Is Gandhian philosophy still relevant? Historian Ramachandra Guha answers

EVERYTHING ABOUT RAMACHANDRA GUHA’S home is colourful—from the striped cushions on the sofa to the large Dhiraj Choudhury painting that dominates one wall—courtesy his designer wife Sujata Keshavan. The most sober thing in the room might be Guha himself, in his formal powder blue shirt and air of the careworn intellectual. But then again, keeping Guha company for over a decade has been one of the most colourful characters in history—Mahatma Gandhi. After all, this is the man who once had a calf injected to death, took untouchables into temples, was obsessed with stool disposal and called his bathroom “a temple”, threw his friend’s binoculars into the ocean in an act of protest, and described hospitals as “institutions of sin”.

Guha, arguably the country’s foremost expert on Gandhi, came out with his first book on the Mahatma on October 2, 2013—Gandhi Before India. This was followed in 2018 by the sequel, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948. And now he’s out with his next, Arguments with Gandhi. Unlike the others, this is not a biography. It deals with Gandhi’s ideas and their immense influence in the world. Whether you seek to propagate or denounce them, they are still alive nearly 80 years after Gandhi’s death. According to Guha, you can’t say the same about any other 20th century thinker. “We remember Winston Churchill for his leadership of Britain during World War II, but do we discuss his ideas? No,” he says. “We remember Charles de Gaulle for his role in freeing France, with the help of Britain, from Germany. But do we discuss his ideas? No. Franklin Roosevelt is remembered for the New Deal and for helping make America a major global power. But are Americans discussing and debating his ideas today? No. [Jawaharlal] Nehru, too, was a great leader but none of his ideas has stood the test of time. So, Gandhi is unique in that his ideas are still alive.”

But can we take Gandhi’s ideas out of classrooms and debate parlours to the streets and villages? In other words, are they implementable? He did hold some quixotic views on marriage, celibacy, contraception, human labour, the role of women and nature cures. But for the most part, his views on caste, religion, gender, non-violence, environment and politics reveal the mind of a brilliant visionary and original thinker who was not afraid to risk his popularity for his beliefs, and who lived out his ideals in a way few other leaders did. “Those who are in my company must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours, subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets,” said Gandhi. They did, because he did.

NON-VIOLENCE

On September 11, 1906, some 3,000 men and women assembled in the city of Johannesburg in South Africa to protest a new racial law imposed by the government of the Transvaal. The protest was led by a 36-year-old Gandhi, writes Guha in his new book. At the meeting, a series of resolutions was passed, of which the most significant was the fourth which stated that British Indians in the Transvaal would rather submit themselves to imprisonment than give in to the “galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance”. This was an altogether novel method of protest, rejecting their earlier pacifist methods of signing petitions and the more violent methods embraced by the revolutionaries.

When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes, defied nighttime curfews and hawked goods without a licence. Between 1907 and 1914, writes Guha, several thousand Indians, including Gandhi, were imprisoned.

In the Transvaal, leading hundreds of people in his chosen method of non-violent protest, Gandhi polished the tactic that he would perfect in India, to which he returned in 1915. Years later, the few hundreds following him would become hundreds of thousands, mobilised by the moral force of their leader’s faith in the ideal of non-violence.  

Non-violence was perhaps one of Gandhi’s greatest legacies whose influence has percolated down the ages, as seen in protest movements like the Chipko, the Save Narmada and the anti-CAA protests of 2019. As Guha asserts in his book, Gandhi was a constant presence at these protests. In Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, a group of Muslim women began a peaceful vigil on December 15, 2019, that continued through the long winter. Soon, thousands of students and people from other religions—Christians, Hindus and Sikhs—joined them. As December gave way to January, writes Guha, the participants recalled Gandhi’s fast for Hindu-Muslim unity in the same city, in another January, long ago. As one Muslim woman told a reporter: “We all need to see the world through Gandhi’s glasses.”

Still, non-violence is not natural to man. “Humans, especially men, want change and are angry and impatient to bring it about,” says Guha. “Young men, particularly, are driven by this. If you look at Hindu, Islamic or Sikh fundamentalism, if you look at the jihadis in Kashmir or the Khalistanis in Punjab, if you look at the Naxalites or organisations like the Bajrang Dal, their cadres predominantly consist of young, testosterone-fuelled men between 18 and 35. There are deep biological, evolutionary and genetic reasons for this. And Gandhi was going against this grain in the larger interests of humanity.”

Gandhi did not know it then, but decades later empirical data was going to prove him right. According to a recent study cited by Guha, in the period since the end of World War II, 57 per cent of successful non-violent campaigns against authoritarian leaders led to democracy, whereas for campaigns that relied on violence, the number was merely 6 per cent.

The propensity to violence among young men was very much prevalent in Gandhi’s time as well. One of Gandhi’s earlier encounters with it was in 1909, when a former colonial official in India, Sir Curzon Wyllie, was shot dead in London by an unrepentant young student from Punjab called Madan Lal Dhingra. Indian students in London greeted Wyllie’s murder with much enthusiasm. Among Dhingra’s supporters was a young man named V.D. Savarkar studying to be a barrister in London. Savarkar and his youth brigade believed that non-violence was “ineffective as well as effeminate”.

Over a century later, whose ideology—Gandhi’s or Savarkar’s—has seeped deeper into the consciousness of the country they fought for? Perhaps both. Perhaps it is difficult to say. But if the recent youth protest in Delhi led by the Cockroach Janta Party shows anything, it is that Gandhi’s spirit is still alive and thriving. While youth protests in other countries like Nepal and Bangladesh turned violent, CJP leaders invoked Gandhian principles to wage war peacefully and without bloodshed. “Gandhi would have been proud of them,” smiles Guha.

GENDER

Gandhi’s progressive views on women were first developed after watching the women suffragettes of Britain, writes Guha. To bring the racist ‘Transvaal Ordinance’ to the attention of the British government, Gandhi boarded the ship from Cape Town to London on October 3, 1906. During this trip, he interacted with journalists, MPs, cabinet ministers and met, for the first and last time, Winston Churchill, who was then an undersecretary of state for the colonies. It was at this time that he got an opportunity to observe the suffragettes as they fought for the right to vote outside the House of Commons, scolding the male MPs who entered or left the building. “Today, the whole country [England] is laughing at them and they have only a few people on their side,” wrote Gandhi in an article he sent to be published in his journal Indian Opinion in South Africa. “But undaunted these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the franchise, for the simple reason that deeds are better than words…. If even women display such courage, shall the Transvaal Indians fail in their duty and be afraid of gaol?”

Years later, thousands of Indian women would answer Gandhi’s call and take to the streets, risking their lives to advance the cause of freedom. In a deeply patriarchal society, women played a crucial role in nation building during Gandhi’s time. Even Martin Luther King Jr’s wife Coretta Scott King, while touring India, spoke about how impressed she was “by the part women played in the political life of India, far more than in our own country”.

Even though he stood for women’s education, fought against the purdah and child marriage, and encouraged women’s participation in the freedom struggle (“The nation walks with one leg only,” said Gandhi when the struggle was dominated by men), Gandhi could be conservative in other ways. He could be, for example, an “overbearing patriarch” in his own home. Millie, the wife of Gandhi’s dear friend Henry Polak, who shared a home with Gandhi and his wife Kasturba for a while in South Africa, wondered how the Hindu husband would ever come to “think that his wife is his equal, when custom requires her to stand behind his chair” while he ate the meal that she had cooked for him. Still, Guha emphasises that Gandhi’s views on women progressed over time, as he encountered independent and capable women from all walks of life.

Today, women are not so visible in nation building. They might be active as voters, but are poorly represented in major legislative bodies. There are only 75 women MPs in the Lok Sabha (approximately 14 per cent of the 543 seats, far below the global average of roughly 26 per cent). Guha attributes this to a reassertion of patriarchy, with men realising that political office gives them power, authority and control over people’s lives.

Another area where women play a starkly subordinate role in contemporary India, points out Guha, is in the formal economy. The female labour participation in India is less than 30 per cent. In India today, women are far less likely to be in paid work than men. When doing the same work, they are likely to be paid less than men. Let alone countries of Western Europe and North America, even our neighbouring Bangladesh has done better in this sphere than India. “Apart from the garments export sector, which has expanded spectacularly in recent decades, women in Bangladesh are also finding employment in services and in micro-finance,” writes Guha. “The enhanced economic independence of women translates into greater rights for them in the family sphere as well. As a consequence, on a wide array of indicators—including women’s literacy, women’s life expectancy and infant mortality—Bangladesh ranks higher than India.”

Even though one can’t blame Gandhi for the current situation, his views on women being employed outside the home were conservative. In an article published in 1931, Gandhi wrote that he wanted the opening of all offices, professions and employments to women. Nonetheless, he thought it would be a “dreary home of which a woman was not the centre”. Gandhi could not “imagine a really happy home in which the wife is a typist and scarcely ever in it. Who would look after the children?”

RELIGION

New Year’s Day, 1947. While the leaders of the independence movement were in Delhi wrangling over the terms of the freedom they were so close to achieving, Gandhi was at the tiny Bengali village of Srirampur in the Muslim-dominated region of Noakhali. So close to the culmination of all his hard work, that New Year’s Day should have been an occasion of celebration for the Mahatma. But it was not, write Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins in Freedom At Midnight. The communal violence that had erupted in Noakhali—with Muslims slaughtering, raping and pillaging their Hindu neighbours—had left Gandhi broken-hearted. For days, Gandhi had been wandering the village, waiting for his ‘inner voice’ to speak. That day, it finally had. It told him to set out on a ‘Pilgrimage of Penance’ to the villages of Noakhali. In the next seven weeks, he would walk barefoot across 47 villages, with only four of his followers accompanying him. This, he said, would be his “last and greatest experiment”. If he could “rekindle the lamp of neighbourliness” in those hate-filled villages, the rest of India might follow suit. As Gandhi crossed paddy fields and rickety log bridges, the villagers heard him singing one of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems: “If they answer not your call, walk alone, walk alone.”

No leader could sense the pulse of the nation so well as Gandhi, but his hope of uniting it through his ‘Pilgrimage of Penance’ in Noakhali was in vain. The fissures ran too deep. A few months hence, India would witness the most brutal carnage during its partition, in which over one million people were killed and 15 million displaced.

But partition was only the effect, not the cause. The cause—deep-rooted religious bigotry—was one which Gandhi had tried to fight all his life. “What Gandhi tried to teach was a consciousness of how no religion is superior to another,” says Guha. “Just because people of a particular religion are in a demographic majority in a country does not give them the right to dominate, oppress and suppress people of a different faith living in that country. One of the global challenges we face today is majoritarian nationalism. In Palestine, the Jews want to suppress the Muslims. In Iran, the Muslims want to suppress the non-Muslims. In Sri Lanka, the Buddhists want to suppress the non-Buddhists. And in India, the Hindus want to suppress the non-Hindus.” 

All the countries that have adopted religious majoritarianism have lost their way, says Guha. He gives the example of Sri Lanka and Iran. Sri Lanka before the civil war in 1983, before Sinhala Buddhist policies were promoted by the government, was far ahead of India when it came to education, women’s rights and health. There was no reason why Kandy or Colombo could not have become what Bengaluru and Hyderabad did—engines of the global IT economy. Same for Iran which, before the Ayatollahs, was unlike any other country in the Islamic world, with a vibrant intellectual culture, outstanding scientists and women in all areas of public life. And yet they threw it all away. The same, feels Guha, is what is happening in India with hindutva.

Today, he writes, it has become a trend among the foot soldiers of hindutva to openly mock and revile Gandhi’s religious pluralism. Guha quotes part of a Hindu poem by Kamal Agney cited in a book on ‘hindutva pop’:

“Had Godse not shot those bullets into Gandhi,

Every Hindu would have been praying at Mecca and Medina today.

Dumb non-violence would have torn India apart,

Had Gandhi lived, the country would have been partitioned once more.”

The poem was received with rapturous applause and loud cheering. In recent years, the anniversaries of Gandhi’s birth and death have become occasions for right-wing Hindus to openly declare their admiration for Godse, writes Guha, with ‘#Nathuram Godse’ trending on X (formerly Twitter), statues of Godse being unveiled and Gandhi’s killing reenacted. “The tragic truth is that the cult of Nathuram Godse is no longer marginal among India’s Hindus,” he writes. “It has gone mainstream.”

PROGRESS

One of Gandhi’s followers recounted in The New Yorker her experience of living with him in his Sevagram Ashram in central India. At 6:30am sharp, he would set out on his morning walk along the dirt road towards Wardha. When he grew tired, he would hand over his staff to the first person who reached for it and put his hands on the shoulders of the women walking beside him, Abha and Sushila. “Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, sisters?” he would invariably ask them. Constipation was the most common complaint in the ashram and everyone was encouraged to be open about it. “His standard prescription for constipation was more vegetables and, if that didn’t work, an enema, which he taught us to administer to each other without any embarrassment,” she writes. Gandhi had chronic amebiasis (an intestinal infection), but he was not embarrassed about it. He was completely unselfconscious about all bodily functions and used to say, “The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there.” If anyone wanted to talk to him, they could walk straight into the bathroom. There was no such thing as privacy there or anywhere else in the ashram.

She recounts an incident when a man came and told Gandhi that he was suffering from heavy nosebleeds. He had tried all sorts of medicines, but nothing had worked. Gandhi gave him a tin of brown powder and told him to take it like snuff. When the man asked what it was, Gandhi told him not to worry, but just to do as he had been told. The man returned after some days to thank Gandhi for his miraculous cure. He asked him once more what the powder was. “I’m not sure I should tell you,” replied Gandhi. “But I might need it again,” said the man. “Well, if you must know,” said Gandhi, “it was an ancient nature-cure formula—powdered cow dung.”

Gandhi was initially against modern medicine and believed in all sorts of nature cures like hydrotherapy, earth treatment and dietetics. When his wife was dying from acute bronchitis, the British flew a supply of rare penicillin to the prison where she was being held, write Lapierre and Collins. But at the last minute, when Gandhi learned the drug which could have saved his dying wife would have to be administered intravenously, he refused her doctors permission to give it to her.

While another great Indian leader, B.R. Ambedkar, thought that industrialisation and urbanisation was the way forward for India, Gandhi argued that a renewal and revitalisation of the village economy was a more sustainable path, writes Guha. In his 1909 book Hind Swaraj, Gandhi attacks professions like medicine and law, and advancements like the telegraph and the railways, as unnecessary to human welfare. “I wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of satisfaction,” he wrote.

Ironically, he would later come to rely on many of these modern evils like the railways. (Lapierre and Collins relate an incident in which Lord Mountbatten, the country’s last viceroy, asked Sarojini Naidu how the Congress ensured Gandhi’s protection when he travelled in third-class carriages. She laughed and replied that most of the ‘untouchables’ in the carriage would be people placed there by the Congress. “My dear Louis,” she told Mountbatten. “You will never know how much it has cost the Congress Party to keep that old man in poverty.”)

So, was Gandhi anti-modern?

Guha says it is important not to cherry-pick Gandhi’s quotes, since his views evolved greatly since the days he wrote Hind Swaraj. “Just as Gandhi modified his opinions about caste, gender and race, so too with technology,” says Guha. “He started with an atavistic, knee-jerk, absolute opposition to modern technology. Over the course of his life, his position became more nuanced. He said some aspects of technology are fine. In some industries, we need centralised production, but where decentralised production is possible, we should follow that path.”

In some respects, says Guha, Gandhi was not just modern, he was ahead of his times. He anticipated concepts now current in the literature on political ecology, such as ‘ecological footprint’ and ‘resource catchment’. “We are sitting in this fine pandal (tent) under a blaze of electric lights, but we do not know we are burning these lights at the expense of the poor,” he once said. Gandhi intuited, as Guha writes, that “the larger the city, the more intensive its use of energy and resources, the wider and more unsustainable the ecological footprint of its residents”. He also foresaw the need for the integration of Ayurveda, Unani and allopathy at a time when each system of medicine looked at the other with distrust and suspicion.

According to Guha, Gandhi’s economic and ecological vision was rejected even more decisively by his compatriots than his ideas of interfaith harmony. Gandhi’s prescriptions for sustainable farming, cooperative management of water and forests and recycling of waste seemed hopelessly outdated for a newly independent country in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the world. Once, when Nehru chastised Gandhi for being against the spirit of the times, Guha quotes Gandhi as saying, “[It] does not frighten me at all that the world seems to be going in the opposite direction. For the matter of that, when the moth approaches its doom, it whirls faster and faster till it burns up. It is possible that India will not be able to escape this moth-like circling. It is my duty to try, till my last breath, to save India and through it the world from such a fate.”

Gandhi might not be here, but he is still speaking. Is it time we listen before we whirl inexorably into our doom?

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

Although Gandhi borrowed the term ‘civil disobedience’ from Henry Thoreau’s 1848 tract, he conceived it differently. Thoreau protested as an individual—refusing to pay taxes and courting arrest. Gandhi turned it into a tool of mass protest. While Thoreau went to jail by himself, Gandhi mobilised hundreds to go to jail with him.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

The first reference to Gandhi in the American press dates to 1897. It was a passing reference in The Nation to a pamphlet he had written about discriminatory colonial laws against Indians in South Africa. Two decades later, The New York Times would publish an essay calling Gandhi “far and away the greatest man in the world”.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

After Gandhi launched his journal Indian Opinion in South Africa in 1903, he began profiling noteworthy people whose work had impressed him. In the first months of 1905, two English women featured in the list: the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry and the nurse Florence Nightingale. “No wonder that a country where such women are born is prosperous,” remarked Gandhi.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

Gandhi first saw women engaged in activities outside the home when he went to study law in the UK in 1888. Until then, he might not have spoken to any woman outside his household. Although he exchanged pleasantries with his landlady and her daughters in London, he did not develop a friendship with them. Yet, his stint in England made him aware of how much women abroad had progressed when compared with Indian women.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

On January 29, 1948, Gandhi told his audience, “Why do you presume that because I am a friend of Muslims, I am an enemy of Hindus and Sikhs? I have not taken to service at anyone’s bidding. I have become what I am at the bidding of God.” He reiterated that for him, peace did not mean going to the Himalayas. His peace was amidst the toil and turmoil of his people. The next day, he was shot dead by Nathuram Godse.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

When the RSS started becoming more violent, Gandhi reiterated that “Hinduism cannot be saved by orgies of murder”. Once, when a member of Gandhi’s party extolled the RSS for the fine work they did at Wah refugee camp and marvelled at their “courage, discipline and capacity for hard work”, Gandhi answered: “But don’t forget, even so had Hitler’s Nazis and the Fascists under Mussolini.”

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

In the 1920s, Albert Einstein had portraits of three physicists hanging in his study: Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell. When he moved to Princeton in 1935, he added a photo of Gandhi who he described as “the greatest man of our age”. Later, when a friend visited him in 1954, photos of the physicists had come down. Only Gandhi remained.

GLIMPSES FROM THE BOOK

In his 1909 book Hind Swaraj, Gandhi spoke about how lawyers and doctors should give up their professions and wealthy men should devote their money to the common cause. Social reformer Gopal Krishna Gokhale found the book’s characterisation of modern civilisation so “crude and hastily conceived” that he prophesied that Gandhi would “himself destroy the book after spending a year in India”.