The Compass
NB: This article appeared today in the Deccan Chronicle, as part of a series commemorating Mahatma Gandhi's 150 birth anniversary.
see also
DELHI DECLARATION OFJANUARY 18, 1948
Gandhi's ashes stolen and photo defaced on 150th birthday
RIP Bhiku Daji Bhilare - the man who saved Gandhiji's life in 1944. By Subhash Gatade
This is an audio-visual recording of a talk with the same title, given on October 4, 2019, under the auspices of the Raza Foundation.
DS
The
Compass
Gandhi's life-work
combined a complex of ideals, concepts and practical endeavour that could
inspire millions of ordinary Indians, but also irritate many sophisticated
minds. His activity pointed toward an overcoming of the binary distinctions
between tradition and modernity; individual and community; faith and religion;
the nation and the world; Indians and humanity; ethics and politics. It is
impossible to reduce Gandhi to any single categorial dimension save this, that
he was an icon of the good man; and a seeker of truth
Two of Gandhi’s most basic philosophical
impulses were the dignity and responsibility of the individual; and the
sacredness of life. These values fused ends and means; and were of global
relevance. That is why he is widely regarded as a friend of humanity. He is
also a luminous representative of the Indian liberal tradition, if we may use
that term to signify the above qualities in combination with courage,
compassion, and dialogic truth-seeking in political life. These impulses impinge upon political
philosophy via the question of violence as the foundation of a polity; and that
of piety translated into civic responsibility. Gandhi’s innovative approach to
these issues was profound. It emerged in his attempt to engage with the
foundation of a new order on the basis of a violent colonial experience, and a
society with deep and traumatic fault-lines.
Originary
violence
The first question relates to the violence
that is supposed necessarily to accompany the founding of new states. Thus, Machiavelli's ‘realistic’ revolt, his substitution
of patriotism for moral virtue abandoned older meanings of the good society. He
discounted any divine or natural support for justice. All legitimacy was rooted
in illegitimacy; all social orders had been established by questionable means -
ancient Rome was founded upon fratricide.
Justice was possible only after the foundation, and its violent origins would inevitably be imitated in extreme cases. The Machiavellian-Hobbesian tradition takes its bearings by the extreme case, which it believes to be more revealing of the character of civil society than the normal case. This assumption was replicated in revolutionary currents from the French revolution onward and attained normative status in the insurrectionary politics of the twentieth century.
Justice was possible only after the foundation, and its violent origins would inevitably be imitated in extreme cases. The Machiavellian-Hobbesian tradition takes its bearings by the extreme case, which it believes to be more revealing of the character of civil society than the normal case. This assumption was replicated in revolutionary currents from the French revolution onward and attained normative status in the insurrectionary politics of the twentieth century.
Gandhi believed that a good society could
never arise from evil foundations. His view is therefore the obverse of Machiavellian pessimism.
Contrary to the belief that
violence is essential to the act of political foundation, Gandhi made the
prescient observation that ‘what is
granted under fear can be retained only as long as the fear lasts’. This
meant that a polity founded upon assassination, which made the extreme case
into a norm, would condemn itself to perpetual oscillation between extremes. In
rejecting revolutionary political theory from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks
and Fascists, he was challenging a centuries-old tradition. His rejection of
the utilitarian suspension of ethics points toward the deeper ramifications of
1947; and throws light upon extremist politics in the successor regimes of
colonial India.
We are habituated
to histories of rupture. Gandhi,
however, took his bearings not by the extreme case but by everyday sociability:
The force of love is the same as the force of the
soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. He asked for a new beginning: ‘if
we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We
must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors. If we may make new
discoveries and inventions in the phenomenal world, must we declare our
bankruptcy in the spiritual domain? Is it impossible to multiply the exceptions
so as to make them the rule? Must man always be brute first and man after, if
at all?’ (1926). It remains to be seen whether political cultures that
celebrate violence will succeed in erasing his influence, or nullifying his
wisdom.
Faith vs ‘irreligion’
Gandhi’s refusal to separate religion from politics is often misunderstood.
The confusion is due to the reduction of religion to political identification.
What we call communalism is a version of political theology, or civil religion.
It starts from the assumption that religious homogeneity is a crucial component
of state authority. Political theology invests in the utility of religion
rather than its truth. But Gandhi was interested neither in the use of religion
by the state, or the use of the state by priests. For him, religion was a source
of philosophical wisdom. This quest led to his refusal to separate means and
ends – evil means would corrupt the best of ends.
Believing that nothing
in the scriptures came from God directly, Gandhi wanted humans to exercise their
judgement. Along with Tagore he distinguished between the religion of humanity
and the faiths which were manifestations of it; hence he could say ‘I have made the world’s faith in God my own.’
His pravachan sabhas, where he read
passages from different religious texts, were an effort to convince Indians
that they could be united, rather than divided by their beliefs; that the fault
lay not in religion but in us.
Gandhi’s name for
communalism was ‘irreligion’. He believed utilitarian religiosity to be a perversion
of faith and a harbinger of disintegration. His instincts told him that a
stable Indian polity could not be based on a ‘national’ religion - the issue
was not the separation of religion from politics, but the separation of
religion from nationhood. This approach answers ‘traditionalist’ objections to
secularism: in India the term relates quite simply to the impossibility of an
imposed religious homogeneity. Far from being a stabilizing factor, attempts at
enforcing uniform faith would ignite a crisis of state legitimacy. This was
borne out by partition and its aftermath. The nationalisation of belief and the
deification of the Nation are new versions of atheism. They aim not at an
Eternal Being, but eternal warfare.
Tradition
vs modernity
As a founder, Gandhi was not burdened with
a ‘bad conscience’, but a good one. As someone searching for a dignified path
toward self-governance, he had to deal with the diversity of traditions. In a speech
in Jaffna (1927), he pointed to the difficulty
of defining ancient culture, and determining when it began to be modern; that prudence
required that we not swear by anything because it was ancient; that any culture
ancient or modern must be submitted to the test of reason and experience. He
continued: “I came by a process of
examination to this irresistible conclusion that there was nothing so very
ancient in this world as these two good old things - truth and non-violence -
and arguing along these lines of truth and non-violence, I also discovered that
I must not attempt to revive ancient practices if they were inconsistent with…
modern life as it must be lived.”
Gandhi thus upheld a
respect for tradition whilst retaining the use of his conscience and his
reason. Swimming in the waters of tradition did not require us to sink in them:
‘Every living faith must have within
itself the power of rejuvenation if it is to live' (1935). He interpreted jnana, bhakti and karma to point
toward knowledge of empirical situations; the imperative of love for one’s
fellows; and service of society. Dharma
could resonate with his favourite citation from Tulsidas (daya dharm ka mool hai...); and also be recast as yuga-dharma, which stressed our duties
in the present - this was the basis for his recommendation of bread labour and
scavenging for all.
The compass
Gandhi often made pragmatic adjustments
to his strategies and ideas - he was in continuous debate with his compatriots,
friends and critics all over the world. As the philosopher Arne Naess observed: “There can be no rule-books of
Gandhian policy.... This, however, does not necessarily reduce the value of
Gandhi’s teaching in the contemporary political situation. After all, the
indication of direction that a compass-needle gives is of some value in itself,
even if it takes no consideration of the terrain through which we must pass.”
The underlying ideal of
Gandhi’s practice remained ‘the oceanic circle’ – an ever-expanding web of
social relationships that reached out from the individual to the village, the
country and the world. That is why he could tell his audience at a
prayer-meeting in November 1947: 'when
someone commits a crime anywhere I feel I am the culprit. You too should feel
the same.. Let us all merge in each other like drops in an ocean.” As he
put it: ‘the bane of our life is our exclusive
provincialism, whereas my province must be co-extensive with the Indian
boundary so that ultimately it extends to the boundary of the earth. Else
it perishes.'
These
sentences condense the reasons why Gandhi remains relevant. If his memory be
not confined to platitudes, we can see that yuga-dharma enjoins upon us to
respect the life-giving capacities of the planet, to ‘clean up our act’, so to
speak. This is not the task of any especially endowed nation. The Amazon rain
forest, the Himalayas, the polar ice caps, the oceans, the air; the crisis of
displaced peoples, the safety of children and the access to knowledge – all
these cannot be left within the ambit of nation-states. We are not particles of
state-structures, but human beings with planetary responsibilities.
The outpouring of
sorrow from around the world upon Gandhi’s assassination demonstrated how much
the world’s people owned him. In recognizing his remarkable nobility of spirit;
they lifted him above the limits of time and place. That is why, in a BBC millennium
poll in 2000, Mahatma Gandhi was voted the greatest man of the past thousand
years.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/op-ed/031019/the-compass.htmlsee also
DELHI DECLARATION OF
Gandhi's ashes stolen and photo defaced on 150th birthday
RIP Bhiku Daji Bhilare - the man who saved Gandhiji's life in 1944. By Subhash Gatade
