Gandhi: The Colonizing Object
In the West nowadays special weightage is given to Gandhi, the
spiritual-philosopher, rather than to the political activist. In fact, many
intellectuals now seem to question whether he had any real interest in
politics.1 This form of speculation is fashionable
to a degree, and it may hence be important, quoting Tory leadership, to ‘get
back to basics.’
Which reminds one that in the same issue
of national papers one finds David Cameron, the latest Tory leader, quoting
Mahatma Gandhi, that he expected party workers to personify social change,
while another piece mentions that the greatest of Tory leaders, Winston
Churchill, would rather have seen him die during a hunger fast. Surely, the
West has come round full circle in their assessment of India’s Father of the
Nation, from half-naked fakir to global guru of peace.
One has a
sneaking suspicion that this is not the result of a change of liberal heart,
but part of a well-orchestrated political strategy that would impress on ‘the
restless natives’ of all nationalities, who now add to one another’s voices of
discontent and rebellion, within the confines of the global American Empire,
that dissent had better be expressed, ‘without stepping on the grass,’ to use Gunter
Grass’s telling description of German revolutionaries. A newly imagined
spiritual aura around India’s great political leader, who in the West’s
re-written history of India achieved independence by a spiritual act, also
subtly re-emphasizes the civilizing mission of the West, which promises to
continue rewarding well-mannered high-flown spirituality with political
concessions. What is a definite political no-no to Kipling’s ‘lesser tribes
without the law,’ and punished severely by stripping away their sovereignty, is
to talk of socialism, dismantling capitalism, or Islamic values while having
oil under one’s feet.
One can then
argue that far from being some mystic authentic voice of traditional Indian
civilization, Gandhi was critiquing Western civilization from within, as a
Victorian radical politician, driven to rebellion by the contradictions between
liberal precept and practice which he experienced as a colonized subject. Why
is it important to say this? First, his mission was to restructure the liberal
political framework he had adopted to fit the specificities of a colony. He had
openly espoused Victorian liberal values, which he held dear along with his
generation of educated Indians, and which led him first to follow through on
Social Reform as a way to enlarged political freedoms. Almost every single
action of his early years attest this identity, whether getting his children to
sing ‘God save the King!’ or joining the medical corps during the Boer War, or
even his liberal disbelief at being thrown out of a first class compartment. If
he wanted Swaraj in later years to liberate the British as well, this was not
the outpourings of a unique Indian sense of inclusiveness; it was the Victorian
in him who always saw his British rulers as misguided friends to be
re-educated, and never as enemies, in the way, for instance, as the Rani of
Jhansi saw them. When he saw a political restructuring was impossible of
achievement because of the very real British colonial interests involved, his
second mission became how best to realize democratic values under the
conditions given by the political development of the nationalistic struggle,
refusing to confuse or conflate the principles of science, rationality, or
democracy with the contingent manifestations of colonialism and imperialism. He
offered a reward for the scientific improvement of the charka. His fanatical
insistence on proper sanitation, never a preoccupation of Indian civilization,
even during his Tolstoy Farm days, exhausted even the modernists in his following.
His insistence on sexual asceticism is more Victorian than Vedantic. His new
conception of ‘Gram Swaraj’ was not a retreat to a bucolic ‘Golden Past,’ but
to anchor modern democratic practice at the place where most people lived; to
rescue democracy from its specific Westminister model, which left power firmly
in the hands of competing elites.
It can be said
with some force that this is a very particularist reading of the man and his
works. The justification in defence would be that the inconsistencies in his
standpoint can be rescued from the accusation of manipulative hypocrisy only,
and only if, one perceives him as a political activist par excellence whose
several actions were contingent upon the political necessity of achieving
national independence. To identify him as a spiritual Indian, or more clearly
Hindu, whose interest was not political but the recovery of the values of a
traditional Hindu civilization would immediately raise the question what
these values were, who they benefited, and
who they suppressed. Could Gandhi, or any other Hindu, claim a ‘genuine
pluralism’ for a civilization that had created a self-policing hierarchy of
castes, the bulk of whom had been savagely discriminated against for over two
thousand years under the guise of religious sanction? Whatever the
justification for such a static discriminatory system during long periods of
economic stagnation, there could be none during the vast social and economic
changeover that Gandhi witnessed. The Durban Conference on Racism has recently
acknowledged that Castism was the same as Racism. If purely driven by a moral
imperative, a person would follow Periyar and Ambedkar to focus on the
destruction of caste hierarchy. However, a leader might perceive the various
political steps that would first have to be taken, independence being a key
one, to achieve moral social change. The
Hindu civilization had subjugated its women, proclaimed Sati as a moral ideal,
and even stripped women of the ancient religious rights they had during the
tribal Vedic period. Again, a personal spiritual drive might have led to
involvement in social reform, as it did a whole generation of people in the 19th
century, but a politician would think first of bringing women out into the
streets to fight for freedom
Therefore,
despite Western pressure to recast Gandhi solely as a spiritual leader,
disinterested in politically contingent activity, and in obscure pursuit of
self-realization and the essence of Indian civilization, unfortunately and
temporarily masked by Victorian Westernisms, it is important, particularly in
the wooly context of elite Indians reinventing themselves, that Gandhi’s role
is re-emphasized and re-examined as supreme political leader of his times, who
restructured the environment of political contestation in such a way as to win
political independence for India against all odds. Clearly, he was also a man
with well articulated moral values, like all revolutionaries, from Robbespiere
to Mao to Fidel Castro, and the measure of meaning in their moral struggles
have to be gauged in real political terms, by how well their revolutions were
able to institutionalize their values into everyday societal practice.
It is important
to restate the early historical context of the freedom movement. Despite the
present-day glorifying by the argumentative classes of the revolutionary
upsurge of those times, even the most sympathetic reading can identify nothing
more than sporadic, individualized, often a farcical, taking to arms.
The first and
last large-scale military contestation in 1857 did find the British in
desperate straits in north India, when faced in battle by their own
well-trained sepoys, and any uprising or even threat of uprising, at the nerve
points of British control over India, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, would have had
them suing for peace, or a peaceful exit. But this just did not happen. This
vast silence to that critical outbreak cannot be explained away without
reference to the very hierarchical caste-ridden nature of Indian societies, a
system of differentiation that has permeated all religious denominations right
down to this day.
The critical
failure of 1857 is key to our understanding of what really happened at Assaye,
or Seringpatanam, or earlier or later with local feudal or tribal revolts. No
effective common cause was ever possible in caste-ridden India; many times the
people separated by class and caste from their rulers remained indifferent to
their masters fate. Human history records several instances of incredible
victories, from Marathon to Dien Bien Phu, when the Weak have destroyed the
Strong, because their leaders made common cause with their peoples. It was not the military skill of Wellington
or Mohammed Ghori that gave victory to the invader, but rather as Mohammed Habib
has noted a kind of imploding revolution, a disappearance of seemingly vast
support, when those who ruled were unable to rule in the old way [meeting half
of Lenin’s dictum for social change]. But the British were very well able to
rule in the old way, and if they were to be challenged it had to be done in a
non-military political environment.
When he returned
at the age of fifty, Gandhi was already a battle-hardened veteran against
colonial rule, from South Africa where colonialism was nakedly racist. He knew
that the Indian peoples, riven in their ranks by caste, would never actively
refuse to be ruled in the old way, hence his tactical attack on untouchability
to start a mass base for political action. Nor was he a failed advocate groping
for a job in the motherland, but a seasoned Middle Temple lawyer who understood
the restrictions imposed by the British administrative system, and the pathways
to widen and secure liberties with legality. It was this skill he would use to
telling effect to baffle the Raj, tie it up in knots in its own
inconsistencies, pitch colonial practice against avowed British political
principle, all with the British voting public so to speak in the jury box. In
other words he spoke in accepted British terms to a British audience, and left
them uncomfortable with their own conscience.
Whether Gandhi’s
political stratagem would have sufficed on its own is a moot question; what is
important is that this political drama was played out against a greatly
weakened Britain during the inter-war years, when Ireland had already been
given freedom for fear of massive revolt, when Labour was contesting power
after the General Strike, when the European ally France was prostrate, while
Germany, the resurgent enemy in Europe, was itching to end the ‘armistice’ that
Marshall Foch declared the Treaty of Versailles to be, when even a romantic
imperialist like Churchill knew they would go under without being propped up by
America, which voiced its own populist angst against British imperialism.
For his superb
strategy to succeed, Gandhi required to ensure two key factors of revolution:
first, masses had to be brought out on the streets on a regular basis with
innocent legal and appealing demands, like the Salt Satyagraha. And, second,
all had to be done in open peaceful protest, almost as Thoreau and Tolstoy
would have advocated, and without any show of violent opposition. The British
must be made to wrong-foot themselves with every police or army assault on
peaceable protests.
Each of these
two factors strengthened the other. An assured environment of legality and
peace would bring out the masses. To retain the masses there, Gandhi had to be
very strict about only peaceful means being adopted. His calling off the
non-cooperation movement after the Chauri-Chaura incident was politically
necessary if the long-term goal was to be achieved. Clothing the tactical
necessity in a new morality imposed on the nation was an integral part of a
strategy by which Indians and the West must view the leader as essentially a
spiritual leader. The instant success of Swami Vivekananda, J. Krishnamurthi,
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Osho, and the lesser gurus, daily remade, has more to do
with the self-conceit of Western elites, rather than to any careful hearing
their words have been given. Gandhi was an astute trespasser over this
carefully cultivated Western landscape; and in recent years has been given an
assured pedestal of his own, as armed or economic challenge has forced the West
to privilege and mythologize spiritual leaders whose successes resonate with
civilizational justifications for Western hegemony.
This does not at
mean that Gandhi was a fraud, or anything but a highly principled man who
carried out all his life continual spiritual exercises. All human beings, whether
they acknowledge it or not, have a strong spiritual dimension to their psyches.
A few like Gandhi give the spiritual function special importance, and exercise
it on a regular basis. This was especially true with this leader of a vast
movement, who furthermore created a specific spiritualized persona to enable
him to carry out the task he realized had been assigned to him.
In times before
Gandhi, from Buddha to Martin Luther, spiritual leaders have made their lives
their message, to carry through great social reform movements, which had the
impact of political revolutions. A distancing from a creative understanding of
these complex men and their role in history arises either by simplifying their
personalities to that of mere manipulative party politicians, or by
dematerializing them as otherworldly saints not interested in the political
realities of their lived world. Gandhi’s message is totally lost if his
politics is taken away from his life. To see Gandhi as the political leader of
a vast movement does not in any way reduce his stature as a spiritual person.
On the contrary, it gives corporeal historical substance to that spirituality.
If one had time
and space one could analyze every one of his actions on the stage of history to
pass judgment whether he was driven by political necessity or an inner-directed
spiritual quest. To take a few salient instances: his support for the Khilafat
movement could hardly be termed as anything else than an expedient attempt to
gather Muslim support, even at the cost of driving Jinnah out of what that
modernist considered the fast-gathering obscurantism of a Hindu-dominated
Congress. The successful and manipulative plea to Ambedkar not to split the
Hindu majoritarian camp had less the spiritual impetus for mystic Hindu
identity, and more vote-bank commonsense. Asking Abul Kalam Azad to step down
as Congress President in favour of Nehru was clearly a painful, non-spiritual
political decision, at a critical moment of history, though he knew the
aristocrat would not support Azad’s Constituent Assembly formula that had
gained the enviable support of Jinnah himself. The Quit India movement in 1942
was timed with strategic precision, at Britain’s weakest moment, and calling
the Cripps offer ‘a rubber cheque from a crashing bank’ had the honest clarity
of a clear-headed negotiating politician.
If Gandhi’s
identity as a political leader is unassailable, the reality of his spiritual
journey is not in doubt either, complex though the relationship is between the
two duties he took on himself. If a
thought experiment could create an observer standing outside of history, such a
person could condemn the inherent hypocrisy in several of Gandhi’s standpoints.
But Gandhi like several other spiritual leaders knew that life itself imposes
doubts, confusions and contradictions on the living, who continually are faced
with unenviable choices. To raise a mass following of Hindus under a
semi-religious umbrella, he had to uphold Sanatana Dharma, and relinquish an
attack on the caste system, that a modernist like Periyar was free to make. To
keep the Congress bourgeois elite together and focused on achieving
Independence, he had to alienate another modernist in Jinnah and accept
Partition as a consequence of his actions. Gandhi walked a tightrope between
marshalling caste Hindu support and condemning untouchability; between
accepting majoritarian Hindu rule, based solidly on Hindu dharma, and reaching
out to the Muslim communities with bridges of social reform modernity, which he
himself broke from time to time to reinforce his spiritual identity for Indian
and Briton alike. He compressed all the contradictions within himself and his
life, for the inexorable progress of national salvation was the message of his
life.
To paint a
genuine, individual spiritual search, bound historically by time, place, and
personal necessity, with the time-erasing colour of a Hindu, ‘eternal’ identity
is unfair to Gandhi, since one must say there is no such overarching singular
ethic to admire, the bulk of the people still victimized by ferocious caste
distinctions, the vast majority of the poor despoiled by the rich, the women
subjugated at home and at work, and the polity a mess of illiteracy, poverty
and disease, which a slight unselfishness among the elite could alleviate to a
remarkable degree.
Modernists like
Jinnah, or Ambedkar, or Periyar, may have led India to better governance, but
to get a chance to do so they would have needed to stymie the British with
their own logic, which they couldn’t as modernists, nor did they have an
effective mass base to posit a future threat as Gandhi could, if, if the
peaceful Mahatma was allowed to die fruitless in hunger. The tragedy of the
incomplete freedom movement was it had to be achieved through a non-modernist
route, where achieving the ‘national democratic’ revolution was not an explicit
goal.
The path to
deliverance from colonized knowledge is never easy. Gandhian thought and action
find a proper context for study when one sees how they impacted the lives of
the multitudinous poor, in his day, and later. Gandhi the politician knew
better than others that the focus of any principled activity must be to
alleviate the suffering of the poor. This could not be done by spiritual
enquiry alone, but only by practical political action, by creating a strategy
for national deliverance from colonial rule, the central cause of poverty, by
cautioning the lawyers, doctors, and engineers, the leading elements of the
powerful bourgeoisie, not to become ‘brown sahibs,’ by enforcing the discipline
of constructive work and the spiritual search for truth among the freedom
fighters, so that the goal of freedom may not be lost soon after it is found.
Once political
state control had been achieved, Gandhi instantly struck at the festering core
of the Congress calling for its disbandment as a political party, and its
conversion to social workers, a call for a massive ‘cultural revolution,’ to
match Mao’s in scope and vision, but an assassin’s bullet rescued the political
elite from such de-stability. Such a move on Gandhi’s part was profoundly a
moral one, as is any great political act. His death froze the enigma of his
life in time, permitting his memory to be used today as a colonizing object by
the West in ceaseless pursuit of global re-colonization. Indian intellectuals,
however much fascinated by Western mirroring of possible Gandhian reflections,
should desist from gutting his record of the centrality of politics in his life
and mission.
1 In the first week of 2006, an imaginative seminar ‘ Gandhi:
Philosophical Debates,’ was organized by Professor Javeed Alam, at the Central
Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad. This seminar gave rise
to this reflection.
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