Along with nonviolence, the most important observance for Gandhi was a concern for truthfulness and truth. And fidelity—to his vows in their own right, to his ideals and thus to himself, to his obligations to others—was for him what held all the observances together and bound him to them in turn. Through making and holding such vows, he trained himself to become someone who could trust himself and who could be trusted by others. Finally, Gandhi rejected secrecy in his dealings with supporters as with those who opposed him.31
This was Gandhi’s nexus of values: nonviolence and tolerance, truth and truthfulness, trust and openness, all connected to both personal and political experience. The attempt in this book is to explain these values in the context of the relationship that Gandhi developed between swaraj and satyagraha: that we become liberated from fear and distrust as we are empowered by truthfulness and nonviolent action; that freedom is not merely license because it must also mean a social awareness and responsibility that comes with a sense of human connectedness. It was King who wrote about freedom and justice from a jail in Birmingham: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”32 Gandhi’s thought and action rest on this same premise of inclusivity, that we are all part of one another and violence retards that realization. This is a truth, as King would say, with the power to set us free.
• AFTERWORD TO THE 2012 REISSUE
Gandhi understood something important about political struggle: that it is always, in the last instance, a struggle within the self…. The real ‘clash of civilizations’ is not ‘out there’ between admirable Westerners and Muslim zealots. It is here, within each person, as we oscillate uneasily between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others.
—Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within
The initial publication of my book in 1993 happened to coincide with the appearance of an extraordinary article by Samuel P. Huntington entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?”1 One purpose of this afterword is to examine those aspects of Gandhi’s theory that give him a place in the vigorous debate initiated by Huntington.
From my perspective, Huntington’s central thesis throws Gandhi’s thought into sharper relief because the two theories stand in such stark opposition. Huntington views contemporary history in terms of violent conflicts. He contends that these are fomented especially by religious traditions of not merely nations but civilizations, such as the Islamic and Hindu. He poses his central question of why clashes must occur in the future along the “cultural fault lines” that separate them as follows:
First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion.
The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.2
Huntington, like Gandhi, gives primacy to religion, but he views it as problematic, provoking violence, and does not acknowledge its traditional values of nonviolence. Their ideas of what is “real” and “basic,” as Huntington uses these words, differ dramatically. Unlike Bernard Lewis, the prominent historian of Islam who introduced the “clash” metaphor in 1990,3 Huntington, a political scientist, conceives the world from a realist’s lens, warning that since the end of the Cold War a stark shift of power has occurred around clashing civilizations. Both Lewis and Huntington agree that America is now dangerously vulnerable to non-Western cultures, especially Islamic systems of belief. Profound, ominous differences exist not merely between transient political regimes but as vast gulfs separating the deepest cultural values of entire civilizations. Whereas Gandhi emphasizes a universal harmony infusing such values, Huntington sees non-Western religions as largely malign with lethal capacities for metastasis. He predicted in the 1990s that power struggles will occur along the civilizational “fault lines” that divide us. Especially since September 11, the religious force behind terrorism has made his argument even more compelling.
The fact that neither Lewis, Huntington, nor anyone else in the ongoing debates published in Foreign Affairs makes any mention of Gandhi or aspects of the Gandhian tradition in India is noteworthy. India is referred to dozens of times in Huntington’s book but not Gandhi. Is this because notions of nonviolence are irrelevant to the main arguments as they frame them? If one considers his historical record as a world-class political leader who was dramaticaily and for decades involved in religious conflict and efforts at resolution, Gandhi deserves a place in this debate. Gandhi, who identified himself as a “Hindu of Hindus,” inspired Buddhists such as Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama and Christians like Bishop Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr. If the world is fractured mainly by religious conflict, the influence of renowned religious leaders like these, to mention only a few, who are committed to nonviolent conflict resolution demands acknowledgment at least, or, at best, inclusion in an expanded dialogue that illustrates the varieties of religious experience. The question is, why should the basic and real forces of history be restricted to religious leaders and political movements characterized by violence?
We do not need to be reminded by Hobbes or Machiavelli of the power of fear behind threats of violence. This certainly is an undeniable aspect of our reality, once again painfully evident in America since September 11. But thankfully this is not our sole reality. Not only Gandhi and King, but religious prophets and writers for millennia have demonstrated that nonviolence can be as consequential as war. In many universities, bastions of civilization, the disciplines of history, religion, and philosophy offer peace studies in the hope that we might better manage conflict so that the terrible carnage of the last century might not be repeated—even though this one is off to a poor start. When only sounds of dissonance are heard, we easily become tone deaf to consonance. Real rhythms of harmony do resound in any civilization. The great ideas of God and society that Huntington lists include a capacity to resolve conflict peacefully as well as to exacerbate it through violence.
Gandhi drew on most of the world’s major religions to shape his thought. During his lifetime of evolving perspectives, he shaped a mature synthesis of ideas that guided his personal and political conduct. His value system may be expressed in terms of dual contesting forces that exist within each self and civilization as well as in the world. One way to see this opposition is through the conceptual prisms of what he termed “exclusivism” and “inclusivism,” and in the manner that analysts of Gandhi like Erik Erikson (Gandhi’s Truth, 1969) and Martha Nussbaum explain his inclusive-ness. Gandhi wrote characteristically that “my nationalism as my religion is not exclusive but inclusive.”4 He opposed a xenophobic world view held by many religious extremists that assigns people abstract identities or character traits derived arbitrarily from stereotypes of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, or nationality. And his political and social campaigns spoke more loudly than his words.
The vital element of Gandhi’s inclusivism that is distinctive to his experience is his invention of satyagraha. This is the central concern of my book, especially chapters 4 and 5 on the Dandi march and the Calcutta fast. The book’s subtitle suggests the opposition of Gandhian nonviolence to “passive resistance.” Gandhi denounced this idea as the opposite of satyagraha. Martin Luther King Jr., while professing his own pacifist inclusivism, discovered Gandhi’s significance for the civil rig
hts struggle in the realization that satyagraha was not passive but “spiritually active.”5 Gandhi’s inclusivism, therefore, was consequential to India and America because it gave a dynamic and undeniable demonstration of nonviolent power in action.
Edward Said contended in his critique of Huntington’s thesis that a major flaw in its approach was to “build a conceptual framework around the notion of us-versus-them” rather than to “emphasize and maximize the spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange.” The former mindset winds up “superficially and stridently banging the drum for ‘our’ culture in opposition to all others.”6 Nussbaum cogently presents Gandhi as a vigorous opponent of the “fault lines” in his own Hindu culture, and as waging a constant struggle against “a ‘clash of civilizations’ in India” rather than “the one depicted by Samuel Huntington, between a democratic West and an antidemocratic Islam.” Gandhi’s transcendent leadership is defined by his “richness in inclusiveness.”7
Nussbaum is concerned with the religious violence from today’s Hindu right, the progeny of those who assassinated Gandhi. In direct opposition to this violent separatism, Gandhi constructed his program for India’s liberation around “three pillars of swaraj.” Through satyagraha he vigorously attacked a tripartite structure of exclusivity: not only Hindu-Muslim enmity but also the dehumanization of the untouchables and the alienation of the upper-class intelligentsia from the poor peasantry. In each case, the evil was in turning another into the Other.
Gandhi’s inclusivism was born of pride in Hinduism, especially of its capacities for synthesis and tolerance, civility and humility. He understood the syncretic spirit of Indian civilization, its constant appeal to “unity in diversity” articulated eloquently by modern Hindu reformers whom he respected like Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. The point that Huntington overlooks or ignores is how history’s largest mass movement for independence was dynamized by a call for religious inclusivism, mobilized around a creed of nonviolence. Here was a political leader who began his autobiography insisting that only from “my experiments in the spiritual field…I derived such power as I possess for working in the political field.”8 As Margaret Chatterjee concludes in her incisive analysis of the centrality of religion in his experience, “Gandhi certainly stood for the spiritualizing of politics.”9
If journals like Foreign Affairs omitted any mention of Gandhi in the clash of civilizations debate, his relevance was not missed by the New York Times. A. M. Rosenthal, writing three months before Huntington’s article appeared, deplored in Gandhian terms Hindu-Muslim violence in India, and editorialized that “Gandhi, founder of Indian freedom, used religion to combat bigotry, not promote it.”10
Four years later, Anthony J. Parel contributed significantly to our understanding of how Gandhi’s religious thought reinforced his political philosophy. In a cogent introduction to his new edition and translation of Hind Swaraj, Parel analyzed the theoretical context of Gandhi’s first major treatise, calling it “the seed from which the tree of Gandhian thought has grown to its full stature.”11 Gandhi’s project was “to free religion of the evil of sectarianism…. Hind Swaraj teaches that there are good religious reasons for practicing toleration” (Gandhi, liv; italics in original).
Parel’s interpretations of Gandhi’s philosophy may be construed within the context of the clash of civilizations debate, although he makes no reference to it. He shows, for example, how Gandhi, laying claim to the essential ethical and spiritual core of his religion, employs Tolstoy’s similar claim as an advocate of pure Christianity to oppose Hindu terrorists like V. D. Savarkar, the intellectual leader of a young group of Indian expatriates in London. Gandhi debated Savarkar personally on his visit in 1909. One might imagine their exchange as a microcosmic political-cum-religious clash within Hindu civilization, as well as an ominous forecast of Gandhi’s assassination almost forty years later by one of Savarkar’s followers.
This moment in London, as Parel conveys it, constitutes an ideological time capsule of Savarkar’s exclusivist Hinduism, his “terrorism legitimized by nationalism,” versus “all the essential ingredients of [Gandhi’s] political philosophy” (Gandhi, xxvii, 1). Their two positions at that time and henceforth proved to be irreconcilable, despite Gandhi’s earnest efforts. When Gandhi demanded, through satyagraha, that human lives must never be treated as means but cherished for their sanctity and dignity, he was asserting a principle that stood at the magnetic center of his theory and practice.
Parel notes a root of satyagraha in Gandhi’s theory of means and ends, his affirmation of “an inviolable connection between ends (sadhya) and means (sadhan)” (Gandhi, 81). This idea was born with Hind Swaraj and flowed abundantly through Gandhi’s writings henceforth. In 1924, when Stalin’s state terror was becoming evident and Indian Communists accepted Bolshevism on faith, Gandhi declared emphatically against it: “I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes. There is, therefore, really no meeting ground between the school of violence and myself.”12 From the perspective of political theory, the fulcrum of Gandhi’s thought is his insistence on the logical and necessary relationship of means and ends (see pages 9—10, 204 of this book). This is the theme of my article, “Gandhi’s Originality.”13
The renewed focus on Hind Swaraj has been sharpened further by the remarkable work of S. R. Mehrotra, a longtime distinguished historian of the Indian nationalist movement. His lengthy introduction to the century edition of Hind Swaraj begins with the discovery that Dr. Pranjivandas J. Mehta (1864—1932), Gandhi’s “oldest and closest friend,” and a staunch proponent of religious tolerance, had a decisive intellectual and material influence on the development and promulgation of Gandhi’s ideas at this time, especially on Hind Swaraj.14 As late as 1940, “Gandhi made a startling disclosure about the genesis of Hind Swaraj,” revealing for the first time that “I wrote the entire Hind Swaraj for my dear friend Dr. Pranjivan Mehta.”15
During Gandhi’s decades in South Africa, a crucial time in his ideological development, he engaged in vigorous dialogues with Mehta, whom he regarded as “an intellectual giant.” Mehta, the first to refer to Gandhi as “Mahatma” and the first Indian to write a biography of him, played a key role in Gandhi’s connection with Tolstoy. Martin Green wrote in-depth about Tolstoy and Gandhi, but he barely mentions P. J. Mehta. Yet it was their joint discovery of Tolstoy that prompted Gandhi to send him a copy of Hind Swaraj. Tolstoy’s response exceeded Mehta’s or Gandhi’s expectations: Hind Swaraj addressed the question that “is important not only for Indians, but for the whole of mankind.”16 Gandhi, inspired by Tolstoy’s writing and example, regarded himself as an “ardent disciple” and “humble follower” and soon established Tolstoy Farm, an ashram, or settlement, near Johannesburg. The early and enthusiastic affirmations of Gandhi’s work by two pacifists whom he held in the highest esteem were decisive as he moved ahead.
Mehrotra, after emphasizing Mehta’s crucial role, then joined Parel in examining Gandhi’s key correspondents at this time. Whether he was writing in intimate terms to Mehta or H. S. L. Polak (his “closest political associate in South Africa” and a “fellow seeker”) or Lord Ampthill (governor of Madras, 1900—1906, and acting viceroy of India in 1904, who wrote an admiring introduction in August 1909 to Joseph Doke’s biography of Gandhi), or Tolstoy,17 he emphasized ideas about violence and nonviolence, grounded in the theoretical connection of means and ends. Gandhi’s brief correspondence with Tolstoy is remarkable for their mutual preoccupation with these ideas, as evidenced in a collection of their correspondence entitled Letter to a Hindoo18
In Gandhi’s letters to Polak and Ampthill, written in the month before the composition of Hind Swaraj, he frames his arguments in terms clearly expressive of a clash of ideas within India’s independence struggle. To his British benefactor he writes:
I have made it a point to see Indians here [in London] of every shade of opinion. Opposed as I am to violence in any shape or form, I have e
ndeavoured especially to come into contact with the so-called extremists who may be better described as the party of violence. This I have done in order if possible to convince them of the error of their ways…. They wield an undoubted influence on the young Indians here. They are certainly unsparing in their efforts to impress upon the latter their convictions. One of them came to me with a view to convince me that I was wrong in my methods and that nothing but the use of violence, covert or open or both, was likely to bring about redress of the wrongs they consider they suffer…. I share the national spirit but I totally dissent from the methods whether of the extremists or of the moderates. For either party relies ultimately on violence.19
To Polak he reiterated the “true spirit” of his method and concluded: “If you agree with me, it will be your duty to tell the revolutionaries and everybody else that the freedom they want, or they think they want, is not to be obtained by killing people or doing violence, but by setting themselves right and by becoming and remaining truly Indian.”20
These two original essays by Mehrotra and Parel on the philosophical meanings and historical context of Hind Swaraj capture Gandhi as a creative synthesizer, contending first and foremost that “violence is an evil and must be avoided at all costs. Satyagraha is not merely a means of aborting violence, it is an infallible remedy…. It blesses him who practices it and also him against whom it is practiced.”21 The relationship of means and ends is crucial here. Martin Luther King Jr. clearly recognized and expressed it when he wrote that this idea set Gandhi apart from other revolutionaries: “Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.”22 King also goes mostly unmentioned in the clash of civilizations debate, yet no American deserves a greater place in it today.
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