Mahatma Gandhi

A Nonviolent Perspective on Peace

Ramin Jahanbegloo

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000223170
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Imperialism

This book maps the genesis and development of Gandhi's idea of non-violence. It traces the evolution of the message of peace from its first expressions in South Africa to Gandhi's later campaigns against British rule in India, most prominently the Salt March campaign of 1930. It argues that Gandhi's blueprint for change must be adopted in the present, as the world craters on the precipice of catastrophic climate change, and the threat of nuclear war hangs over our heads.

A timely book for uncertain times, this work is a reminder of the value of peace in the 21st century. It will be of great interest to readers, scholars and researchers of peace and conflict studies, politics, philosophy, history and South Asian studies.

1
INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF GANDHI’S PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE

Gandhi certainly deserves our recognition as an exceptional peacemaker, but if anything his idea of peace was far more complex than is generally thought and quite different from that of writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, though he was inspired and influenced by all three of these thinkers. In his autobiography, Gandhi mentions, “Three modern men have left a deep impression on my life, and captivated me: Raychandbhai by his living contact; Tolstoy by his book, The Kingdom of God is Within You; and Ruskin by his Unto This Last.”¹ Among the three Western thinkers, Tolstoy certainly had the greatest influence on Gandhi. Gandhi came to know Tolstoy through a pamphlet written by him called Letter to a Hindu. This pamphlet was written by Tolstoy in reply to Tarak Nat Das, the editor of Free Hindustan. Das had asked Tolstoy’s opinion on the use of force and terrorism against the British, who held the Indians in subjugation. Tolstoy’s response was quite the opposite. “If the English have enslaved the people of India,” he wrote,

it is just because the latter recognized, and still recognize, force as the fundamental principle of the social order. In the name of this principle they submitted to their title Tsars, the Princes, in the name of it they struggled with each other, fought with Europeans, with the English, and at present, are preparing to struggle with them again.²

For Tolstoy, the reason the Indians had accepted British violence was that they themselves had lived with the law of violence and failed to assume the law of love. But

if man only lives in accord with the law of love which includes non-resistance, and does not participate in any form of violence, not only will hundreds not enslave millions, but even millions will be unable to enslave one individual. Do not resist evil, but also do not participate in evil yourselves.³

Gandhi knew Tolstoy before corresponding with him about the Letter to a Hindu. He had read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) and was impressed by it. Also in a biographical sketch of Tolstoy, he wrote:

It is believed that, in the western world at any rate, there is no man so talented, learned and as ascetic as Count Tolstoy. . . . himself a Russian nobleman, and has, in his youth, rendered very good service . . . in the Crimean War. . . . He gave up his wealth and . . . lived like a peasant. . . . He believes that . . . men should not accumulate wealth; no matter how much evil a person does to us, we should always do good to him . . .; agriculture is the true occupation of man. . . . Such is the power of his goodness and godly living that millions of peasants are ever ready to carry out his wish no sooner than it is spoken.⁴

Gandhi’s first contact with Tolstoy was in the form of a letter that he wrote to him on October 1, 1909, asking permission to publish and distribute 20,000 copies of the Letter to a Hindu. In his reply to Gandhi, Tolstoy wrote:

I have just received your most interesting letter, which has given me great pleasure. May God help all our dear brothers and co-workers in Transvaal. The struggle of the gentle against the harsh, of humility and love against conceit and violence, is making itself more and more among us also.⁵

With his second letter to Tolstoy on November 10, 1909, Gandhi enclosed a copy of his biography written by Rev. J.J. Doke titled M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa.

The exchange of letters between Gandhi and Tolstoy went on until Tolstoy’s death in 1910. As a result, Tolstoy’s writings created a profound change in Gandhi’s thoughts on peace and nonviolence. Even one can say with certitude that Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj was written in 1909 under the spell of Tolstoy. He sent a copy to Tolstoy on April 4, 1910. Two weeks after receiving the book, Tolstoy noted in his diary:

This morning two Japanese arrived. Wild men in ecstasy over European civilization. On the other hand, the book and the letter of the Hindu reveal an understanding of all the shortcomings of European civilization and even its total inadequacy.⁶

Few months later before his death, Tolstoy wrote his last letter to Gandhi, which was translated into English by Vladimir Chertkov. In this final letter Tolstoy expressed his despair regarding modern civilization while asking Gandhi to continue promoting his message of universal love. Tolstoy wrote:

The longer I live, and especially now, when I vividly feel the nearness of death, I want to tell others what I feel so particularly clearly and what to my mind is of great importance, namely that which is called “passive resistance”. But which is in reality nothing else than the teaching of love uncorrupted by false interpretations. That love, which is the striving for the union of human souls and the activity derived from it, is the highest and only law of human life; and in the depth of his soul every human being – as we most clearly see in children – feels and knows this; he knows this until he is entangled by the false teachings of the world. . . . Therefore, your activity in the Transvaal, as it seems to us, at this end of the world, is the most important of all the work now being done in the world, wherein not only the nations of the Christian, but of all the world, will unavoidably take part.⁷

From Tolstoy, Gandhi borrowed arguments in favour of his Satyagraha in South Africa and later in India in particular and in the direction of his philosophy of peace and nonviolence in general. As such, Gandhi equated love and nonviolence. In his model of peace, love and nonviolence had a mutually interacting and reinforcing relation. That is why in Gandhi’s philosophy of peace, disobeying unjust laws came hand in hand with the love of the Other. In other words, Gandhi did not consider civil disobedience only as an assertion of one’s rights but also as an act of love. As Vinit Haksar observes,

Gandhi has an important insight, namely, that when we suffer by non-cooperation and civil disobedience (or by fasting) for our rights the oppressor is less likely to be impressed with our suffering than when we suffer (by undertaking noncooperation and civil disobedience or fasting) out of altruism or out of love for the opponent.⁸

This is the point of intersection between Tolstoy’s idea of love and H.D. Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience. Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay for the first time during his jail term. Interestingly, Thoreau himself was not unfamiliar with the Indian culture, since he had been a reader of the Baghavad-Gita and the Uppanishads. But the discovering of his essay by Mahatma Gandhi gave a new birth to his idea of disobedience in India and beyond. However, Gandhi did not get the idea of Satyagraha from Thoreau, but he was deeply influenced by him on approaching the idea of individual resistance against injustice. As a matter of fact,

the noted American reporter, Webb Miller, a long-time admirer of Thoreau asked Gandhi in 1931 while the Mahatma was in London for the Round-Table conference, if he had ever read Henry D. Thoreau; “Why, of course, I read Thoreau” replied Gandhi. “I read Walden first in Johannsburg in South Africa in 1906, and his ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian independence…There is no doubt that Thoreau’s ideas greatly influenced my movement in India.”⁹

In Thoreau’s essay, Gandhi found the philosophical confirmation of an idea that he already had: that the individual had to turn to his/her moral conscience as the last resort for truth-seeking. The essence of Thoreau’s “disobedience,” which he distinguishes from mere lawlessness,

is contained in the word civil – a word of many and varied connotations. First of all, civil is an adjective relating to the responsibilities of the citizen, and the whole justification for Civil Disobedience lies in the idea that the man who practices it fulfills his responsibilities by demonstrating in action his disapproval of an evil law or social situation which ordinary democratic procedures will not eliminate.¹⁰

For Thoreau what is important in making peace with oneself and with the world is the appeal to inner sense of the moral law, which invokes the idea of responsibility towards oneself and towards the Other. In this sense, what Thoreau suggests is that to transform the world, one needs to transform oneself. Thoreau, therefore, underlines the right of conscience as a form of nonviolent resistance against injustice and untruth. According to Anthony Parel, after reading Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, Gandhi extracted four principal ideas.

The first concerns the moral foundation of government and the state. To be strictly just, government must have the sanction of the governed. The second idea concerns the relationship of the individual to the state. In some respects, the individual is subject to the power of the state, but in some other respects, he or she is independent of it. Gandhi agreed with Thoreau that there would never be a truly free and enlightened state until the state recognized the individual as the higher and independent power from which all of its own power and authority are derived and treated him or her accordingly…..The third idea concerned the need to limit government’s power over the citizen. “That government is best which governs least” is the famous motto of Thoreau that Gandhi adopted as his own….The fourth idea was that the duty to disobey an unjust law requires prompt, concrete action….Thoreau’s famous dictum that under a government that imprisons any person unjustly, “the true place for a just man is also a prison”, went straight to Gandhi’s heart.¹¹

Thus, for Gandhi, the foundation of world peace was inscribed in two major principles: love of the Other, which he got from Tolstoy, and the Thoreauvian principle of search for Truth speaking from within. As Thoreau said, “It is by obeying the suggestions of a higher light within you that you escape from yourself and …travel totally new paths.”¹²

John Ruskin was yet another source of inspiration for Gandhi’s philosophy of peace. He translated Ruskin’s Unto This Last under the title Sarvodaya, which is translated as “Welfare for All.” Ruskin’s anti-utilitarian and solidaritic critique of modern liberal self-interest made him realize that the progress of human civilization is to be measured in the scale of ethical conduct and not materialism. As the result of his reading of John Ruskin, Gandhi defined true civilization in his seminal work, Hind Swaraj, as follows:

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means “good conduct.”¹³

At the time of writing Hind Swaraj, Gandhi was already deeply committed to the idea of peace, which was closely related to his ideal Swaraj. Gandhi, therefore, considers peace as a continuous civilizing process, which deals with self-transformation and creating an empathetic climate for conflict resolution. His strategy of replacing the great happiness of the great number by mutual accommodation of the “self” and the “other” leads to reconciliation, harmonic exchange, cooperation among individuals and nations and finally world peace. Gandhi insisted on a vital element of respect for the “otherness of the Other,” which we can find in the thoughts of Ruskin, Thoreau and Tolstoy. From Ruskin, Gandhi learnt three lessons:

That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. That a lawyer’s work has the same value as the barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gandhi as a peacemaker
• 1 Intellectual origins of Gandhi’s philosophy of peace
• 2 The three pillars of Gandhian perspective on peace
• 3 Gandhian pedagogy for peace
• 4 Gandhi and the struggle for peace
• Conclusion: Gandhi and the future of peace
• Bibliography