The week's been dedicated to the Bhagavad Gita and to Gandhi's thoughts about, and building from it, in Hind Swaraj. I'd forgotten to post the Hind Swaraj text on our online platform (and no student had alerted me to its absence) so it fell to me to tell them about this remarkable work from 1909, clear articulation of Gandhi's critique of "modern civilization" and of the love/soul/truth-force (satyagraha) that True Home Rule for India would mean. It's written as a dialogue with someone who wants to kick the English out. Gandhi tries to convince him that the problem isn't (just) the English but the English way of understanding human life, economy, politics, spirituality. Thinking like their colonial oppressors, the Indian nationalists "want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger" (12). In particular, trying to fight the English with the same "brute-force" they use is doomed to failure. The interlocutor isn't easily persuaded, and offers a powerful analogy. If an armed thief comes into your house, ought you not to drive him out?
I read the class Gandhi's response, which begins by imagining how arming yourself and your neighbors against the thief would lead to a widening escalation of arms - and would probably end in disgrace. But there's an alternative.
"You set this armed robber down as an ignorant brother; you intend to reason with him at a suitable opportunity: you argue that he is, after all, a fellow man; you do not know what prompted him to steal. You, therefore, decide that, when you can, you will destroy the man's motive for stealing. Whilst you are thus reasoning with yourself, the man comes again to steal. Instead of being angry with him, you take pity on him. You think that this stealing habit must be a disease with him. Henceforth, you, therefore, keep your doors and windows open, you change your sleeping-place, and you keep your things in a manner most accessible to him. The robber comes again and is confused as all this is new to him; nevertheless, he takes away your things. But his mind is agitated. He enquires about you in the village, he comes to learn about your broad and loving heart, he repents, he begs your parson, returns you your things and leaves off the stealing habit. He becomes your servant, and you find for him honourable employment." (44)
I'd put up this image of Gandhi from the New School's Orozco murals, and talked a little about how hard it is to recapture the sense of utopian hope it represented in 1931, when the toppling of the British Raj was inconceivable to most. (Hope and need?) What place is there today for a fairy story like that of the robber let alone for its utopian feel, its imagining a genuine alternative to the failed dream of western modernity? As Amitav Ghosh and Prasenjit Duara lament, Indian and Chinese religious figures early saw through the false promises of western models of national strength and prosperity but these lands' current governments want the tiger's nature. India isn't Gandhian anymore! A rousing manifesto for "climate satyagraha" written at a PanAfrican conference on nonviolence (the brief second reading the students had prepared) added to the utopian feel, and the feel of estrangement. Is love-force, soul-force, truth-force really more than a fantasy? Can we even feel it, numbed as we are? Then this happened:
Actually, said one student, the earth, doesn't the earth treat us just the way Gandhi says we should treat the robber, setting everything out for us to take?
Seismic.
The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Penguin, 1993)
