In this manner, Gandhi announced a contest in Indian Opinion for the renaming of “passive resistance.” The thinking behind this idea of a contest is further explained as he describes the origins of his movement in South Africa: “… the phrase ‘passive resistance’ gave rise to confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to be known only by an English name. Again, that foreign phrase could hardly pass as current coin among the community. A small prize was therefore announced in Indian Opinion to be awarded to the reader who invented the best designation for our struggle.”11 Gandhi’s remark here that a “foreign phrase could hardly pass as current coin among the community” is noteworthy; equally significant is his candid admission, noted above, that “I did not quite understand the implications of ‘passive resistance’ as I called it. I only knew that some new principle had come into being.” The “new principle” inspired both new deeds and thoughts and all first found expression in South Africa.
“What Gandhi did to South Africa,” observes one of his biographers, “was less important than what South Africa did to him.”12 South Africa provided the laboratory for Gandhi’s experiments; it proved an excellent testing ground, since many of the problems he later found in India occurred there in miniature. No Indian had confronted these problems in South Africa before: Gandhi was writing on a clean slate and he was able to try out almost any methods he chose.
Gandhi had formed beliefs before he arrived in South Africa. His Autobiography testifies to the lasting impression of childhood experiences, impressions, and lessons that were to affect the later development of the two ideas that would dominate his thought: truth and nonviolence.13 Then almost three years were spent as a law student in London, during which time he discovered the Sermon on the Mount and came to understand the Bhagavad Gita through Sir Edwin Arnold’s English translation.14 Gandhi recalled that at this time, “My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, The Light of Asia and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly.”15 Religious and moral attitudes had thus begun to form in London. But they took definite shape only in South Africa. Moreover, he does not appear to have given any thought at all to political questions before his direct involvement with the problems of the Indian community in Natal. He remarked tersely in 1927, “South Africa gave the start to my life’s mission.”16 This mission was one of self-realization but before he left South Africa he knew that it must involve a struggle for India’s freedom as well. He had left Bombay for Durban in 1893 as a legal counsel for Dada Abdulla and Company; he returned to India twenty-one years later with a sense of mission, a reservoir of practical experience in social and political reform, and with the ideas that formed the basis of his political thought. That is what South Africa did for Gandhi.17
Hind Swaraj: A Proclamation of Ideological Independence
The main ideas that emerged from Gandhi’s South African experience are contained in his short work, Hind Swaraj, easily one of the key writings of his entire career.18 The original text, written in Gandhi’s native language of Gujarati in 1909 during a return voyage from London to South Africa, was first published serially in Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion; later it went through numerous reprints, became a text for the Indian nationalist movement and was occasionally banned by the Government of India. In a significant comment on Hind Swaraj written in 1921, Gandhi stated the purpose behind the book.
It was written … in answer to the Indian school of violence, and its prototype in South Africa. I came in contact with every known Indian anarchist in London. Their bravery impressed me, but I feel that their zeal was misguided. I felt that violence was no remedy for India’s ills, and that her civilization required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection. The Satyagraha of South Africa was still an infant hardly two years old. But it had developed sufficiently to permit me to write of it with some degree of confidence… It [Hind Swaraj] teaches the gospel of love in the place of that of hate. It replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul-force against brute force.19
The aim of Hind Swaraj was to confront the anarchists and violence-prone Indian nationalists with an alternative to violence, derived from Gandhi’s earliest experiments with satyagraha. Equally important is the book’s concern with the concept from which it takes its title: this is Gandhi’s first extensive statement on swaraj, his idea of freedom. The ideas he sets forth here provide the basis for much of his future thinking on both satyagraha and swaraj and the correspondence drawn between them.
Gandhi had written of swaraj before 1909; but he seldom referred to the term then, and conveyed only a limited awareness of the concept as it was developing in India. The first explicit use of swaraj in Gandhi’s Collected Works occurs with a brief reference to Dadabhai Naoroji’s Congress Presidential Address in 1906 that was cited above, in the introduction. Gandhi wrote in Indian Opinion:
The address by the Grand Old Man of India is very forceful and effective. His words deserve to be enshrined in our hearts. The substance of the address is that India will not prosper until we wake up and become united. To put it differently, it means that it lies in our hands to achieve swaraj, to prosper and to preserve the rights we value…For our part we are to use only the strength that comes from unity and truth. That is to say, our bondage in India can cease this day, if all the people unite in their demands and are ready to suffer any hardships that may befall them.20
These few sentences contain the germs of the concept of freedom that Gandhi was soon to develop; and thirty-four years later he was still admonishing the Congress, and the Indian people, that swaraj “will not drop from heaven, all of a sudden, one fine morning. But it has to be built up brick by brick by corporate self-effort.”
In the months following Naoroji’s address, and before the writing of Hind Swaraj, while Gandhi rarely used the term swaraj he did develop his idea of freedom. Immediately before his departure for London in June 1909, Gandhi had spent three months in a Pretoria prison for civil disobedience. There he read The Gita, Upanishads, and the Bible, as well as Ruskin, Tolstoy, Emerson and Thoreau. He was impressed by Thoreau, and particularly by this passage from On Civil Disobedience: “I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.”21
Gandhi remarked on these lines that the individual who pursues truth through civil disobedience may be imprisoned but “his soul is thus free,” and “taking this view of jail life, he feels himself quite a free being.” He concluded that a right understanding and enjoyment of freedom “solely rests with individuals and their mental attitude.”22 A year later he wrote: “Whilst the views expressed in Hind Swaraj are held by me, I have but endeavoured humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers, besides the masters of Indian philosophy.”23
When Gandhi left Capetown for London, then, the strands of his ideas on freedom, gleaned from both Indian and Western sources as well as from his own experience, were in his mind. The stimulus for weaving them together into a coherent pattern, and fusing them with a program of social action, came during his four months stay in London. Gandhi arrived on July 10, 1909; nine days earlier London had been shaken by the murder of Sir Curzon Wyllie by a young Indian terrorist, Madanlal Dhingra, who delivered at his trial a stirring speech on patriotism. The city was afire with discussions among anarchists, nationalists, and terrorists. Gandhi became intensely involved. He argued the views on satyagraha that were soon to become an integral part of his political and personal creed: India could gain her freedom only through nonviolence; terrorism would cause disruption and decay. From these conversations emerged the ideas set forth in Hind Swaraj.24
Hind Swaraj takes the form of a dialogue between “Reader” and “Editor.” The former argues with haste and rashness terrorist ideas; the latter presents Gandhi’s own case. At the outset, the Editor appears on the defensive. T
hen gradually he subdues the anarchist’s storm. Ultimately the Reader yields to the force and novelty of an alternative that seems more revolutionary than his own position. As a statement of political thought Hind Swaraj has considerable limitations. It is a brief polemical tract more than a logical development of a serious and measured argument: written hastily, in less than ten days, it suffers from occasional disjointedness and egregious overstatement. Yet the essence of Gandhi’s political and social philosophy is here and he could write in 1938, “after the stormy thirty years through which I have since passed I have seen nothing to make me alter the view expounded in it.”25
The book opens with the Reader’s attack upon the Indian Congress as “an instrument for perpetuating British rule.” Moderates like Dadabhai Naoroji and G. K. Gokhale are indicted as unworthy “friends of the English.” Gandhi rises to their defense: he insists that they, along with Englishmen like Hume and Wedderburn, deserve India’s respect for their selflessness and for preparing the foundations of Indian Home Rule. The nature of Gandhi’s argument is crucial. He neither identifies himself with the Moderates nor does he consider their position adequate: he argues only that their contribution was necessary to make further advance possible. “If, after many years of study,” the Editor contends, “a teacher were to teach me something and if I were to build a little more on the foundation laid by that teacher, I would not, on that account be considered wiser than the teacher. He would always command my respect. Such is the case with the Grand Old Man of India [Naoroji].”26
The Reader reluctantly agrees and elicits from the Editor this reply: “Professor Gokhale occupies the place of a parent. What does it matter if he cannot run with us? A nation that is desirous of securing Home Rule cannot afford to despise its ancestors. We shall become useless, if we lack respect for our elders.” “Are we, then, to follow him in every respect?” “I never said any such thing. If we conscientiously differed from him, the learned Professor himself would advise us to follow the dictates of our conscience rather than him.”27
Thus, while the Moderates are defended in an almost reverential spirit, they are in practice set aside as “ancestors” who have played out their roles. The Congress appears in much the same manner, worthy of respect but no longer a dynamic organ of progress. “All I have to show,” the Editor concludes, “is that the Congress gave us a foretaste of Home Rule [swaraj].”28 And this indeed is all that he does show.
Gandhi’s attitude toward the Congress, and the Moderates who in 1909 controlled the Congress, is clear. But he has not yet mentioned the Extremists. Aurobindo Ghose, B. C. Pal, B. G. Tilak, and Lajpat Rai were all Extremist leaders of considerable renown at this time, yet their names do not appear in Hind Swaraj. A passing, but revealing, reference is made to the Extremist group at the end of the second chapter. “Our leaders,” the Editor observes, “are divided into two parties: the Moderates and the Extremists. These may be considered as the slow party and impatient party.”29
“Slow” and “impatient”: this is how Gandhi characterizes the two main sections of Indian political leadership in 1909. India cannot move ahead with slow leaders, but rash action may result in self-destruction. If the Moderates are left behind then the Extremists are irresponsible. It is no coincidence that the Editor often criticizes the Reader for his “impatience.” Hind Swaraj is a direct reply to the Extremists, especially to the lunatic fringe of Indian anarchists and terrorists. Early in the book, then, Gandhi dismisses the leadership of both national parties in India as unviable. The moment has arrived for a statement of his own position: a philosophy and program of action that appear to gain the best of both sides, not through steering a mean course, but rather by moving forward to a new alternative and a fresh conception of freedom.
The Reader now poses the central question, “What is swaraj?” and the remainder of the book is occupied with a consideration of that question. The Reader gives his version of swaraj first: “As is Japan, so must India be. We must have our own navy, our own army, and we must have our own splendor, and then will India’s voice ring through the world …. If the education we have received be any use, if the works of Spencer, Mill and others be of any importance, and if the English Parliament be the Mother of Parliaments, I certainly think that we should copy the English people…. It is, therefore, proper for us to import their institutions.”30
The Editor disagrees:
You have drawn the picture well. In effect it means this: that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but Englishtan. This is not the Swaraj that I want….
It is as difficult for me to understand the true nature of Swaraj as it seems to you to be easy. I shall therefore, for the time being, content myself with endeavoring to show that what you call Swaraj is not truly Swaraj.31
The subsequent discussion, which occupies the middle section of the book, comprises Gandhi’s notorious blanket condemnation of modern civilization. The argument is grossly overstated, often misguided, and in some instances, as with the sweeping denunciation of doctors and hospitals, lapses into pure fantasy.32 The main point of this section is that all Western civilization should be shunned, for it “takes note neither of morality nor of religion.”33 All its trappings, from its parliamentary system of government to the whole of its industrial complex, are foreign to real civilization. If Indians are to attain swaraj, they must not imitate the Western example, but construct a civilization on the simple ethical and religious truths found in their own tradition.34 “The tendency of the Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the modern Western civilization is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God.”35
This simplistic categorization of Indian and Western civilizations respectively as “moral” and “immoral,” “soul force” versus “brute force,” presented a wholesale indictment of modernity, worse, a polarization into an attitude of “us” against “them” redolent of what Gandhi would later deride as “violence of the spirit.” Hind Swaraj in this respect reveals the high-water mark of his exclusivist ideology; that is, the depiction of social and political realities in antagonistic terms of unbridgeable dichotomies. Such an uncompromising view of human experience would later prove uncharacteristic of the Mahatma. Even in 1909, this portrayal of world cultures as mutually exclusive did not really befit a syncretic thinker like Gandhi, who had by that time been profoundly influenced by the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and Henry David Thoreau as well as British liberalism. Within ten years, Gandhi’s exclusivist attitudes would evolve into an inclusivist approach evident in the way that his ideas were expressed toward the British in the salt satyagraha or toward Muslims in the Calcutta fast, as suggested in chapters 4 and 5. His inclusivism would ultimately become identified throughout the world and in the judgment of history as Gandhi’s unique style of politics. Yet it is hard to imagine this mature inclusivist style without first passing through the youthful fire of Hind Swaraj, because the primary consolidation of his theory occurred there.
Although Gandhi never explicitly renounced any component of Hind Swaraj, he later modified his judgments of modern Western civilization, parliamentary democracy, and modern technology. In 1921 he accepted as an immediate, though not ultimate, goal, “Parliamentary Swaraj.” “The least that Swaraj means,” he said, “is a settlement with the Government in accordance with the wishes of the chosen representatives of the people.”36 Similarly with his views on machinery, he modified his stand, contending in 1924, “What I object to is the craie for machinery, not machinery as such …. I am aiming not at eradication of all machinery, but limitations.”37 By the 1920s his inclusivist thought had evolved into a vision of an ideal society that sought to meld elements of traditional Indian philosophy with the ideas of the Russian anarchists, Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin. He envisaged a social order of small communities,
each seeking attainment of individual freedom and social equality through mutual cooperation and respect. This was his theory of sarvodaya, the “Welfare of All,” a society that had indeed achieved swaraj.
In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose center will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.38
A right form of civilization, Gandhi had concluded in Hind Swaraj, “is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means ‘good conduct.’”39 In striving to build this civilization, Indians will not only construct a free nation, they will come to realize swaraj within themselves. For just as a free civilization demands “mastery over our mind and our passions,” so freedom for the individual consists of each person establishing self-rule. “If we become free, India is free. And in this thought you have a definition of Swaraj. It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands…. But such Swaraj has to be experienced, by each one for himself.”40
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