Faisal Devji, a contemporary historian of South Asia, is concerned, like Nussbaum, with religious violence. However, he offers a very different interpretation of Gandhi’s meaning in The Terrorist in Search of Humanity23 He begins by citing Karl Jaspers’ view of Gandhi “as the chief and indeed only global example of modernity’s sacrificial logic,” as seen in his “practices of sacrifice, which ran the gamut from fasting and celibacy to non-cooperation and passive resistance.” Devji acknowledges that Gandhi “was of course the very antithesis of a terrorist in his espousal of nonviolence,” yet he nonetheless “resembles Al-Qaeda’s militants by his suprapolitical deployment of sacrifice, which like them he glorified in the form of a willingness to die for principles. So Gandhi, like Bin Laden, very regularly used the Islamic word for martyrdom, shahadat, to describe this sacrifice,” even as he spoke of his willingness to give innocent lives in the cause of India’s freedom (Devji, 18—19). Devji further explains that his reason for invoking Gandhi’s humanitarian and nonviolent example is “not only to offer a new perspective on militant Islam, but also to point out how important South Asia in fact is to this phenomenon, comprising as it does the world’s largest Muslim population together with some of the chief sites of Islamic militancy today” (Ibid., 21).
Gandhi is invoked throughout Devji’s book, from his militant tone in Hind Swaraj to his opinions on how the Jews should martyr themselves in the Holocaust.24 Devji argues that Muslim terrorists mimic Gandhi in their martyrdom, and so they might, but it is not clear why they should choose a prophet of nonviolence, since Gandhi emphasized that the force of satyagraha depends on love of one’s enemies and for this reason is “a thousand times more effective…it excludes every form of violence, direct and indirect, and whether in thought, word or deed…. Satyagraha is gentle, it never wounds. It must not be the result of anger or malice. It was conceived as a complete substitute for violence.”25 This should hardly appeal to a terrorist of any faith. James Rowell grasps this as an obvious point of difference between satyagraha and terrorism in his study Gandhi and Bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes (2009). In this short book Rowell manages to include an acute analysis of Gandhi’s varied legacies to King and Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the Muslim “Frontier Gandhi”), as well as a succinct criticism of Huntington.
Terrorists cannot adopt a Gandhian theory of power because it would transform completely their use of it. King had an excellent grasp of the meaning and use of satyagraha, martyrdom and all, and like Gandhi stressed self-sacrifice as among the major elements in his philosophy of nonviolence, “a willingness to accept suffering without retaliation, to accept blows from the opponent without striking back. ‘Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood,’ Gandhi told his countrymen. The nonviolent resister is willing to accept violence if necessary, but never to inflict it.”26 This comes from an American Baptist minister recommending an extreme sacrificial course of action to a primarily Christian audience. However, as suggested above, there is plenty of the martyr’s spirit to go around: King did not share many of Malcolm X’s doctrines, but there is an eerie similarity between the former’s famous “mountaintop speech” that seems to anticipate his death on the eve of his assassination, and Malcolm’s declaration forty-eight hours before his murder that “it’s a time for martyrs now.”27
In Gandhian terms, the essential difference is between the use of duragraha (passive resistance) and satyagraha. As discussed in this book, Aurobindo Ghose, a Hindu terrorist, advocated the former at the same time that Gandhi developed the latter (see pages 37—40). Gandhi’s theory of power, as excluding every form of violence, physical and psychological, would seem to disqualify him and King as models for terrorists (in King’s words, satyagraha must act never in anger or hatred “to defeat or humiliate the opponent”). If Muslim extremists want a philosopher of terrorism in South Asia, complete with a full dose of religious martyrdom, then Aurobindo might be their man. After all, Aurobindo, an exquisite writer, excelled Gandhi in his eloquent espousal of humanitarianism in the cause of Indian liberation, and no Hindu theorist formulated a loftier spiritual vision of global unity. His powerful advocacy for violence invoked the Bhagavad Gita, and was arguably more faithful to that sacred text than Gandhi’s unorthodox interpretation of it. Aurobindo’s main argument with Gandhi was over the superiority of nonviolent power and, consequently, the logical and integral relationship of means and ends, but terrorism never pauses to consider these latter ideas.
Among recent American studies of Gandhi and his legacy, a cogent case for the power of self-sacrifice in a nonviolent cause is made by Joseph Kip Kosek in Acts of Conscience, a thorough new exploration of Gandhi’s impact on Christian pacifists like Richard Gregg, John Haynes Holmes, A. J. Muste, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation from World War I to the Montgomery bus boycott.28 Kosek does not mention Huntington and offers no original analysis of Gandhi, but he certainly demonstrates a complete command of how leading American pacifists transformed their personal acts of suffering into the Age of Conscience from 1945 to 1956 (see chapter 6). We may infer from this that an authentically Gandhian response to “sacrificial logic” came with the culmination of this quality in King’s civil rights movement, as Kosek relates the story with meticulous scholarship, scrupulously unearthing documents about the sacrifices of individual pacifists that are not usually regarded as among America’s heroes.
We have focused so far on theories of clashes or conflicts and their resolution. This leaves the concept of civilization, Huntington’s other major concern. He concluded his first essay, in accordance with his realist philosophy, on a cautious note, following his thesis about the power and tenacity of cultural fault lines: “For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to coexist with the others.”29 Four years later, after expanding a short article into a long book, his last paragraph acknowledges the positive features of “the world’s great civilizations, with their rich accomplishments in religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, technology and compassion” as “the surest safeguard against world war.” Peace depends on forming an “international order based on civilizations” to stand against the threat of terrorism. We must choose between civilization and barbarism if humanity is to survive,30 and Huntington leaves no doubt about the dominant role that the West must play in this momentous struggle.
Most of the responses in the two collections from Foreign Affairs are favorable, offering relatively moderate criticisms. A genuine critique of Huntington’s thesis comes in Wendy Brown’s piercing assault on the contemporary value of tolerance in Regulating Aversion. Brown makes no mention of Gandhi in her discussion, but she sharply indicts both American liberals and conservatives who assert “the superiority of the West and of liberalism by valorizing (and even ontologizing) individual autonomy.”31 It would have been useful here to introduce Gandhi’s idea of autonomy into the discourse, especially as it is interpreted by Ronald Terchek, the prominent Gandhi theorist. Wendy Brown succinctly states the case against Huntington’s advocacy of “a civilizational discourse that codifies the superiority and legitimates the superordination of the West.”32
If only in terms of elegance of style, though, the better assault is by Edward Said, who condemns Huntington for encouraging us to be
ostrich-like to maintain our civilization by holding all the others at bay, increasing the rifts between peoples in order to prolong our dominance. That is, in effect, what Huntington is arguing, and one can quite easily understand why it is that his essay was published in Foreign Affairs, and why so many policy-makers have drifted toward it as allowing the United States to extend the mind-set of the Cold War into a different time and for a new audience. Much more productive and useful is a new global mentality that sees the dangers we face from the standpoint of the whole human race.33
The imperative, Said urges, is for civilizations to define themselves and others in
such a way that they will work toward harmony and not hegemony.
Although Said was no pacifist, much of his cosmopolitan humanism was akin to Gandhi’s conception of inclusive nationalism. Both were strident critics of Western imperialism, especially its arrogance of power. Both were born into and championed oppressed peoples yet also enthusiastically embraced selective elements of European and American culture. Although these shared qualities are impressive, their differences are most dramatic. Said was an authentic renaissance man and prestigious professor, whereas Gandhi rightly said, “I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain” (page 1).
Gandhi’s original if nonacademic philosophy emerged from a decade of activism in South Africa, synthesizing ideas that produced Hind Swaraj. His concept of civilization announced here is the most controversial part of the tract. When bloggers connect Huntington with Gandhi on the Internet, it is invariably over Gandhi’s quip that Western civilization would be a “good idea.”
Whereas Huntington and his sympathizers clearly see the West as best, Gandhi identified its colonialism and consequent harm with barbarism. Both viewed the idea of a civilization in terms of shared values, but—contrary to Huntington’s characterization of his culture—Gandhi contrasted the spirit of Indian civilization as “good conduct” (sadharo), diametrically opposed to kadharo (uncivil behavior) found in the West’s endemic violence, its brutal subjugation and dehumanization of every country it colonized. Gandhi asks in Hind Swaraj, “what is civilization?” and then answers that it was correctly conceived in ancient India as “that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.”34 Gandhi affirms not the primacy of individual rights of which the West is so proud but the conviction that rights must be derived from duties properly performed, thus switching the imperative to the fulfillment of social responsibility (pages xi—xiii).
Gandhi formulated his critique of Western civilization while in South Africa, during a period of thirteen years leading up to the publication of Hind Swaraj. He read strong American and British critics of their own countries like Thoreau and Edward Carpenter (whose Civilization: Its Caase and Care is listed in the appendices of Hind Swaraj), and tested his ideas about Western versus Indian civilizations on close European friends such as Polak and Hermann Kallenbach, who also condemned aspects of their own societies, England and Germany, respectively. When he sent a copy of Hind Swaraj to Tolstoy, he knew that he had found a sympathetic ear. Tolstoy wrote in his diary on April 10, 1910, “Read Gandhi about civilization, wonderful.”35
As R. N. Iyer observed, in this context, although Gandhi did not mention them, Marx and Rousseau were also obvious critics of the West who played a vital role in providing authority and a sense of validity to Gandhi’s position. The extent to which he used a prestigious array of other Western writers to criticize the West is clear from the list of those cited or quoted in the appendix to Hind Swaraj, beginning with Plato’s Socrates and extending to contemporary “eminent men” of Germany and England. Iyer drew numerous parallels between Gandhi and Western philosophers who entered into this spirit of self-criticism, developing Gandhi’s critique of Western civilization into a penetrating indictment of the industrial age. Gandhi’s notorious opposition to machinery, for example, was cogently interpreted by Iyer in the context of his whole thought—and especially the evolution of his ideas after Hind Swaraj—into an indictment of the craze for acquisitions that resonates throughout contemporary critiques of consumerism and “luxury fever.” As a political theorist, Iyer’s intention was not to defend Gandhi, because he freely acknowledged his excesses, but rather to clarify his mature concept of civilization and its enduring relevance.
Overview Of Gandhi Scholarship
Social and political theory comes from a historical context. A study of the Indian independence movement, and Gandhi’s example in particular, provides a classic case of ideas emerging from action. To understand his multiple meanings, we turn to a study of Gandhi’s voluminous writings and then to his more prominent and recent biographers; Judith Brown (1989), Yogesh Chadha (1997), and Rajmohan Gandhi (2006) have worked through a vast corpus of materials connected with their subject. There is certainly a plethora of primary sources by or about him to study. Mountains of records relating to the Indian nationalist movement as it was from the beginning of his career can be found in the Indian Office Library and various archives, public and private, throughout India that have been a staple for my research.
Regarding the last decade of Gandhi’s life alone, The Transfer of Power, 1942—1947, edited by Nicholas Mansergh, served as an indispensable reservoir of documents relating to the partition of India. It has fortunately been much expanded and enhanced by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, the general editor (and successor of Sarvepalli Gopal) of Towards Freedom, 1937—1947 (2009). With a formidable team of Indian scholars, including Gandhi experts like Sumit Sarkar and Bimal Prasad, he has, like Mansergh, skillfully collected and edited a mass of official records, private papers, newspapers and heretofore unpublished documents relating to India’s freedom struggle. These are filled with Gandhi’s writings published alongside correspondence to him by other key figures including Jawaharlal Nehru.36
All of these historians mined the archives and abundant Gandhiana in India and abroad to provide a more comprehensive and deeper grasp of his leadership. Subaltern historians like Shahid Amin (1984) and David Hardiman added still another dimension by interpreting his appeal through village and local peasant studies. As if this were not enough, individual collections of the writings of prominent actors in the movement, led by Gandhi’s Collected Works in 100 volumes (1958—1964) and accompanied by the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (2006 and in progress), are followed by similar collections from the writings of a host of other participants in the independence struggle that feature important interactions with Gandhi. The initial point, therefore, is that the raw data for a study of the Indian nationalist movement, and Gandhi’s central role in it, are formidable, arguably greater than for any of the major mass movements of the last century.
What is especially striking though, beyond this treasure trove of sources, is the distinct pattern of interaction between political theorists and historians dealing with the Gandhi phenomenon. The task of understanding this individual has not been undertaken by historians alone: political thinkers have recognized the originality of his methods from the outset and analyzed the meaning of his power. In my experience, this pattern was exemplified by the Gandhi studies of my two mentors: Hugh Tinker (1965, 1967) and W. H. Morris-Jones (1960, 1971). The first biography of Gandhi was published during his lifetime by J. J. Doke (1909), followed by theorists of satyagraha who tried to formulate a systematic construct of satyagraha: C. M. Case (1923), Richard Gregg (1938) and Krishnalal Shridharani (1939). This first flush of political theory flowed into the early biographies of Louis Fischer (1950) and B. R. Nanda (1958), which were in turn enlarged by the multivolume Mahatma tomes compiled by D. G. Tendulkar (1960), Pyarelal and Sushila Nayar (10 vols., 1958—1989), and Narayan Desai. Sometimes these biographies are hagiographical and fail to convey the harsh yet eloquent and theoretically sophisticated critiques of the Mahatma from his adversaries. They demand a brief comment here, in addition to the analysis offered in chapter 3.
It was inevitable that as Gandhi gained control of the nationalist movement in 1920 (founded with the India National Congress in 1885), he would face immediate ideological challenges from well-established leaders like B. G. Tilak (see pages 35—38), as well as from prominent political theorists, including M. N. Roy, B. R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore (see chapter 3), and an array of others such as C. R. Das and Subhas Bose, who are hardly mentioned in my book. Even so, this is just a short list of his critics. More are discussed in the new third edition of Sources of Indian Tradition (see chapter 6). Altogether they comprise a formidable series of critiques from vociferous contemporaries, some of whom, like V. D. Savakar and Palme Dutt, carried on a relentless barrage of attacks on
all aspects of Gandhi’s personal life and his social and political programs. An early assault by an Indian in South Africa was both physical and ideological, while the last by Nathuram Godse killed him. The premise that Gandhi was anointed as the Mahatma by his nation and subsequently swam in friendly waters of ahimsa natural to India is false. In reality, Indian adversaries were omnipresent and harder on him than the British colonizers, including Churchill and Lord Wavell. After all, there is no evidence that the Raj ever proposed shooting him; that task was left to one of his own religion, who offered a defense at trial that is stunning for its eloquent evocation of orthodox Hindu views. Godse’s remarkable testimony alone demonstrates well the depth of the “clash within.”
By the late 1950s a substantial body of literature about Gandhi’s thought and practice had been completed or was well underway. At this moment a systematic study of his theory of conflict resolution appeared. Joan Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (1958) was distinguished especially by its exploration of the centrality and implications in satyagraha of the means-end relationship, Bondurant’s formulation of “The Gandhian Dialectic and Political Theory” (see chapter 6). Twenty-five years later Howard Gardner, in Creating Minds (1993), would reflect on the intellectual revolution that Gandhi represented and, comparing him with other geniuses of the twentieth century like Einstein, Freud, and Picasso, concluded that “Gandhi was a thinker of the highest order. The conception of satyagraha was worked out as carefully as a philosophical system, with every step and its possible consequences carefully calibrated.”37
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