Andrea Elizabeth Mathew

rd
3 year B. A. (Hons) History
Roll no.:- 170256

Question: Discuss the political philosophy of Gandhi with reference to the intellectual influences
that shaped his ideas.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was in Porbandar, a small town in Kathiawad (Saurashtra),

a princely state in western Gujarat, on 2nd October 1869. He belonged in a family of the Modh
Bania caste that had a long tradition of service to the ruler of Kaithwad. Gandhi’s immediate
family lived this idea of isolation and dynamism (a region isolated yet dynamic, rich in trade but
poorer than the fertile parts of eastern Gujarat, except for the merchants.) in significant ways. A
middle-class family of Banias, it had ties with local politics. Gandhi’s grandfather Uttamchand
and father Karamchand served as diwans (prime ministers and advisors) to the rulers of Porbandar,
and both, particularly his father, got into trouble on account of their independent spirit. Gandhi
admired his grandfather and father as ‘models of integrity and courage’. More significant, his
socialization in a ‘princely milieu’ as the son of a diwan, primed Gandhi to think of Indians as
leader of their states, no matter how small they may be, ‘not mere subjects of the British, but
ministers in their lands, albeit under the watchful eye of the British political agent’.

These techniques went well with the eclectic religious beliefs that Gandhi grew up with.
His mother Putlibai, his father’s fourth wife, belonged to an eighteenth-century sect called
Pranami, whose founder had advocated the unity of different faiths and instilled in his followers a
belief in the simplicity of living and distaste for formally structured religion. This faith, which
‘taught charity, chastity and amity with followers of distinct religions and insisted on the values
of a temperate life lived modestly’ had a fundamental influence on young Gandhi. Kathiawad,
moreover, was the home of Jains, Vaishnavites and Muslims. Many Banias were Jains but the
Muslims were mainly poor tenants, although they did have a visible cultural presence in towns
such as Ahmedabad. Gandhi absorbed beliefs of the Pranami sect along with the ‘non-violence’
practised by Jains and Vaishnavas. Putlibai’s regular fasts and austere lifestyle and the ‘strong
ascetic demands’ she made on herself left a lasting impression on Gandhi.

Gandhi’s attitude toward the Raj and the Indian interaction with it, argues David Arnold,
was crucially shaped by his childhood experience of the presence of Indian rulers and relative lack
of exposure to the British administration. It instilled in him a great sense of power, an inner belief
that for all the trials and sufferings of colonial rule ‘the (Indians of his status and background) were
men fit to rule’ or be the power behind the throne. This combined in intricate ways with his Bania
origins, to which he owed a lot of his social and cultural ideas. Gandhi imbibed traditions of
resistance and self-resistance, current among the Bania and other merchant and moneylender castes
of Kathiawad. Resistance and self-suffering, employed strategically, served a dual purpose-when
directed at tenants and clients they enforced the payment of debts; and against rulers they served
as measures of protest against injustice. Some of them could take the form of self-flagellation that
morally compelled the debtor, friend or client to meet legitimate demands. Others were relatively
more peaceful-they included fasting or sitting on a dharna, sitting still at a selected place for hours
and days till the time the aggrieved individual’s suffering had an impact on the ruler or drew public
attention. The techniques, of course, had great effect in the context of face-to-face, personal
interaction between the ruler and the subject. Gandhi, as we shall soon see, used them to great
advantage to strike deals with the government, first in South Africa, and later in India.

In September 1888, Gandhi went to London to study law and stayed there till June 1891.
Gandhi had grown up in a strictly vegetarian family and had promised his mother to abstain from
meat in England. At the same time, as a rebellious teenager he had made a few attempts at eating
meat. His friend and advisor had been Sheikh Mehtab, a youth ‘hardier, physically stronger, and
more daring’ who ‘dazzled’ Gandhi with his immense capacity to put up with corporal punishment.
Gandhi had also been influenced by the widely held belief that meat-eaters were sexually virile.
Henry Salt’s acclaimed work, A Plea for Vegetarianism, which spoke of kindness to animals and
convincingly argued in favour of a vegetarian diet, appealed to Gandhi instantly and made him
turn to the vegetarians in England. Apart from solving his problem of ‘what to eat’, vegetarianism
gave him access to ‘some of London’s most eccentric idealists’. Through Henry Salt, Gandhi came
in contact with Edward Carpenter, whose book Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889) provided
the groundwork for Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Gandhi got to participate in discussions on a wide
range of controversial social and economic issues, including vivisection and birth control. All this
prompted him to embrace ‘vegetarianism by choice, in a spirit that promised a different kind of
strength than that which meat promised’. Gandhi came to look upon vegetarianism as an ideal to
be cherished and propagated, not a burden of cultural inheritance to be borne under duress. He
began his experiments in diets which, as indicated earlier, was closely tied to his ideals of truth
and morality. Two decades later, such ideas would encompass his country and countrymen. ‘Non-
violence’ for Gandhi, affirms Alter, was ‘as much an issue of public health, as an issue of politic,
morality, and religion’.

In the view of some scholars, these two and a half years were vital in shaping his career
(Hunt 1993). The move, from Rajkot to London, from ‘an imperial backwater to the very heart of
the British Empire’, must have impressed Gandhi, not quite 19 and for the first time on his own.
Gandhi’s attitude to the law training at the Inner Temple, where he qualified in 1890, was ‘fairly
matter-of-fact’ and did not appear to have aroused much enthusiasm. ‘He was mostly interested in
the law as a profession through which to earn a living and recoup the family’s ailing fortunes rather
than a means to achieve social justice and political rights’. Towards the end of his second year in
London, Gandhi was drawn into the circle of theosophists, a middle-class group interested in the
esoteric religions of the Orient, namely Hinduism and Buddhism, under the influence of Madam
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in the United States. The theosophists in London were more
interested in esoteric Hinduism than Buddhism. Gandhi joined the Blavatsky
Lodge of the Society in 1891, but did not participate actively. At the same time, he was invited to
help translate the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit, and to read it alongside Edwin Arnold’s The Song
Celestial (1886), a translation of the Gita. The acquaintance with Edwin Arnold-theosophist,
vegetarian, a former principal of Deccan College and ‘a leading cross-cultural synthesizer’ of
Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Victorian Science-possibly made Gandhi aware that
religions need not be rigidly compartmentalized. Gandhi also got to meet Annie Besant, who had
converted to theosophy in 1889 and had become a prominent member of the Theosophical Society
of London. Initially fascinated by Besant’s ‘utter sincerity’, Gandhi later came to think of her as a
charlatan who represented the occult side of theosophy that Gandhi was uneasy about, and also as
a white woman who appropriated Hinduism for her own ends.
 In June 1891, Gandhi came back to India, but he was sad to leave London as he had grown fond
of that place. Harsh reality hit him in India. Because of his shy and hesitant nature, he could not
establish a law practice either in Rajkot or in Bombay and move into the prestigious rank of the
professional middle class, as his family had expected. In addition to the humiliation he suffered in
court on account of his inability to speak publicly, he was insulted by the political agent with whom
he had become slightly acquainted in London. Gandhi had gone to see him to ask for a favour on
behalf of his brother, and when he tried to remind the agent of their acquaintance, he was told
sharply that things were different in India and thrown out of the office. When Gandhi sought the
advice of veteran leader Pherozeshah Mehta, he was asked to ‘pocket the insult’. Neither Gandhi’s
upbringing nor his stay in London had prepared him for this. He realized to his horror what it
meant to be a ‘mere colonial subject’ without authority, respect and recourse against injustice.

In April 1893, Gandhi left Bombay once more, this time for South Africa. His stay there of
21 years, between 1893 and 1914, formed a decisive phase in his life and fundamentally shaped
his career-the ‘low point’ that would become the ‘turning point’. By the time Gandhi arrived in
South Africa in May 1893, it had a large Indian community. Cape Town had been an important
port of call for ships sailing between Europe and India from the seventeenth century. Indians
constituted a small but a significant minority (about 2 per cent of the population). By the time
Gandhi arrived, the Indian community had earned the wrath of the white population on different
grounds-the ‘Arab’ traders as threatening competitors, and the indentured labourers, the ‘coolies,’
for being insanitary and dirty, responsible for spreading disease and epidemic such as the plague.
For Gandhi, however, white racism became manifest in a distinct way. When he appeared in court
for the first time wearing a turban, he was asked to remove it. He left the court in protest. Soon,
Gandhi experienced the much-discussed incident of being thrown out of the first-class
compartment of a train during his first journey from Durban to Pretoria—although he had a first-
class ticket, only whites could travel first class. This incident landed Gandhi in a dilemma. Gandhi
decided on the second course. These experiences, argues Rudolph, suddenly made Gandhi aware
that the skills he had acquired recently-the use of English, an awareness of legal processes and
codes and ‘a belief that English justice must be enforced-were desperately needed and lacking
among the Indian community’. The white attack on Indians’ sanitation and lifestyle, and the
association of race with disease shook Gandhi to the inner core; it went against his firm belief in
the intimate ties between health and morality and his growing pride in Indian civilization.

All this, however, did not turn Gandhi into a mass leader overnight. Although Susanne
Rudolph and Judith Brown commend him for his relentless campaign for 20 years ‘to stem the tide
of racial discrimination which threatened to engulf the Indian community’ and argue that this
campaign organized ‘the previously quiescent Indian community’. Gandhi gave up law practice in
1911, and between 1907 and 1914 he gave leadership to three successive campaigns of passive
resistance, soon called Satyagraha. The newspaper, Indian Opinion, helped Gandhi learn the ‘craft
of journalism’ and served as a means through which ‘he endeavored to educate Indians in matters
as diverse as European history and public health’ and as an organ that gave practical advice on the
tactics of Satyagraha to the participants. Early indications of Gandhi’s search for and ideas on truth
and freedom were advanced in the Hind Swaraj, written in the form of a dialogue-questions and
answers between a nationalist reader and an editor who ‘ventriloquized’ Gandhi’s views. The
Swaraj of Hind Swaraj, therefore, involved the question of ‘proper rule of and for India’. And it
was the insistence on the ‘proper’ that produced Gandhi’s attack on civilization, or rather ‘modern
civilization’, since the sovereignty involved in this civilization forgot the swa completely.

Uday Singh Mehta offers yet another suggestive analysis of Hind Swaraj and of Gandhi’s
philosophy. The need for patience, of not being rushed, writes Mehta, runs through Hind Swaraj
and Gandhi’s several other writings with remarkable consistency. In addition to the fact that
Gandhi confesses to a certain hesitancy in making the English version of Hind Swaraj public
because he had ‘hurriedly dictated it’ to a friend, Gandhi referred to Hind Swaraj itself as
something that required patience, since his views were to develop in the course of the discourse
with the reader (Mehta 2003). The comportment appropriate to swaraj in its different forms
involved a difficult challenge that drew on ‘the complex interiority of the self’. And it was
precisely because swaraj was difficult that Gandhi was hesitant about answering what swaraj is.
Instead of making declarative statements, he pointed to the difficulties in attaining swaraj,
difficulties that required patience and a certain lapse of time in order to be properly dealt with.
Gandhi's use of the phrase, "what is known as civilization", is worth flagging at this point since I
will have occasion to come back to it very soon. Hind Swaraj remained the touchstone of his beliefs
and actions throughout his life, it was the fountainhead of his inspiration: he never changed his
views on the fundamental principles he set out in this text, even though he was open to the
possibility of his views being proven wrong. It is worth noting that Hind Swaraj is the only work
that Gandhi himself translated from Gujarati to English. Even his auto biography, The Story of
My Experiments with Truth, was translated by his secretary, Mahadev Desai.

In a preface to the Gujarati edition of Hind Swaraj written in 1914, Gandhi described
himself as "an uncompromising enemy of the present day civilization in Europe". It was this
unrelenting hostility to European or western civilization that is manifest in Hind Swaraj. He was
referring to western/European civilization when he used the words "what is known as civilization".
Gandhi believed that western civilization was only one in name. In the Hind Swaraj, he launched
an attack on every aspect of western civilization in order to prove how evil and how harmful it
was. The text also contains Gandhi's alternative to modern civilization and a programme of action
and behavior that Indians must follow to make that alternative a reality. Gandhi equated modern
civilization with the western one because the west was the principal site of all that is considered
modern. What he actually attacked was a particular form of western civilization, the one that
emerged with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. A year before writing the Hind
Swaraj, he had written, "Let it be remembered that western civilization is only a hundred years
old, or to be more precise, fifty". Gandhi interpreted the industrial revolution as having brought
about a radical transformation in people's lives and in people's attitudes to themselves and to the
world around them. Fundamental to this transformation was the premise that through Reason and
Science human beings were capable of mastering nature and thus fulfilling their desires and wants.
This, Gandhi believed, inevitably led to greed, to competition and finally to violence. Therefore,
violence was embedded in modern civilization and this made it satanic and immoral. It was not
enough to reject industrialization; Gandhi made a critique in Hind Swaraj of the entire intellectual
scaffolding of modern civilization - Science, history, political and social institutions and so on. All
that is associated with modernity and modern civilization, Gandhi repudiated.

This ‘theory of India’s salvation’, affirms Ashis Nandy, involved ‘Gandhi’s spirited search
for the other culture of Britain, and of the West’, an anti-thesis of the English that was latent in the
English too. It was evident in Gandhi’s preference for some Christian hymns and Biblical texts
that was much more than a gesture of salute to a ‘minority religion’. It contained a firm affirmation
that elements of Christianity were perfectly congruent with elements of Hindu and Buddhist world
views and that ‘the battle he was fighting for the minds of men was actually a universal battle to
rediscover the softer side of human nature’. For Brown, the ideology behind ‘Gandhian passive
resistance’ was ‘a blend of the Hindu Vaishnava tradition of ahimsa, non-violence, and a belief in
suffering rather than fighting to overcome an opponent’. In his book titled Satyagraha (1951),
Gandhi defined it as ‘holding on to Truth’ or ‘Truthforce’ and distinguished it from its English
translation, passive resistance, associated with the movement of suffragists and non-conformists
in England. Passive resistance was ‘a weapon of the weak’; it did not exclude the use of physical
force or violence in order to achieve its end. Satyagraha, on the other hand, was ‘a weapon of the
strongest’ and did not admit ‘the use of violence in any shape or form’. Gandhi embarked on
Satyagraha in South Africa as a ‘pragmatist’ but soon began to think of it as an ‘idealist’. For
inspiration, he drew on his earlier readings and experiences, defined the sets of circumstances
where it was applicable, marked out the type of person who could use it and invested it with his
own meaning. This re-definition of passive resistance as Satyagraha involved ‘a total philosophy
of life and action’

The dilemma of the elite was caused by Gandhi’s avowal that the simplicity of ‘dress’ was a
part of the ‘proper’ conduct of a true Satyagrahi. Emma Tarlo (1996) lucidly portrays the
interweaving of dress and identity in constructions of the nation, and argues that the seriousness
with which Gandhi addressed the issue brought about a dramatic change not only in his own
clothing, but also of others. Here too, as with other parts of his message, Gandhi’s adoption of the
loincloth, which has attained almost ‘folkloric proportions’, showed that there were wide
discrepancies in the way ‘Indians’ viewed it

In sum, the force of Gandhi’s message lay in its polyvalence and amenability to diverse
understandings and appropriations. Such perceptions made him the ‘Mahatma’; they also led to
his assassination. Gandhi’s message revealed the possibilities and limits of a truly national struggle
for swaraj even as it exposed the many contestations of both swaraj and the nation. His violent
death perhaps embodies the violence that inheres in nations, making the achievement of a swaraj
premised on nonviolence an elusive goal.

Bibliography-

 A History of Modern India- Ishita Banerjee-Dube

 Gandhi’s Swaraj- Rudrangshu Mukherjee