Gandhi's West, West's Gandhi_Vinay Lal_New Literary History

8/8/2019 Gandhi's West, West's Gandhi_Vinay Lal_New Literary History

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New Literary History, 2009, 40: 281313

Gandhis West, the Wests Gandhi

Vinay Lal

M

ohandas Gandhi, who made his way rom the coastal towno Porbandar in western India to London and South Aricabeore returning to India and in time becoming Indias most

iconic gure around the world, is commonly believed to have had, atbest, an ambivalent relationship with the West. Gandhi was a relentlesscritic o modern industrial civilization, and on more than one occasionhe described Western civilization as Satanic;1 on the other hand, thereis a strong body o scholarly opinion that holds, on what appears to beunimpeachable evidence, that Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and John Ruskin exercised something close to a seminal infuence uponGandhi. It is reported that when asked, on his last visit to Britain, whathe thought o Western civilization, Gandhi quipped: I think it would bea very good idea.2 Some have thought that Gandhis remark points to

the corrosive infuence o nationalism upon him; others view the storyas, i not apocryphal, indicative o the act that the saintly Mahatma was endowed with a generous sense o humor; and yet others thinkthat this light-hearted remark may have masked eelings o proounduncertainty that Gandhi continued to entertain about the West and itsunprecedented role in shaping the course o human history over the lastve hundred years. It is also remarkable that however critical Gandhis views o Western civilization, at no point in his adult lie did Gandhilack British, European, and American riends. There are many poignantstories to be told in this regard, none more so than that o his visit to

the cloth mills in Lancashire where, despite the adverse consequenceso the Gandhi-initiated boycott o mill-manuactured clothing on thelivelihoods o English workers, he received a rousing welcome.3

The West has, one might well argue, reciprocated in a great measureGandhis ambivalence. There can be little question that the predominantrepresentation o Gandhi, at least among those who are not actively hostileto him, hovers around a saintly gure, lionized as the prophet o peaceand as the supreme apostle o nonviolence in our times. His lie has beenheld up as exemplary by many in the West: the Christians who knew himin his own lietime had no diculty in abiding by their judgment that

Gandhi was a better Christian than most who style themselves Christians,


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just as some Western eminists, who have had, or good reasons, an uneasyrelationship with Gandhi, have now come around to the view that Gandhi

displayed a rather distinct and admirable sensibility in his articulation ocare as a moral imperative.4 There are those among his admirers in theWest who, not entirely unmindul o Gandhi as a practitioner o massnonviolent resistance, have nonetheless ound in him a more potenticon to advocate other interests. Among those constituencies in theWest that have championed him, vegetarians, naturopaths, anarchists,luddites, ecologists, teetotalers, walkers, and even nudists come readilyto mind.5 Quite characteristically, Gandhi himsel had cause to remarkon this phenomenon: I have been known as a crank, addist, mad man.Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to

mysel cranks, addists and mad men.6

Not everyone was sold on the idea o nonviolent resistance, and someopenly held the idea in deep contempt. Some o Gandhis critics in theWest derided him as a hopelessly nave idealist incapable o understand-ing the real evil that people are capable o inficting upon others. Themost commonly encountered argument, particularly in the wake opronounced anti-Semitism and then the Holocaust, as well as the masskillings orchestrated in Stalins Russia, is that Gandhi could only havesucceeded against the gentlemanly British. He would have had, Gandhiscritics declaim with supreme condence, no answer to Hitlers bombs

and guns, and it is inconceivable that any totalitarian regime would havepermitted him to exploit the media as he did, or had the oolhardinessto allow him the privilege o lecturing the judge who had been charged with bringing Gandhi to trial. One rejoinder to this argument pointsto the history o British atrocities in their colonies,7 and even to other willul orms o genocide, such as the various permissive amines thatseemed to ollow the English in Ireland, India, and elsewhere aroundthe world.8 Another strand o this argument has called attention to theSouth Arican origins o Gandhian satyagraha,9 where neither the Brit-ish nor the Boers displayed any contrition in slaughtering each other

much less the rebellious Zulus. The supposition that Gandhi had noexperience o real evil not only overlooks his long years o experi-ence in South Arica, but also betokens a ailure to understand that themost acute orms o oppression may not always be expressions o brutephysical violence.

Gandhi was also widely held to be a dangerous meddler in politics.The word dangerous, however, lends itsel to more than the commonreadings here, not all o them wholly or even remotely pejorative. Gan-dhis antagonist in South Arica, General Jan Smuts, came to an earlyappreciation o what mass nonviolent resistance could achieve and ne-

gotiated an agreement designed to redress some o the grievances held


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283gandhis west, the wests gandhi

by Gandhi and the Indian community. Watching Gandhi in South Aricarom aar, the Oxord don and classicist Gilbert Murray had the pulse

on Gandhi when he cautioned the world: Persons in power should becareul how they deal with a man who cares nothing or sensual plea-sure, nothing riches, nothing or comort or praise or promotion, but issimply determined to do what he believes is right. He is adangerousanduncomortable enemybecause his body, which you can always conquer,gives you so little purchase upon his soul (emphasis added).10 Gandhisolder contemporary, the Maharashtrian Brahmin Bal Gangadhar Tilak,was among the rst to give voice to the opinion that politics was a gameo worldly people and not o sadhus [holy men; renouncers],11 andhis misgivings about the entry o Gandhi, who seemed adamant about

spiritualizing politics, into the public realm would soon translate intothe more ervent and widespread criticism that Gandhi was playing adangerous game in bringing religion into politics.

The English, an eminently practical people who, i I may put it thisway, cared little or philosophy and thought o themselves as the menon the spot,12 ound themselves conronted by a much more tangiblesense o the dangerous element in Gandhian praxis. They were wellversed in putting down armed uprisings, as their savage suppression othe rebellion o 1857 amply demonstrates, and sedition-mongers andrecalcitrant rebels could be put away in jail or lengthy periods o time

or banished to the Andamans. But just how was one to respond to aman who appeared keener on punishing himsel than on chastisingthe British? I the man insisted on asting in an eort to bring about apolitical solution, just how was he was to be prevented rom executinghis plans? Here was a man who, as George Orwell surmised,13 had thedaring to think that he only had to orgo ood and an empire wouldshake to its roots. Unlike most other eminent revolutionaries o thetwentieth century, dedicated to stealth as much as to violence, Gandhisought to disarm his opponents by advertising his plans. When he haddecided upon commencing the Salt Satyagraha in 1930, he took the

unusual step o dispatching a letter to the Viceroy outlining the precisecourse o action he proposed to undertake i the British were not willingto enter into negotiations with the Congress (CW48:362-67). NeitherLord Irwin nor Reginald Reynolds, the bearer o the letter, realized atthat time just how dangerous Gandhi could be, but Reynolds, at least,came to an awareness o this soon thereater. Gandhiji would always oerull details o his plans and movements to the police, wrote Reynoldssome years ater Gandhis death, thereby saving them a great deal otrouble. One police inspector who availed himsel o Gandhis courtesyin this matter is said to have been severely reprimanded by his chie.

Dont you know, he told the inspector, that everyone who comes intoclose contact with that man goes over to his side?14


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Lord Irwin, the recipient o Gandhis missive, was a man o Christianbelie who subscribed to the school o thought that Christianity could

be rightully harnessed to the project o empire; the messenger, a youngEnglish Quaker, represented a much soter strand o Christianity whoseadherents would have had no diculty in understanding Gandhis in-junction to listen to the still small voice within onesel; and the authoro the message, who declared himsel a believer in sanatan dharma, ora certain orthodox conception o Hinduism as an eternal religion, hadbeen hailed by an eminent American clergyman as the Christ o ourage and had by his own admission learned much about nonviolentresistance rom the Sermon on the Mount (CW54:308).15 In this interac-tion, we might say that Gandhi opened the world to three aces o the

Christian West. There had doubtless been many Indians beore him whohad something o an intellectual and spiritual engagement with Chris-tianity, but Gandhi must be numbered among the rst Indians whoseinterpretations o Christianity, and o the Christian West, would acquirea wide public dimension. He brought to his reading o the Sermonon the Mount a dierent spirit, and perhaps strove to resuscitate andstrengthen traditions in the West that had long been marginalized. Itwould be a truism, o course, to suggest that Gandhi did not accept theWests own authorized version o itsel as the best representation o theWest, but did Gandhi seek to authenticate versions o the West that, in

his judgment, were calculated to not only serve the cause o colonizedsubjects but to liberate the West rom its own worst tendencies? Shouldnot Gandhis encounter with the West also be read as a parable o hisstrongly held view that victors need to be liberated as much as the van-quished, the colonizers as much as the colonized?

The Past is a Familiar Country:Sojourns o a Gujarati in the Other West

Gandhis staunchest riends and supporters in South Arica were Euro-pean Jews.16 For close to ve decades, he maintained close riendships witha larger number o Americans, Britons, and other Europeansmany othem eminent in the arts, education, and public lie. He drew to himselgures as diverse as Romain Rolland, a hugely successul French novel-ist and biographer o Beethoven; Madeleine Slade, the daughter o anEnglish admiral who in time came to serve as Gandhis daughter; CharlesAndrews, an English clergyman who reportedly was so close to Gandhithat he alone had the privilege o addressing him as Mohan; and Lanzadel Vasto, an Italian aristocrat who traveled to India to meet Gandhi in

1936 and returned to France as Shantidas, Servant o Peace, to ound


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something akin to a Gandhian Order o Nonviolent Companions. Gandhistill lived in the epistolary age, and his numerous correspondents in the

West also shared his enormous appetite or letter writing. Gandhi alsoentertained thousands o visitors in India rom abroad, among them thecombative Margaret Sanger, an enthusiastic advocate o birth control aswell as eugenics. The extent o his amiliarity with Western intellectualtraditions is a matter o some debate,17 and Gandhi himsel conessedthat he could not claim much book knowledge18; but there is littlequestion that he had a reasonably rm grasp over the general outlineso Western history. A narrative and interpretive account o Gandhi andthe West is thus constrained not by a lack o sources but rather by anembarrassingly huge array o possibilities.

There are, in this narrative, certain iconic moments, and Gandhisdiscovery o the Holy TrinityThoreau, Tolstoy, and Ruskinhas beenetched as a history o successive epiphanies. Ashis Nandy has written oGandhi that almost all his gurus were Western intellectuals, and thetwo Indian intellectuals to whom he elt closest, Rabindranath Tagoreand Gopal Krishna Gokhale, were conspicuously bicultural.19 Nandywisely eschews the word infuence since it is none too clear what kindo analytical purchase i any the word carries.20 In an age o politicalpandits, management gurus, and even sex gurus, the word guru hasalso lost much o its zing. I by guru is meant what traditional usage has

long dictated, namely teacher, then there is no doubt that Gandhi viewedhimsel as having learned something immensely valuable rom certainWestern intellectuals; i, moreover, the word guru is taken in his widestexpanse, to suggest a source o deep inspiration, then also it is unques-tionably true that Gandhi saw considerable congruence between his viewsand those o the gures who are supposed to have had an incalculablepresence in his lie. Nevertheless, it is also imperative to recognize thatGandhi was an immensely generous man, and he acknowledged manymore gurus than one person is likely to have. Indeed, gurus are posses-sive and do not countenance competition: the supposed prolieration

o gurus in Gandhis lie suggests that, ultimately, he was very much hisown man. Einstein was, I suspect, much closer to the truth when hegave it as his opinion that Gandhi would have been Gandhi withoutThoreau and Tolstoy.21

Gandhis journeys in the Other West commenced in the very hearto the West, the metropolitan capital, London. I thought to mysel,Gandhi would write years ater his rst visit in 1891, i I go to Englandnot only shall I become a barrister (o whom I used to think a greatdeal), but I shall be able to see England, the land o philosophers andpoets, the very centre o civilization (CW 1:42). I the ambition to

make their name in India was writ large in the lives o proconsuls such


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as Curzon,22 Indian men such as the young Gandhi had no doubt thatthey had to seek their credentials in Britain. We need not be detained

by the now amiliar account o how Gandhi strove to become an Englishgentleman, taking lessons in the violin, dancing, and elocution, besidesacquiring a chimney-pot hat and having his clothes cut at the Armyand Navy Stores (Apt. I, ch. 25). In later lie, Gandhi would describehimsel as having learned much rom having consorted with the Eng-lish: Punctuality, reticence, public hygiene, independent thinking andexercise o judgment and several other things I owe to my association with them (CW48:375). Growing up in Gujarat, distinct in India orits delectable vegetarian cuisine, Gandhi and his ellow Gujaratis werereminded by the poet Narmad that the mighty Englishman ruled the

Indian small since he was a meat-eater (Apt. I, ch. 6); and yet it is inLondon, o all places, that Gandhi embraced vegetarianism, no longerrom instinct or habit, but as a choiceand commenced what wouldbecome lie-long experiments in dietetics, read the Bhagavad Gita inEdwin Arnolds translation, and ell in with the Theosophists (Apt. I,chs. 14, 17, 20).23 It is remarkable that where many other Indians hadarrived in London, or the other capitals o Europe, to imbibe lessonsrom the West about how to become modern, imbued with the spirito rational thinking and the scientic outlook, Gandhi associated withpeople who were themselves at the margins o British society, ridiculed

as cranks and viewed as exponents o ideas that were hopelessly at oddswith the dominant temper o the time.It is in South Arica that Gandhi rst encountered the writings o Tol-

stoy and Ruskin.24 Suce it to say that, with his characteristic generosityand humility, Gandhi described them as having played a signicant i notcritical role in his intellectual development (Apt. II, ch. 1). It is uponreading Tolstoys The Kingdom of God Is Within You, says Gandhi, that hebegan to realize more and more the innite possibilities o universallove (A, Pt. II, Ch. 22), and elsewhere he described him as the bestand brightest exponent o the doctrine o Soul-orce.25 Shortly beore

Tolstoy died in November 1910, Gandhi entered into a correspondencewith him and was greatly heartened by Tolstoys enthusiastic approbationo his deployment o satyagraha in South Arica. Gandhi honored Tolstoy,not only with a ulsome obituary upon his death, but by naming a armwhere he had settled down with like-minded companions ater the Russiancount. But Gandhi had rst commenced upon experiments in communalliving at a rural settlement called Phoenix outside Durban: the occasionor such a departure rom city lie was a serendipitous reading aboard atrain o Ruskins Unto This Last. The chapter in his autobiography whereGandhi narrates the mesmerizing hold Ruskins ideas came to have on

him is entitled, The Magic Spell o a Book, and he credits the book as


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having brought about an instantaneous and practical transormationin his lie (Apt. IV, ch. 18).

Ruskins teachings, we are told by Gandhi, are easily encapsulated inthree propositions: rstly, the good o the individual is contained in thegood o all; secondly, all work, howsoever high or low in common esti-mation, has the same value, and all work should be sucient to securea person his or her livelihood; and, thirdly, a lie o labor is eminentlythe lie worth living. The ollowing short sentences describe how thesepropositions appeared to Gandhi: The rst o these I knew. The secondI had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me (A pt. IV,ch. 18). The admission rom a Gujarati baniathat he had never givenany thought to the lie o labor is candidly rereshing as much as it is

unsurprising.26

But let us ollow Gandhi to the end o that paragraph:I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.Ruskins Unto This Last gave Gandhi intimations o the principles re-quired or ar-reaching social reconstruction, just as Tolstoys writingsstrengthened Gandhi in his resolve to seek truth through nonviolentaction. Gandhi took these doctrines to their limits, where in the handso their authors they would have remained untested theories; and thoughGandhi was deeply attracted in principle to the nonviolent anarchismby which Tolstoy abided, he also came to understand that it providedan insucient basis on which to build either resistance to an oppressive

state or a nonviolent social order.We may, by way o illustration o the argument that Gandhi held Tho-reau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy in much veneration, consider in greater detailthe case o Thoreau. It is through Henry Salt that Gandhi would havebecome acquainted with Thoreau, rom whose works a quote graced theopening o Salts A Plea for Vegetarianism(1885), which he had chancedupon in a shop window just months into his stay in London (Apt. I, ch.14): I have no doubt that it is a part o the destiny o the human race,in its gradual improvement, to leave o eating animals, as surely as thesavage tribes have let o eating each other.27 Thoreau has been o

particular interest to biographers o Gandhi: deeply steeped, or a littletraveled man rom Concord, in numerous Indian philosophical texts,28his essay on civil disobedience is believed to have let a lasting impacton Gandhi. In a memorable passage in Walden, ostensibly an account ohis lie in the woods, Thoreau imagined the sweltering inhabitants oBombay, Madras, and Calcutta drinking at his well. And as or Thoreauhimsel, he bathed his intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonalphilosophy o the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years o thegods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world andits literature seem puny and trivial. And as he drew the water, Thoreau

sensed that the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water o


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the Ganges.29 With Gandhi, the circle is said to have been completed: writing to American Friends in 1942, Gandhi said, You have given

me a teacher in Thoreau, who urnished me through his essay on theDuty o Civil Disobedience scientic conrmation o what I was doingin South Arica (CW83:163).

Thoreaus case, as shall be seen, amply suggests what Gandhi gainedrom a Western thinker, and why prevalent conceptions o the infu-ence exercised by Thoreau on Gandhi are inadequate and even intel-lectually uninteresting. It is in a response to a query rom Salt, alsoThoreaus biographer, that Gandhi admitted that Civil Disobediencehad let such a deep impression upon him that he had reproducedcopious extracts rom the essay in Indian Opinionand even translated

portions o it or his readers. Gandhi described Thoreaus essay as soconvincing and truthul that it had created in him a desire to knowmore o Thoreau, and this led him to Salts biography, Walden, andother essays, all o which I read with great pleasure and equal prot.30The American reporter Webb Miller, whose amous dispatches on theSalt Satyagraha were beamed around the world, reports that Gandhiwas more explicit in a conversation with him in 1931. Explaining thathe had read Waldenin Johannesburg in 1906, Gandhi continued: Why,I actually took the name o my movement rom Thoreaus essay, Onthe Duty o Civil Disobedience, written about eighty years ago.31 Yet,

i it appears rom all this that the matter is settled and that a relativelystraightorward chronology establishes nearly the precise moment whenGandhi might have ound inspiration in Thoreau, then it is also instruc-tive that at various times Gandhi expressed considerable reticence aboutThoreaus impact on him. The persons who have infuenced my lie as awhole in a general way, he wrote in 1931, are Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreauand Raychandbhai. Perhaps I should drop Thoreau rom this list (CW51:38). Four years later, he insisted to another correspondent that thestatement that I derived my idea o Civil Disobedience rom the writingso Thoreau is wrong. The resistance to authority . . . was well advanced

beore I got the essay.32

There are obvious diculties in imagining a straight line that mighttake us rom Thoreaus essay on civil disobedience to Gandhian satya-graha. The questions o precisely when and in what circumstances Gandhibecame acquainted with this text apart, nothing in Thoreaus writingssuggests that he envisioned civil disobedience as a mass movement, andhis numerous biographers and other scholars are settled upon the con-sensus view that Thoreau is ultimately best understood as a specimeno Yankee individualism. The history o the New England tradition,Perry Miller was to write o the American transcendentalists, is a series

o splinterings, o divisions, and subdivisions and the subdivision o


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subdivisions, until you are let breathless as you try to keep pace withthe accelerating pace o Yankee individualism.33 There is the critical

consideration that Thoreau appeared to have undamentally withdrawnrom society while Gandhi, in spite o his ability to retreat into himseland be attentive to his own inner voice, was throughout a rm adherento the view that the only place or a man or woman o religion was inthe slum o politics.

To assert such is not to entertain the view that Thoreau was apolitical;quite to the contrary, he was deeply troubled by the phenomenon oslavery, and he doubtless also recognized that the same individualismthat he cherished could be tethered to the most brutal orms o capi-talistic aggrandizement. It is more than probable that reading Thoreau

moved Gandhi to a uller appreciation o the moral imperative that oneis bound to ollow ones conscience when it comes into confict withauthoritative texts or, or that matter, unjust laws. Seventeenth-centuryEuropean thinkers, John Locke in particular, adopted the view thatto adhere to ones conscience was to retreat into a state o nature; asinstitutions o civil society matured and the will o the people could bevoiced through the legislature, the subjects o the state had to relinquishtheir private judgment or conscience. One o the key insights o Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, with which Gandhi was in agreement,was that the priority o the conscience had to be restored. But at some

point, Gandhi parted company rom Thoreau: not only was a personobligated to cease cooperation with a government that had shed allsemblance o moral probity, but the call o the conscience had to betaken much urther so that one became the bearer o the suering oothers. As Gandhi insistently claimed, the capacity o the oppressor toinfict suering had to be matched by the capacity o the oppressed toendure the same and, with this selfess display o orbearance, move theoppressor to repentance and reconciliation.

It is my submission, moreover, that a largely mechanistic reading oGandhis relationship to Thoreau, revolving around the amous essay

on civil disobedience, has obscured the various ways in which Thoreaumay have let a lasting imprint on Gandhi. I shall gesture here, feet-ingly at best and largely as an illustration, at only one other reading,though many others come to mindrom their common ruminationson the uncommon pleasures o prison lie and their wry observations onthe supposed merits o such technological marvels as the telegraph toGandhis keen appreciation o the act that Thoreau taught nothing hewas not prepared to practice in himsel.34 There is no reason to believethat Gandhi took to walking upon reading Thoreau, but the lives o bothresonated deeply with daily walks. In walking, Gandhi paid remembrance

to Thoreau: thus, writing to the editor o a Gujarati newspaper in 1916,


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Gandhi gave it as his opinion that walking as an exercise was barely worthit unless one was prepared to walk twice a day, six miles at each stretch.

Gandhi continues, Thoreau used to walk or eight hours daily whenhe wrote his best book. Tolstoy testies to the act that while writing hisbest books he never used to sit at his desk beore he had had plenty oexercise (CW15:216). That this is not a mere stray thought is nowheremade as clear as in his advice to visitors to Wardha twenty years later: Toappreciate all the advantages o walking you must read Thoreau. I havemade it a rule that no one, unless he is completely disabled, should beencouraged to come here in a bullock cartnot even Jamnalalji withhis heavy body (CW69:163).

True, Thoreau and Gandhi did not walk in the same ashion, and it is

even likely that Thoreau would have ound Gandhis walking purposeul,and thus not walking at all. I have met with but one or two persons inthe course o my lie, Thoreau wrote in his magisterial essay on walking,who understood the art o Walking, that is, o taking walks, who hada genius, so to speak, or sauntering; which word is beautiully derivedrom idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, andasked charity, under pretence o going la sainte terre to the holyland; and, yet, as Thoreau pertinently added, some people derive theword rom sans terre, without land or a home, which, thereore, in thegood sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home

everywhere.35

The idea o Gandhi sauntering about does not sit easily onthe imagination; but perchance his walking was not always as purposeulas we are wont to imagine, i we consider that Gandhi had, in his ownmanner, orsaken the conception o home. Saints and religious teachersbeore Gandhi had walked the length and breadth o the land, but inhis articulation o the virtues o walking Gandhi was to strike multiplechords. Some have charged Gandhi with, in eect, walking away romhis amily and ailing miserably in the discharge o his duties towards hissons; many more have alleged that, in an age when most o the worldwas striving to accelerate the pace o modern lie and reap the benets

o numerous technological marvels, Gandhi sought to return Indian tothe age o the bullock-cart. Gandhi would have said that his critics aretoo charitably disposed towards him: what to speak o a bullock-cart, hewould have taken us only as ar as his legs could take him. As Gandhiwould aver in Hind Swaraj, good travels at snails pace.36

The Debate Within:The West, Nationalism, and Real Swaraj

Gandhi had read Unto This Laston a night train in South Arica, andit is aboard a ship in 1908 that he penned a tract known as Hind Swaraj.


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Its subtitle, Indian Home Rule, conveys the impression that Gandhismaniesto is a plea or some degree o independence (swaraj) rom Brit-

ish rule in India (Hind), but many readers are startled to nd, withinits pages, what appears to be an ill-conceived and even tasteless diatribeagainst doctors, lawyers, and the Indian railways. Some commentators inthe West, in particular, have expressed themselves as gravely disturbedby what are taken to be its excessive anti-Western sentiments, though itis striking that the eminent authorities Gandhi summoned in deenseo his views are also predominantly Western. It is reliably reported thatwhen Gandhi shared Hind Swarajwith Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the ven-erated politician elt acutely embarrassed and predicted that Gandhihimsel would consign Hind Swaraj to the dustbin within a year o his

return to India. But Gandhi did no such thing: quite to the contrary, inhis preace o 1921 he armed that he stood by the severe condem-nation o modern civilization ound in the booklet. On the thirtiethanniversary oHind Swarajs publication, Gandhi added a new message:while conceding that he would perhaps change the wording here andthere, he was also unequivocally o the view that events o stormy thirtyyears had done nothing to make him alter the views expounded init (HS13-17).

Hind Swarajis cast in the orm o a dialogue between The Reader,a nameless interlocutor evidently opposed to Gandhis views, and The

Editor, none other than Gandhi himsel. The 1921 edition carried a brieaccount o the circumstances under which it had been written: Londonwas then a reuge or various types o advocates o violence and armedrevolutionary activity in India, and having encountered them there,Gandhi resolved to answer them. Their bravery impressed me, wroteGandhi, but I elt that their zeal was misguided. I elt that violence wasno remedy or Indias ills, and that her civilization required the use o adierent and higher weapon or sel-protection (HS15). Though HindSwarajhas had ever since its publication a small but singularly devotedollowing, there has also been a tendency to dismiss large parts o it as

the ramblings o a luddite and obscurantist whose eccentricities havebeen humored ar too long. The colonial government, however, advo-cated a more stern position: at the behest o the Gujarati Interpreterto the High Court o Madras, Hind Swarajwas proscribed. The censoradmitted that the work neither advocated open revolt nor the use ophysical orce against the British government; nevertheless, its authorwas a proponent o passive resistance against British supremacy, andi his idea o noncooperation caught the imagination o young inex-perienced men, thus jeopardizing the eective unctioning o variousbranches o the government, it was likely to compromise the saety and

integrity o the government. Immediate suppression o the book wasnecessary, even i, as the censor noted, the writers ideas upon other


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matters are ridiculous and impracticable.37 Yet there is much that isinexplicable in the censors report: i, or instance, the British much

preerred Gandhi, as has oten been alleged by many o his critics, to violent revolutionaries, then their ear o passive resistance is morethan a trife surprising.

Many ideas run through the twenty short chapters oHind Swaraj, andinterested readers will nd in it intimations o the great events aroundwhich Gandhis lie has been ramed by biographers and historians. TheSalt March was not undertaken until 1930, but we already nd Gandhideclaring that the salt-tax is not a small injustice (HS23). Eorts toorge unity between Muslims and Hindus would preoccupy Gandhi inthe later years o his lie, butHind Swarajadduces sucient evidence

that this had become a critical concern or him at the onset o his po-litical lie (HS44-49). One could go on in this vein, but above all,HindSwarajis dominated by one central conception. Modern civilization hadrendered the condition o England pitiable, and now the canker o thiscivilization had spread to India. Much had been made o the EnglishParliament, the electoral system, and the supposed reedoms o thepress in Britain, but Gandhi described modern civilization as a disease,though not an incurable one (HS34). The Editor and the Reader notbeing in disagreement about the desirability o bringing British rule inIndia to a close, there remained the question o how India was to attain

its independence. The Reader, having in mind Japans triumph overRussia in 1905, which gave an enormous boost to the condence o allAsians, proposes the arming o India and hopes or splendorous militaryvictories. In what is doubtless the most amous passage in this tract, theEditor replies: In eect it means this: that we want English rule withoutthe Englishman. You want the tigers nature, but not the tiger; that isto say, you would make India English. And when it becomes English, itwill be called not Hindustan but Englistan. And this, he emphaticallyadds, is not the Swaraj that I want (HS27).

An India won over or the Indians by violence was not calculated

to produce real swaraj (reedom, sel-rule, rule over ones sel). Thisargument, an article o Gandhis aith, would be rehearsed endlesslybut is less germane to Gandhis reading o the West and colonial rulethan some o his other insights. First, as has now been indubitably es-tablished by a wide body o scholarship, by the mid- to late-nineteenthcentury it was widely accepted by many Indian nationalists that thoughthe West exercised a resounding superiority over India in the materialdomain, India remained the lodestar in spiritual matters. The spirit oinnovation, the energy o its people, and the drive o capital had cometogether in England to create a veritable revolution in the material

conditions o daily lie. Thus England had come to colonize India and,


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between them, the European powers had parceled the world amongstthemselves. But India seemed destined or a dierent sort o greatness:

in no other place on earth could one witness such keen care o the soulor such ponderous meditations on the meaning o human existence. Thenationalists granted that Indias cultivation o the spirit had renderedit vulnerable to marauding outsiders, but in Indias spiritual hegemonylay the seeds or the renewal o the country and the regeneration o allhumankind. Swami Vivekananda, Indias emissary to the West, put thecontrast in unmistakably oppositional but complementary terms: Whenthe Oriental wants to learn about machine-making, he should sit at theeet o the Occcidental and learn rom him. When the Occidental wantsto learn about the spirit, about God, about the soul, about the mean-

ing and mystery o this universe, he must sit at the eet o the Orient tolearn.38 Whether Gandhi similarly shared in the conceit about Indiasunique spiritual gits is debatable, but nowhere does he eect a morepalpable departure rom nationalist thought than in his emphatic rejec-tion o the idea that the emulation o the Wests material gains wouldprot India. The modern civilization o the West would sel-destruct: inEngland it was eating into the vitals o the English nation, enslavingpeople to brutal work regimes, sustaining them through intoxication,and rendering them subservient to debased political institutions suchas the Parliament (HS33-34).

Secondly, even as Gandhi dismissed modern civilization, he recognizedits allure or Indians. Nationalists had spun a narrative that variously at-tributed Indias subjugation under colonial rule to British chicanery, theailure o the British to honor promises to Indian rulers, the disunity oIndia, and the superior organization o European armies. Some writersthought that Indias susceptibility to oreign rule was also a consequenceo the division o labor under caste and the excessive devotionalism o itscommon people. The precise nature o these arguments did not interestGandhi; it was sucient or him that, whatever the motivations o theBritish in coming to India, their ambitions had ound a hospitable home

in India: The English have not taken India; we have given it to them.They are not in India because o their strength, but because we keepthem (HS35). Gandhi conceded that the Hindus and the Mahomedanswere at daggers drawn, and the British had been aided by the quarrel-ing that went on among Indians; but none o this could disguise the actthat the commerce o the English pleased Indians. Hence it is truer tosay, remarks the Editor, that we gave India to the English than thatIndia was lost (HS36). In the ace o the unanimously held opinion thatultimately Britain held India by the sword, Gandhi stood out as the soledissenter: The causes that gave them [the English] India enable them

to retain it. Some Englishmen state that they took and they hold India


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by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirelyuseless or holding India. We alone keep them (HS36). As a corollary,

it stood to reason that as there were Indians who had sold their servicesto the English, so there were Englishmen whose sympathies and interestslay with India rather than with their own country. Gandhis sojourns inthe Other West had sensitized him to the presence o Britons who wereprepared to be enlisted alongside Indians in the struggle against colonialrule: I can never subscribe to the statement, wrote Gandhi, that allEnglishmen are bad. Many Englishmen desire Home Rule or India (HS21). It was hardly necessary to set the expulsion o all the English romIndia as a goal: I the English become Indianized, we can accommodatethem. I they wish to remain in India along with their civilization, there

is no room or them (HS59).The attenuated tone o some o Gandhis observations should notobscure the unremitting conclusion which he had reached: In our owncivilization, there will naturally be progress, retrogression, reorms, andreactions; but one eort is required, and that is to drive out Westerncivilization. All else will ollow (HS 82). A little more than a decadeater the publication oHind Swaraj, the apotheosis o Mohandas intothe Mahatma had taken place, and Gandhis swit political ascendancyand take over o the Congress had, at least in the early 1920s, renderedadvocates o armed insurrection marginal. But the debate about the

place that Western civilization ought to occupy in the imaginary othe Indian nation was ar rom over, and Gandhis instigation o thenoncooperation movement brought orth a new, ormidable i riendlyadversary o his views in the gure o Rabindranath Tagore, then easilythe most well-known name in Indian literature. Tagore recognized thatGandhi uniquely stood or the application o moral orce in politics,and the perpetration o atrocities by the British in the Punjab, to whichboth responded with rmness and dignity, cemented their relationshipand enormous respect or each other. Tagore publicly lent his name toGandhis eorts to stir the entire nation into nonviolent resistance to

colonial oppression, and in his letter o April 12, 1919, released to thepress, he proclaimed Gandhi as a great leader o men who had comeorward to resuscitate the ideal o India, the ideal which is both againstthe cowardliness o hidden revenge and the cowed submissiveness o theterror-stricken.39

Their riendship would endure many dierences, almost none asacute as over Tagores view that Gandhis noncooperation movement,launched ironically at a time when Tagore was himsel traveling aroundEurope preaching cooperation o cultures between East and West,created walls between India and the West that would lead to ceaseless

conficts. The great call o the day was or cooperation, and Indias


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genius militated against any advocacy o the separateness o ones ownpeople rom others: India has ever declared that Unity is Truth, and

separateness is maya[ignorance, though more commonly rendered intoEnglish as illusion].40 Tagore pronounced himsel a believer in the truemeeting o the East and the West,41 and Gandhi was not about to statehis opposition to this ideal. He had striven at least as hard as Tagoreto adhere to an ecumenical worldview, but Gandhi, in two responsesto Tagore published in Young Indiaon June 1, 1921, decried both thepoets dread o the negative and his inability to understand that Westerneducation had created new hierarchies o class and broadened the ritbetween haves and have-nots. The miasma o Western education has soeaten into [our] society that, wrote Gandhi, in many cases, the only

meaning o Education is a knowledge o English. In a justly amouspassage, Gandhi suggested that the encounter between India and the West could only fourish under conditions more conducive to a justexchange: I hope I am as great a believer in ree air as the great Poet.I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windowsto be stued. I want the cultures o all the lands to be blown aboutmy house as reely as possible. But I reuse to be blown o my eet byany.42 Back and orth they went, and scholars and critics have dieredon who ultimately comes across better. Distant observers, among themRolland, watched with ascination as the two men, both bound by the

highest conception o the truth, stuck to their ground without betrayinga gross attachment to their own respective views.43 Yet it is also true thatto many in the outside world, the debate was less important than theact that Indias most amous living poet had heralded the arrival o agreat soul. The Mahatma, as shall presently be seen, was now poisedto cast his shadow over a segment o the Wests own history.

Arican Americans and the Quest or a Black Gandhi

Gandhi had been in South Arica or only a week when he undertooka train journey to Pretoria that would transorm his lie. He came to anawareness o racial discrimination when, en route at Pietermaritzburg,he was asked to vacate the rst-class cabin seat or which he held a ticket.When Gandhi reused to comply, he was pushed out and his luggagethrown out ater him onto the railway platorm. Mohandass apotheosisinto Mahatmahood perorce had to be by way o cooliehood. That journeyhad more than its share o traumas or Gandhi, but these experiencesmay have steeled him in his determination to resist iniquity (Apt. II, ch.8-9). A little-noticed detail in Gandhis narrative announces an unlikely

conclusion to the whole journey: no one was at the train station when


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he arrived in Pretoria late on a Sunday evening, nor did Gandhi have ahotel room; despairing about how and where he was to spend the night,

he was saved by an American Negro who was standing nearby and hadoverheard the conversation between Gandhi and the ticket collector.This American Negro took him to a hotel owned by another American,who agreed to accommodate Gandhi or the night on the condition thathe would agree to take dinner in his own room. Assuring Gandhi thathe had no colour prejudice, the proprietor stated that he had onlyEuropean guests, who would likely leave the hotel i they ound Gandhiseated in the dining room (Apt. II, ch. 10).

Almost seven decades later, another American Negro would journeyto India, announcing that while he went to other countries as a tourist,

he came to India as a pilgrim. Martin Luther Kings name has becomeindubitably linked to that o Gandhi, but the Arican American interestin Gandhi much precedes King. W. E. B. Du Bois, who at least in retro-spect has been recognized as the most prominent black intellectual o histime, was writing about Gandhi in his journal Crisis, subtitled A Recordo Darker Races, at least as early as 1922. Du Bois wrote admiringly ononviolent resistance in his article Gandhi and India, characterizingGandhi as a man who proesses to love his enemies and who reusesto take advantage o or embarrass [the] government in a crisis.44 TheCrisiscarried extensive coverage o political events in India over the next

decade, and Du Boiss 1928 novel,Dark Princess, one scholar has writ-ten, critically dismissed Garveyism, revolutionary black militancy, anda proessed American republicanism, advancing instead the civil disobe-dience best practiced by Mahatma Gandhi.45 In response to a request,repeated on several occasions, rom Du Bois in April 1929 to contributean article to Crisis, Gandhi enclosed what he described as a little lovemessage or Arican Americans: Let not the 12 million Negroes beashamed o the act that they are the grand-children o slaves. There isno dishonour in being slaves. There is dishonour in being slave-owners.DuBois, in turn, speculated that real human equality and brotherhood

in the United States will come only under the leadership o anotherGandhi.46 A year later, Du Bois was describing Gandhi as akin to theBuddha, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ in catapulting India once moreto the great and ateul moral leadership o the world, and he lookedupon Gandhis mighty experiment and Russias endeavors to organizework and distribute income according to some rule o reason as thegreat events o the modern world. The black olk o America were tolook upon the present birth-pains o the Indian nation with reverence,hope and applause.47

Du Bois was by no means singular in his appreciation o Gandhi.

From the 1920s to the late 1940s, other black periodicalsChicago De-


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fender, Atlanta Daily World, Baltimore Afro-American, and Marcus GarveysNegro Worldalso showed a sustained interest in Gandhi. James Weldon

Johnson, executive secretary o the National Association or the Ad-vancement o Colored Peoples (NAACP), speculated in 1922 whetherGandhian satyagraha would be as eective as the methods o violenceused by the Irish: just why this question was o absorbing interest isrevealed when he adds, I noncooperation brings the British to theirknees in India, there is no reason why it should not bring the white manto his knees in the South.48 Calls or a black American Gandhi beganto appear in the press around this time. Howard Thurman led the rstArican American delegation to India in 1936, and Benjamin E. Mays oMorehouse College, who criticized clergymen when they were unwilling

to advocate Christianity as a Social Gospel, and Mordecai Johnson, Presi-dent o Howard College, led another delegation to coner with Gandhiin 1947. They were among many prominent Arican American clergy-man, educators, and public gures who succeeded in placing beore theblack Arican public a narrative o the reedom struggle in India, andollowed Gandhis satyagraha campaigns, asts, calls or mass mobiliza-tion, and jail terms with unfinching interest. The next generation oArican American leaders would build on this legacy: it is rom Thurman,then on the aculty at Howard, that James Farmer, one o the principalarchitects o the Congress o Racial Equality (CORE), whose members

consciously dressed themselves in the garb o Gandhian philosophy asthey embraced a spiritual nonviolent politics, imbibed the teachings oGandhi.49 Similarly, a sermon on Gandhi by Johnson in 1949, King wouldrecall some years later, inspired him to suspend the skepticism that hehitherto harbored towards pacism. His message was so proound andelectriying, King wrote o Johnsons sermon, that I let the meetingand bought a hal-dozen books on Gandhis lie and works. King hadso ar been unable to see how the power o love might be brought tobear upon the realm o social reorm, and the ethics o Jesus appearedto have a bearing only on individual conduct. But the introduction he

had now gained to Gandhi brought intimations o the greatness o hisaccomplishment: Gandhi was probably the rst person in history to litthe love ethic o Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to apowerul and eective social orce on a large scale.50

Ten thousand miles apart, Arican Americans and Indians had, oneis inclined to believe, made common cause. The one historian who hasdelved deeply into the Arican American encounter with Gandhi reachesmuch stronger conclusions, arguing that the receptivity to Gandhi amongearly black leaders germinated in the ollowing generations heady em-brace o Gandhian strategies o nonviolent resistance.51 Yet Sudarshan

Kapur is much more reticent about the precise ways in which an interest


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in Gandhi might have been translated into Gandhian-style acts o massresistance among American blacks, just as he leaves unexplored other

substantive questions. Two oppressed groups had wrought into being asustained communication with each other, but it is not clear that theydid so through the mediation o a dominant culture. True, Gandhi hadbeen educated in Britain, and early Arican American leaders would nothave been ignorant o Thoreaus legacy, but nevertheless the lengthyengagement o at least a certain class o black Americans with Gandhiand the Indian independence movement compels renewed considerationo how ideas traveled across borders, the nature o political solidarityamong subordinated groups, the heterogeneous legacies o anticolonialand antiracist movements, and theories o cosmopolitanism that have not

deviated much rom the supposition that the ount o ecumenism remainsthe liberal humanist tradition o the West. What makes the history o thelong conversation between black American intellectuals and Gandhi allthe more interesting is that the requently voiced criticism that Gandhiwas inattentive to the suerings o black South Aricans, choosing to wagea struggle only on behal o the oppressed Indian population during histwo decades long stay in South Arica, appears not to have infuencedArican American estimations o Gandhi. It is also conceivable that blackAmericans may have known o Gandhis assiduous eorts to bring a haltto the system o indentured labor, which one prominent historian not

uncontroversially described as another orm o slavery.52

In the activities o A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, and Bayard Rus-tin, we arrive at a closer approximation o how Gandhis ideas would bediused among black Americans to create an activist ethics beore Kingsull-bodied embrace o satyagraha in the decade rom the mid-1950s untilhis assassination appeared to vindicate Gandhis prescient observation in1936 that it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated mes-sage o nonviolence will be delivered to the world.53 One historian hassuggested that the signicance o Randolph, Americas most prominentblack labor leader, is best gauged by understanding that he made a link

between the depression-era readiness o blacks to engage in more mili-tant and conrontational orms o protest and the diuse but persistentArican-American ascination with Gandhi and Gandhism.54 Randolphintroduced the idea o mass nonviolent resistance in the United Stateswith his call or a march to Washington in 1941 in an attempt to ensurethat blacks would have equal access to jobs in the burgeoning deenseindustries. Like Gandhi, Randolph had no hesitation in accepting theassistance o liberal whites; but just as Gandhi was unequivocally rmin his resolve that ultimately Indians had to ght their own battle, soRandolph justied his March on Washington Movement as an endeavor

to develop a sense o sel-reliance with Negroes depending on Negroes


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in vital matters. It helps break down the slave psychology and inerioritycomplex in Negroes which comes with Negroes relying on white people

or direction and support. What Negroes required was mass organiza-tion with an action program, aggressive, bold and challenging in spirit,and the example o the people o India with mass civil disobedienceand non-cooperation and the marches to the sea to make salt was be-ore them.55

The historian George Frederickson has oered a number o pregnantobservations that sound an alert about viewing Randolph as some kind oArican American Gandhi. It is not merely that Randolph was an atheistand an economic determinist; more critically, he achieved his victoriessimply by threatening mass demonstrations, and he never actually

embarked on mass nonviolent action.56

Randolphs younger contempo-rary, James Farmer, and the coounders o CORE had by ar the greaterexperience with nonviolent political activism; having introduced thesit-in and the reedom ride to the repertoire o resistance in the U. S.,Farmer was perhaps the rst practitioner and theorist o black resistanceto the pernicious system o segregation that then prevailed in the U. S.who was ully committed to putting Gandhis teachings to eect in theAmerican context. As he outlined in a memo to the leading Americanpacist, A. J. Muste, in 1942:

Segregation will go on as long as we permit it to. Words are not enough; theremust be action. We must withhold our support and participation rom theinstitution o segregation in every area o American lienot an individual wit-ness to purity o conscience, as Thoreau used it, but a coordinated movemento mass noncooperation as with Gandhi. And civil disobedience when laws areinvolved. And jail where necessary. More than the elegant cadre o generals wenow have, we also must have an army o ground troops. Like Gandhis army, itmust be nonviolent. Guns would be suicidal or us. Yes, Gandhi has the key orme to unlock the door to the American dream.57

I we place Farmers lionization o Gandhi in apposition with the recent

pronouncement by Fred Thompson, ormer American Senator andPresidential candidate, that Gandhis way isnt the American way,58 theprooundly radical implications o Farmers proposed introduction omass nonviolent resistance become all too clear. Farmer may still havebeen holding on to some orm o American exceptionalism in invokingthe American dream, but that he should have thought o Gandhi aspaving the way or emancipating the American dream rom the burdeno its oppressive history is a remarkable testament to his vision.

It would take the immense gits o Rustin and King to make massnonviolent resistance a reality in the U. S. Though Farmer was an

inspired activist, he was not a master strategist; moreover, CORE was


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neither a predominantly black organization nor had its members givenmuch thought to how a collective ethos o resistance was to be orged

rom the embers o a dissenting conscience. Rustin was, we might say,a wholly unlikely man to assume the mantle o a Gandhian strategistto help King lead Arican Americans to the mountaintop, but there islittle question that no American then had a richer understanding omass nonviolent resistance and the mind o a strategist to give eect toGandhian ideas than Rustin. In todays clichd language, Rustin was anoppressed man many times over: besides being an Arican-American, hewas gay, a conscientious objector and drat-dodger, and rmly committedto communism. I, to quote Kings adversary H. Rap Brown, violence isas American as cherry pie,59 then let it be recalled that Rustin was also

an avowed pacist and Quaker. None o these attributes was designedto endear Rustin to his ellow Americans.A contemporary o Muste and Randolph, Rustin made a detailed study

o Gandhis lie, writings, and political campaigns and oered a candidappraisal in 1942 that no situation in America has created so much in-terest among negroes as the Gandhian proposals or Indias reedom.60A ew years later, Rustin was among those undertaking the Journey oReconciliation who sought to test the Supreme Courts ruling declar-ing segregation o interstate transportation acilities unconstitutional.The Montgomery bus boycott o 1955-56, with which the advent o mass

nonviolent resistance in the American South was announced to theworld, brought King into the limelight; it also brought Rustin and thewhite Methodist minister Glenn E. Smiley to Montgomery at a criticaljuncture, when Kings resolve to persist amidst adversity and intimidatingretaliatory violence was beginning to dwindle. Rustin became teacherto a pupil, writes one scholar, whose ame would soon outstrip hismentors.61 Some years later, Rustin recalled that though King then hada feeting knowledge o Gandhian nonviolence, and knew very littleabout the man [Gandhi],62 he displayed a heady capacity to absorbthe teachings that were placed beore him. It is through the struggle,

Rustin told an interviewer, that King came to a prooundly deep un-derstanding o nonviolence, and he described as a hoax the idea thatsomehow college proessors who had read Gandhi had prepared himin advance.63 But Rustins supreme Gandhian moment was still to come:the much-promised March to Washington had been lingering in the airsince the time o Randolph, and Rustin, King, and Arican Americanleaders had decided in 1963 that the time to redeem the promise oAmerica, or descendants o slaves as much as the descendants o slaveowners, had arrived. Gandhis walk to the sea had rendered the marchinto the iconic gesture o mass nonviolent resistance, and since at least

the 1930s American demonstrators had sought to render it into a suc-


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cessul American technique or direct action.64 Rustin, the chie architecto the March to Washington, where King would deliver his most amous

sermon, would have agreed with the prospective assessment that it wasthe most signicant civil rights demonstration since Gandhi led theIndians to reedom.65

Believing that God has called Martin Luther King to lead a greatmovement, Smiley, ater one meeting with him, would put the epitaphto the quest that had commenced in the 1920s: King can be a NegroGandhi.66 King had grated Gandhi on to both Arican American Chris-tianity and the personalist philosophy under the shadow o which hehad been educated:67 in Kings dramatically sparse language, I went toGandhi through Jesus,68 though had he substituted Rustin or Jesus, he

would not have been committing any historical blunder. King would otenlink Gandhi and Jesus together: at a sermon in Montgomery in 1959,he remarked that both had died on a Friday, and elsewhere he charac-terized the relationship in these terms: Christ urnished the spirit andmotivation, while Gandhi urnished the method.69 King deployed nearlythe entire Gandhian arsenalrom picketing, boycotts, and strikes tomarches, fooding the jails, bearing witness, and the skillul mobilizationo all orms o the mediaas he transormed the Arican American civilrights movement into the apex struggle o its times. The entire Gandhianapparatus was centered in the idea o sel-suering, and King remained

true to the ideal. He oten cited Gandhi, Rivers o blood may have tofow beore we gain our reedom, but it must be our blood.70 StrideTowards Freedom(1958) and Where Do We Go From Here?(1968) boldly setout his conviction that in Gandhis lie and struggle were to be ound thecues that Arican Aricans could ollow with success. In his last sermonat Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple in Memphis, a day beore his assas-sination, King adverted to unnished dreams and Gandhis unrelentingsorrow at the partition o Indiaperhaps in intuitive acknowledgmento the possibility that his own days were numbered.71

Inspiring as this story may be o solidarity o the oppressed across

borders, some dicult questions remain. Refecting perhaps his implicitgrounding in Indian philosophical traditions, Gandhi spoke only inre-quently o sin; indeed, the centrality osatya(truth) to his praxis andphilosophical outlook alike allowed or the marginalization o the ideao sin. Always prepared to obey the call o truth, Gandhi saw no reason why many others might not share in that journey. King, on the otherhand, was committed to a much stronger notion o sinthough perhapsone might want to resist viewing this only, or even predominantly, as hisChristian inheritance. A glutton or ood, tobacco, and sex, King argu-ably had more reason to think o sin. But the matter cannot rest there,

not even with the contrary example o Gandhi, whose indierence to


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a theological conception o sin may perhaps be partly derived rom theact that his own lie was so singularly devoid o sin as this is commonly

understood. For close to ve decades, Gandhi held ast to the idea thatthe practitioner o satyagraha has to make every endeavor to lead alie o purity, and he even came to believe that political violence or thebreakdown o satyagraha is but the refection o the satyagrahis ailureto exercise swaraj, here understood as control over ones baser instincts.72There is little to suggest that King or the Arican American masses werewilling to ollow Gandhi on this matteror, more crucially, in acceptinghis strictures against modern industrial civilization. King has written that,having been born on the verge o the Great Depression and recallingthe breadlines that would soon orm throughout the country, he had

always harbored anticapitalistic eelings, and in 1967-68 he moved toa much stronger expression o his sentiment that the agitation or civilliberties had to be more closely intertwined with struggles to eect aradical distribution o economic and social entitlements.73 Nevertheless,it appears to be indisputably true that Arican American leaders, Kingnot excepted, did not entertain ar-reaching critiques o modernity,opting at most or socialist conceptions o social justice. Gandhi mayhave been closer to otherworldly Christian traditions o renunciationthan most o his Christian admirers. Eschewing the other worldlinesso Gandhi, represented at one end in his extraordinary discipline and,

at the other end, in his relentless critique o the spectacular misruleo modernity, Arican Americans were tethered to the pragmatism o aGandhian grammar o dissent in its everyday operations against regimeso oreign and native oppression.

Gandhi in World History

The ascendancy o Barack Obama to the Presidency o the UnitedStates urnishes the latest iteration o the globalizing tendencies o

the Gandhian narrative. Unlike his predecessor, whose disdain or thepractice o reading generated a mill o rumors, Obama is said to havea passion or books; and Gandhis autobiography has been described asoccupying a prominent place in the reading that has shaped the countrysrst Arican American President.74 Obama gravitated rom Change WeCan Believe In to Change We Need, but, in either case, the slogan isreminiscent o the saying with which Gandhis name is rmly, indeedirrevocably, attached: We Must Become the Change We Want To See Inthe World. This quote graces Gandhi T-shirts, it adorns banners fownat political demonstrations, and it even appears as an inscription on a

statue o Gandhi unveiled in the town o Skokie, Illinois, a ew years ago.


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As I have elsewhere argued,75 even overseas Indians who are inclinedto disown Gandhi as something o a relic rom an earlier age have

understood that the name o Gandhi carries immense cultural capital.Obama and many others have drawn upon the huge reservoir o goodwillgenerated by Gandhi to underscore their commitment to change, winpolitical riends, and gain electoral votes. Delivering a message on theanniversary o Gandhis birth last year, Obama wrote o the Mahatma:His portrait hangs in my oce to remind me that real change will notcome rom Washingtonit will come when the people, united, bring itto Washington. Obama concluded his message with the exhortation thatwe must all rededicate ourselves, every day rom now until November4th, and beyond, to living Gandhis call to be the change we wish to see

in the world.76

The Wests Gandhi is evidently one who is supremely a world historicalgure, but this Gandhi is not easily reconciled with the Gandhi who wasan emphatic critic o nearly all the critical categories o modern politi-cal and humanist thought. Most political thinking in the West over thecourse o the last century has been riveted on the question o rights,and it is no accident that recent political movements in the West have,in addition to the rights o the individual, a question which has been atthe heart o Western political theory, vigorously asserted the rights ogroups, whether dened with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual

orientation, or some other marker o identity. Gandhi, at least in thereceived view, might reasonably be seen as alling entirely within thisramework. How could one possibly dispute the act that he assertedthe rights o Indians, rst as subjects o the Empire, and later, ater hehad been transormed rom a believer in the airness o the British toan ardent noncooperator, as arbiters o their own destiny? The sameGandhi, even i he deplored attempts by the colonial state to drive awedge between Hindus and religious minorities, was nonetheless quitecertain that a democracy is to be judged by how it treats its minorities.More broadly, one can describe Gandhi as someone who initiated the

modern campaigns against colonialism, racism, and xenophobia, and inthis respect he can be viewed as an advocate o the right o people tolive an unettered lie o dignity.

And yet, i one should thus be tempted to assimilate Gandhi into apantheon o the champions o human rights, one would doubtless beobscuring his proound skepticism toward the discourse o rights. Rightsare ordinarily claimed against the state, and those desirous o stakingclaims look up to the state to saeguard their rights. Yet, apart rom theconsideration that the state is oten the most egregious violator o rights,Gandhi had little, i any, enthusiasm or the modern nation-state. This

argument does not coincide with the commonly held view o him as an


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Indian nationalist, but just how anomalous a gure Gandhi was even onthe Indian political scene is something that has seldom been understood

in the West. Indeed, Gandhi is distinct among modern political guresin decisively rejecting the narrow association that the idea o citizen-ship has come to have with the demand or rights and in reinstatingthe concept o duty. It is in South Arica, where the rights o Indianswere trampled upon at every turn, where every Indian was but a coolie,that Gandhi had something o an epiphany: i he wished to claim hisrights as a member o the human race, andwith perhaps more legalorceas a subject o the British monarch, he perorce had to live andact in ull awareness o his duties. Much more than our decades aterhe had been tossed out o a train or daring to enter a rst-class train

cabin as a brown-skinned man, Gandhi, now immersed in a struggle withthe ruler o his native Rajkot, averred that In swaraj based on ahimsa[nonviolence], people need not know their rights, but it is necessary orthem to know their duties. There is no duty but creates a correspondingright, and those are true rights which fow rom a due perormance oones duties.77 Attentiveness to our duties is the only true condition oour liberationnot only rom oppression without, but rom the moreinsidious and intractable servitude demanded by the ego.

We can see how ar Gandhi had traveled rom classical and contempo-rary political thinking, and it is certain that his stress on duties would

place him at great odds with activists and observers or whom the notiono duties is not even remotely part o their political vocabulary.78 Gandhisunfinching skepticism towards history urnishes an even more dramaticexample o his repudiation o the liberal traditions o learning o themodern West and o the categories o thought marshaled by modernknowledge systems. The dominant discipline in the human sciences,the French eminist thinker Luce Irigaray remarks, is now history.79History had, however, become ascendant much earlier, certainly by theearly part o the nineteenth century. When James Mill and ThomasMacaulay sought to demonstrate that Indians were not much given to

rational thinking, they adduced as evidence the lack o interest in his-tory among Indians and the sheer inability o Indians to deliver simplechronologies. I any Indian was disinclined to believe this, all that wasrequired was to faunt Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Macaulay, andlater Leopold von Ranke beore the skeptic and ask i any Indian textcould even remotely meet the standards o historical reasoning that hadbecome commonplace in Europe.

Indian nationalists wilted under this charge and set themselves tocounter it with a vengeance.80 Nationalist thought was heavily investedin the idea o history, and the commitment to history took many orms.

Some began with the simple but perhaps still indisputably true proposi-


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tion that history, or what survives as history, is almost always the recordo the victors rather than o the vanquished; others, in what might be

described as a more complex variation o this theme, attacked Europeanwritings on India as (in todays language) Orientalist. We read bookswritten in English by English historians, Gandhi told a gathering o sometwenty-ve thousand people at the Inter-Asian Relations Conerence inDelhi in 1947, but we do not write in our own mother tongue or in thenational languageHindustani. We study our history through Englishbooks rather than through the originals. That is the cultural conquestwhich India has undergone (CW94:221-22). For writers such as Ban-kimcandra Chatterjee, the task o historical reconstruction could even beattempted by the deployment o the historical novel, and similarly Indians

had to be weaned away rom their oolish and enervating attachment tomyths. Bankim ound no ault with Hindus or worshipping Krishna, buthe could not contain his anxiety that the predominant Krishna o theHindus was an ahistorical deity about whom nothing veriable could besaid with certainty. Whatever the ideological dierences between armedrevolutionaries, liberals, constitutionalists, Indian Tories, and Hindusupremacists, they were all agreed that that an Indian history, or andby Indians, was the supreme requirement o the day. No nation couldbe considered ree until it had authorized its own version o history; butor its narrative productions to count as history, the approbation o the

West was indispensable.Though one can speak o Gandhis departure rom the main strandso nationalist thought in numerous domains, it is in Gandhis absoluteindierence to the language and claims o history that one can witnesswhat a lonely path he struck and how ar he had distanced himsel romthe sensibility o the West as much as the aspirations o Indian national-ists. It would be trivial to suggest that Gandhi did not lack an awarenesso the past; but had he lacked such awareness, it is ar rom certain thathe would have viewed his ignorance as a deciency. Gandhis indisposi-tion towards viewing the Mahabharata, Ramayana or thepuranicmate-

rial as a historical record is pronounced. He wrote o the Mahabharata,in a lengthy piece dated to 1924, that it is hopeless as a history. Butit deals with eternal verities in an allegorical ashion. Describing him-sel as unwilling to enter into speculations about the value o historyconsidered as an aid to the evolution o our race, Gandhi declared: Ibelieve in the saying that a nation is happy that has no history. It is mypet theory that our Hindu ancestors solved the question or us by ignor-ing history as it is understood today and by building on slight eventstheir philosophical structure. Such is the Mahabharata. Viewed in thislight, Gibbon was clearly an inerior edition o the Mahabharata.81 A

year later, in a short article on Sikhism, Gandhi once again armed:


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My Krishna has nothing to do with any historical person.82 Let aloneKrishna or Rama, Gandhi evidently did not even care an iota whether

the historical Jesus had ever existed. All the labors o German highercriticism or the debates on the synoptic gospels might as well have beenor naught: I have never been interested in a historical Jesus, Gandhiexplained to his ellow passengers aboard the S. S. Pilsna on ChristmasDay 1931, and I should not care i it was proved by someone that theman called Jesus never lived, and that what was narrated in the Gospelswas a gment o the writers imagination. For the Sermon on the Mountwould still be true or me (CW54:308).

Gandhis proound misgivings about history arose rom a number oconsiderations. The nation-state appeared to him as perhaps the most

pernicious orm o organizing collectivities, and he saw the enterpriseo history as rmly tethered to the project o the nation-state. The stateproduces authorized versions o the nation-in-the-making and the ulll-ment o the destiny o a people in something called the nation-state isviewed as the end o history. Minorities increasingly contest the ociallysanctioned narratives, each keen on ensuring that it receives honorablemention and more, and the sanctimonious pieties in which nationalistnarratives are wrapped are punctured with great gusto. The nation-statecan then advertize its ecumenism and commitment to multiculturalismto the rest o the world, though the nation-state is no more permissive

o real dissenters than is the discourse o history. But Gandhis acuteskepticism towards history was also a consequence o his awareness thatnineteenth-century ideas about history and the inevitability o humanprogress were but orms o social evolutionism. Civilizations were to beassessed along an evaluative scale, and history became the template bywhich people were judged as more or less socially evolved. In the Indiao the nineteenth century, Europeans saw the remains o their ownsixteenth- or seventeenth-century civilizations that could no longer bewitnessed at rst hand in Europe itsel. Europes past was Indias present;Indias uture was Europes present. History was thus not only a totalizing

mode o interpreting the past that was wholly inhospitable to competingvisions o the past, it was, even more ominously, a way o hijacking theuture o colonized peoples. The only history that India could live outwas someone elses history.

Gandhis own pronounced indierence to history has been largelyreciprocated by those in the West who are charged with the production,dissemination, and interpretation o knowledge. This will appear as asurprising, indeed inexplicable, statement to those who look aroundthem and rightly perceive that Gandhi has an inescapable presence inthe public imagination, popular art, the speeches o policy makers, and

even, in certain ways, in the knowledge industry. It thereore becomes


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imperative to ask precisely what kind o Gandhi is recalled in historiesand the manner in which the shapers o opinions and the ramers o

knowledge have neutralized him. The idea o world history has oundmany supporters in the ranks o progressive historians, and Gandhisplace in world histories seems assured. But a perusal o such historiesreveals something signicant. The world histories accord a place toGandhi as an Indian nationalist who articulated some unusual ideaso nonviolent resistance, orged a mass anticolonial struggle againstthe British, ought valiantly to bring peace to communities torn apartby violence, and agitated or various social reorms. World histories, inother words, have room or a sanitized Gandhi, the apostle o peace andthe principal architect o a nonviolent movement to liberate India rom

the shackles o colonial rule, but such histories are deaeningly silent onGandhis withering critique o modernity, his condemnation o urbanindustrial civilization, his strictures against Western systems o education,or his requently expressed concern that the encroaching materialism othe West was poised to destroy the abric o human societies. Only a ewpublic intellectuals o the rst rank have dared to embrace Gandhi asmore than just a practitioner o nonviolent resistance, and it is the rarethinker in the West who, recognizing that a narrowly political concep-tion o satyagraha cannot describe the worldview that animated Gandhi,has seriously sought to understand Gandhis resounding critique o the

entire edice o modern social systems.83

There is, in act, an unremitting hostility to Gandhi in India as muchas in the Westamong eminists, Marxists, and modernizers, to name justa ew constituencies.84 It is not necessary, at this juncture, to enter intothe various reasons why Gandhi has had detractors, but representationso him as a resolute antimodernist who had quaint i not repulsive ideasabout sex, loathed modern medicine, and hearkened back in countlessways to some highly idealized view o India as a cluster o autarchic vil-lage republics have not been uncommon in the West. Gandhi, in turn,remained visibly unimpressed by the high culture o the West, and, as

I have argued, his sympathies lay with dissenting, marginalized, andperipheral philosophies, movements, and gures. His singularity in thatrespect, within the fowering o Indian political culture that took placerom the time o Rammohun Roy until nearly the advent o indepen-dence, is also vitally signicant. Alone among his contemporaries whoengaged seriously with the modern West, Gandhi was let entirely unazedby its accomplishments. An exchange that transpired in 1928 gives someinsights into his thinking: when asked how he would reply to a claimmade in the Times of Indiathat over the last one hundred years everyone o the Indians who have achieved anything worth mentioning in any

direction was or is the ruit, directly or indirectly, o Western education,


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Gandhi averred that he regarded the infuence o Western culture ashaving had an adverse eect insoar as it interered with the ull eect

that the best in Eastern culture might have produced on notable Indi-ans. As an Anglicized, denationalized being, having little knowledgeo, and even despising, the habits, thoughts and aspirations o themasses, Gandhi suspected that he would have been worthless to them,and he eared that a considerable portion o the nations energy hadbeen consumed in staving o the encroachments o a oreign culturewhich, whatever its merits, was unsuited or Indians whilst they had notimbibed and become rooted in their own. While ready to acknowledgehis own debt to Western culture, Gandhi nonetheless wished to impressupon the reader that, in his own words, whatever service I have been

able to render to the nation has been due entirelyto the retention by meo Eastern culture to the extent it has been possible (CW42:207).Though the authorized version o the nation-states history sees Gan-

dhi as the culmination o the Indian renaissance that commenced withRoy, the liberal politician and Gandhis adversary, C. Sankaran Nair, wasmuch closer to the truth when he observed that there is scarcely anyitem in Gandhis programme which is not a complete violation o every-thing preached by the oremost sons o India till 1919.85 Outside India,Gandhis sin was seen in an even graver light: alone, or perhaps nearlyso, o all the major gures ormed by Western education, he reused his

allegiance to the knowledge systems o the modern West. Even the seg-ment o the Western academy, which over the last two decades has beenmost heavily invested in critiques o colonialism, xenophobia, politicalrepression in the nation-state, and social injustice, has had little time orGandhi, and the leading gures o postcolonial criticism in the West,other than some Indian academics, have barely been able to spare morethan a ootnote or two or Gandhi. It may be that in the years to come,the West will nd yet more sophisticated ways to render Gandhi into anobject o study, but there is almost no sign yet that Gandhis insights arebeing brought to bear upon the study o the very precepts and epistemo-

logical oundations o economics, anthropology, sociology, or the otherdisciplines. There is even, to take one instance, a mini-industry o sortson Gandhian economics, but perish the thought that any proessionaleconomist would ever deploy Gandhi to critique Paul Samuelson, KennethArrow, or Lawrence Summers. The most enduring aspect o Gandhiscritique o the West, then, is surely his understanding that oppression willincreasingly be exercised through the categories o modern knowledge.Do or Die, he urged Indians as he pushed orth his 1942 Quit Indiamovement; and to this mantra we might add another Gandhian insight:think locally, act globally. In this last thought is encapsulated the gist o

Gandhis engagement with the West: he embraced it, as he embraced


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any part o the world, as the arena o action or any person endowedwith a moral conscience, but he was justly suspicious o the view that all

our universalisms are to be derived rom the West.

University of CaliforniaLos Angeles

NOTES

1 According to the teaching o Mahomed, Gandhi was to write o the civilization omodern Europe in 1909, this would be considered a Satanic Civilization, The CollectedWorks of Mahatma Gandhi(New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry o Inormation andBroadcasting, Government o India, 1958), 10:261. He armed again in 1920, It is myrm opinion that Europe today represents not the spirit o God or Christianity but thespirit o Satan. . . . The last War however has shown, as nothing else has, the Satanic natureo the civilization that dominates Europe today. Every canon o public morality has beenbroken by the victors in the name o virtue (ibid., 21:241). (Hereater, The Collected Worksof Mahatma Gandhiwill be cited as CWollowed by volume and page number; the entireset is available online in PDF ormat at http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html).2 E. F. Schumacher has described, in his book Good Work(New York: Harper Perennial,1979), seeing a lm with documentary ootage o Gandhi in Britain where the question wasposed to himexcept that Gandhi was asked, What do you think o modern civilization?Schumacher suggests that the correction to the received version makes or a more orceulargument, but I am not certain that I am inclined to agree with him. Gandhis views onmodern civilization are well known and leave little room or ambiguity; but he had, asmy paper seeks to establish, a much more ambivalent relationship with the West. My view,moreover, is neatly summed up in the punch line in John Fords classic Western, The ManWho Shot Liberty Valance, When the legend becomes act, print the legend. Leela Gandhi,

while accepting the version proposed by Schumacher, reers to the story as journalisticlegend. See Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction(Delhi: Oxord IndiaPaperbacks, 1999), 22.3 Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (1969; New York: Smithmark,1995), 416. Gandhi and the workers in Lancashire may have had altogether dierentexpectations: i Gandhi attempted to elicit their sympathies or the struggle or reedomrom British rule, they may have labored under the impression that a meeting with Gan-dhi would help in restoring the trade. The euphoria o that visit, one might well argue,did not last long; as the Darwen Newseditorialized on October 3, 1931, Mr. Gandhi hasseen Lancashire, and Lancashire has seen Mr. Gandhi, and there is the end o it (p. 4).The matter is still more complex, and Gandhi recognized what many in the mills ailedto acknowledge: the machinery in use in Englands mills was shockingly outdated and thetextile mills o western India were, by comparison, models o good management.4 Joseph Kuper, Gandhi and the Virtue o Care, Hypatia22, no. 3 (2007): 1-21.5 When, or example, Gandhi visited the writer Romain Rolland in Switzerland in 1931,nudists, peasants, crazies, and vegetarians were among those who brought milk to the Kingo India. See David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003), 133.6 Mahatma Gandhi, Food Faddists, Young India, June 13, 1929, in CWMG46:105.7 John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples History of the British Empire(London:Bookmarks, 2006).8 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nio Famines and the Making of the Third World(London: Verso, 2002).


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9 Satyagraha, a term coined by Gandhi, is derived rom satya(truth) and agraha(orce).It is most commonly rendered in English as truth-orce, or soul-orce, neither o whichare perhaps the most elicitous expressions. Gandhi sought to distinguish the nonviolent

resistance that he came to embrace rom passive resistance. He elaborates upon the distinc-tion in Satyagraha v. Passive Resistance, chapter 13 oSatyagraha in South Africa(1928;

Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1972), 103-7.10 See Gilbert Murray, The Soul as It Is, and How to Deal with It Hibbert Journal16, no.2 (Jan. 1918): 201, cited by Raghavan N. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of MahatmaGandhi(New York: Oxord Univ. Press, 1973), 126.11 Cited by Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making ofModern India(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. o Caliornia Press, 1961), 291-92.12 The man on the spot is a widespread but little explored trope o imperialist gover-nance: it was the rejoinder issued by colonial ocials to their armchair superiors in London

when they were reprimanded or harsh or injudicious conduct towards the natives.13 George Orwell, Refections on Gandhi (1949), in Collected Essays, Journalism and Let-

ters of George Orwell, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,1970), 523-31.14 Reginald Reynolds, A Quest for Gandhi(New York: Doubleday, 1952), 88 n.1.15 John Haynes Holmes, The World Signicance o Mahatma Gandhi (1922), in JohnHaynes Holmes and Donald S. Harrington, The Enduring Greatness of Gandhi: An American

Estimate(Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1982), 48.16 The correspondence between Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach, a German architect

who became one o Gandhis nancial patrons, is uniquely captured in Gandhi Letters:From Upper House to Lower House, 1906-1914, ed. Gillian

Documents

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