Posted by Dilip Simeon
|
The Compass
Posted: 03 Oct 2019 03:44 AM PDT
NB: This article appeared today in the Deccan Chronicle,
as part of a series commemorating Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary.
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.
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. Dharmacould 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.html see also Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Mahatma Gandhi: The pulse of a legacy in an age of heroics The search for new time – Ahimsa in an age of permanent war Love at Work: Mahatma Gandhi’s Last Struggle Satyagraha – An answer to modern nihilism C. Douglas Lummis – The Smallest Army Imaginable: Gandhi’s Constitutional Proposal for India and Japan’s Peace Constitution Ayush Chaturvedi: Main Gandhi ke saath hun // Samar Halarnkar: In the time of Godse, a search for Hindus who will stand with Gandhi The Abolition of truth |