Nirmalaya Deb
Every important historical personality is subject to incisive scrutiny. Every one of their thoughts and actions should be dissected by the intense analysis of successors, or intellectual descendents, who then ought to place them in perspective by drawing a background of their thoughts and actions and judging them historically, which also often turns out to be a normative process of intellectual inquiry; that is ethical judgments come to light and the otherwise formal activity of criticism takes a moral turn.
It would be inane to deny that someone of the political and intellectual stature of Mahatma Gandhi is outside the purview of this moral criticism, not least because the man himself was so eager to be judged by posterity in moral terms, and also because he never considered human activity, whether bodily or mental (although these are loose philosophical terms), worthwhile if it was devoid of moral motive and purpose.
Now, what our standard of moral judgment should be depends on our understanding of the historical reality that enveloped Gandhi, his thoughts, deliberations, concerns, and actions. In South Africa Gandhi had to confront social evils like racism, which were an ugly offshoot of colonialism. Colonialism he had to confront in India too, and his response in South Africa – that of legal and civil opposition to colonialism and racism – remained largely reflective of the character of his political intervention and actions in India, especially during the early years he spent with Gopal Krishna Gokhale in India.
Hind Swaraj, a book he wrote while travelling from Johannesburg to Mumbai in the last years of the first decade of the 20th century, contains a dialectical exposition of his political thought from its slow germination from the philosophy of moral and spiritual anarchy of Ruskin and Tolstoy to anarchical interventions in the political sphere, the method all the while being non-violent resistance. He quite resembled the ‘Anarchist’ in Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, in the famous and, at the same time, infamously difficult to stage, ‘interpolation scene’ where while all the whole world is agog with curiosity and conflict, the Anarchist disobeys the state by keeping his hands decently folded. Although it might seem outright reactionary to analyse the early Gandhi’s interventions in the political sphere as anarchist – it could itself seem to be an “imperialist” analysis by certain standards – his later political career in India, especially the Quit India agitation and the Civil Disobedience period, showed that his anarchism had ripened and his tools of political practice had sharpened.
His all-inclusionary utopia is grounded in an almost village morality of heavily decentralized forms of political power with feeble centres of control like the Gram Sabhas and the panchayats with a highly indigenized system of education and virtually no heavy industries and mechanized production is anarchism in the extreme in a relatively developed post-colonial society with no formal acquaintance with the language of contemporary politics and industry and with a huge agricultural base in need of immediate modernization and overall mechanical development. It had, the India of 1947, a huge human resource base too waiting to be honed in the language and syntax of modern science, engineering, technology, management, teaching and pedagogy, and technical acumen and quantitative ability. Thus, save his language policy that Hindustani be the official language – an amalgam of Urdu and Hindi in the traditional Devnagari script – his philosophy of education was, according to present-day standards – highly outdated. Even Hindu traditionalists like Rabindranath Tagore have differed with him on this score.
His ethics like that of Plato tends towards a new authoritarianism, albeit of a veiled nature. In Plato’s case Spartan discipline and industriousness seemed to be the ideal – “Republic” – in Gandhi’s case “Ram Rajya” appeared as the only alternative to a voluminous, bulging capitalist society on the brink of collapse and in need of urgent resuscitation and moral and psychological discipline, political restraint and limited economy and resources. Now, this is outright reactionary to the spirit of scientific activity and a society tottering on the edge with not even science being there to set up the foundations on which it would stand, is truly an ill-fated society.
Is there any reason to lose all hope of scientific survival in the technological, nuclear age? As long as the hermeneutic use of the term “survival” is properly understood, it is. Away from the strict methodology of industry and inductive experiment of the natural sciences, the hermeneutic principle tries to identify human effort and consciousness as the root of all action and all moral and ecological judgments. Therefore, “scientific survival” connotes the fact that mankind has mastered the art of assimilating the latest scientific know-how within the boundaries of the moral life, which is highly stoic in different respects, but all through characterized by an emphasis on human labour and dignity. This art of scientific survival India has mastered over the decades, although there have been minor tremors and major disasters at intervals like the Bhopal Gas tragedy, we can today definitely claim that as per our cognitive understanding of the political-economy of contemporary India, we have entered a definitive post-Gandhian phase.
Industry is booming, desi capital is flying offshore and scientific tests and space research have entered a phase of renewed discovery. The unveiling of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Parliament Square in Great Britain, as expected, received considerable media attention, especially the presence of the Indian Prime Minister and his British counterpart and finance minister Arun Jaitley and the speeches they made after the formal ceremony. Their speeches were judiciously minced in the mainstream media and allegations of “hypocrisy” hurled at leaders like the Indian PM who denounces communalism that Gandhi loathed but whose government is embroiled in controversies ranging from ‘ghar wapsi’ and persecution of religious minorities. Other columnists tried to understand the rationale of creating a statue of Gandhi beside that of former British PM Winston Churchill other than to remind posterity of the cruel words Churchill used to describe Gandhi: “A naked fakir climbing up the steps of Westminister” and Gandhi’s famous repartee: “Your Majesty has enough clothes for the two of us.”
Anyway, the statue is not “a re-packaging of Gandhi for the 21st century”, as one columnist says; it is rather an acknowledgement that right in front of the great temple of democracy there should stand the statue of a man whose political ideals still continue to inform thought and action. He showed the way of morality rather than merely engaging in a verbal discourse on its nature. That, of course, happens to be the reason why he is so highly placed in the history of ethical thought.