The Violence of Gandhi's Non-Violence - Ania Loomba by brinesalt

THE VIOLENCE OF GANDHI’S NON-VIOLENCE ANIA LOOMBA

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

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while others moved away from them, and it is often these departures, rather than the pious invocations, that manifest the most powerful attempts to engage with Gandhi. The legacies of Gandhi are myriad and complex, and any account of him is bound to be contentious. His collected works run into almost a hundred volumes, and there are over 400 biographies of him. As one commentator put it, he lived till 79 and was rarely silent. So it is hardly surprising that he contradicted himself, often self-consciously, writing that ‘my aim is not [to] be consistent with my previous statements but with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment…since I am called “Great Soul” I might as well endorse Emerson’s saying that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”’ (Anderson, 2012: 30). In my lecture, upon which this small essay is based, I decided to offer a very personal approach to Gandhi’s legacies in order to think about the various forms of non-violence, some invoked by him and others that he resolutely turned his back on, as well as the many forms of violence, again some embraced by Gandhi and others disavowed by him. There is a telling scene in Richard Attenborough’s hagiographic film Gandhi. Although, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, this film gives the impression that all one had to do to achieve Indian independence was lie down in front of the oppressor, this particular scene allows us to think about Gandhi’s tactics (Rushdie, 1991).1 The leaders of the Indian National Congress, including Mohammad Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, are conferring with Gandhi in Delhi about their next move against the British authorities. Gandhi makes it clear that he has never advocated ‘passive anything’, and that he wants an ‘active and provocative’ resistance. He understands that a day of prayer and fasting is in effect a general strike. But it is crucial for him that it not be called a strike, even though a strike is also a non-violent action. Gandhi had a checkered engagement with strikes; he once led them in South Africa and later fasted in support of striking Indian mill workers, but becoming increasingly close to big capitalists, he pronounced that India had no place for ‘political strikes’. The scene reminds us that the vocabularies Gandhi developed were as cannily political as they appeared to be high-minded, indeed they were cannily political because they sounded the way they did, seemingly eschewing the political. But Gandhi himself insisted that non-violence was not a strategy, but an absolute moral position. He writes that since we 20

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have control over the means and not the end, ‘means are after all everything’. This rhetoric is repeated by the hagiography of much Gandhi scholarship. Thus Akeel Bilgrami, a philosopher at Columbia University, writes: Violence has many sides. It can be spontaneous or planned, it can be individual or institutional, it can be physical or psychological, it can be delinquent or adult, it can be revolutionary or authoritarian. A great deal has been written on violence: on its psychology, on its possible philosophical justifications under certain circumstances, and of course on its long career in military history. Non-violence has no sides at all. Being negatively defined, it is indivisible…(2003: 4159).

On the contrary, I shall argue that non-violence is not indivisible and it should not be negatively defined; it too ranges over a wide political spectrum. Moreover, it is precisely the Gandhian history of non-violence that has made it impossible to simply counter-pose it to violence. Indeed, Gandhi himself acknowledges this, repeatedly confessing his dilemna: ‘God alone knows what is himsa (violence) and what is ahimsa (non-violence)’ and at other times even suggesting that ‘all killing is not himsa (violence)’, and that one who has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing; in other words one must have the capacity for violence in order for its renunciation to have any meaning (Gandhi, 1999: vol. 79, 173). The philosophy and practice of ‘satyagraha’ embody this complexity. This is a phrase which Gandhi coined, rejecting his own earlier term ‘passive resistance’ which, he says, ‘gave rise to confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to be known only by an English name. . . . Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence’ (ibid.: vol. 34, 93). The term was, in fact, not widely adopted outside India, and ‘passive resistance’ and ‘non-violence’ became more popular. Both of these do not register the ‘force’ that the term ‘satyagraha’ includes, a force that has two components; the first is, of course, the sheer physical courage involved in satyagraha. In high school, I, like so many Indians of my generation, read Jawaharlal Nehru’s description of his first experience of a police 21

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beating with a baton or a lathi in 1928. Such a beating had recently killed the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai. Nehru describes how he had to fight hard against his instinct to shelter. Afterwards, he felt exhilarated, and felt he had come out morally clear-headed and even superior. But the next day there was a harder attack by mounted police; the protestors received a tremendous hammering, and the clearness of vision that I had had the evening before left me. All I knew was that I had to stay where I was and must not yield or go back. I felt half blinded with the blows, and sometimes a dull anger seized me and a desire to hit out. I thought how easy it would be to pull down the police officer in front of me from his horse and to mount up myself, but long training and discipline held, and I did not raise a hand, except to protect my face from a blow…’ (Nehru, 1941: 137).

Nehru’s descriptions of police brutality strengthened his belief that ‘In spite of its negative name it [ahimsa] was a dynamic method, the very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will. It was not a coward’s refuge from action, but the brave man’s defiance of evil and national subjection’ (ibid.: 80). And yet, he writes that the memory that endures with me, far more than that of the beating itself, is that of many of the faces of those policemen, and especially of the officers, who were attacking us…, full of hate and bloodlust, almost mad, with no trace of sympathy or touch of humanity! Probably the faces on our side just then were equally hateful to look at, and the fact that we were mostly passive did not fill our minds and hearts with love for our opponents, or add to the beauty of our countenances… (ibid.: 138).

Contrary to Gandhi’s exhortations, Nehru confesses, none of the satyagrahis had been able to rid themselves of their hatred for their adversaries. But, of course, this was the second injunction to a satyagrahi—the removal of hatred and the embracing of one’s oppressor, flouted by many of those who later appropriated Gandhi. This also baffled many of his followers. There is the famous incident at Chauri Chaura, the place where 23 policemen 22

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were burnt to death by an angry ‘mob’ in February 1922, leading Mahatma Gandhi to suspend the struggle against the British. Everyone remembers Gandhi’s response—he called off the struggle and went on a fast to atone for the violence. What has been forgotten are the rioting peasants, perceived as criminals by both nationalists and imperialists. As the historian Shahid Amin puts it in a memorable book, the event itself became the ‘great unremembered episode of modern Indian history’, reduced to nothing but metaphor for ‘all manner of untrammelled peasant violence, specifically in opposition to disciplined non-violent mass satyagrahas’ (1995: 3). Amin asks us to re-examine the ideologies and cultures of the peasants who made Gandhi into a Mahatma and yet were far from being represented by him, and also, to think about the costs of Gandhi’s non-violence. This rethinking is also provoked by Raja Rao’s 1937 novel Kanthapura, a powerful and prescient account of Gandhism. Rao describes how a young man called Moorthy brings the Gandhian movement to a tiny village in south India. His first and most active followers are the village women who have previously never left their homes. They are also the most radical, and Moorthy has a hard time teaching them Gandhian ways. When the local policeman Bade Khan starts beating up Moorthy the women cry out: At him! And they all fall upon Bade Khan and tearing away the lathi, bang it on his head. And the maistri comes to pull them off and whips them, and women fall on the maistri and tear his hair, while Moorthy cries out, ‘No beatings, sisters. No beatings, in the name of the Mahatma.’ But the women are fierce and they will tear the beard from Bade Khan’s face… (Rao, 1963: 59).

The next day, Moorthy, just like Gandhi, goes on a fast to atone for this violence. The women are puzzled at his insistence that they must ‘love’ Bade Khan. Rangamma did not understand this, neither, to tell you the truth, did any of us. We would do harm to no living creature. But to love Bade Khan—no, that was another thing. We would not insult him. We would not hate him. But we could not love him. How could we? He was not my uncle’s son, was he? And even if he were…

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Gandhi claimed the force of moral right in a way his followers often could not. Gandhi had few self-doubts about this question: ‘it has been my experience that I am always true from my point of view’. He goes on to say that therefore his opponents can also claim a right to truth, and that is the reason not to hate but to transform them. But as Kanthapura reminds us, there were material reasons why this was not possible for his followers. In a remarkable passage, as the women train themselves for the next confrontation, Rangamma would say, ‘Now if the police should fall on you, you must stand without moving a hair,’ and we would feel a shiver run down our backs, and we would say, ‘No, sister, that is too difficult,’ and Rangamma would say, ‘No, sister, that is not difficult. Does not the Gita say, the sword can split asunder the body, but never the soul?...’ And one day Nanjamma came and said, ‘Sisters, last night I dreamt my husband was beating me and beating me, and I was crying and my bangles broke and I was saying, “Oh, why does he beat men with a stick and not with his hands?” and then when I saw him again, it was no more my husband, it was Bade Khan, and I gave such a shriek that my husband woke me up’ (ibid.: 107).

Later, precisely this conflation of the domestic and political becomes part of their training method: . . . and we stand straight and hold our hands against our breasts, and Rangamma says, ‘Now, imagine the policemen are beating you, and you shall not budge a finger’s length,’ and we close our eyes and we imagine Bade Khan after Bade Khan, short, bearded, lipsmacking, smoking, spitting, booted Bade Khan, and as we begin to imagine them, we see them rise and become bigger and bigger in the sunshine, and we feel the lathis bang on us, and the bangles break and the hair tear and the lips split, and we say, ‘nay, nay,’ and we cannot bear it, and Dore’s wife Sundri begins to cry out and she is frightened; but Ratna, who is by her, says, ‘Be strong, sister, When your husband beats you, you do not hit back, do you? You only grumble and weep. The policeman’s beatings are the like!’ and we say, ‘So they are.’ And we begin to get more and more familiar with it (ibid.: 122).

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On the one hand, the analogy between the local police and the husband allows the women to resist the former, precisely because satyagraha has to take the form of submission. But while Gandhi himself was to proclaim that such physical submission did not imply a moral capitulation, the women’s resistance to the police is rehearsed through their acceptance of domestic violence, on keeping the domestic hierarchy secure. Indeed, this is the paradox of Gandhi’s method—one must simultaneously resist the law and submit to it. Both in the novel, and in the Gandhian movement, women were enjoined not to neglect domestic duties, not to question the familial hierarchy as they ventured into the larger world. In reality, of course, women did breach established boundaries as they began to participate in political life in unprecedented numbers. They did attempt to recast domestic relations, did transgress into previously unacceptable spaces, but arguably, this they did in spite of Gandhi, not because of him.2 Gandhi himself used a strikingly gendered and violent image to explain the moral truth of satyagraha: ‘the ideal satyagrahi is the twentieth century Sati’. In this image, non-violent political dissent is compared to the immolation of a Hindu widow, a Brahmanical rite that was outlawed by the British, and that many Hindu reformers also sought to eradicate. It is a curious image. Since there is nothing that is resisted by the action of a widow who kills herself, no dominant order that is questioned, no authority whose rights are questioned, what does Gandhi’s imagery draw upon, and what does it result in? It certainly references the immense physical courage and pain that the widow must endure. But it also draws upon the idea that the widow possesses sat or the ‘truth’. In doing so it suggests that this pain is voluntarily undertaken by the widow, and is an act of moral courage. As Indian feminists have argued at great length, widow immolation is better seen as a submission—often coerced— to an intensely patriarchal, and intensely violent social order, but its supporters, till today, still repeat the notion of a sati’s courage and morality, and indeed accuse their opponents of being un-Indian, Westernised, and out of touch with tradition.3 Gandhi’s pronouncements on sexual violence against women rehearsed the logic of this earlier comparison of the satyagrahi and sati: I have always held that it is physically impossible to violate a woman against her will. The outrage takes place only when she gives way to

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fear or does not realize her moral strength. If she cannot meet the assailant’s physical might, her purity will give her the strength to die before he succeeds in violating her. Take the case of Sita. Physically she was a weakling before Ravana, but her purity was more than a match even for his giant might. He tried to win her with all kinds of allurements, but could not carnally touch her without her own physical strength or upon a weapon she possesses, she is sure to be discomfited whenever her strength is exhausted….4 It is my firm conviction that a fearless woman, who knows that her purity is her best shield can never be dishonoured. However beastly the man, he will bow in shame before the flame of her dazzling purity. … I therefore recommend women…to try to cultivate this courage. They will become wholly fearless if they can and cease to tremble as they do today at the thought of assaults…. Parents and husbands should instruct women in the art of becoming fearless. It can best be learnt from a living faith in God. Though He is invisible, He is one’s unfailing protector. He who has this faith is the most fearless of all …5

If, in the face of the violence against women in India, this seems grotesque, so does Gandhi’s controversial letter to the Jewish people of Germany: If I were a Jew and were born in Germany…I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy…the calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror…(Homer, 1956: 319, 320).

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Unfortunately, Gandhi’s statements about sexual violence have been institutionalised in modern India; they were required reading for undergraduates when I started my teaching career. Later, a colleague at Jawaharlal Nehru University repeated them to a young graduate student who wanted to work on sexual violence; he told her that the project was bankrupt since a good Hindu woman could not be raped. After the notorious rape of a woman in Delhi in December 2012, an RSS leader announced that such rapes are only a part of urban and Westernised India. They do not exist in Bharat (the Hindi term for the country). The well-known postcolonial thinker Ashis Nandy also said there was some truth is this statement. The point here is that Gandhi’s legacy has legitimised a kind of commonsense about sexual violence and its supposed links with female purity as well as allowing a horrific romanticisation of rural India, and this commonsense can be shared across the political spectrum. At the same time, as many scholars have suggested, Gandhi’s methods of resistance, and his own example, remoulded the ideal of a freedom fighter from hyper-masculine and aggressive to vulnerable, passive and, therefore, feminine. In fact, as the passage from Nehru that I quoted earlier attests, his male followers had to unlearn traditional masculine privilege and masculine behaviour in order to practice satyagraha. Certainly, Gandhi’s own body was remoulded over the years from that of a sophisticated Westernised barrister to the image of an average poor peasant, vulnerable in his nakedness and poverty. One the one hand, this has been an abiding legacy for political activists in India—the simple white clothes, the shunning of ornaments and ostentation, the paring down of one’s needs—a certain asceticism became part of the nationalist movement in general, defining the political culture of large segments of the left, for example, and large sections of the feminist movement as well. But we must remember the gap between form and content—of course Gandhi was no fakir; he simulated a prototype of an Indian peasant, just as his ashrams were the simulation of an ideal village community. As historian Tanika Sarkar (2011) points out, Gandhi’s practical resolution to the problem of inequality was to short-circuit a social process by a personal example: to be self-sufficient in all forms of labour that are necessary for the reproduction of daily life. He hoped to live without exploitation.

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What Gandhi and his associates did was a matter of personal conviction and choice. The self-chosen poverty of the great leader did not question the brutal lack in their lives. It morally privileged and aestheticized them….Gandhi himself lived in ashrams that were simulated rural communities, but ones that were free of actual contradictions that actual villages faced.

This is a crucial point; when, in the novel Kanthapura, the women satyagrahis find it impossible to love Bade Khan the local policeman, they are simply pointing out that one’s relationship with the colonial masters who live far away is one thing, but its translation at the local level, where antagonistic and oppressive social relations permeate every aspect of one’s being, quite another. In the village of Kanthapura, as in India, possibly the most violent and intractable contradiction is that of caste. Although Gandhi believed that ‘poverty is the worst kind of violence’, and certainly recognised the violence of caste, his solutions did not involve a rewriting of the existing social or economic conditions of their existence. Indeed, he used considerable force—one may even say violence—to ensure their continuance, as was pointed out by B. R. Ambedkar, his most radical interlocutor. Ambedkar’s legacy challenges Gandhi’s, indeed it challenges the privilege of the postcolonial ruling classes, and thus has been systematically excluded from postcolonial education. I feel ashamed that while I was growing up, I knew little of Ambedkar’s work, and have had to systematically unlearn much of what I had been taught in order to approach it. Ambedkar pointed out that Gandhi’s caste-work was directed at ensuring the continuance of the system as a whole. Just as Gandhi argued for a moral awakening on the part of the rich, who should, he said, regard their property as held in a trust for the poor, he insisted that caste was a matter of reform of upper-caste Hindu consciousness. He insisted that Dalits were a part of Hindu society—but this was not necessarily a moral stance. Without their inclusion, Hindus would not have had a clear majority in the country. Ambedkar pointed out that Gandhi repeatedly affirmed his personal faith in the caste system as a whole; he quotes Gandhi as writing: I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because it is founded on the caste system.

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The seeds of Swaraj (self-rule) are to be found in the caste system. Different castes are like different sections of the military division. Each division is working for the good of the whole …. To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up on the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. …It will be a chaos if everyday a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin.6

These views are, if we look closely, derived from colonial anthropologists of caste. All of them believed that caste was the glue that held India together. H. R. Risley, the British census commissioner who tried to measure caste groups using the racist colonial methods of anthropometry writes that caste forms the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society.... Were its cohesive power withdrawn or its essential ties relaxed, it is difficult to form any idea of the probable consequences. Such a change would be more than a revolution; it would resemble the withdrawal of some elemental force like gravitation or molecular attraction. Order would vanish and chaos would supervene (1915: 278).

This is neither to undermine nor to disparage Gandhi’s personal disgust at the inequities and hypocrisies of the caste system. Take, for example, his challenge to the manual scavenging of human feces, which was both decreed as the work of the Untouchables, and declared as the cause of their ritual pollution. Gandhi started cleaning latrines in South Africa, and insisted that everyone in his ashram do the same, including his pregnant wife Kasturba. From what we know, she reacted as if this demand was a violent assault upon her sensibilities. But then Gandhi declared that he loved scavenging himself, and that scavengers born to this occupation must also love it: ‘You should realize you are cleaning Hindu society’, he told them. Ambedkar pointed out that if a Brahmin cleaned human waste, he would not become an Untouchable: For 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

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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 only him to keep on scavenging….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 in life… is an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr. Gandhi can perpetuate with equanimity and impunity (see note 6).

Ambedkar writes powerfully about the sheer violence of the caste order. The sanctity and the infallibility of the Vedas, the 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 forged against the Untouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated, blasted and blighted the life of Untouchables are to be found intact and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism.

Indeed, Gandhi’s naming of the Untouchables as ‘Harijans’, or children of God, was a kind of violence in itself inasmuch as it claimed that those who were blighted by man were loved by God; instead, the name that emerged from anti-caste struggles is Dalit, or broken people, that names the very real brutality of caste. At the time of Ambedkar’s writing, he noted, some of the provinces in India ‘have laws which make refusal by a scavenger to do scavenging a crime for which he can be tried and punished by a criminal court.’ Ambedkar could only see Gandhi’s non-violence as a refusal to ‘hurt the propertied class’. Gandhi ‘has no passion for economic equality….The owners need not deprive themselves of their property. All that they need to do is to declare themselves Trustees for the poor.’7 He suggested that Gandhism may well be suited to a society which does not accept democracy as its ideal….Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its calls of back to nature, means back to

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nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast majority of the people…class structure in Gandhism is not a mere accident. It is its official doctrine…

Ambedkar concluded that 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.

It is this paradox that explains the violence of Gandhi’s nonviolence. When Ambedkar appropriated Gandhian weapons but for a far more radical agenda, organising a series of satyagrahas where Dalits claimed the use of tanks and roads close to temples, distanced himself firmly. ‘No Harijan need fast against anyone nor need satyagraha be offered by them….Let them not engage in quarrels with local caste Hindus. Their behaviour should be at all times courteous and dignified.’ They should embark on ‘internal reforms: untouchables ought to give up alcohol, bathe more often, stop eating beef and carrion (the availability of carrion as food was one of the few occupational advantages of being a scavenger), educate their children, and improve their methods of scavenging and tanning.’ As Daniel Immerwahr notes (2007: 275–301): Gandhi’s hope for quietism on the part of untouchables was accompanied by a grim view of their capacities as political actors. ‘The poor Harijans have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of difference between God and not God,’ he explained to an aghast C. F. Andrews. To think that they could act as a group would be ‘absurd.’ To the missionary John R. Mott, Gandhi insisted that untouchables lacked ‘the mind and intelligence to understand what you talked’ and thus could never be the subjects of genuine conversion. ‘Would you preach the Gospel to a cow?’ he asked. Pessimistic about any possibility for real political action on the part of the untouchables, Gandhi denied that Ambedkar, an outspoken radical with an Ivy League education, could ever represent them.

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For Gandhi, it was the saint in the loincloth, not the lawyer in jacket and tie, who must speak for the downtrodden people of India.8

Gandhi was prepared to go to any lengths to prevent the realisation of Ambedkar’s demand for a separate electorate for Dalits. If this were to happen, he speculated that Dalits would join hands with Muslim hooligans and kill upper-caste Hindus (Desai, 1996: 167). Thus in 1932, when separate electorates became a possibility, he used his ultimate weapon against it—a fast unto death. The effect was sensational, as it was calculated to be. Ambedkar was cornered: There was before me the duty, which I owed as a part of common humanity, to save Gandhi from sure death. There was before me the problem of saving for the untouchables the political rights which the Prime Minister had given them. I responded to the call of humanity (Immerwahr, 2007: 288).

Ambedkar later regretted his capitulation: ‘there was nothing noble in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act. The fast was not for the benefit of the Untouchables. It was against them and was the worst form of coercion against a helpless people…’ (Ambedkar: 72). Gandhi also admitted later that his fast ‘did unfortunately coerce some people into action which they would not have endorsed without my fast…. But such conduct is of daily occurrence in the ordinary affairs of life.’ As Perry Anderson points out, Gandhi never undertook a fast against the actions of upper-caste Hindus. It is important to note that whenever the policy of affirmative action in favour of Dalits has been implemented, there has been a rash of upper-caste suicides, although self-immolation has been the preferred method, sati-like, rather than fasting. It is commonplace to compare Gandhi with Martin Luther King. Its effect is to suggest a comparison between the colonised subjects of India and the Blacks of the United States. Daniel Immerwahr astutely points out that such a comparison elides the place of the untouchables entirely; it was ‘warmly embraced’ by both Indian nationalists and black activists. Lala Lajpat Rai, for example, abandoned the comparisons he once used to make between Dalits and American Blacks in favour of those between all Indians and 32

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Blacks. Immerwahr’s work reminds us of the enormous institutional and financial networks that created Gandhism as an international creed, and of its costs—-one of them is the Black Power movement which did not, surprisingly, engage with the question of caste at all. On the other hand, Dalits did engage with the Black Panther movement, but that is another story. We cannot end without thinking about the violence of Gandhi’s death. Nathuram Godse, who shot him, believed that Gandhi’s ideology would emasculate Hindus and dismantle their traditions of anti-Islamic militancy. Gandhi’s last fast, protesting the unfair treatment of Pakistan in the process of Partition, was for him, the last straw. Godse calls Gandhi ‘a violent pacifist’ which Ambedkar himself might have suggested as an apt phrase for Gandhi’s philosophy and practice. But Godse spoke in the voice of militant Hindusim, rather than in protest against it. For this version of Hinduism, Ramchandra Guha writes: Gandhi was ‘a heterodox Hindu, who was detested by the priestly orthodoxy so much so that the Sankaracharyas once even organized a signature campaign that asked the British to declare Gandhi a non-Hindu’ (2013). Today, the Hindu Right still detests Gandhi, though it has learnt to opportunistically use him. But the problem is that Gandhi himself created some of the terrain on which they act. By insisting on using Ramarajya as his image of a just order, he participated in the construction of India as a fundamentally Hindu nation, one in which Muslims were younger siblings needing protection, and in which Dalits could hardly be any better. This is the vocabulary that has been systematically appropriated and hardened by the Hindu Right, which of course has no pretensions to nonviolence at all, and is devoted to establishing an aggressive Hinduism. But beyond the extreme right, even liberal intellectuals in India have participated in white-washing the issues at hand. Thus Guha goes on to proclaim that For all their lapses and departures from orthodoxy—or perhaps because of them—Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru were the three 20th century figures who did most to rid Hinduism of its ills and excesses, who worked most heroically to nurture the spirit of equal citizenship that the Laws of Manu so explicitly deny. The work that they, and the equally remarkable reformers who preceded them, did, are what Hindus should be most proud of.

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This neatly side-steps the enormous difference between Gandhi and Ambedkar, without which such easy extolling of Gandhi’s positions on caste is impossible. Perhaps the last word on violence can be literary. In a moving story, ‘Shishu’, Mahasweta Devi describes how Adivasis have been literally and figuratively crippled in modern India. In this story, a well-meaning development officer called Singh goes to distribute food in a relief camp in the Adivasis’ forests. He finds that every night his supplies are stolen. So one night he plans to stay awake to catch the thief. And he sees little bodies come in from the dark and surround him. Fear—stark, unreasoning, naked fear—gripped him. Why this silent creeping forward? Why didn’t they utter one word?… Why were they naked? And why such long hair? Children, he had always heard of children, but how come that one had white hair? Why did the women—no, no, girls—have dangling, withered breasts?…. ‘We are not children. We are Agarias of the Village of Kuva…. There are only fourteen of us left. Our bodies have shrunk without food. Our men are impotent, our women barren. That’s why we steal the relief. Don’t you see we need food to grow to a human size again?’…. They cackled with savage and revengeful glee. Cackling, they ran around him. They rubbed their organs against him and told him they were adult citizens of India…. Singh’s shadow covered their bodies. And the shadow brought the realization home to him. They hated his height of five feet and nine inches. They hated the normal growth of his body. His normalcy was a crime they could not forgive. Singh’s cerebral cells tried to register the logical explanation but he failed to utter a single word. Why, why this revenge? He was just an ordinary Indian. He didn’t have the stature of a healthy Russian, Canadian or American. He did not eat food that supplied enough calories for a human body. The World Health Organization said that it was a crime to deny the human body of the right number of calories….

Today, large numbers of such forest dwellers, crippled and disfigured, their iron rich lands invaded first by the Indian state, and 34

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now by Indian and multinational companies, have taken to the gun. They haven’t come out of the blue; their insurgency is a version of the miltiant rebellions by peasants, women, hill people, workers, and indeed intellectuals, since the beginning of the 20th century. They are being hunted not just by state and military guns but also by the rhetoric of non-violence. Anyone who supports them is asked to declare their position on violence. The situation is not, of course, unique. Thus, as I was writing this essay, I also happened to watch a powerful Swedish documentary, Black Power Mixtape, that tracks African-American militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. In this, the legendary Angela Davis is interviewed. At the time of the interview, she was still in prison, and the interviewer asks her if she approves of violence. In reply, Davis simply describes in detail the bombings of her Black and poor Birmingham neighbourhood by white supremacists. She recalls how her mother was called by a friend to pick up the remains of four young girls blown to smithereens by such bombs. She then asks the interviewer, ‘And you want to know my position on violence?’ The problem I have been highlighting is that Gandhi’s remarks on non-violence are directed always towards the dissentor; while one could argue that he is hardly concerned with preaching to the oppressor, that his constituency is those who dissent, we need to think hard about the effect of directing the plea of non-violence, or often the charge of violence, towards those who are protesting against injustice in the first place. Gandhi’s most powerful legacy is not some absolute insistence on non-violence. Gandhi invoked the morality of dissent when it suited him. To disobey an oppressor is a right, he intoned, and it is also moral obligation. We should appropriate this legacy by questioning Gandhi’s own vocabularies, by asking where the violence lies, and what true non-violence might mean today.

NOTES

See also Richard Grenier’s brilliant review of the film. http://www. commentarymagazine.com/article/the-gandhi-nobody-knows/: [Accessed 14 March 2014].

See Tanika Sarkar’s fine essay in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.) (2011).

For an overview of some of these debates on sati, see Ania Loomba (1993).

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Harijan, 1 September 1940, 266. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/ chap62.htm

Harijan, 14 January 1940. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap62. htm

B.R. Ambedkar. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, available at http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41L.What%20Congress%20 and%Gandhi%20CHAPTER%20XI.htm

Gandhi writes: ‘In the struggle between capital and labour, it may be generally said that more often than not the capitalists are in the wrong box. But when labour comes to fully realize its strength, I know it can become more tyrannical than capital. The millowners will have to work dictated by labour, if the latter could command intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour will never attain to that intelligence. If it does, labour will cease to be labour and become the master. The capitalists do not fight on the strength of money alone. They do possess intelligence and tact’ (Quoted by Ambedkar in What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (see note 6). Max Weber, in his The Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggests somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have ‘nothing to lose but their chains,’ that they, too, have ‘a world to win’—the only problem being that they have to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, ‘is characterized by a dread of the magical evil of innovation.’ Gandhi also writes in Hind Swaraj: ‘the peasant… observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? …Do you want to make him discontented with . . . his lot?’

The relationship between race and caste has produced many debates; the most productive position, in my view, is that of Gerald D. Berreman (1960). See also Oliver Cox’s letter challenging this position, and Berreman’s rejoinder in the same journal, Vol. 66, No. 5, March 1961, 510–14.

REFERENCES

Amin, Shahid. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Perry. 2012. The Indian Ideology. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective. Berreman, Gerald D. 1960. ‘Caste in India and the United States’, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 2, September, pp. 120–27. Bilgrami, Akeel. 2003. ‘Gandhi the Philosopher’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 39, 27 September. Desai, Mahadev. 1996. The Diary of Mahadev Desai, quoted in Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Gandhi and Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership’, in From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays in the Ambedkar Movement, pp. 150–83. Delhi: Manohar. Gandhi, M.K. 1999. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 98 Volumes. Volume 79, 173 [Accessed at http:// www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm]. Guha, Ramchandra. 2013. ‘Why Hindus Can and Should be Proud Of’, The Hindu, 23 July.

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Homer, A. Jack (ed.). 1956. The Gandhi Reader. New York: Grove Press. Immerwahr, Daniel. 2007. ‘Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States’, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 2: 275–301. Loomba, Ania. 1993. ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India’, History Workshop 36, pp. 209–27. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1941. Toward Freedom, The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: The John Day Company. Rao, Raja. 1963. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions. Risley, H.R. 1915. The People of India. Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. ‘Attenborough’s Gandhi’, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books. Sarkar, Tanika. 2011. ‘Gandhi and Social Relations’, in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. Cambridge University Press, pp. 173–98.