Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality

Global Perspectives

Debjani Ganguly, John Docker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134074303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book presents a rethinking of the world legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in this era of unspeakable global violence. Through interdisciplinary research, key Gandhian concepts are revisited by tracing their genealogies in multiple histories of world contact and by foregrounding their relevance to contemporary struggles to regain the 'humane' in the midst of global conflict. The relevance of Gandhian notions of ahimsa and satyagraha is assessed in the context of contemporary events, when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial capital to reduce the world to a state of international lawlessness.

Covering a wide and comprehensive range of topics such as Gandhi's vegetarianism and medical practice, his successes and failures as a litigator in South Africa, his experiments with communal living and his concepts of non-violence and satyagraha. The book combines historical, philosophical, and textual readings of different aspects of the leader's life and works.

Rethinking Gandhi in a New World Order will be of interest to students and academics interested in peace and conflict studies, South Asian history, world history, postcolonial studies, and studies on Gandhi.

1
Global state of war and moral vernaculars of nonviolence

Rethinking Gandhi in a new world order

Debjani Ganguly

1

Every year 21 September is commemorated across the globe as the International Day of Peace. Ten days later, on 2 October, India ritually marks the day on which one of the greatest advocates of peace and non-violence in the modern world was born. He was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Given the state of the world today, however, one can be forgiven for thinking that these commemorative days are both symbolically and substantively empty. As the renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his magisterial account of the short twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, ‘The years after 1989 saw more military operations in more parts of Europe, Asia and Africa than anyone could remember’.¹ The last decade and a half has witnessed civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in India, rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Central and West Asia, globalization of Islamic fundamentalism, the carnage of September 11, aggressive US-led neoliberal military occupation in Iraq and a West-led global War on Terror that appears interminable at least from the vantage point of the present. If anything has been democratized at all across the globe, it is the culture of death.

What traction do peace and Gandhi have in these violent times when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial capital to reduce the world to a state of international lawlessness? In what possible registers can Gandhian moral vernaculars – ahimsa, satyagraha, sarvodaya – address the ravages of our contemporary world? How do instances from Gandhi’s life inspire one to deal with what Judith Butler very evocatively calls ‘the dry grief of endless political rage’ that characterizes our times?² Do the distinctions that Gandhi posited between ‘legitimate actions’ and ‘law’ in challenging colonial sovereignty become dangerous when deployed to read the violent insurgencies against the global imperial order, some of which have been given the name of ‘terrorism’? Or do they once again bring home to us the violent dissonance between the tenets of international law and principles of human equity?

Such questions and many others constitute the imperative behind producing this book. Conceived, debated and written in the shadow of the US Occupation of Iraq in 2003, this book has its genesis in a symposium on Gandhi held in late 2004 on the premises of Australia’s foremost custodian of humanist values, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (ANU) Also the home of the radical project on Indian history Subaltern Studies from 1981 to 1995, ANU has a history of active intellectual and ethical engagement with human rights and democracy across the world. In rethinking Gandhi’s relevance for our fraught times, the symposium chose to approach Gandhi not purely as a ‘Indian’ figure, as if he belonged in modernity to only one history, but as a activist-thinker with an eager cosmopolitan interest in diverse world histories. This exercise in claiming Gandhi as a citizen of the world resulted in a series of imaginative and thought-provoking presentations that explored eccentric and idiosyncratic aspects of Gandhi, that glanced off Gandhi to speculate about other figures and histories and that traced the resonance of Gandhian ideas and praxis with concerns and dangers of the present. This volume builds on the work of the ANU Gandhi symposium and attempts to rethink his legacy in the new war-torn millennium.

In Sydney a few months ago, an American peace activist, Scott Parkin, was arrested by ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation) and deported to the US for being a ‘threat to national security’.³ His crime: participating along with other anti-globalisation demonstrators in a peaceful protest against the Forbes Global CEO Conference outside the Sydney Opera House. Parkin also helped stage a street play called ‘The Coalition of the Billing’ outside the Sydney headquarters of Halliburton of Dick Cheney fame and one of the largest US contractors in Iraq today. In Houston, his hometown, Parkin had been at the forefront of a community awareness group that protested against oil companies profiting and profiteering from war. The protests were always peaceful and generally involved staging street plays lampooning mascots or key corporate figures of the oil industry. Before his arrival in Sydney, this activist who counts Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King among his sources of inspiration, spent days travelling around Australia conducting workshops on nonviolent activism. Apart from irritating American authorities with his criticisms of the Iraq War, and being briefly arrested for civil disobedience in 2003 – actions which any healthy democracy ought to be able to accommodate – Scott Parkin has had no record of violence against the American nation-state. Yet, when he was arrested in Sydney and taken to a nearby police station, he was asked to make a case for why he was not a threat to Australian national security. His response was ‘I am a nonviolent person, a peace activist, I organize peace events, I do talks’. The Australian law-enforcement agencies nevertheless cancelled his visa and he was asked to leave Australia immediately.

The fact that even so-called ‘benign’ democracies such as Australia treat peace activists as threats to national security is a sign of the violent and morally skewed times we live in. The speculation that Australian law-enforcing agencies may have taken this action against Parkin at the behest of the Bush administration makes it even worse. Taken together these developments conjure up a scenario of global politics where, on the one hand, power is concentrated in the hands of a few hyper-masculine bullies and, on the other, all modalities of protest – which actually range the spectrum from peaceful to the utterly carnage-ridden – are invariably tarred with the brush of ‘terrorism’.

It is at such junctures that we need to insert once again voices such as Gandhi’s to stem the shrill and raucous ‘good vs evil’ or ‘us vs them’ rhetoric of the dominant political players of the global order. We need to retrieve for the amnesiac violent global players the Gandhian insistence on the inviolability of soul-force in each and every one of us, the force that conserves the world against all attempts to annihilate it. We need to remind the world that Gandhi’s idiosyncratic, almost Chaplinesque political style that evoked humour, encouraged dialogue, and remained fundamentally humane in face of the most formidable colonial/imperial machinery, provides an alternative language of political engagement. It is the language of nonviolent relationality in the public domain, of a moral internationalism based on the notion of compassion for and connectivity with strangers, the language of soul-force based on truth and love. As Gandhi reminded us in the early years of the twentieth century in his classic political tract Hind Swaraj, the resilience of this world owes more to human care than we are willing to admit:

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. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on.⁴

More than twenty years ago, India’s renowned social scientist, Ashis Nandy, wrote that Gandhi’s transcultural androgynous protest against the excessive aggression of British colonialism held in trust a peculiar form of ethically potent ‘weakness’ to which ‘a violent, culturally barren and politically bankrupt world may some day have to return’.⁵ That ‘some day’ is our here-and-now. European colonialism may have been defeated, but new modalities of enslavement that speak the language of religion, money and arms continue to be invented. They are modalities in which more and more people around the world are complicit than ever before.

The present volume undertakes to name and investigate this very particular form of Gandhian ‘weakness’ that Nandy talks of. It is not the weakness of passivity or piety. Rather it constitutes a transcultural nonviolent ethics of the everyday that is eminently translatable across a range of political sites. It is an ethics of relationality across strangeness and difference as against an orientation that valorizes propinquity and sameness to mark human sociality. That is why the book argues and makes a case for a global cosmopolitan instead of an exclusively indigenous traditional base for the very foundations of Gandhi’s ahimsa and satyagraha. Such a theoretical position marks Gandhi as a hybrid cosmopolitan figure who transformed Third World anti-colonial nationalist politics in the twentieth century in ways that neither indigenous nor westernized Indian nationalists could. To that extent, the book’s historicizing of Gandhi’s thought, practice and legacy is novel. It does not prioritise the narrative of Indian nation making or the narrative of the Indian diaspora in situating Gandhi. Each is seen as embedded in the other and both are read as being oriented towards the world. It is also because of the permeability and translatability of specifically Gandhian modalities of ‘weakness’ that this book makes no attempt to either deify Gandhi or hail him as an apostle of nonviolence who now irrevocably transcends the messiness of our complex humanity. Rather it explores precisely the sheer worldliness and embodied nature of Gandhi’s valiant ‘weakness’ and the modes of its global dissemination.

II

It is no coincidence that the next three chapters of the book give us vignettes of Gandhi’s anti-imperial, nonviolent energy refined and filtered through acts of relational embodiment – his experience of vegetarianism, his quirky experiments with alternative medicine and his renowned fasts. These constitute the first part of the book, entitled ‘Worlding the Gandhian everyday: food, medicine and fasts’. Leela Gandhi’s chapter, ‘Ahimsa and Other Animals: the Genealogy of an Immature Politics’, with which this part begins, traces a complex etymology of Gandhian ahimsa. She argues that Gandhi’s anti-imperial politics and polemic have transnational sources in his active involvement with fin de siècle vegetarianism which itself constituted part of late-Victorian animal-welfare movements. In order to do so, she revisits Gandhi’s young adult days in England where he first encountered Henry Salt’s book Plea for Vegetarianism. This encounter was life changing for Gandhi for it opened up for him a world of hospitality and friendship via animal-welfare activists whose anti-colonialism directly emerged from what Leela Gandhi calls their ‘zoophilia’. She cites a public letter Gandhi wrote in 1894 in which he expressed his solidarity with the English vegetarians on the grounds that ‘the vegetarian movement’ would ‘aid India politically … inasmuch as the English vegetarians … readily sympathise[d] with the Indian aspirations’. The author carefully extricates three strands from the intellectual-activist repertoire of late-Victorian animal welfarism that discursively wove themselves into the elementary grammar of Gandhian ahimsa. They included, a radical cosmopolitanism most often manifested in a ‘culinary’ form, a critique of imperial masculinity based on meat-eating or kreophagy and, finally, a resistance to modern forms of governmentality that erect all kinds of barriers to multiple forms of relationality – both human and animal. These strands were themselves in turn inflected by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill (whose anthropocentric condescension and embargo on sentiment they rejected), by Darwinian evolutionism that asserted the connectedness of all sentient life, and by socialist and anarchist energies of various stripes. In tracing such a complex genealogy of ahimsa, Leela Gandhi’s chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book which attempts to re-world Gandhi by situating him along multiple matrices across the globe.

The chapter that follows this one, Sandhya Shetty’s ‘The Quack Whom We Know: Illness and Nursing in Gandhi’, identifies Gandhian dietetics, especially his philosophical and political adherence to vegetarianism, as the key framework within which Gandhian ‘quackery’ in relation to the issue of medicine becomes intelligible. Gandhi’s views on medicine were, in fact, unambiguously set against the grain of all received positions: nationalist or colonialist, shastric or Western, professional or lay. The basic premises of medicine articulated in terms of the health and well being of man as a self-evident good – by all standards an irreproachable ideal – appear as negative impulses within the unrelentingly humane yet acerbic framework of Gandhian vegetarianism. As Shetty puts it, Gandhi’s ‘self-conscious ascetic disregard for life unlimited’ made him very critical of the fundamental presupposition of conventional medicine: ‘an excessive desire for living’. She adds that Gandhi’s critique of medicine exceeded the Fanonian one of medicine’s complicity in the productivity of colonial pathology, for it was founded on a deeper and more universal notion of ethical self-cultivation. Thus, both illness and nursing were reconceived in the Gandhian scheme of things as imperatives to an ethical way of living, a saving and refashioning of the body and the spirit that were both responsive to and could feel suffering and violation. As with his views on other matters, neither his critique of the upas tree of modernity nor his critique of modern medicine was rooted in Indian tradition, at least not in any simple way. As Shetty shows, his position on medicine involved a profound break with Ayurveda’s therapeutic and cultural practice and precept, specifically a rejection of, what appeared to him, as vaids’ laxity and equivocation, in the name of ‘life’ or health, with regard to the general scriptural taboo on meats and wines. He himself appeared to have recognized the idiosyncratic and utterly marginal nature of his own position, labelling himself ‘quack’ and ‘crank’ in his Autobiography. A significant aspect of Shetty’s analysis consists in its elaboration of a notion of ‘unconditional hospitality’, à la Derrida, in relation to Gandhi’s vision of nursing. She undertakes this analysis in the context of Gandhi’s nursing of rank outsiders – an unknown leper and Zulu soldiers. This is a notion of intimate bodily contact, albeit palliative, which even in a context of aggressive imperialism and racism does not distinguish between friend and stranger. As such it articulates a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Global state of war and moral vernaculars of nonviolence
• Part I Worlding the Gandhian everyday
• Part II Of friendship, law and language
• Part III Carrying Gandhi over
• Part IV Interlocuting with modernity
• Index