GREGORY CLAEYS GANDHI, MOHANDAS K. (1869–1948)

GREGORY CLAEYS GANDHI, MOHANDAS K. (1869–1948)

The Indian nationalist, Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi, rejected his upper-class background to become a ‘champion of the oppressed’ in both South Africa and India. Between 1893 and 1914 he developed an eclectic socio-political doctrine that synthesized oriental and Western ideas on resistance, reconciliation and ‘the good life’. An activist rather than a theoretician, Gandhi wrote few books, but was a prolific journalist.

Gandhi was born in western India in October 1869. His father, a Hindu, was the Prime Minister of the native state of Porbandar, while his mother was a devotee of the Pranami sect, a religion that venerated both the Koran and the cult of Vishnu. Although Gandhi subsequently regretted his child-marriage (1883) and his poor record as a school student, his early life acquainted him with both the ‘power politics’ of the British Raj and the major Pranami tenets of religious toleration, simplicity of living and the ability of the will to subdue bodily appetites (e.g. through fasting).

In 1888, Gandhi travelled to London to study Law. After three years of training, he became a barrister, although his extracurricular interests in theosophy, Christianity and vegetarianism had a much greater long-term impact on his intellectual development. Gandhi also read TOLSTOY (The First Step) during this visit to London. From 1891 to 1893, Gandhi practised law in India before emigrating to South Africa. Once there, he encountered anti-Indian discrimination in both Natal and Transvaal, and began to campaign against various discriminatory laws and policies. Gradually, Gandhi developed

a style of non-violent resistance that—from 1908 onwards—he called satyagraha (‘truth force’). Having won many, but not all, of his demands, Gandhi returned to India in 1915.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 240 In 1904, Gandhi read Unto this Last, by RUSKIN, and concluded that the revival of

traditional handicrafts was the necessary economic corollary of his socio-political conceptions of local democracy, a ‘minimal state’ and ‘the simple life’. A more specific goal of Gandhian politics was Indian independence from British rule, and he set out both this specific demand—and his over-arching philosophy—in Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule) . Originally a newspaper article (1909), this seminal text was republished as a pamphlet in 1910, 1914, 1919, 1921, 1924, 1938 and 1939.

Gandhi had established the intellectual parameters of satyagraha in Africa and the final 33 years of his life can be seen as the application/ popularization of a nineteenth- century doctrine. This involved personal campaigning against both colonialism and ‘untouchability’, and in favour of Hindu-Muslim unity, gender equality, hand-spinning and village self-sufficiency, as well as publishing books such as The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–9) and Satyagraha in South Africa (1928). The main changes to Gandhism, after the Chauri Chaura massacre of Indian policemen (1922), were an even greater emphasis on ahimsa (‘non-violence’) and a less optimistic assessment of the prospects for a harmonious ‘end of empire’. During the Boer, Zulu and First World Wars Gandhi supported medical/ambulance assistance to British forces, but in 1942 he launched a ‘Quit India’ campaign that ultimately contributed to both independence and partition (i.e. the creation of Pakistan). In January 1948, Gandhi’s opposition to communal violence led to assassination by a Hindu extremist.

Gandhi’s disagreements with other Indian nationalists were not new, and help to explain the different emphases that he placed upon certain aspects of his system at different times. For example, in the Edwardian period, Gandhi stressed his criticisms of industrialism, modernization, terrorism and Hindu chauvinism in order to debunk expatriate socialists and the ‘Extreme’ wing of the Indian National Congress. His position, as set out in Hind Swaraj, was closer to that of the ‘Moderate’ faction in Congress, in that he shared their admiration for the principles (but not the practice) of the British Constitution, but Gandhi was not a secularist, and saw ‘reform of the soul’ as a necessary prerequisite of political transformation. Furthermore, the ‘oriental’ dimension of Gandhi’s thought can be seen again in the manner in which he sought to stress continuity between his conception of dharma (‘natural moral law’) as a system of mutual obligation, and the more hierarchical concepts of duty propounded in the classical Indian texts that he studied avidly (e.g. Bhagavadgita and Ramayana). However, Gandhi’s religious thought included a more active dimension than was traditional in the subcontinent; this was reflected in his admiration for both Mohammed and Jesus of Nazareth.

As well as biblical Christianity, a number of other Western beliefs helped to shape Gandhi’s doctrines. Thus, in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi described himself as a follower of Tolstoy, Ruskin, EMERSON and THOREAU. The first three were unorthodox Christians, while Thoreau’s more secular doctrine of civil disobedience to unjust laws was nevertheless reliant upon a ‘Protestant’ conception of individual conscience. Gandhi was particularly indebted to Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is within You (which he read in 1894) for bringing to his attention Christian ideals of personal virtue and non-violence (as expounded in the Sermon on the Mount). Moreover, Tolstoy and Ruskin were advocates of ‘the simple life’—and therefore passionate critics of industrial civilization— for not only was such a life preferable for the poor, but also luxury corrupted the moral

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and aesthetic sensibilities of the rich. This line of argument was frequently taken up by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj and elsewhere. Although Gandhi also described himself as a follower of Emerson, this admiration seems to have been largely due to a sense that the American was a ‘spiritual’ thinker, rather than to any specific concept. There seem to be stronger parallels between Gandhi’s attempts to link national and personal regeneration, and those of the Italian nationalist, MAZZINI. Gandhi expressed particular admiration for the latter’s The Duties of Man (1844).