Gandhi and Tagore

Politics, truth and conscience

Gangeya Mukherji

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317368731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book brings together the political thought of Gandhi and Tagore to examine the relationship between politics, truth and conscience. It explores truth and conscience as viable public virtues with regard to two exemplars of ethical politics, addressing in turn the concerns of an evolving modern Indian political community.

The comprehensive and textually argued discussion frames the subject of the validity of ethical politics in inhospitable contexts such as the fanatically despotic state and energised nationalism. The book studies in nuanced detail Tagore's opposition to political violence in colonial Bengal, the scope of non-violence and satyagraha as recommended by Gandhi to Jews in Nazi Germany, his response to the complexity of protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the differently constituted nationalism of Gandhi and Tagore. It presents their famous debate in a new light, embedded within the dynamics of cultural identification, political praxis and the capacity of a community to imbibe the principles of ethical politics.

Comprehensive and perceptive in analysis, this book will be a valuable addition for scholars and researchers of political science with specialisation in Indian political thought, philosophy and history.

Gangeya Mukherji is Reader in English at Mahamati Prannath Mahavidyalaya, Mau-Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India.

I

Cuspidal imaginings of political community in modern India

Bankimchandra and Vivekananda

The early imaginings of the political community in modern India are perhaps better understood within the relationship of politics with the values of truth and conscience. The political imagination evolved as a part of conceptional nationalism that envisaged the centrality of reform and the reimagining of tradition and social arrangements. It is widely acknowledged that the most meaningful intellectual engagement in nineteenth-century India related to the reform of the social, religious and political community.

We now live in an age of hardened positions regarding ideas and concepts. Many of our ideas of protest and social/systemic change are indeed as they should be a matter of faith for us. But this has an unfortunate complication of creating barriers in a conversation of ideas even while guarding against any dilution in the ideological commitment, so much so that the baggage of historical/ideological contradistinctions threatens to choke all rapprochements. Monolithic doctrines generate opposition and protest. And with the growing harshness of assertion, this may naturally follow that intractable ideological dispute may find its manifestation in violence. Needless to say this is happening. The question of the relevance of the value of reconciliation in social change may not be altogether irrelevant. Reconciliation might ultimately serve as impost for situating of truth and conscience at the centre of politics, meeting a crucial condition for non-violent change in human affairs. It is true that for many in the academy, the Indian nationalist idea has been divested of nearly all regard, but analyses of its workings may not entirely fail to reveal the glimmerings of truth and conscionableness. Sudhir Chandra has seen a somewhat similar value in the phenomenon of Indian nationalism: ‘Seeing through the magic of an idea or ideology is important to knowing. But recognising the efficacy and glory of the magic while it lasted, is no less important.’¹ I do not thereupon intend, however, to allude to any ephemerality or unreality regarding the concern for justice and restitution that I find solidly reflected in a major trajectory of Indian nationalism and the pragmatism of its politics.

Nationalism qua reform

Charles Griswold represents true reconciliation as being dependent on truthful memory: ‘Without honest assessment of the past, no memory worth having; without honest memory, no present worth living; without apology for injuries done, no future worth hoping for.’² For our present purpose, reconciliation may be viewed as an attitudinal concept with regard to the social world, or to ‘one’s own social world’. Looking at Hegel’s social philosophy as a project of reconciliation, Michael Hardimon has examined the question of social attitude. ‘Ones attitude towards one’s social world may be implicit, expressed by the way in which one relates to the central institutions and practices of the society. “Relating to an institution” is a matter of conducting oneself in a certain way with a certain frame of mind with regard to that institution.’³ But the issue of adopting a particular attitude is again imbued with different layers of consciousness and could even sound amorphous, especially in cases where the attitude may be one of unqualified acceptance of social arrangements and institutions. However, the idea of relating to the political order is in Hardimon’s view comparatively easy to depict within a political order, like that of Nazi Germany which forces answers to basic questions of compliancy, complacency and resistance to an evidently evil regime: ‘How can I avoid complicity in its evil?’⁴ Reconciliation has also been taken to mean ‘resignation’, ‘submission’ or ‘consolation’. I have chosen to use reconciliation not in these terms but have rather seen it as both a process and a situation. As a process, reconciliation seeks to overcome conflict, division and alienation, whereas the restoration of harmony and equity is the state of reconciliation. It would be preferable for the discussion to view it also as a form of protest and as a positive concept that Hardimon finds best expressed in the German term versohnung (conciliation), which conveys transformative possibility in that it does not presuppose a return to earlier circumstances in reconciling but rather reconciling in transformation. Hardimon speculates on the foundational attitudes of this transformation:

This, in turn, allows us to articulate further our understanding of the conditions the social world must meet if it is to be a home. It seems natural to suggest that if the social world is to be a home, there must be no class of people who are excluded from participating in its central arrangements. We might try to convey this point by suggesting that, in assessing our relation to the social world, the guiding question should not be, Can I be reconciled to the social world? but rather, Can we be reconciled to the social world?⁵

In the early years of the Congress, the apex organisation of Indian nationalism, there was a general acknowledgement of the moral necessity of merging social reform with nationalism. But it should not be imagined that the imperativeness of such merging were unanimously accepted in the policy planning sessions of the highest level. This indifference, manifested as objection on grounds of expediency and practicability, persisted till the first decade of the twentieth century in spite of the general and expressed feeling among many of the intellectuals and leaders of the disprivileged groups that the largely casteist nationalist movement had no commonality with the crucial issues affecting their society. Jotirao Phule was writing in 1873 in Gulamgiri (Slavery) of the great benefit of English rule in ending caste oppression in India, and of his gradual disillusionment, as against his boyhood enthusiasm, with nationalist exhortations directed at the unity of all classes to free India from colonial subjection. Phule terms English rule as a great social leveller and harbinger of opportunities for the shudras and counsels them to avail of the avenues of advancement till English rule lasted. He is rather caustic about mainstream nationalist politics as it obtained till his time: ‘Thank God that He helped the brave English to subdue the rebellion of the bhat Nana [Saheb]. Otherwise those enlightened brahmans who worship the phallus would surely have sentenced many mahars for life for tucking their dhotis at one side or for having uttered Sanskrit shlokas in their kirtanas.’⁶ In the Congress session in 1886 at Calcutta, Dadabhai Naoroji, notwithstanding his stated awareness to its necessity, flatly denied the propriety of the desire of delegates to admit questions of social reform on the Congress platform, as they had met as a political organisation to plead for political representation, and not to confer on social reform, and criticism for ignoring social issues would be analogous to ‘[blaming] the House of Commons for not discussing the abstruser problems on mathematics or metaphysics’.⁷ Badruddin Tyabji, as president in the Congress session at Madras in 1887, reiterated Naoroji’s position on the grave objection of the delegacy to Congress not discussing the issues related to social reform.⁸ The most detailed expositional refusal to the persistent demand to prominently incorporate social reform issues in the Congress proceedings came from W. C. Bonnerjee in his presidential address in the Allahabad session in 1892. Bonnerjee informed the delegacy that this issue had been ‘discussed threadbare’ in the inaugural Bombay session with prominent social reformers including Mahadev Govind Ranade, and it was decided not to ‘meddle’ with the question, leaving delegates, however, free to confer informally on the topic in the Congress hall after the formal session. This position was adopted mainly because of the controversial nature of the issue and the potential fractiousness that could accrue from formal involvement of Congress sessions with the topic of social change. Bonnerjee pointedly mentioned the variety of concerns linked to this theme, based on individual as well as community attitudes, ranging from women education, child marriage to widow remarriage. Significantly, he refuted the argument that all political reform had to be preceded by social reform. This position is of course deservedly open to analysis on the plane of political philosophy; however, Bonnerjee here referred to the sustainability of the linkage in the context of purely legal measures that the Congress had been consistently proposing, such as the separation of judicial and executive powers up to a level and amendments in laws relating to land and forests. He asked suggestively: ‘I ask again, what have these to do with social reforms? Are we not fit for them because our widows remain unmarried and our girls are given in marriage earlier than in other countries? because our wives and daughters do not drive about with us visiting our friends? because we do not send our daughters to Oxford or Cambridge?’⁹ Bonnerjee did not in this context raise the issue of the humiliation and exploitation of the perpetually oppressed castes in India. But, as amply indicated by the persistent presence of the issue of social reform even at the highest levels of the political leadership, such questions were being earnestly discussed in the political community. In a few years, the strongest criticism by a political leader of caste oppression was presented by Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1903 at the Dharwar Social Conference. Gokhale was scathingly critical of the social arrangements that were responsible for such discrimination from the standpoint of justice, humanity and ‘national self-interest’. He lamented that the attitude of the educated youth towards the depressed classes as particularly painful and that it was ‘monstrous’ that certain castes were permanently debarred by social sanction from all opportunity to liberate themselves from their degradation. ‘This is deeply revolting to our sense of justice. I believe one has to put oneself mentally into their place to realise how grievous this injustice is.’¹⁰ He mentioned the almost ready endorsement for Gandhi’s movement in South Africa and restated what he said had been his privilege to hear during a meeting in Bombay − a speech by Ranade wherein Ranade had drawn comparisons with the treatment of the depressed classes in India with the degradation of Indians in South Africa. Gokhale rejected the analogy of caste as in India and class as in the West, as caste in India was rigid and no movement was possible within its scope: ‘A great writer has said that castes are eminently useful for the preservation of society, but that they are utterly unsuited for purposes of progress.’¹¹ National interest, too, required that opportunities be made available for realising the potential of every inhabitant of the country, and it was to the detriment of the higher aspirations of the nation to keep the ‘low castes’ at their present level of ignorance and incapacity. Gokhale now touched on the issue of a larger section of Indians remaining unenthused about what were the greater goals of national revival: ‘Can you not realize that so far as the work of national elevation is concerned, the energy, which these classes might be expected to represent, is simply unavailable to us? I understand that that great thinker and observer – Swami Vivekananda−held this view very strongly.’¹² He appealed to the university-educated young men to join the movement for elevation of the disprivileged and hoped that at least some of them would dedicate their lives to the noble endeavour of educating and promoting the well-being of the ‘unhappy low castes’.

I propose to examine Bankimchandra and Vivekananda, who stand as it were outside the formal political community, as being among the early contributors to the idea of ethical politics, which at its best sought to promote ideas of equal participation of the diverse religious communities, castes and classes in Indian society, not through a hegemonical vision of assimilation within a hierarchical social structure but through a subtler and attitudinal reconciliation. It is possible to see the trajectory of their thought as assisting to conduce the harmonious coexistence of the diverse social groups in India, who have still not come to terms with transactions of claim and consideration which had commenced under a colonial regime during the early decades of the nineteenth century, as also an increasing recognition in the writings of most of these thinkers that the said transactions were motored by the awareness on the part of many social groups that particular facets of the dominant culture of the land actively abetted and upheld their degradation and exploitation. They evidence an acute sensitivity to a central problem with reincarnating traditions with conte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Cuspidal imaginings of political community in modern India: Bankimchandra and Vivekananda
• 2. Politics: truth and non-violence
• 3. Nationalism: ethics and responsibility
• 4. In argument: considerance of the political
• Bibliography
• Index