THE VIOLENCE OF GANDHI’S NON-VIOLENCE ANIA LOOMBA
I
n 2013, as part of a series on the subject of ‘Violence’ organised by the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, I was asked to deliver a lecture on Gandhi on 2 October, his 144th birth anniversary. I suppose the idea was to take a look at violence from the perspective on non-violence. Indeed, in an increasingly militarised world, non-violence seems urgently necessary, if also hopelessly romantic. In the preceding decade, as the United States wrecked havoc in several parts of the world in the name of revenge, the truth of Gandhi’s remark, ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind’ seems only too evident. But it also seems increasingly difficult to insert Gandhi’s vocabulary into the world of contemporary politics, in which protests both proliferate and are marginalised, appropriated and dismantled by ever more powerful corporate and state systems. Popular culture, state machinery and establishment scholarship have collectively entrenched the image of Gandhi as a saint, and effective because a saint, and this makes our task even harder. There is no shortage of nuanced critiques of Gandhi, but these are largely marginalised, as Perry Anderson (2012) has recently alleged, or considered as bad form. Gandhism has become a religion, which means that its mantra of non-violence is most passionately invoked by those least committed to it. I do not wish to discount the very real and very transformatory powers of Gandhi’s example, manifest in social and political movements from the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers agitation, Occupy Wall Street and the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Many of these movements adapted his methods Summer 2014, Volume 41, Number 1 19