Violence and Non-Violence across Time

History, Religion and Culture

Sudhir Chandra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429880926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

This book probes the complex interweaving, across time and cultures, of violence and non-violence from the perspective of the present. One of the first of its kind, it offers a comprehensive examination of the interpenetration of violence and non-violence as much in human nature as in human institutions with reference to different continents, cultures and religions over centuries. It points to the present paradox that even as violence of unprecedented lethality threatens the very survival of humankind, non-violence increasingly appears as an unlikely feasible alternative.

The essays presented here cover a wide cultural–temporal spectrum — from Vedic sacrifice, early Jewish–Christian polemics, the Crusades, and medieval Japan to contemporary times. They explore aspects of the violence–non-violence dialectic in a coherent frame of analysis across themes such as war, jihad, death, salvation, religious and philosophical traditions including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, mysticism, monism, and Neoplatonism, texts such as Ramayana, Mahabharata and Quran, as well as issues faced by Dalits and ethical imperatives for clinical trials, among others.

Offering thematic width and analytical depth to the treatment of the subject, the contributors bring their disciplinary expertise and cultural insights, ranging from the historical to sociological, theological, philosophical and metaphysical, as well as their sensitive erudition to deepening an understanding of a grave issue. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of history, peace and conflict studies, political science, political thought and cultural studies, as well as those working on issues of violence and non-violence.

1
Violence and Non-Violence Across Time

An abiding puzzle

Sudhir Chandra

I

Never has humankind needed non-violence so desperately as now, nor ever been so unready for it. This paradox was the inspiration behind the two workshops of which this volume is an upshot. To me the paradox came through my engagement with Gandhi. When freedom was round the corner after thirty years of a unique war of independence, which he and the entire world had believed was non-violent, Gandhi discovered that this had not been so. What he had led was actually mere passive resistance. And passive resistance, necessarily, is preparation for violence. Which is what had erupted in the moment of India’s freedom.

This is a disconcerting discovery, and for ordinary mortals despairing. If even Gandhi failed to make his otherwise dedicated followers true practitioners of non-violence, there is little to inspire faith in the practicability of organised collective non-violence. Maybe that is why the discovery has remained neglected. We need faith in non-violence even as we believe it to be empirically an impossible possibility.¹

But Gandhi was a man of faith. He had faith in intrinsic human goodness. It may lie buried deep within us. But sooner or later, it must respond to the self-suffering which the non-violent resister patiently undergoes for a just cause. More, he had faith in God and, which meant the same thing, in Truth. So, despite his disconcerting discovery – confirmed by the no less disconcerting confrontation with human evil in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – he retained faith in the power of non-violence.² Responding to the question if the atom bomb had not antiquated non-violence, he said categorically: ‘Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.’³

Hours before his assassination, pointedly asked how he ‘would meet the atom bomb,’ he replied: ‘I would meet it by prayerful action.’ The calm cryptic reply baffling the interviewer, she asked what form his ‘prayerful action’ would take. Gandhi elaborated: ‘I will not go underground. I will not go into shelters. I will come out in the open and let the pilot see I have not the face of evil against him.’ Here he paused, resumed for a moment his spinning, and continued:

The pilot will not see our faces from his great height, I know. But that longing in our hearts that he will not come to harm would reach up to him and his eyes would be opened. Of those thousands who were done to death in Hiroshima, if they had died with that prayerful action – died openly with that prayer in their hearts – then the war would not have ended so disgracefully as it has. It is a question now whether the victors are really victors or victims of our own lust … and omissions. Because the world is not in peace it is still more dreadful.⁴

What kind of faith is this? Let each one of us ask ourselves. Our response to it may, for better or for worse, affect the human future. What is my own response, then? Gandhi here is extraordinary. His extraordinariness is not in the warning against the unprecedented destructive potential of nuclear weaponry, not even in stressing the urgency of non-violence.⁵ Many others, too, were doing this in the wake of the Second World War, and many are doing so even now. Gandhi is extraordinary in the depth of his faith in non-violence and in the simplicity of his mode of resistance. He stands apart because of the nature of his faith, from which accrues its depth, in non-violence. He rejects as illusory the pervasive human faith in the efficacy of violence. Violence, he sees, only breeds more violence and can resolve nothing.⁶

That makes non-violence the sole viable mode of human transaction, not just a desirable alternative. The pragmatic and the ethical, if one can see, are inseparable.

Implicit in my attribution of ‘simplicity’ to Gandhi’s plan to meet the atom bomb is a complex response. Simple carries variegated connotations from egregiously naïve, even stupid, to brilliantly innovative. Disbelief – that a man could at all have thought of so meeting the atom bomb – dominated as I read with fast-changing feelings what Gandhi meant to do. Sequentially as I read on, and cumulatively as I reflected back, his ‘prayerful action’ seemed pathetic, exasperating, quixotic and heroic.

Gandhi, it is striking, is alone – a solitary ‘I’ – as he embarks on his ‘prayerful action’. But, suddenly, he is joined in by others, and he begins speaking of ‘we’. Who could be the mysterious constituents of his ‘we’? Gandhi was unafraid of being in a minority of even one. He would not have hesitated to go out to meet the atom bomb all on his own. What gave him the faith that he would not in that insane resistance be left alone? Can I imagine myself, or anyone I know, feeling driven to join that quixotic-heroic ‘we’?

No less striking is Gandhi’s matter-of-fact remark that in the kind of war that ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki there can be no victors because their needs must be ‘victims of our own lust … and omissions.’ Victims not of their own – the putative victors’ – lust and omissions – as most of us would feel tempted to say – but of ‘our own.’ Reading ‘our own lust and omissions’ I thought that Margaret Bourke-White, the interviewer, had got it wrong. But once Gandhi’s meaning revealed itself after that initial cognitive hiccup, I found myself wondering why the truth of his remark had eluded me in the first instance. I had on my own realised this very truth during a visit to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in 1997. Moving through the graphic testimony to the city’s desolation, I was struck by a photograph that showed a train-load of Japanese boy-soldiers being enthusiastically seen off as they left for the front. The museum designed to re-create the unimaginable perpetrated by the victors has this photograph that, inadvertently, implicates the victims as well.

The enthusiastic barbarity alike of the victorious Americans and the vanquished Japanese constitutes what Gandhi saw as our – humankind’s – lust and omissions. Moral philosophers and historians might quibble over it endlessly, but the question eventually is not one of the relative culpability of the victors and the victims.⁷ That culpability is indivisible.

This brings to mind a Jataka tale which Gananath Obeyesekere, the wise Sri Lankan scholar, narrates in his ‘Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay’:

A householder, on the death of his father, had a hard time continuing his father’s occupation and caring for his widowed mother. She urged him to marry so he would at least have help with the household chores. At first he refused but finally

agreed. Unfortunately the wife proved to be barren; so the mother nagged him to get another wife. The barren wife felt that he would eventually yield to his mother’s request and also felt a second wife of his mother’s choice might undermine her position in the household. She therefore decided to pick a second wife for her husband herself and keep the woman as her subordinate. This she did but lest the second wife bear a child and thereby pose a threat, she pretended friendship and asked to be told when the second wife conceived.

The woman did so and the barren wife secretly introduced dangerous medicines into the food she prepared for her cowife and this caused a miscarriage. She conceived again, and again the barren wife caused the foetus to be aborted. The cowife was now warned by the neighbours and took precautions not to tell her rival about the third pregnancy. But the barren wife found out and administered a poison during the labour. The child lodged horizontally in the womb as a result and both mother and child died during the labour. Before she died the cowife swore vengeance, to be born as an ogress and devour her rival’s children in a future birth.

So in the next birth the cowife was born as a cat and the barren wife as a hen. When the hen laid her eggs, three times in succession the cat ate them up. The hen then vowed revenge and was born as a tigress while the cat was born as a deer. Three times the tigress ate the deer’s offspring and so in turn the deer vowed revenge. The tigress was born as a daughter in a noble family in Savatthi. She married and bore a child. The deer was reborn as a demoness who, taking the guise of a friend, came and devoured the child. A second child was eaten in the same way. On the third pregnancy the woman fearing a repetition went to her parents’ home to deliver the child. Meanwhile, the demoness was doing her duties in the demon world. The noblewoman had her child. However, as she was returning home, she happened to pass by the monastery where the Buddha resided and stopped to take a bath in a nearby pond. Just then the demoness who had completed her labours in the demon world saw the woman and child and pursued them. The woman picked up the child and rushed into the temple, fell at the feet of the Buddha and begged protection for her child that was about to be devoured by the demoness. The demoness, unable to enter the temple, was

lurking outside. The Buddha invited her in. He preached a sermon to the ogress that expressed the ethics of the Dhammapada. “Hatred that burns on the fuel of justifications must be quenched by the water of compassion, not fed with the firewood of reasons and causes.” He then asked the woman to give her child to the demoness to hold. The woman was terrified but the Buddha calmed her fears. The demoness hugged and caressed the child and began to weep. The Buddha then instructed the noblewoman to “take this demoness to your home and without fear keep her there. Give her the first servings of whatever you cook and look after her well.”⁸

In a mere four births – generations – the vicious cycle of revenge ends harmonically. That happens, pivotally, because of the Buddha’s intervention. Wising up the two antagonists – and humanity – to the inexorable spiral of violence and counter-violence, he shows them a – the only – way out. They are, as a result, transformed immediately and, we are expected to believe, for good. But that happens only in the parable. Real life is different. Individual transformations apart, including an isolated freak like Emperor Ashok, human interaction remains as fractious as before.

The best that can happen in real life is better reflected in the partial and transient transformations effected by Gandhi. Thousands of women and men could for a while feel a few centimetres taller than they actually were as they came under his influence. Then their lives lapsed back into the normal, more or less. There were the likes of Nkrumah who, having sworn by Gandhi during the anti-imperialist struggle, settled comfortably into a violent dictatorial mould. And, much better, there were the likes of Nehru, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, even who, for all their achievements, could not be exemplar followers of the Master.

In real life, unending cycles of revenge and return-revenge are played out until their origins are irrevocably lost. Lost or not, origins are invariably thrust upon the opponent. Irrespective of whether the origins are recent or ancient, known or unknown, the only way out of the vicious cycle is the one humankind has long known and persistently neglected. That venerable way was in our own day shown by Gandhi. Lamenting that his country’s fratricidal Hindus and Muslims had become animals, he said, ‘That one of the two should cease to be animal is the only way out.’⁹

The message is clear. It admits of no exception, no equivocation, no sophistry, no metaphysical jugglery, and no negation of the kind that, as many chapters in this volume testify, humans have avidly perfected across cultures. Little analysis is needed to show how every level of human existence is infused with violence. Analysis, though, may help unravel the rhetorical and institutional cunning that, in familiar and ever-new ways, so camouflages and legitimises violence as to render it natural, acceptable, invisible, even obligatory. In this act of unravelling, analysis is pitted against heavy odds, always struggling to catch up with organised cunning.

How else would one understand – let alone explain – a phenomenon like imperialism continuing to be in varying degree accepted not just by the erstwhile colonisers but also by the decolonised? Or the continuing legitimacy of organised religions despite the brutal violence that went into their expansion and helps sustain them? Or the absence of consensus about condemning the violence without which the iniquity of the hereditary Indian caste system could not have been possible? Or the quiet neglect of the naked and legitimised violence by means of which large populations of have-nots are, along with Nature, systematically and routinely crushed in the name of ever-greater material development required for meeting the ever-spiralling ‘basic’ human needs? Or the triumphal tyranny of the global market which, as Roger Jeffery’s contribution to this volume shows, makes even medicine, arguably among the most beneficent applications of science, as rapacious as the arms industry? The litany of ceaseless human violence against the self, against fellow humans and against Nature is endless.

Humankind, to venture a generalisation, has over many millennia lived by a paradoxical imperative. It has needed violence and inter-nalised, institutionalised and valorised it. It has also, at the same time, so fashioned itself as to cherish core values – believing them to be eternal and universal – like love, compassion and forgiveness that compel avoidance of violence.

Given this paradoxical imperative, there must always be space for legitimate violence.¹⁰ However, given that there is inherent in it a spirit of necessary and desirable limits, the idea of legitimate violence is not the problem. The problem is the non-observance of that spirit. Rather than being reined in by that spirit, humankind has been perennially fecund in devising ways to disregard it and resort to violence at will and has done so with astonishing freedom from guilt, indeed with aggressive self-righteousness. These ways have ranged from negating or invisibilising one’s own violence to projecting, indeed believing, it to be just, noble and obligatory.

Intellect and conscience – the very bedrock of human progress – are the two unlikely instruments that have made possible this fecundity. Responsible as much for the best in human character and civilisation as for the worst, both the instruments have been deceptively, and frighteningly, double-edged. The Mahabharata, an archetypal report on human nature unbelied by time, demonstrates this in a human drama that has since recurred with unrelieved regularity in infinite varia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Violence and non-violence across time: an abiding puzzle
• 2 The negation of violence in the Vedic sacrifice
• 3 Is violence intrinsic to religious confrontation?: the case of Judeo-Christian controversy, second to seventeenth centuries
• 4 What inspires non-violence and violence in Islam?: some religious and historical factors
• 5 Buddhism and ‘violence’: reading the medieval war chronicle The Tales of Heike
• 6 Between military strength and non-violence: experience and symbolic use of elephants in European cultures
• 7 Violence in the philosophy of Saint-Simon
• 8 Non-violence, identity, sympathy: a meditation
• 9 Some unfashionable observations on non-violence
• 10 Being the object of others: social distancing and non-violence: the conditionalities of Dalits and slums
• 11 Representations of violence and non-violence in Palestinian society
• 12 War against disease without violence to clinical trial participants?
• 13 Being truthful to ‘reality’: grounds of non-violence in ascetic and mystical traditions