Social and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi

Bidyut Chakrabarty

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134235728
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sozialwissenschaften
• Thema: Soziologie

During his campaign against racism in South Africa, and his involvement in the Congress-led nationalist struggle against British colonial rule in India, Mahatma Gandhi developed a new form of political struggle based on the idea of satyagraha, or non-violent protest. He ushered in a new era of nationalism in India by articulating the nationalist protest in the language of non-violence, or ahisma, that galvanized the masses into action.

Focusing on the principles of satyagraha and non-violence, and their evolution in the context of anti-imperial movements organized by Gandhi, this fascinating book looks at how these precepts underwent changes reflecting the ideological beliefs of the participants. Assessing Gandhi and his ideology, the text centres on the ways in which Gandhi took into account the views of other leading personalities of the era whilst articulating his theory of action.

Concentrating on Gandhi's writings in Harijan, the weekly newspaper he founded, this volume provides a unique contextualized study of an iconic man's social and political ideas.

1Gandhi
The idea of swaraj

In the context of India’s freedom struggle, swaraj is both an ideal and a principle. As an ideal, it set the ideological tenor of a struggle against the British; as a principle, it provided the nationalists with a blueprint for an independent India. Swaraj was never conceptualized in its narrow meaning of ‘political independence’ instead, its wider connotation was constantly hammered out to highlight that it was qualitatively different from mere political independence. Given its Indian roots, swaraj was always preferred presumably because of its semantic familiarity among the participants in probably the most gigantic freedom struggle in the twentieth century. It was therefore easier for the nationalists to mobilize the masses despite the adverse consequences. So the importance of swaraj as an ideology stems from the fact that, not only did it bring together disparate masses politically, it also contributed to a worldview with an organic link to the Indian psyche. In other words, apart from its significance in political mobilization, swaraj also sought to articulate a whole range of moral issues, integrally linked with India’s freedom struggle, a struggle that was also unique both in its ideological character and articulation. So, it would be wrong to designate swaraj as a mere political mechanism that articulated the nationalist protest most effectively. Instead, it was also a device that sought to radically alter human nature by emphasizing its moral dimensions. Underlying this remains the distinctiveness of swaraj also instrumentalized by the nationalists during the course of the anti-British campaign in India. Swaraj is thus a history of the nationalist struggle with a clear impact on what the nation later became and also the language in which the nationalist protest was articulated. Politically meaningful and socially rejuvenating, swaraj was a unique experiment that stood out as a philosophical concept with a clear practical application. Although the role of the nationalist leadership was significant in conceptualizing swaraj, the context in which the idea gained ground was nonetheless important in its articulation. The aim of this chapter is therefore twofold: a) to identify the distinctive features of swaraj, which was never a mere political category in the historical context of India’s freedom struggle; and b) to draw out the philosophical basis of the idea of swaraj, an idea also enmeshed in a wider search for human freedom or liberty. The Gandhian conceptualization of swaraj is illustrative of this, since it denotes not merely a system of governance but also epitomizes a quest for human freedom in its wider sense. While evolving swaraj as an integral part of the political freedom from the British rule, Gandhi drew on those nationalists who defined the concept contextually even before his arrival on the political scene. It would therefore be inappropriate to concentrate exclusively on Gandhi while dealing with this fundamental pillar of colonial nationalist thought since the Gandhian conceptualization also dwells on what was available then. This chapter has been structured accordingly. Simultaneously with focus on the context, the chapter also deals with those relevant conceptual issues organically linked with the conceptualization of swaraj and its articulation in an empirical context, namely, India’s freedom struggle; the other significant part of this chapter relates to those implicit ideas that appear to have influenced, if not shaped, the articulation of the idea of swaraj, underlining its wider connotation. In other words, in order to identify the complex and varied roots of Gandhian swaraj, the chapter pays attention to the historical context and also to the evolution of the idea of swaraj during the long history of the nationalist confrontation with the British.

The perspective

First of all, the conceptualization of swaraj needs to be contextualized in the larger social processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The two most obvious influences are nationalism and democratization. In the context of the first, the question that deserves careful attention is why the idea of swaraj gained ground. Simply put, after the late nineteenth century the claim to any form of self-government was shelved so long as it was not articulated as the claim of a nation. Colonial sovereignty in part rested upon denying that India was a nation. The nationalist project was not simply something that elites dreamt up to define others in their image, it also sought to identify and highlight the distinctive features of a population to justify its claim for nationhood. And the idea of swaraj provided the nationalists with a clearly defined socio-political economic vocabulary, meaningful for a subject nation.

The belief in an Indian nationhood as a historical fact was based on Western models. But it ‘was also an emotionally charged reply to the rulers’ allegation that India never was and never could be a nation’.¹ The construction of even a vaguely defined Indian nationhood was a daunting task simply because India lacked the basic ingredients of a conventionally conceptualized notion of nation. There was therefore a selective appeal to history to recover those elements transcending the internal schism among those who were marginalized under colonialism. Hence a concerted attempt was always made to underline ‘the unifying elements of the Indian religious traditions, medieval syncretism and the strand of tolerance and impartiality in the policies of Muslim rulers’.² So the colonial milieu was an important dimension of the processes that led to a particular way of imagining a nation in a multi-ethnic context like India, which is so different from perceptions based on Western experience. The political sensibilities of Indian nationalism ‘were deeply involved in this highly atypical act of imagining’.³

Apart from colonialism, the major factor that contributed to swaraj as a conceptual vehicle for national consciousness was the freedom movement. It is therefore no exaggeration to suggest that the Indian consciousness as we understand it today ‘crystallized during the national liberation movement’. So, national ‘is a political and not a cultural referent in India’.⁴ This perhaps led the nationalist leaders to recognize that it would be difficult to forge the multi-layered Indian society into a unified nation-state in the European sense.⁵ Accepting the basic premise about the essentially ‘invented’ nature of national identities and the importance of such factors as ‘print capitalism’ in their spread and consolidation, Partha Chatterjee challenges the very idea of ‘modular forms’, as articulated by Benedict Anderson,⁶ since this ignores the point that, if modular forms are made available, nothing is left to be imagined.⁷ It is true that the non-Western leaders involved in the struggle for liberation were deeply influenced by European nationalist ideas. They were also aware of the limitations of these ideas in the non-European socioeconomic context due to their alien origin. So, while mobilizing the imagined community for an essentially political cause, they began, by the beginning of the twentieth century, to speak in a ‘native’ vocabulary. Although they drew upon the ideas of European nationalism, they indigenized them substantially by discovering or inventing indigenous equivalents and investing these with additional meanings and nuances. This is probably the reason why Gandhi and his colleagues in the anti-British campaign in India preferred swadeshi⁸ to nationalism. Gandhi avoided the language of nationalism primarily because he was aware that the Congress flirtations with nationalist ideas in the first quarter of the twentieth century frightened away not only the Muslims and other minorities but also some of the Hindu lower castes. Focusing on swadeshi seems the most pragmatic idea one could possibly conceive of in a country like India, one which was not united in terms of religion, race, culture or common historical memories of oppression and struggle. Underlying this is the reason why Gandhi and his Congress colleagues preferred ‘the relaxed and chaotic plurality of the traditional Indian life to the order and homogeneity of the European nation state [because they realized] that the open, plural and relatively heterogeneous traditional Indian civilization would best unite Indians’.⁹ Drawing on values meaningful to the Indian masses, the Indian freedom struggle developed its own modular forms, which are characteristically different from that of the West. Although the 1947 Great Divide of the subcontinent of India was articulated in terms of religion,¹⁰ the nationalist language drawing upon the exclusivity of Islam appeared inadequate in sustaining Pakistan following the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.¹¹

The second broader context that appears to have decisively shaped the conceptualization of swaraj is democratization. What sort of ‘unity’ does democracy require? After all, it was a staple of liberal discourse that democracy could not flourish in multi-ethnic societies. The most widely quoted theorist raising doubts about the possibility of creating a liberal democratic community in a multinational, multi-linguistic state is of course John Stuart Mill. In his opinion, ‘[f]ree institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feelings, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united people opinion necessary to the working of representative institutions cannot exist.’ ¹² Apart from Jinnah and Savarkar, who deployed precisely the liberal argument about why a unitary nationhood is necessary for a modern polity, the rest of the nationalist leadership, including Gandhi, always couched their views in terms of swaraj, whereby attempts were made to avoid the possible reasons for communal tension and rivalry. Second, democracy complicates the problem of ‘representation’. What is being represented and on what terms? After all, the divisions between the Congress and Muslim League turned on issues of representation. Swaraj was an effort to articulate these complex issues, couched in both governmental and constitutional terms. This is not to suggest, however, that the state created two monolithic communities which came into being through ‘the politics of representation’, since the relationship between representation and democracy is far deeper and more complex than it is generally construed in contemporary discourses on South Asia. Swaraj is, at best, about expressing one’s agency and creating new forms of collective agency. In this sense, conceptualization of swaraj was a significant part of the democratic ferment – where a specific type of political articulation, seeking to gloss over the divisions between the communities as far as possible, took place. This process is likely to unfold at all levels with a complicated relationship between the levels.

Furthermore, democratization is both inclusive and exclusive and swaraj was a serious endeavour to articulate these complementary tendencies. Inclusive because it unleashes a process to include people, at least theoretically, regardless of class, clan and creed, it is essentially a participatory project seeking to link different layers of socio-political and economic life. As a movement, democracy thus, writes Charles Taylor, ‘obliges us to show much more solidarity and commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryears’.¹³ This is also the reason why democratization tends towards exclusion that itself is a byproduct of the need for a high degree of cohesion. Excluded are those who are different in many ways. We are introduced to a situation where swaraj sought to protect the well-formed communal identity in the context of the freedom struggle, which failed to escape the tension as a result of created or otherwise communal rivalries,¹⁴ though there had been attempts even by the revolutionaries, who were clearly biased against the Muslims on occasions, to appeal to the Muslim sentiments as well in their public statements. In June 1907, Sandhya, a powerful mouthpiece of the revolutionaries in Bengal, exhorted:

we want Swaraj for all the sons of Mother India that there are… And, for this reason, we cannot promote the interests of the Hindus at the cost of those of the Mussalmans, or the interest of Mussalmans at the cost of those of the Hindus. What we want is that Hindus and Muslims both should bring about this Swaraj in unison and concert.¹⁵

The merger of the 1919–21 Non-Cooperation Movement with the Khilafat Movement was perhaps a political manifestation of what was commonly characterized as an illustration of ‘a composite culture’. By a single stroke, both the Hindus and Muslims were brought under a single political platform, submerging at one level their distinct separate identities. At another level, this movement is a watershed in the sense that these two communities remained separate since they collaborated as separate communities for an essentially political project.¹⁶ So the politics of inclusion also led towards exclusion for the communities which identified different political agenda to mobilize people.

In the construction of swaraj as a political strategy that was relatively less controversial, both these forces of nationalism and democratization appeared to have played decisive roles. Swaraj was not merely unifying, it was also gradually expansive in the sense that it brought together apparently disparate socio-political groups in opposition to an imperial power.¹⁷ The character of the anti-British political campaign gradually underwent radical changes by involving people of various strata, regions and linguistic groups. The definition of nation also changed. No longer was the nation confined to the cities and small towns, it also consisted of innumerable villages so far peripheral to the political activiti...