ania loomba — "the violence of gandhi's non-violence"

8/10/2019 Ania Loomba "The Violence of Gandhi's Non-Violence"

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ANIA LOOMBA

Summer 2014, Volume 41, Number 1

THE VIOLENCE

OF GANDHISNON-VIOLENCE

In 2013, as part of a series on the subject of Violence organisedby the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania,I was asked to deliver a lecture on Gandhi on 2 October, his 144th

birth anniversary. I suppose the idea was to take a look at violencefrom the perspective on non-violence. Indeed, in an increasinglymilitarised world, non-violence seems urgently necessary, if alsohopelessly romantic. In the preceding decade, as the United

States wrecked havoc in several parts of the world in the name ofrevenge, the truth of Gandhis remark, an eye for an eye makes thewhole world go blind seems only too evident. But it also seemsincreasingly difcult to insert Gandhis vocabulary into the worldof contemporary politics, in which protests both proliferate and aremarginalised, appropriated and dismantled by ever more powerfulcorporate and state systems. Popular culture, state machinery andestablishment scholarship have collectively entrenched the imageof Gandhi as a saint, and effective because a saint, and this makes

our task even harder. There is no shortage of nuanced critiquesof Gandhi, but these are largely marginalised, as Perry Anderson(2012) has recently alleged, or considered as bad form. Gandhismhas become a religion, which means that its mantra of non-violenceis most passionately invoked by those least committed to it.

I do not wish to discount the very real and very transformatorypowers of Gandhis example, manifest in social and politicalmovements from the South African anti-apartheid struggle and theCivil Rights Movement in the United States, to the Cesar Chavez-ledUnited Farm Workers agitation, Occupy Wall Street and the NarmadaBachao Andolan. Many of these movements adapted his methods


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while others moved away from them, and it is often these departures,rather than the pious invocations, that manifest the most powerful

attempts to engage with Gandhi. The legacies of Gandhi are myriadand complex, and any account of him is bound to be contentious.His collected works run into almost a hundred volumes, and thereare over 400 biographies of him. As one commentator put it, helived till 79 and was rarely silent. So it is hardly surprising that hecontradicted himself, often self-consciously, writing that my aim is not[to] be consistent with my previous statements but with truth as it maypresent itself to me at a given momentsince I am called Great SoulI might as well endorse Emersons saying that foolish consistency isthe hobgoblin of little minds (Anderson, 2012: 30). In my lecture,upon which this small essay is based, I decided to offer a very personalapproach to Gandhis legacies in order to think about the various formsof non-violence, some invoked by him and others that he resolutelyturned his back on, as well as the many forms of violence, again someembraced by Gandhi and others disavowed by him.

There is a telling scene in Richard Attenboroughs hagiographiclm Gandhi. Although, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, this lm gives

the impression that all one had to do to achieve Indian independencewas lie down in front of the oppressor, this particular scene allows usto think about Gandhis tactics (Rushdie, 1991). 1 The leaders of theIndian National Congress, including Mohammad Jinnah, Sardar Pateland Jawaharlal Nehru, are conferring with Gandhi in Delhi abouttheir next move against the British authorities. Gandhi makes it clearthat he has never advocated passive anything, and that he wantsan active and provocative resistance. He understands that a day ofprayer and fasting is in effect a general strike. But it is crucial for him

that it not be called a strike, even though a strike is also a non-violentaction. Gandhi had a checkered engagement with strikes; he once ledthem in South Africa and later fasted in support of striking Indianmill workers, but becoming increasingly close to big capitalists, hepronounced that India had no place for political strikes. The scenereminds us that the vocabularies Gandhi developed were as cannilypolitical as they appeared to be high-minded, indeed they werecannily political becausethey sounded the way they did, seeminglyeschewing the political.

But Gandhi himself insisted that non-violence was not astrategy, but an absolute moral position. He writes that since we


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have control over the means and not the end, means are after alleverything. This rhetoric is repeated by the hagiography of much

Gandhi scholarship. Thus Akeel Bilgrami, a philosopher at ColumbiaUniversity, writes:

Violence has many sides. It can be spontaneous or planned, it canbe individual or institutional, it can be physical or psychological, itcan be delinquent or adult, it can be revolutionary or authoritarian.

A great deal has been written on violence: on its psychology, on itspossible philosophical justications under certain circumstances, andof course on its long career in military history. Non-violence has nosides at all. Being negatively dened, it is indivisible(2003: 4159).

On the contrary, I shall argue that non-violence is not indivisibleand it should not be negatively dened; it too ranges over a widepolitical spectrum. Moreover, it is precisely the Gandhian history ofnon-violence that has made it impossible to simply counter-pose itto violence. Indeed, Gandhi himself acknowledges this, repeatedlyconfessing his dilemna: God alone knows what is himsa (violence)

and what is ahimsa (non-violence) and at other times evensuggesting that all killing is not himsa (violence), and that one whohas lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing; in other wordsone must have the capacity for violence in order for its renunciationto have any meaning (Gandhi, 1999: vol. 79, 173).

The philosophy and practice of satyagraha embody thiscomplexity. This is a phrase which Gandhi coined, rejecting hisown earlier term passive resistance which, he says, gave rise toconfusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to

be known only by an English name. . . . Truth (satya) implies love,and rmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonymfor force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, thatis to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence(ibid.: vol. 34, 93). The term was, in fact, not widely adoptedoutside India, and passive resistance and non-violence becamemore popular. Both of these do not register the force that the termsatyagraha includes, a force that has two components; the rst is, ofcourse, the sheer physical courage involved in satyagraha.

In high school, I, like so many Indians of my generation,read Jawaharlal Nehrus description of his rst experience of a police


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beating with a baton or a lathi in 1928. Such a beating had recentlykilled the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai. Nehru describes how he

had to ght hard against his instinct to shelter. Afterwards, he feltexhilarated, and felt he had come out morally clear-headed and evensuperior. But the next day there was a harder attack by mountedpolice; the protestors received

a tremendous hammering, and the clearness of vision that I had hadthe evening before left me. All I knew was that I had to stay whereI was and must not yield or go back. I felt half blinded with theblows, and sometimes a dull anger seized me and a desire to hitout. I thought how easy it would be to pull down the police ofcerin front of me from his horse and to mount up myself, but longtraining and discipline held, and I did not raise a hand, except toprotect my face from a blow (Nehru, 1941: 137).

Nehrus descriptions of police brutality strengthened his belief thatIn spite of its negative name it [ahimsa] was a dynamic method, thevery opposite of a meek submission to a tyrants will. It was not a

cowards refuge from action, but the brave mans deance of evil andnational subjection (ibid.: 80). And yet, he writes that

the memory that endures with me, far more than that of the beatingitself, is that of many of the faces of those policemen, and especiallyof the ofcers, who were attacking us, full of hate and blood-lust, almost mad, with no trace of sympathy or touch of humanity!Probably the faces on our side just then were equally hateful to lookat, and the fact that we were mostly passive did not ll our minds

and hearts with love for our opponents, or add to the beauty of ourcountenances (ibid.: 138).

Contrary to Gandhis exhortations, Nehru confesses, none of thesatyagrahis had been able to rid themselves of their hatred for theiradversaries.

But, of course, this was the second injunction to asatyagrahithe removal of hatred and the embracing of onesoppressor, flouted by many of those who later appropriatedGandhi. This also baffled many of his followers. There is thefamous incident at Chauri Chaura, the place where 23 policemen


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were burnt to death by an angry mob in February 1922, leadingMahatma Gandhi to suspend the struggle against the British.

Everyone remembers Gandhis responsehe called off thestruggle and went on a fast to atone for the violence. What hasbeen forgotten are the rioting peasants, perceived as criminals byboth nationalists and imperialists. As the historian Shahid Aminputs it in a memorable book, the event itself became the greatunremembered episode of modern Indian history, reduced tonothing but metaphor for all manner of untrammelled peasantviolence, specically in opposition to disciplined non-violent masssatyagrahas (1995: 3). Amin asks us to re-examine the ideologiesand cultures of the peasants who made Gandhi into a Mahatmaand yet were far from being represented by him, and also, to thinkabout the costs of Gandhis non-violence.

This rethinking is also provoked by Raja Raos 1937 novelKanthapura, a powerful and prescient account of Gandhism. Raodescribes how a young man called Moorthy brings the Gandhianmovement to a tiny village in south India. His rst and most activefollowers are the village women who have previously never left their

homes. They are also the most radical, and Moorthy has a hard timeteaching them Gandhian ways. When the local policeman BadeKhan starts beating up Moorthy the women cry out:

At him! And they all fall upon Bade Khan and tearing away the lathi,bang it on his head. And the maistri comes to pull them off andwhips them, and women fall on the maistri and tear his hair, whileMoorthy cries out, No beatings, sisters. No beatings, in the name ofthe Mahatma. But the women are erce and they will tear the beard

from Bade Khans face (Rao, 1963: 59).

The next day, Moorthy, just like Gandhi, goes on a fast to atone forthis violence. The women are puzzled at his insistence that theymust love Bade Khan.

Rangamma did not understand this, neither, to tell you the truth,did any of us. We would do harm to no living creature. But to loveBade Khanno, that was another thing. We would not insult him.

We would not hate him. But we could not love him. How could we?He was not my uncles son, was he? And even if he were


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Gandhi claimed the force of moral right in a way his followersoften could not. Gandhi had few self-doubts about this question:

it has been my experience that I am always true from my pointof view. He goes on to say that therefore his opponents canalso claim a right to truth, and that is the reason not to hate butto transform them. But as Kanthapura reminds us, there werematerial reasons why this was not possible for his followers. Ina remarkable passage, as the women train themselves for the nextconfrontation,

Rangamma would say, Now if the police should fall on you, youmust stand without moving a hair, and we would feel a shiver rundown our backs, and we would say, No, sister, that is too difcult,and Rangamma would say, No, sister, that is not difcult. Does notthe Gita say, the sword can split asunder the body, but never thesoul?... And one day Nanjamma came and said, Sisters, last nightI dreamt my husband was beating me and beating me, and I wascrying and my bangles broke and I was saying, Oh, why does hebeat men with a stick and not with his hands? and then when I saw

him again, it was no more my husband, it was Bade Khan, andI gave such a shriek that my husband woke me up (ibid.: 107).

Later, precisely this conation of the domestic and political becomespart of their training method:

. . . and we stand straight and hold our hands against our breasts,and Rangamma says, Now, imagine the policemen are beating you,and you shall not budge a ngers length, and we close our eyes

and we imagine Bade Khan after Bade Khan, short, bearded, lip-smacking, smoking, spitting, booted Bade Khan, and as we beginto imagine them, we see them rise and become bigger and biggerin the sunshine, and we feel the lathis bang on us, and the banglesbreak and the hair tear and the lips split, and we say, nay, nay, andwe cannot bear it, and Dores wife Sundri begins to cry out and sheis frightened; but Ratna, who is by her, says, Be strong, sister, Whenyour husband beats you, you do not hit back, do you? You onlygrumble and weep. The policemans beatings are the like! and wesay, So they are. And we begin to get more and more familiar withit (ibid.: 122).


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On the one hand, the analogy between the local police and thehusband allows the women to resist the former, precisely because

satyagraha has to take the form of submission. But while Gandhihimself was to proclaim that such physical submission did notimply a moral capitulation, the womens resistance to the police isrehearsed through their acceptance of domestic violence, on keepingthe domestic hierarchy secure. Indeed, this is the paradox of Gandhismethodone must simultaneously resist the law and submit to it.Both in the novel, and in the Gandhian movement, women wereenjoined not to neglect domestic duties, not to question the familialhierarchy as they ventured into the larger world. In reality, of course,women did breach established boundaries as they began to participatein political life in unprecedented numbers. They did attempt to recastdomestic relations, did transgress into previously unacceptable spaces,but arguably, this they did in spite of Gandhi, not because of him. 2

Gandhi himself used a strikingly gendered and violent imageto explain the moral truth of satyagraha: the ideal satyagrahi is thetwentieth century Sati. In this image, non-violent political dissent iscompared to the immolation of a Hindu widow, a Brahmanical rite

that was outlawed by the British, and that many Hindu reformersalso sought to eradicate. It is a curious image. Since there is nothingthat is resisted by the action of a widow who kills herself, nodominant order that is questioned, no authority whose rights arequestioned, what does Gandhis imagery draw upon, and what doesit result in? It certainly references the immense physical courage andpain that the widow must endure. But it also draws upon the ideathat the widow possesses sat or the truth. In doing so it suggeststhat this pain is voluntarily undertaken by the widow, and is an act

of moral courage. As Indian feminists have argued at great length,widow immolation is better seen as a submissionoften coercedto an intensely patriarchal, and intensely violent social order, but itssupporters, till today, still repeat the notion of a satis courage andmorality, and indeed accuse their opponents of being un-Indian,

Westernised, and out of touch with tradition. 3

Gandhis pronouncements on sexual violence against womenrehearsed the logic of this earlier comparison of the satyagrahi and sati:

I have always held that it is physically impossible to violate a womanagainst her will. The outrage takes place only when she gives way to


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fear or does not realize her moral strength. If she cannot meet theassailants physical might, her purity will give her the strength to die

before he succeeds in violating her.Take the case of Sita. Physically she was a weakling before

Ravana, but her purity was more than a match even for his giantmight. He tried to win her with all kinds of allurements, but couldnot carnally touch her without her own physical strength or upon aweapon she possesses, she is sure to be discomted whenever herstrength is exhausted. 4

It is my rm conviction that a fearless woman, who knows thather purity is her best shield can never be dishonoured. Howeverbeastly the man, he will bow in shame before the flame of herdazzling purity.

I therefore recommend womento try to cultivate thiscourage. They will become wholly fearless if they can and cease totremble as they do today at the thought of assaults. Parents andhusbands should instruct women in the art of becoming fearless. Itcan best be learnt from a living faith in God. Though He is invisible,He is ones unfailing protector. He who has this faith is the most

fearless of all 5

If, in the face of the violence against women in India, this seemsgrotesque, so does Gandhis controversial letter to the Jewish peopleof Germany:

If I were a Jew and were born in GermanyI would refuse tobe expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And fordoing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil

resistance, but would have condence that in the end the rest werebound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were toaccept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse offthan now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them aninner strength and joythe calculated violence of Hitler may evenresult in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his rst answer tothe declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could beprepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imaginedcould be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah hadwrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. Forto the God-fearing, death has no terror(Homer, 1956: 319, 320).


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Unfortunately, Gandhis statements about sexual violence have beeninstitutionalised in modern India; they were required reading for

undergraduates when I started my teaching career. Later, a colleagueat Jawaharlal Nehru University repeated them to a young graduatestudent who wanted to work on sexual violence; he told her thatthe project was bankrupt since a good Hindu woman could not beraped. After the notorious rape of a woman in Delhi in December2012, an RSS leader announced that such rapes are only a part ofurban and Westernised India. They do not exist in Bharat (the Hinditerm for the country). The well-known postcolonial thinker AshisNandy also said there was some truth is this statement. The pointhere is that Gandhis legacy has legitimised a kind of commonsenseabout sexual violence and its supposed links with female purity aswell as allowing a horric romanticisation of rural India, and thiscommonsense can be shared across the political spectrum.

At the same time, as many scholars have suggested, Gandhismethods of resistance, and his own example, remoulded theideal of a freedom ghter from hyper-masculine and aggressive tovulnerable, passive and, therefore, feminine. In fact, as the passage

from Nehru that I quoted earlier attests, his male followers had tounlearn traditional masculine privilege and masculine behaviourin order to practice satyagraha. Certainly, Gandhis own body wasremoulded over the years from that of a sophisticated Westernisedbarrister to the image of an average poor peasant, vulnerable in hisnakedness and poverty. One the one hand, this has been an abidinglegacy for political activists in Indiathe simple white clothes, theshunning of ornaments and ostentation, the paring down of onesneedsa certain asceticism became part of the nationalist movement

in general, dening the political culture of large segments of the left,for example, and large sections of the feminist movement as well.But we must remember the gap between form and contentofcourse Gandhi was no fakir; he simulated a prototype of an Indianpeasant, just as his ashrams were the simulation of an ideal villagecommunity. As historian Tanika Sarkar (2011) points out,

Gandhis practical resolution to the problem of inequality wasto short-circuit a social process by a personal example: to beself-sufficient in all forms of labour that are necessary for thereproduction of daily life. He hoped to live without exploitation.


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What Gandhi and his associates did was a matter of personalconviction and choice. The self-chosen poverty of the great leader

did not question the brutal lack in their lives. It morally privilegedand aestheticized them.Gandhi himself lived in ashrams thatwere simulated rural communities, but ones that were free of actualcontradictions that actual villages faced.

This is a crucial point; when, in the novel Kanthapura, the womensatyagrahis nd it impossible to love Bade Khan the local policeman,they are simply pointing out that ones relationship with the colonialmasters who live far away is one thing, but its translation at the locallevel, where antagonistic and oppressive social relations permeateevery aspect of ones being, quite another.

In the village of Kanthapura, as in India, possibly the mostviolent and intractable contradiction is that of caste. Although Gandhibelieved that poverty is the worst kind of violence, and certainlyrecognised the violence of caste, his solutions did not involve arewriting of the existing social or economic conditions of theirexistence. Indeed, he used considerable forceone may even say

violenceto ensure their continuance, as was pointed out by B. R. Ambedkar, his most radical interlocutor. Ambedkars legacy challengesGandhis, indeed it challenges the privilege of the postcolonial rulingclasses, and thus has been systematically excluded from postcolonialeducation. I feel ashamed that while I was growing up, I knew littleof Ambedkars work, and have had to systematically unlearn much ofwhat I had been taught in order to approach it.

Ambedkar pointed out that Gandhis caste-work was directedat ensuring the continuance of the system as a whole. Just as Gandhi

argued for a moral awakening on the part of the rich, who should, hesaid, regard their property as held in a trust for the poor, he insistedthat caste was a matter of reform of upper-caste Hindu consciousness.He insisted that Dalits were a part of Hindu societybut this was notnecessarily a moral stance. Without their inclusion, Hindus wouldnot have had a clear majority in the country. Ambedkar pointed outthat Gandhi repeatedly afrmed his personal faith in the caste systemas a whole; he quotes Gandhi as writing:

I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because itis founded on the caste system.


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The seeds of Swaraj (self-rule) are to be found in the castesystem. Different castes are like different sections of the military

division. Each division is working for the good of the whole .To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European

social system means that Hindus must give up on the principle ofhereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Itwill be a chaos if everyday a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudraand a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin. 6

These views are, if we look closely, derived from colonialanthropologists of caste. All of them believed that caste was the gluethat held India together. H. R. Risley, the British census commissionerwho tried to measure caste groups using the racist colonial methods ofanthropometry writes that caste

forms the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indiansociety.... Were its cohesive power withdrawn or its essentialties relaxed, it is difficult to form any idea of the probableconsequences. Such a change would be more than a revolution;

it would resemble the withdrawal of some elemental force likegravitation or molecular attraction. Order would vanish and chaoswould supervene (1915: 278).

This is neither to undermine nor to disparage Gandhis personaldisgust at the inequities and hypocrisies of the caste system. Take,for example, his challenge to the manual scavenging of humanfeces, which was both decreed as the work of the Untouchables,and declared as the cause of their ritual pollution. Gandhi started

cleaning latrines in South Africa, and insisted that everyone in hisashram do the same, including his pregnant wife Kasturba. Fromwhat we know, she reacted as if this demand was a violent assaultupon her sensibilities. But then Gandhi declared that he lovedscavenging himself, and that scavengers born to this occupationmust also love it: You should realize you are cleaning Hindu society,he told them. Ambedkar pointed out that if a Brahmin cleanedhuman waste, he would not become an Untouchable:

For in India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is ascavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question whether


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he does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavengingis a noble profession with the object of inducing those who refuse

to engage in it, one could understand it. But why appeal to thescavengers pride and vanity in order to induce him and only himto keep on scavenging.To preach that poverty is good for theshudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for theUntouchables and for none else, and to make them accept theseonerous impositions as voluntary purposes in life is an outrageand a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr. Gandhican perpetuate with equanimity and impunity (see note 6).

Ambedkar writes powerfully about the sheer violence of the caste order.

The sanctity and the infallibility of the Vedas, the Smritis andShastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and thesenseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritableinstruments of torture which Hinduism forged against theUntouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated,blasted and blighted the life of Untouchables are to be found intact

and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism.

Indeed, Gandhis naming of the Untouchables as Harijans, orchildren of God, was a kind of violence in itself inasmuch as itclaimed that those who were blighted by man were loved by God;instead, the name that emerged from anti-caste struggles is Dalit,or broken people, that names the very real brutality of caste. At thetime of Ambedkars writing, he noted, some of the provinces in Indiahave laws which make refusal by a scavenger to do scavenging a

crime for which he can be tried and punished by a criminal court. Ambedkar could only see Gandhis non-violence as a refusal

to hurt the propertied class. Gandhi has no passion for economicequality.The owners need not deprive themselves of theirproperty. All that they need to do is to declare themselves Trusteesfor the poor. 7 He suggested that

Gandhism may well be suited to a society which does not acceptdemocracy as its ideal.Under Gandhism the common man mustkeep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. Inshort, Gandhism with its calls of back to nature, means back to


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nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorancefor the vast majority of the peopleclass structure in Gandhism is

not a mere accident. It is its ofcial doctrine

Ambedkar concluded that

Gandhism is a paradox. It stands for freedom from foreigndomination which means the destruction of the existing politicalstructure of the country. At the same time it seeks to maintain intacta social structure which permits the domination of one class byanother on a hereditary basis which means a perpetual dominationof one class by another.

It is this paradox that explains the violence of Gandhis non-violence. When Ambedkar appropriated Gandhian weapons but fora far more radical agenda, organising a series of satyagrahas whereDalits claimed the use of tanks and roads close to temples, distancedhimself firmly. No Harijan need fast against anyone nor needsatyagraha be offered by them.Let them not engage in quarrels

with local caste Hindus. Their behaviour should be at all timescourteous and dignied. They should embark on internal reforms:untouchables ought to give up alcohol, bathe more often, stopeating beef and carrion (the availability of carrion as food was one ofthe few occupational advantages of being a scavenger), educate theirchildren, and improve their methods of scavenging and tanning. AsDaniel Immerwahr notes (2007: 275301):

Gandhis hope for quietism on the part of untouchables was

accompanied by a grim view of their capacities as political actors.The poor Harijans have no mind, no intelligence, no sense ofdifference between God and not God, he explained to an aghastC. F. Andrews. To think that they could act as a group would beabsurd. To the missionary John R. Mott, Gandhi insisted thatuntouchables lacked the mind and intelligence to understandwhat you talked and thus could never be the subjects of genuineconversion. Would you preach the Gospel to a cow? he asked.Pessimistic about any possibility for real political action on the partof the untouchables, Gandhi denied that Ambedkar, an outspokenradical with an Ivy League education, could ever represent them.


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For Gandhi, it was the saint in the loincloth, not the lawyer in jacketand tie, who must speak for the downtrodden people of India. 8

Gandhi was prepared to go to any lengths to prevent the realisationof Ambedkars demand for a separate electorate for Dalits. If thiswere to happen, he speculated that Dalits would join hands withMuslim hooligans and kill upper-caste Hindus (Desai, 1996: 167).Thus in 1932, when separate electorates became a possibility,he used his ultimate weapon against ita fast unto death. Theeffect was sensational, as it was calculated to be. Ambedkar wascornered:

There was before me the duty, which I owed as a part of commonhumanity, to save Gandhi from sure death. There was before me theproblem of saving for the untouchables the political rights whichthe Prime Minister had given them. I responded to the call ofhumanity (Immerwahr, 2007: 288).

Ambedkar later regretted his capitulation: there was nothing noble

in the fast. It was a foul and lthy act. The fast was not for the benetof the Untouchables. It was against them and was the worst form ofcoercion against a helpless people (Ambedkar: 72). Gandhi alsoadmitted later that his fast did unfortunately coerce some peopleinto action which they would not have endorsed without my fast.But such conduct is of daily occurrence in the ordinary affairs oflife. As Perry Anderson points out, Gandhi never undertook a fastagainst the actions of upper-caste Hindus. It is important to notethat whenever the policy of afrmative action in favour of Dalits has

been implemented, there has been a rash of upper-caste suicides,although self-immolation has been the preferred method, sati-like,rather than fasting.

It is commonplace to compare Gandhi with Martin LutherKing. Its effect is to suggest a comparison between the colonisedsubjects of India and the Blacks of the United States. DanielImmerwahr astutely points out that such a comparison elides theplace of the untouchables entirely; it was warmly embraced by bothIndian nationalists and black activists. Lala Lajpat Rai, for example,abandoned the comparisons he once used to make between Dalitsand American Blacks in favour of those between all Indians and


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Blacks. Immerwahrs work reminds us of the enormous institutionaland nancial networks that created Gandhism as an international

creed, and of its costs-one of them is the Black Power movementwhich did not, surprisingly, engage with the question of caste atall. On the other hand, Dalits did engage with the Black Panthermovement, but that is another story.

We cannot end without thinking about the violence of Gandhisdeath. Nathuram Godse, who shot him, believed that Gandhisideology would emasculate Hindus and dismantle their traditionsof anti-Islamic militancy. Gandhis last fast, protesting the unfairtreatment of Pakistan in the process of Partition, was for him, the laststraw. Godse calls Gandhi a violent pacist which Ambedkar himselfmight have suggested as an apt phrase for Gandhis philosophy andpractice. But Godse spoke in the voice of militant Hindusim, ratherthan in protest against it. For this version of Hinduism, RamchandraGuha writes: Gandhi was a heterodox Hindu, who was detestedby the priestly orthodoxy so much so that the Sankaracharyas onceeven organized a signature campaign that asked the British to declareGandhi a non-Hindu (2013). Today, the Hindu Right still detests

Gandhi, though it has learnt to opportunistically use him. But theproblem is that Gandhi himself created some of the terrain on whichthey act. By insisting on using Ramarajya as his image of a just order,he participated in the construction of India as a fundamentallyHindu nation, one in which Muslims were younger siblings needingprotection, and in which Dalits could hardly be any better. This is thevocabulary that has been systematically appropriated and hardenedby the Hindu Right, which of course has no pretensions to non-violence at all, and is devoted to establishing an aggressive Hinduism.

But beyond the extreme right, even liberal intellectuals in India haveparticipated in white-washing the issues at hand. Thus Guha goes onto proclaim that

For all their lapses and departures from orthodoxyor perhapsbecause of themGandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru were the three20th century gures who did most to rid Hinduism of its ills andexcesses, who worked most heroically to nurture the spirit of equalcitizenship that the Laws of Manu so explicitly deny. The work thatthey, and the equally remarkable reformers who preceded them,did, are what Hindus should be most proud of.


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This neatly side-steps the enormous difference between Gandhi and Ambedkar, without which such easy extolling of Gandhis positions

on caste is impossible.Perhaps the last word on violence can be literary. In a moving

story, Shishu, Mahasweta Devi describes how Adivasis have beenliterally and guratively crippled in modern India. In this story, awell-meaning development ofcer called Singh goes to distributefood in a relief camp in the Adivasis forests. He nds that everynight his supplies are stolen. So one night he plans to stay awake tocatch the thief. And he sees little bodies come in from the dark andsurround him.

Fearstark, unreasoning, naked feargripped him. Why thissilent creeping forward? Why didnt they utter one word? Whywere they naked? And why such long hair? Children, he had alwaysheard of children, but how come that one had white hair? Why didthe womenno, no, girlshave dangling, withered breasts?. Weare not children. We are Agarias of the Village of Kuva. There areonly fourteen of us left. Our bodies have shrunk without food. Our

men are impotent, our women barren. Thats why we steal the relief.Dont you see we need food to grow to a human size again?.They cackled with savage and revengeful glee. Cackling, they

ran around him. They rubbed their organs against him and told himthey were adult citizens of India.

Singhs shadow covered their bodies. And the shadow broughtthe realization home to him.

They hated his height of ve feet and nine inches.They hated the normal growth of his body.

His normalcy was a crime they could not forgive.Singhs cerebral cells tried to register the logical explanation but

he failed to utter a single word. Why, why this revenge? He was justan ordinary Indian. He didnt have the stature of a healthy Russian,Canadian or American. He did not eat food that supplied enoughcalories for a human body. The World Health Organization saidthat it was a crime to deny the human body of the right number ofcalories.

Today, large numbers of such forest dwellers, crippled anddisgured, their iron rich lands invaded rst by the Indian state, and


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now by Indian and multinational companies, have taken to the gun.They havent come out of the blue; their insurgency is a version of

the miltiant rebellions by peasants, women, hill people, workers,and indeed intellectuals, since the beginning of the 20th century.They are being hunted not just by state and military guns but alsoby the rhetoric of non-violence. Anyone who supports them is askedto declare their position on violence. The situation is not, of course,unique. Thus, as I was writing this essay, I also happened to watcha powerful Swedish documentary, Black Power Mixtape, that tracks

African-American militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. In this, thelegendary Angela Davis is interviewed. At the time of the interview,she was still in prison, and the interviewer asks her if she approvesof violence. In reply, Davis simply describes in detail the bombingsof her Black and poor Birmingham neighbourhood by whitesupremacists. She recalls how her mother was called by a friend topick up the remains of four young girls blown to smithereens bysuch bombs. She then asks the interviewer, And you want to knowmy position on violence?

The problem I have been highlighting is that Gandhis remarks

on non-violence are directed always towards the dissentor; whileone could argue that he is hardly concerned with preaching to theoppressor, that his constituency is those who dissent, we need to thinkhard about the effect of directing the plea of non-violence, or often thecharge of violence, towards those who are protesting against injusticein the rst place. Gandhis most powerful legacy is not some absoluteinsistence on non-violence. Gandhi invoked the morality of dissentwhen it suited him. To disobey an oppressor is a right, he intoned,and it is also moral obligation. We should appropriate this legacy by

questioning Gandhis own vocabularies, by asking where the violencelies, and what true non-violence might mean today.

NOTES

1. See also Richard Greniers brilliant review of the lm. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-gandhi-nobody-knows/:[Accessed 14 March 2014].

2. See Tanika Sarkars ne essay in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.)(2011).3. For an overview of some of these debates on sati, see Ania Loomba (1993).


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4. Harijan, 1 September 1940, 266. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/ chap62.htm

5. Harijan, 14 January 1940. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap62.htm

6. B.R. Ambedkar. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,available at http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41L.What%20Congress%20and%Gandhi%20CHAPTER%20XI.htm

7. Gandhi writes: In the struggle between capital and labour, it may be generallysaid that more often than not the capitalists are in the wrong box. But whenlabour comes to fully realize its strength, I know it can become more tyrannicalthan capital. The millowners will have to work dictated by labour, if the lattercould command intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour willnever attain to that intelligence. If it does, labour will cease to be labour and

become the master. The capitalists do not ght on the strength of money alone.They do possess intelligence and tact (Quoted by Ambedkar in What Congressand Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (see note 6). Max Weber, in his TheReligion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggestssomewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have nothing to lose but theirchains, that they, too, have a world to winthe only problem being that theyhave to die rst and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutablesystem of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, is characterized by a dread ofthe magical evil of innovation. Gandhi also writes in Hind Swaraj: the peasantobserves the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do youpropose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Do you want to make him

discontented with . . . his lot?8. The relationship between race and caste has produced many debates; the most

productive position, in my view, is that of Gerald D. Berreman (1960). See alsoOliver Coxs letter challenging this position, and Berremans rejoinder in the same

journal, Vol. 66, No. 5, March 1961, 51014.

REFERENCES

Amin, Shahid. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 19221992.Delhi:Oxford University Press.

Anderson, Perry. 2012. The Indian Ideology. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective.

Berreman, Gerald D. 1960. Caste in India and the United States, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 2, September, pp. 12027.

Bilgrami, Akeel. 2003. Gandhi the Philosopher, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 39, 27 September.

Desai, Mahadev. 1996. The Diary of Mahadev Desai, quoted in Eleanor Zelliot, Gandhiand Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership, in From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays in the Ambedkar Movement, pp. 15083. Delhi: Manohar.

Gandhi, M.K. 1999. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: PublicationsDivision, Government of India, 98 Volumes. Volume 79, 173 [Accessed at http:// www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm].

Guha, Ramchandra. 2013. Why Hindus Can and Should be Proud Of, The Hindu,23 July.


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Homer, A. Jack (ed.). 1956. The Gandhi Reader. New York: Grove Press.Immerwahr, Daniel. 2007. Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,

Modern Intellectual History, 4, 2: 275301.Loomba, Ania. 1993. Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity,

Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India, History Workshop 36, pp. 20927.

Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1941. Toward Freedom, The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: The John Day Company.

Rao, Raja. 1963. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions.Risley, H.R. 1915. The People of India. Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co.Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Attenboroughs Gandhi, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and

Criticism 19811991. London: Granta Books.

Sarkar, Tanika. 2011. Gandhi and Social Relations, in Judith M. Brown and AnthonyParel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. Cambridge University Press,pp. 17398.

ania loomba — "the violence of gandhi's non-violence"

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