extremists the bold party. All interpret the two words according to their preconceptions. This much is certain that there has arisen an enmity between the two. The one distrusts the other and imputes motives. At the time of the Surat Congress there was almost a fight. I think that this division is not a good thing for the country, but I think also that such divisions will not last long. It all depends upon the leaders how long they will last. |
The Congress & It's Officials |
Reader: Just at present there is a Home Rule wave passing over India. All our countrymen appear to be pining for National Independence. A similar spirit pervades them even in South Africa. Indians seem to be eager to acquire rights, Will you explain your views in this matter? Editor: You have put the question well, but the answer is not easy. One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it, another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments, and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects. The exercise of all these three functions is involved in answering your question. To a certain extent the people's will has to be expressed, certain sentiments will need to be fostered, and defects will have to be brought to light. But. as you have asked the question, it is my duty to answer it. Reader: Do you then consider that a desire for Home Rule has been created among us? Editor. That desire gave rise to the National Congress. The choice of the word "National" implies it. Reader: That surely, is not the case. Young India seems to ignore the Congress. It is considered to be an instrument for perpetuating British Rule. Editor: That opinion is not justified. Had not the Grand Old Man of India prepared the soil, our young men could not have even spoken about Home Rule. How can we forget what Mr. Hume has written, how he has lashed us into action, and with what effort he has awakened us, in order to achieve the objects of the Congress? Sir William Wedderburn has given his body, mind and money to the same cause. His writings are worthy of perusal to this day. Professor Gokhale in order to prepare the nation, embraced poverty and gave twenty years of his life. Even now, he is living in poverty. The late Justice Budruddin Tyebji was also one of those who, through the. Congress, sowed the seed of Home Rule. Similarly, in Bengal, Madras. the Punjab and other places, there have been lovers of India and members of the Congress, both Indian and English. Reader: Stay, stay, you are going too far, you are straying away from my question. I have asked you about Home or Self-Rule; you are discussing foreign rule. I do not desire to bear English names, and you are giving me such names. In these circumstances, I do not think we can ever meet. I shall be pleased if you will confine yourself to Home Rule. All other talk will not satisfy me. Editor: You are impatient. I cannot afford to be likewise. If you will bear with me for a while. I think you will find that you will obtain what you want. Remember the old proverb that the tree does not grow in one day. The fact that you have checked me and that you do not want to bear about the well-wishers of India shows that, for you at any rate, Home Rule is yet far away. If we had many like you, we would never make any advance. This thought is worthy of your attention. Reader: It seems to me that you simply want to put me off by talking round and round. Those whom you consider to be well-wishers of India are not such in my estimation. Why, then, should I listen to your discourse on such people'? What has he whom you consider to he the Father of the Nation done for it? He says that the English Governors will do justice and that we should co-operate with them. Editor: I must tell you, with all gentleness that it must be a matter of shame for us that you should speak about that great man in terms of disrespect. Just look at his work. He has dedicated his life to the service of India. We have learned what we know from him. II was the respects Dadabbai who taught us that the English had sucked our lifeblood. What does it matter that, today, his trust is still in the English nation'! Is Dadabhai less to be honored because, in the exuberance of youth, we are prepared to go a step further? Are we, on that account. wiser than he? it is a mark of wisdom not to kick away the very step from which we have risen higher. The removal of a step from a staircase brings down the whole of it. When, out of infancy, we grow into youth, we do not despise infancy, but, on the contrary, we recall with affection the days of our childhood. If, after many years of study, a teacher were to teach me something, and if I were to build a little more on the foundation laid by that teacher, I would not, on that account, be considered wiser than the teacher. He would always command my respect. Such is the case with the Grand Old Man of India. We must admit that he is the author of nationalism. Reader: You have spoken well. I can now understand that we must look upon Mr.Dadabhai with respect. Without him and men like him, we should probably not have the spirit that fires us. How can the same be said of Professor Gokhale? He has constituted himself a great friend of the English., he says that we have to learn a great deal from them, that we have to learn their political wisdom, before we can talk of Home Rule. I am tired of reading his speeches. Editor: If you are tired, it only betrays your impatience. We believe that those, who are discontented with the slowness of their parents and are angry because the parents would not run with their children, are considered disrespectful to their parents. Professor Gokhale occupies the place of a parent. What does it matter if he cannot run with us? A nation that is desirous of securing Home Rule cannot afford to despise its ancestors. We shall become useless, if we lack respect for our elders. Only men with mature thoughts are capable of ruling themselves and not the hasty-tempered. Moreover, how many Indians were there like Professor Gokhale. when he gave himself to Indian education? I verify believe that whatever Professor Gokhale does, he does with pure motives and with a view of serving India. His devotion to the Motherland is so great that he would give his life for it, if necessary. Whatever he says is said not to flatter anyone but because he believes it to be true. We are bound, therefore to entertain the highest regard for him. Editor: I never said any such thing. If we conscientiously differed from him, the learned Professor himself would advise us to follow the dictates of our conscience rather than him. Our chief purpose is not to decry his work, but to believe that he is infinitely greater than we are, and to feel assured that compared, with his work for India, ours is infinitesimal. Several. newspaper,-, write disrespectfully of him. It is our duty against such writings. We should consider men like Professor Gokhale to be the pillars of Home Rule. It is bad habit to say that another man's thoughts are bad and ours only. are good and that those holding different view's from ours are the enemies of the country. Reader: I now begin to understand somewhat your meaning, I shall have to think the matter over. But what you say about Mr. Hume and Sir William Wedderburn is beyond my comprehension. Editor: The same rule holds good for the English as for the Indians. I can never subscribe to the, statement that all Englishmen are bad. Many Englishmen desire Home Rule for India. That the English people are somewhat more selfish than others is true, but that does not prove that every Englishman is bad. We who seek justice will have to do justice to others. Sir William does not wish ill to India, -that should be enough for us. As we proceed, you will see that, if we act justly India will be sooner free. You will see, too, that if we shun every Englishman as an enemy, Home Rule will be delayed. But if we are just to them, we shall receive their support in our progress towards the goal. Reader: All this seems to me at present to be simply nonsensical. English support and the obtaining of Home Rule are two contradictory things. How can the English people tolerate' Home Rule for us? But I do not want you to decide this question for me just yet. To spend time over it is useless. When you have shown how we can have Home Rule, perhaps I shall understand your views. You have prejudiced against you by discoursing on English help. I, would, therefore, beseech you not to continue on this subject. Editor: I have no desire to do so. That you are prejudiced against me is not a matter for much anxiety. It is well that I should say unpleasant things at the commencement. It is my duty patiently to try to remove your prejudice. Reader: I like that last statement. It emboldens me to say what I like. One thing still puzzles me. I do not understand how the Congress laid the foundation of Home Rule. Editor: Let us see. The Congress brought together Indians from different parts of India, and enthused us with the idea of nationality. The government used to look upon it with disfavor. The Congress has always insisted the nation should control revenue and expenditure. it has always desired self-government after Canadian model. Whether we can get it or not, whether we desire it or not, and whether there is not something more desirable, are different questions. All I have to show is that the Congress gave us a foretaste of Home rule. To deprive it of the honor is not proper, and for us to do so would not only be ungrateful, but retard the fulfillment of our object. To treat the Congress as an institution inimical to our growth as a nation would disable us from using that body. |
Why Was India Lost? |
Reader: You have said much about civilization-enough to make me ponder over it. I do not now know what I should adopt and what I should avoid from the nations of Europe, but one question comes to my lips immediately. If civilization is a disease and if it has attacked England, why has she been able to take India. and why is she able to retain it? Editor: Your question is not very difficult to answer, and we shall presently he able to examine the true nature of Swaraj; for I am aware that I have still to answer that question. I will, however. take up your previous question. The English have not taken India., we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them. Let us now see whether these propositions can be sustained. They came to our country originally for purposes of trade. Recall the Company Bahadur. Who made it Bahadur? They had not the slightest intention at the time of establishing a kingdom. Who assisted the Company's officers'? Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this. In order to become rich all at once we welcomed the Company's officers with open arms. We assisted them. If I am in the habit of drinking bhang and a seller thereof sells it to me, am I to blame him or myself'? By blaming the seller shall I he able to avoid the habit? And, if a particular retailer is driven Away will not another take his place? A true servant of India will have to go to the root of the matter. If an excess of food has caused me indigestion. I shall certainly not avoid it by blaming water. He is a true physician who probes the cause of disease, and if you pose as a physician for the disease of India, you will have to find out its true cause. |
The Condition of India (continued) |
Editor: Your last question is a serious one and yet, on careful consideration, it will be found to be easy of solution. The question arises because of the presence of the railways, of the lawyers and of the doctors. We shall presently examine the last two. We have already considered the railways. I should, however, like to add that man is so made by nature as to require him to restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will take him. If we did not rush about from place to place by means of railways and such other maddening conveniences, much of the confusion that arises would be obviated. Our difficulties are of our own creation. God set a limit to a man's locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Maker. Man abused it so that he might forget his Maker. I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbors, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded. According to this reasoning, it must be apparent to you that railways are a most dangerous institution. Owing to them, man has gone further away from his Maker. |
The Condition of India (continued) |
Editor: Your last question is a serious one and yet, on careful consideration, it will be found to be easy of solution. The question arises because of the presence of the railways, of the lawyers and of the doctors. We shall presently examine the last two. We have already considered the railways. I should, however, like to add that man is so made by nature as to require him to restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will take him. If we did not rush about from place to place by means of railways and such other maddening conveniences, much of the confusion that arises would be obviated. Our difficulties are of our own creation. God set a limit to a man's locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Maker. Man abused it so that he might forget his Maker. I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbors, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded. According to this reasoning, it must be apparent to you that railways are a most dangerous institution. Owing to them, man has gone further away from his Maker. |
The Condition of India (continued) : Doctors |
Reader: I now understand the lawyers, the good they may have done is accidental. I feet that Profession is certainly hateful. You, however, drag in the doctors also, how is that? |
'Hind Swaraj Or The Indian Home-Rule' (1909): The Gandhian Concept Of Self-Rule |
HIND SWARAJ, the title of the first definitive writing of Mahatma Gandhi, and which continues to evoke critical interest the world over even now, literally means ‘self-rule in India’. This small book of about 30,000 words was written in Gujarat in November 1909 on board the ship during Gandhi's return trip from England to South Africa after an abortive mission, within 10 days, 40 of the 275 pages being written with left hand. As stated by Gandhiji himself: "I wrote the entire Hind Swaraj for my dear friend Dr. Pranjivan Mehta. All the argument in the book is reproduced almost as it took place with him." [CWMG 71: 238] It was published in the Indian Opinion in Natal and was soon banned by Government in India because it contained 'matter declared to be seditious'. On that, Gandhi published the English translation from Natal to show the innocuous nature of its contents. The ban was finally lifted on 21 December 1938. A number of editions have been published thereafter, the most common being that published by Navjivan press in India in 1938 with the title 'Hind Swaraj: the Indian Home Rule'. In 1924, an American edition, called 'Sermon on the Sea', (Intro. by John Haynes Holmes) was published from Chicago. Recently, a Reader on it has been published under the 'Cambridge Texts in Modem politics', edited by Professor Anthony J. Parel of University of Calgary (Canada) in 1997. The book has 20 chapters and 2 appendices. Appendix I lists twenty references for further reading, including six by Tolstoy, two by Thoreau, two by Ruskin, one by Plato (Defence and Death of Socrates), and one by Mazzini (Duties of Man), and one each by Dadabhai Navroji, and R. C. Dutt on the economic condition of colonial India. 71 quotations from 'Hind Swaraj'(1938 edition), covering the essential philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, are being given hereafter. 1. Duties of a Newspaper "One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects." [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. I] 2. Obligation to Dadabhai Navroji "Is Dadabhai less to be honoured because, in the exuberance of youth, we are prepared to go a step further? Are we, on that account, wiser than he? It is a mark of wisdom not to kick away the very step from which we have risen higher. The removal of a step from a staircase brings down the whole of it." [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. I] 3. Justice "We who seek justice will have to do justice to others." [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. I] 4. Discontent and Unrest "Unrest is, in reality, discontent. This discontent is a very useful thing. As long as a man is contented with his present lot, so long is it difficult to persuade him to come out of it. Therefore it is that every reform must be preceded by discontent. We throw away things we have, only when we cease to like [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. III] 5. What is Swaraj? "In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englistan. This is not the Swaraj that I want." [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. IV] 6. The Condition of British Parliament "The best men are supposed to be elected by the people. The members serve without pay and therefore, it must be assumed, only for the public weal. The electors are considered to be educated and therefore we should assume that they would not generally make mistakes in their choice. Such a Parliament should not need the spur of petitions or any other pressure. Its work should be so smooth that its effects would be more apparent day by day. But, as a matter of fact, it is generally acknowledged that the members are hypocritical and selfish. Each thinks of his own little interest. It is fear that is the guiding motive. What is done today may be undone tomorrow. It is not possible to recall a single instance in which finality can be predicted for its work. When the greatest questions are debated, its members have been seen to stretch themselves and to doze. Sometimes the members talk away until the listeners are disgusted. Carlyle has called it the "talking shop of the world". Members vote for their party without a thought. Their so-called discipline binds them to it. If any member, by way of exception, gives an independent vote, he is considered a renegade. Parliament is simply a costly toy of the nation. The Prime Minister is more concerned about his power than about the welfare of Parliament. His energy is concentrated upon securing the success of his party. His care is not always that Parliament shall do right. In order to gain their ends, they certainly bribe people with honours. I do not hesitate to say that they have neither real honesty nor a living conscience. To the English voters their newspaper is their Bible. The same fact is differently interpreted by different newspapers, according to the party in whose interests they are edited." [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. V] 7. Civilization "Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy. There are now diseases of which people never dreamt before, and an army of doctors is engaged in finding out their cures, and so hospitals have increased. This is a test of civilization." "This civilization takes note neither of morality nor of religion." "Civilization seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so." Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.”
[M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. VI & VIII] 8. Why was India Lost? "The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them. When our Princes fought among themselves, they sought the assistance of Company Bahadur. That co-operation was versed alike in commerce and war. It was unhampered by questions of morality. Its object was to increase its commerce and to take money. The Hindus and the Mohammedans were at daggers drawn. This, too, gave the Company its opportunity and thus we created the circumstances that gave the Company its control over India. They wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods. They will leave no stone unturned to reach the goal. It is my deliberate opinion that India is being ground down, not under the English heel, but under that of modern civilization. We are turning away from God.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. VII & VIII] 9. Fearlessness Is Strength “Strength lies in absence of fear, not in the quantity of flesh and muscle we have on our bodies.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. VIII] 10. Evil Has Wings, Good Takes Time “Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time. But evil has wings. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. IX] 11. We Indians Are One “We were one nation before they [The English] came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us. And we Indians are one as no two Englishmen are. Only you and I and others who consider ourselves civilized and superior persons imagine that we are many nations.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. IX] 12. Concept of Swadeshi “God set a limit to man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit. God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Marker. Man abused it so that he might forget his maker. I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbors, but in my conceit I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 13. India Is A Nation “India cannot cease to be one nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. The introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation; they merge in it. A country is one nation only when such a condition obtains in it. That country must have a faculty for assimilation. India has ever been such a country.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 14. Religion and Nationality Not Synonymous “In reality, there are as many religious as there are individuals; but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion. In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 15. Hindu-Muslim unity – I “Do people become enemies because they change their religion? Is the God of the Mahomedan different from the God of the Hindu?” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap X] 16. Cow Protection “If I were overfull of pity for the cow, I should sacrifice my life to save her but not take my brother’s. This, I hold, is the law of our religion. Who protects the cow from destruction by Hindus when they cruelly ill-treat her?” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 17. Weak Unity is Fragile “A clay pot would break through impact, if not with one stone, then with another. The way to save the pot is not to keep it away from the danger point but to bake it so that no stone would [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 18. Hindu-Muslim Unity – II “There is mutual distrust between the two communities.” I do not suggest that the Hindus and the Mahomedans will never fight. Two brothers living together often do so. We shall sometimes have our heads broken. Such a thing ought not to be necessary, but all men are not equitable. When people are in a rage, they do many foolish things. How shall a third party distribute justice amongst them? Those who fight may except to be injured.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 19. Lawyers “My firms opinion is that the lawyers have enslaved India, have accentuated Hindu-Mahomedan dissensions and have confirmed English authority.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XI] 20. Law & Lawyers “the profession teaches immorality, it is exposed to temptation from which few are saved. It is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes. Why do they want more fees than common laborers? Why are their requirements greater?” In what way are they more profitable to the country than the laborers? The parties alone know who is right. We, in our simplicity and ignorance, imagine that a stranger, by taking our money, given us justice. What I have said with reference to the pleaders necessarily applies to the judges; they are first cousins; and the one gives strength to the other.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. X] 21. Doctors “I have indulged in vice, I contract a disease, a doctor cures me, the odds are that I shall repeat the vice. Had the doctor not intervened become happy.” “He is a true physician who probes the cause of disease.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XII & VII] 22. Indian Civilization – I “I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be in the world. It is a charge against India that her people are so uncivilized, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change. Many thrust their advice upon India, and she remains steady. This is her beauty: it is the sheet-anchor of our hope.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 23. What Is True Civilization? “Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means ‘good conduct.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 24. Indian Civilization – II “The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 25. Indian Civilization – III “We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade and charged a regulation wage. It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They, therefore, after due deliberation decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 26. Indian Civilization – IV “They further reasoned that large cities were a snare and a encumbrance and that people would not be happy in them, that there would be gangs of thieves and robbers, prostitution and vice flourishing in them and that poor men would be robbed by rich men. They were, therefore, satisfied with small [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 27. Indian Civilization – V “They saw that kings and their swords were inferior to the sword of ethics, and they, therefore, held the sovereigns of the earth to be inferior to the Rishis and the Fakirs.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVI] 28. Indian Civilization – VI “Justice was tolerably fair. The ordinary rule was to avoid courts. There were no touts to lure people into them. This evil, too, was noticeable only in and around capitals.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 29. Indian Civilization Vs Western Civilization ”The tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the Western civilization is to propagate immorality.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIII] 30. Swaraj Is Self-Rule “It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands. But such Swaraj has to be experienced, by each one for himself. One drowning man will never save another.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIV] 31. Freedom from England “If the English become Indianlized, we can accommodate them. If they wish to remain, in India along with their civilization, there is no room for them.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIV] 32. Swaraj For Everyone ”I believe that you want the millions of India to be happy, not that you want the reins of government in your hands. If that be so, we have to consider only one thing: how can the millions obtain self-rule?” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XV] 33. Patriotism “My patriotism does not teach me that I am to allow people to be crushed under the heel of Indian princes if only the English retire. By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and if I could secure it at the hands of the [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XV] 34. Sacrifice Is Bravery “What we need to do is sacrifice ourselves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others. Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XV] 35. Gains Of Fear Short-Lived “What is granted under fear can be retained only so long as the fear lasts.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XV] 36. Means and End – I “Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. We reap exactly as we sow.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVI] 37. Rights & Duties “But real rights are a result of performance of duty; And, where everybody wants rights, who shall give them to whom? [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVI] 38. Means and End – II “ If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift I shall have to plead for it; and according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVI] 39. Means and End – III “fair means alone can produce fair results, and that, at least in the majority of cases, if not indeed in all, the force of love and pity is infinitely greater than the force of arms. There is harm in the [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XV] 40. Brute Force Vs. Love-Force “A petition of an equal is a sign of courtesy; a petition from a slave is a symbol of his slavery. A petition backed by forced is a petition from an equal and, when he transmit his demand in the form of a petition, it testifies to his nobility. Two kinds of force can back petitions. “We shall hurt you if you do not give this,” is one kind of force; it is the force of arms. The second kind of force can thus be stated: “If you do not concede our demand, we shall be no longer your petitioners. You can govern us only so long as we remain the governed; we shall no longer have any dealing with you.” The force implied in this may be described as love-force, soul-force, or, more popularly but less accurately, passive resistance. This force is indestructible.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVI] 41. Love / Soul / Truth-Force “The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 42. History A Record Of Wars “History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world, and so there is a proverb among Englishmen that a nation which has no history; that is, no wars, is a happy nation.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 43. History A Record Of Interpretation Of Soul-Force “Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundred of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 44. Satyagraha Explained – I “Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 45. Satyagraha Explained – II “Everybody admits that sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of other. Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is unjust, only the person using it suffers.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 46. Satyagraha Explained – III “The real meaning of the statement that we are a law-abiding nation is that we are resisters. When we do not like certain laws, we do not break the heads of law-givers but we suffer and do not submit to the laws.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 47. Satyagraha Explained – IV “it is contrary to our manhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and means slavery. Even the Government does not expect any such thing from us. They do not say: ‘You must do such and such a thing, ’but they say: ’If you do not to do it, we will punish you’.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 48. Satyagraha Explained – V “If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man’s tyranny will [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 49. Satyagraha Explained – VI “All reforms owe their origin to the initiation in opposition of minorities in opposition to majorities.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 50. Satyagraha Explained – VII “So long as the superstition that men should obey unjust laws exists, so long will their slavery exist. And a passive resister alone can remove such a superstition.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 51. Satyagraha Explained – VIII “Physical-force men are strangers to the courage that is requisite in a passive resister,” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 52. Satyagraha Explained – IX “Who is the true warrior – he who keeps death always as a bosom-friend, or he who controls the death of others? Believe me that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive resister. Passive resistance is an all-sided sword, it can used anyhow, it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used?” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 53. Non-Violence Is Superior To Violence “Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. They want to command, but those who have to obey commands do not want guns: and these are in a majority throughout the world. They have to learn either body-force or soul-force. Where they learn the former, both the rulers and the ruled become like so many madmen; but where they learn soul-force, the commands of the rulers do not go beyond the point of their swords, for true disregard unjust commands. Peasants have never [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 54. Satyagraha Is India’s Creation “The fact is that, in India, the nation at large has generally used resistance in all department of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 55. No Home-Rule Without Satyagraha “Real Home Rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people. Any other rule is foreign rule.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 56. Traits Of A Satyagrahi “After a great deal of experience it seems to me that those who want to become passive resisters for the service of the country have to observe perfect chastity, adopt poverty, follow truth, and cultivate fearlessness.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 57. Trusteeship “Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 58. Fearless Is Strength “A warrior without fearlessness cannot be conceived of. It may be thought that he would not need to be exactly truthful, but that quality follows real fearlessness. When a man abandons truth, he does so owing to fear in some shape or form.
[M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVII] 59. True Education “What is the meaning of education? It simply means a knowledge of letter. It is merely an instrument, and an instrument may be well used or abused. Therefore, whether you take elementary education or higher education, it is not required for the main thing. It does not make men of us. It doe not enable us to do our duty. In its place it can be of use and it has its place when we have brought our senses under subjection and out our ethics on a firm foundation. Our ancient school system is enough. Character building has the first place in it and that is primary education. A building erected on that foundation will last.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVIII] 60. English-Knowing Indians Have Enslaved India “English-knowing Indians have not hesitated to cheat and strike terror into the people. It is we, the English-knowing Indians, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVIII] 61. India’s Common Language Is Hindi -I “A universal language for India should be Hindi, with the option of writing it in Persian or Nagari characters.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XVIII] 62. India’s Common Language Is Hindi –II “The common language of India is not English but Hindi.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XX] 63. Economic Enslavement Of India – I “When I read Mr. Dutt’s Economic History of India, I wept; and as I think of it again my heart sickens. It is machinery that has impoverished India. It is difficult to measure the harm that Manchester [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIX] 64. Economic Enslavement Of India – II “It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American Rockefeller. Impoverished India can become free, but it will be hard for any India made rich through immorality to regain its freedom.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XIX] 65. Real Home-Rule “What others get for me is not Home-Rule but foreign rule; therefore, it would be proper for you to say that you have obtained Home-Rule if you have merely expelled the English. [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XX] 66. Duty Is Service “Let each do his duty. If I do my duty, that is, serve myself, I shall be able to serve others.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XX] 67. Real Home-Rule (Conclusion) “I will take the liberty of repeating: 1.Real home-rule is self-rule or self-control. 2.The way to it is passive resistance: that is soul-force or love force. 3.In order to exert this force, Swadeshi in every sense is necessary. 4.What we want to do should be done, not because we object to the English or because we want to retaliate but because it is our duty to do so.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XX] 68. Gandhiji’s Commitment To Swaraj “In my opinion, we have used the term ‘Swaraj’ without understanding its real significance. I have endeavoured to explain it as I understand it, and my conscience testifies that my life henceforth is [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Chap. XX] 69. A Word Of Explanation “In my opinion it is a book which can be put into the hands of a child. It teaches the gospel of love in place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul force against brute force.” [M. K. Gandhi, Young India, January 1921] 70. A Word Of Explanation “I would warn the reader against thinking that I am today aiming at the Swaraj described therein [In ‘Hind Swaraj’]. I know that India is not ripe for it. It may seem an impertinence to say so. But such is my conviction. I am individually working for the self-rule pictured therein. But today my co-operate activity is undoubtedly devoted to the attainment of Parliamentary Swaraj in a day.” [M. K. Gandhi, Young India, January 1921] 71. Gandhiji’s Message To The ‘Aryan Path-Special Hind Swaraj Number’ Of September, 1938 “I Welcome your advertising the principles in defence of which Hind Swaraj was written. The English edition is a translation of the original which was in Gujarati. I might change the language here and there, if I had to rewrite the booklet. But after the stormy thirty years through which I have since passed, I have seen nothing to make me alter the views expounded in it. Let the reader bear in mind that it is a faithful record of conversations I had with workers, one of whom was an avowed anarchist. He should also know that it stopped the rot that was about to set in among some Indians in South Africa. The reader may balance against this the opinion of a dear friend, who alas! Is no more, that it was the production of a fool.” [M. K. Gandhi, Segaon, July 14th, 1938] Compiled by Dr. Y. P. Anand Director, National Gandhi Museum |
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