Jesus counselled the upholders of the lex talionis [law of retaliation] who claimed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth that he who had been smitten on one cheek should turn the other cheek also to the smiter. So much for the foreign tyrant. As for his own countryman, the Jew, who, falling a victim to his own weakness and a fear of the Gentile masters of Judea, had become a publican or tax-collector on behalf of the foreigner, he too could easily claim a share in the abounding love of Jesus. The idea of being all-powerful by suffering and resignation, and of triumphing over force by purity of heart, is as old as the days of Abel and Cain, the first progeny of Man. But since it so eminently suited the conditions of the times of Jesus, and the record of his ministry, however inadequate or defective, has still preserved for us this part of his teachings in some detail, it has come to be regarded by Christians, and even by many non-Christians as an idea peculiar to Jesus.
Be that as it may, it was just as peculiar to Mahatma Gandhi also; but it was reserved for a Christian government to treat as a felon the most Christ-like man of our times and to penalise as a disturber of the public peace the one man engaged in public affairs who comes nearest to the Prince of Peace. The political conditions of India just before the advent of the Mahatma resembled those of Judea [under foreign rule] on the eve of the advent of Jesus, and the prescription that he offered to those in search of a remedy for the ills of India was the same that Jesus had dispensed before in Judea. Self-purification through suffering; a moral preparation for the responsibilities of government; self-discipline as the condition precedent of Swaraj—this was the Mahatma’s creed and conviction; and those of us who have been privileged to have lived in the glorious year that culminated in the Congress session at Ahmedabad [in 1921] have seen what a remarkable and what a rapid change he wrought in the thoughts, feelings and actions of such large masses of mankind. …
Friends, I have said all that I could say on the Hindu–Muslim question and if after all this lengthy dissertation I leave any Hindu or Muslim still unconvinced of the necessity of co-operation among ourselves and non-cooperation with our foreign masters, I can say no more and must acknowledge myself beaten. One thing is certain, and it is this that neither can the Hindus exterminate the Muslims to-day nor can the Muslims get rid of the Hindus. If the Hindus entertain any such designs they must know that they lost their opportunity when Mohammad bin Qasim landed on the soil of Sind twelve hundred years ago. Then the Muslims were few, and to-day they number more than seventy millions. And if the Muslims entertain similar notions, they too have lost their opportunity. They should have wiped out the whole breed of Hindus when they ruled from Kashmir to Cape Comorin and from Karachi to Chittagong. And as the Persian proverb says, the blow that is recalled after the fight must be struck on one’s own jaw. If they cannot get rid of one another, the only thing to do is to settle down to co-operate with one another, and while the Muslims must remove all doubts from the Hindu minds about their desire for Swaraj for its own sake and their readiness to resist all foreign aggression [i.e., from Afghanistan], the Hindus must similarly remove from the Muslim minds all apprehensions that the Hindu majority is synonymous with Muslim servitude. …
Warfare, according to the Quran, is an evil; but persecution is a worse evil, and may be put down with the weapons of war. When persecution ceases, and every man is free to act with the sole motive of securing divine goodwill, warfare must cease. These are the limits of violence in Islam, as I understand it, and I cannot go beyond these limits without infringing the Law of God. But I have agreed to work with Mahatma Gandhi, and our compact is that as long as I am associated with him I shall not resort to the use of force even for purposes of self-defence. And I have willingly entered into this compact because I think we can achieve victory without violence; that the use of violence for a nation of three hundred and twenty millions of people should be a matter of reproach to it; and, finally, that victory achieved with violence must be not the victory of all sections of the nation, but mainly of the fighting classes, which are more sharply divided in India from the rest of the nation than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Our Swaraj [self-government] must be the Raj [government] of all, and, in order to be that, it must have been won through the willing sacrifice of all. If this is not so, we shall have to depend for its maintenance as well on the prowess of the fighting classes, and this we must do. Swaraj must be won by the minimum sacrifice of the maximum number and not by the maximum sacrifice of the minimum number.
[From Select Writings and Speeches of Maulana Mohamed Ali, ed. Afzal Iqbal (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1944), 2:117–118, 141–142, 145, 188.]
By 1930 the communal split was apparent: both Ali brothers denounced Gandhi as a tool of the Hindu Mahasabha. At once suspicious of and disillusioned with the Mahatma, and convinced by the growing appeal of Muslim separatism, the Ali brothers departed irrevocably from a nationalist movement that they could no longer deem inclusive of their interests. When Gandhi came forth with his new call for mass civil disobedience, it no longer resonated with the Alis as it had ten years earlier. Mohamed condemned Gandhi as “fighting for the supremacy of Hinduism and the submergence of Muslims.”28 Both brothers urged Muslims not to join the salt satyagraha.
Shortly before he died, Mohamed Ali championed the two causes closest to his heart: the “supernationalist” freedom of India, and the integrity of the world of Islam.
The one purpose for which I came [to speak] is this—that I want to go back to my country if I can go back with the substance of freedom in my hand. Otherwise I will not go back to a slave country. I would even prefer to die in a foreign country so long as it is a free country, and if you do not give us freedom in India you will have to give me a grave here. …
The real problem which is upsetting us all the time has been … the Hindu–Muslim problem; but that is no problem at all. The fact is that the Hindu–Muslim difficulty … is of your own creation. But not altogether. It is the old maxim of “divide and rule.” But there is a division of labour here. We divide and you rule. The moment we decide not to divide you will not be able to rule as you are doing to-day. …
I belong to two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric. One is India, and the other is the Muslim world. When I came to India in 1920 at the head of the Khilafat Delegation [to defend the traditional position of the Turkish caliph], my friends said: “You must have some sort of a crest for your stationery.” I decided to have it with two circles on it. In one circle was the word “India”; in the other circle was Islam, with the word “Khilafat.” We as Indian Muslims came in both circles. We belong to these two circles, each of more than 300 millions, and we can leave neither. We are not nationalists but supernationalists, and I as a Muslim say that “God made man and the Devil made the nation.” Nationalism divides; our religion binds. No religious wars, no crusades, have seen such holocausts and have been so cruel as your last war [World War I], and that was a war of your nationalism.
[From Mohamed Ali, Select Speeches and Writings, 2:350, 355–357, 361.]
Gandhi replied to them on the eve of the march, on March 12, 1930.
Having lost caste with some Mussalmans, there are numerous misrepresentations about me to be seen in the Muslim Press. A friend has brought the latest to my notice. It is to the effect that I have prevented the Imam Saheb, an inmate of the Ashram and an honored life co-worker, from joining the Ashram group of civil resisters, on the plea that he could not subscribe to non-violence as an article of faith for achieving the national purpose. The fact is quite the reverse. Imam Saheb’s name is on my list. He gave it after full deliberation. I personally never had any difficulty about reading the message of non-violence in the Koran. Imam Saheb is not joining the march as he is too weak to undertake the exertion. But it is quite likely that he may offer himself for arrest when the actual manufacture of contraband salt commences. Two Mussalmans are actually enlisted for the march, as they have no difficulty about subscribing to the creed of non-violence for the purpose of swaraj. Thus the insinuation referred to is baseless in two ways. But the moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted. The present plan of campaign is so designed as ultimately to dispel all suspicion. …
Maulana29 Shaukat Ali is reported to have said that the independence movement is a movement not for swaraj but for Hindu Raj and against Mussalmans, that therefore the latter should leave it alone. On reading the report I wired to the Maulana inquiring whether he was correctly reported. He has kindly replied confirming the report. The Maulana has launched a grave charge against the movement. It needs to be repudiated once for all. Whatever the movement is, it certainly is not for Hindu Raj, nor is it against Mussalmans. It bears within itself a complete answer to the charge. The Congress has taken the first step in final non-cooperation. No Congressman can enter the legislatures, much less accept employment under the Government. No Congressman can seek or receive favors from the Government. Does not the Hindu–Muslim question center round a division of political power—spoils of office? How can the movement be anti-Mussalman or for Hindu Raj when no one identified with it has the slightest notion, till independence is reached, of possessing any political power? … The only ground for the belief, in so far as I can fathom it, can be that those who are engaged in it must, by its very nature, become more self-reliant, more defiant and more capable of resisting any encroachment on their liberty than before, and that since the vast majority of them are Hindus, they will in course of time become more powerful than the Mussalmans. But such reasoning would be unworthy of the brave Maulana I have known him to be. He must therefore explain to the public what he means by his serious charge.
I grant that if till the end of the chapter only Hindus join the movement in the right spirit, they will become an irresistible force of the right, i.e. non-violent type. But the obvious deduction from this fact is that all those who are keeping aloof should join the movement at the earliest moment. And I prophesy that, if the movement keeps the chalked path, the Maulana and the other Mussalmans, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jews, etc., will join in.
Surely all are equally interested in securing repeal of the salt tax. Do not all need and use salt equally? That is the one tax which is no respecter of persons. …
As against this absolutely national method of gaining our end, put the unnatural, artificial and diplomatic method of a Round Table Conference in which conflicting interests will be represented by interested parties, and all the Indian groups together will be moved and dominated by the paramount and all-powerful British group. This conference without the power of the people behind it and composed of the powerful and the weak will bring anything but swaraj. In the existing circumstances therefore it can only result in further consolidating the British power.
Civil resisters can have nothing to do with such a conference. Their business is merely to generate and conserve national strength. They have nothing to do with communalism. But if they are compelled by force of circumstances to countenance a communal solution, they are pledged only to consider such as may be satisfactory to the parties concerned. How the Maulana can call such a movement anti-Muslim or one for obtaining Hindu Raj, passes comprehension.
The fact that those taking part in the movement are preponderatingly Hindus is unfortunately true. By proclaiming a boycott the Maulana is helping the process. Even so, there can be no harm, if the Hindu civil resisters are fighting not for themselves but for all—Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, and others who will make the nation of the future free India. …
As for the irritation felt by the Maulana against me personally, I need not say much. Since I have no counter-irritation in me, I prophesy that when his temper has cooled down and when he discovers that I am not guilty of the many sins he imagines against me, he will restore me to “his pocket” in which I had the honor to be only the other day as it were. For it is not I who have gone out of his pocket. He has thrown me out of it. I am the same little man that I used to be in 1921. I can never be an enemy of Englishmen, even though they may heap further wrongs upon the Everest of wrongs their representatives have already piled. I am too conscious of the imperfections of the species to which I belong to be irritated against any single member thereof. My remedy is to deal with the wrong wherever I see it, not to hurt the wrongdoer, even as I would not like to be hurt for the wrongs I continually do.
[CWMG 43:54–57.]
From the beginning of the twentieth century, faced with political unrest or opposition of disturbing kinds, the Home Department of the Government of India concentrated much attention on investigating the disturbers. In addition to a host of individual files on people and events, it initiated larger, connected compilations. There were two important series running through most of the first half of the century: the “political trouble” series and the “communism in India” series. There were several volumes in both series, each roughly covering a decade or more. Each book-length, skillfully prepared volume was written by a senior Home Department official and printed for consumption within the Home Department, both for senior police officials and probably for certain officials of the British government. One compilation was published and made public for political purposes: the Rowlatt or Sedition Committee Report, 1918. This report exaggerated the threat posed by the revolutionaries, so that the Rowlatt Bill would be passed and implemented. It provoked considerable political opposition among Indians.
Since undercover political plotters, whether revolutionary terrorists or communists, did not leave a copious written record of their activities, these compilations (along with the files from which they were constructed), constitute one of the best historical records of this activity. In addition to the details of plots against the Raj, the reports had charts, maps, chronological tables of these plottings, and appendices with documents captured from the revolutionaries and communists. One of the documents appended to H. W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937, was “Philosophy of the Bombs,” from the 1920s and purportedly issued by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (or Army) (HSRA). Following Aurobindo Ghose in “The Doctrine of Passive Resistance” (on which see chapter 5), it argues for the use of all means including violence against an oppressor. It also makes clear why Gandhi said he had to fight a war on two fronts: against the violence of the oppressor and against the violence of some of his countrymen.
The debate between advocates of terrorism and Gandhi’s response can be examined in the context both of specific historical events, and of contemporary political ideas about the relative merits of violent or non-violent political action. In the months surrounding the civil disobedience campaign of 1930, a brief encapsulation of this crucial moment in Indian history may begin with the end of 1929.
On December 23, 1929, only six days before the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress took place in Lahore, terrorists exploded a bomb under the viceroy Lord Irwin’s train as it approached Delhi. Many such acts of terrorism against British Indian government officials and civilians had occurred throughout the independence movement.30 But this failed attempt on Irwin and his entourage may be seen in retrospect as particularly significant, because it triggered a debate among the three parties mentioned in Gandhi’s “Letter to Lord Irwin.” These were what Gandhi termed, “the organized violent force of the British rule, … the growing party of violence,” and the party committed to the theory and practice of satyagraha. All three of these parties converged on the specifics of the bomb as a tool of resistance.
As the Lahore Congress began on December 30, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association distributed the following manifesto, aimed at Gandhi’s campaign for independence.
To us the Mahatma is an impossible visionary. Non-violence may be a noble Ideal, but it is a thing of the morrow. We can … never hope to win our freedom by mere non-violence. The world is armed to the very teeth. And the world is too much with us. All talk of peace may be sincere, but we, of the slave Nation, cannot, and must not, be led by such false Ideology. What Logic, we ask, is there in asking the country to traverse a non-violent path when the world atmosphere is surcharged with violence and exploitation of the weak? We declare with all the emphasis we can command that the youths of the Nation cannot be lured by such mid-summer-night’s dream.
We believe in violence, not as an end in itself but as a means to a Noble End. And the votaries of non-violence, as also the advocates of caution and circumspection will readily grant this much at least, that we know how to suffer for, and act up to, our convictions. Shall we here recount all those sacrifices which our comrades have offered at the altar of our common Mother? Many a heartrending and soul-stirring scene has been enacted inside the four walls of His Majesty’s Prison: We have been taken to task for our Terroristic Policy. Our answer is that terrorism is never the object of revolutionaries, nor do they believe that terrorism alone can bring independence. No doubt the revolutionaries think, and rightly, that it is only by resorting to terrorism alone that they can find a most effective means of retaliation. The British Government exists, because the Britishers have been successful in terrorising the whole of India. How are we to meet this official terrorism? Only counter-terrorism on the part of the revolutionaries can checkmate effectively this bureaucratic bullying. A feeling of utter helplessness pervades society. How can we overcome this fatal despondency? It is only by infusing a real spirit of sacrifice that that lost self-confidence can be restored. Terrorism has its international aspect also. England’s enemies, which are many, are drawn towards us by effective demonstration of our strength. That in itself is a great advantage.
[Quoted in H. W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh, 1974), 217–218.]
The manifesto quoted above, signed by Kartar Singh, president of HSRA, prompted the following response from Gandhi on January 2, 1930, as a summary of the major resolutions he had introduced during the Lahore conference.
If I did not know that violence was like froth coming to the surface in an agitated liquid, I should probably despair of non-violence succeeding in the near future in giving us the freedom which we are all violently-minded and non-violently-minded people yearning for. Happily I have a certain belief based upon ceaseless experience during my tour in the heart of India for the past twelve months very nearly, that the vast masses who have become conscious of the fact that they must have freedom are untouched by the spirit of violence. In spite therefore of sporadic violent outbursts such as the bomb explosion under the Viceregal train I feel that non-violence for our political battle has come to stay. It is because of my increasing faith in the efficacy of non-violence in political warfare and the possibility of its being practised by masses of people that I propose to reason with those who may not be so much saturated with violence as to be beyond the pale of reason.
Let us think then for a moment what would have happened if the Viceroy had been seriously injured or killed. There certainly would have been no meeting of 23rd ultimo and therefore no certainty as to the course to be adopted by the Congress. That surely would have been, to say the least, an undesirable result. Fortunately for us the Viceroy and his party escaped unhurt, and with great self-possession he went through the day’s routine as if nothing had happened. I know that those who have no regard even for the Congress, who hope nothing from it and whose hope lies only through violence, will not be affected by this speculative reasoning. But the others, I hope, will not fail to realize the truth of the argument and to put together several important deductions that can be drawn from the hypothetical case put by me.
Take again the net result of political violence practised in this country. Every time violence has occurred we have lost heavily, that is to say, military expenditure has risen. As against this, I am willing to put the Morley-Minto reforms, the Montagu reforms and the like. But an ever widening circle of politicians is now beginning to realize that they have been like toys given to us against heavy economic burden. Whilst paltry concessions have been made, a few more Indians have found employment under Government, the masses in whose name, and for whose sake, we want freedom, have had to bear greater burdens without having any return whatsoever therefor. If we would only realize that it is not by terrorising the foreigner that we shall gain freedom, but by ourselves shedding fear and teaching the villager to shed his own fear that we shall gain true freedom, we would at once perceive that violence is suicidal.
Then consider its reaction on ourselves. From violence done to the foreign ruler, violence to our own people whom we may consider to be obstructing the country’s progress is an easy natural step. Whatever may have been the result of violent activities in other countries and without reference to the philosophy of non-violence, it does not require much intellectual effort to see that if we resort to violence for ridding society of the many abuses which impede our progress, we shall but add to our difficulties and postpone the day of freedom. The people unprepared for reform because unconvinced of their necessity will be maddened with rage over their coercion, and will seek the assistance of the foreigner in order to retaliate. Has not this been happening before our eyes for the past many years of which we have still painfully vivid recollections?
Take now the positive side of the argument. When, that is in 1920, non-violence came to be part of the Congress creed, the Congress became a transformed body as if by magic. Mass awakening came no one knows how. Even remote villages were stirred. Many abuses seemed to have been swept away. The people became conscious of their power. They ceased to fear authority. … If the march of non-violence had not been interrupted by events culminating in Chauri Chaura, I make bold to say that we would have been today in full possession of swaraj. No one has been found to dispute this proposition. But many have shaken their heads as they have said, “But you can’t teach non-violence to the masses. It is only possible for individuals and that too in rare cases.” This is, in my opinion, a gross self-deception. If mankind was not habitually non-violent, it would have been self-destroyed ages ago. But in the duel between forces of violence and non-violence the latter have always come out victorious in the end. The truth is that we have had patience enough to wait and apply ourselves whole-heartedly to the spread of non-violence among the people as a means for political ends.
We are now entering upon a new era. Our immediate objective and not our distant goal is complete independence. Is it not obvious that if we are to evolve the true spirit of independence amongst the millions, we shall only do so through non-violence and all it implies? It is not enough that we drive out Englishmen by making their lives insecure through secret violence. That would lead not to independence but to utter confusion. … Let those who are not past reason then cease either secretly or openly to endorse activities such as their latest bomb outrage. Rather let them openly and heartily condemn these outrages, so that our deluded patriots may for want of nourishment to their violent spirit realize the futility of violence and the great harm that violent activity has every time done.
[CWMG 42:361–364.]
Kartar Singh immediately responded to this in a more fully developed second manifesto for the HSRA, entitled “The Philosophy of the Bombs.” Singh began by referring directly to the failed bomb attack on Irwin, regretting its unfortunate failure and concluding, “If fortunately, the explosion had been powerful enough to kill the Viceroy, one more enemy of India would have met a well deserved doom.”31
VIOLENCE OR NON-VIOLENCE
Let us, first of all, take up the question of violence and non-violence. … When a revolutionary believes certain things to be his right, he asks for them, argues for them, wills to attain them with all the soul-force at his command, stands the greatest amount of suffering for them, is always prepared to make the highest sacrifice for their attainment, and also backs his efforts with all the physical force he is capable of. … While the revolutionaries stand for winning independence by all the forces, physical as well as moral, at their command, the advocates of soul-force would like to ban the use of physical force. The question really, therefore, is not whether you will have violence or non-violence, but whether you will have soul-force plus physical force or soulforce alone.
OUR IDEAL
The revolutionaries believe that the deliverance of their country will come through Revolution. The Revolution they are constantly working and hoping for, will not only express itself in the form of an armed conflict between the foreign government and its supporters and the people, it will also usher in a New Social Order. The revolution will ring the death knell of capitalism and class distinctions and privileges. It will bring joy and prosperity to the starving millions who are seething today under the terrible yoke of both foreign and Indian exploitation. It will bring the nation into its own. It will give birth to a new State—a new social order. Above all, it will establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and will for ever banish social parasites from the seat of political power.
The revolutionaries already see the advent of the revolution in the restlessness of youth, in its desire to break free from the mental bondage and religious superstitions that hold them. As the youth will get more and more saturated with the psychology of revolution, it will come to have a clearer realization of national bondage and a growing, intense, unquenchable thirst for freedom. It will grow, this feeling of bondage, this insatiable desire for freedom, till, in their righteous anger, the infuriated youth will begin to kill the oppressors. Thus has terrorism been born in the country. It is a phase, a necessity, an inevitable phase of the revolution. Terrorism is not the complete revolution and the revolution is not complete without terrorism. This thesis can be supported by an analysis of any and every revolution in history. Terrorism instills fear in the hearts of the oppressors, it brings hopes of revenge and redemption to the oppressed masses, it gives courage and self-confidence to the wavering, it shatters the spell of the superiority of the ruling class and raises the status of the subject race in the eyes of the world, because it is the most convincing proof of a nation’s hunger for freedom. Here in India, as in other countries in the past, terrorism will develop into the revolution, and the revolution into independence, social, political and economic. …
THE CONGRESS AND THE REVOLUTIONARIES
Meanwhile, what has Congress been doing? It has changed its creed from swaraj to complete independence. As a logical sequence to this, one would expect it to declare war on the British Government. Instead, we find, it has declared war against the Revolutionaries. The first offensive of the Congress came in the form of a resolution deploring the attempt made on the 23rd December 1929, to blow up the Viceroy’s special. It was drafted by Gandhi and he fought tooth and nail for it, with the result, that it was passed by a trifling majority of 81 in a house of 1713.32 Was even this bare majority a result of honest political convictions? Let us quote the opinion of Sarla Devi Chaudhrani, who has been a devotee of the Congress all her life, in reply. She says, “I discovered in the course of my conversations with a good many of the Mahatma’s followers that it was only their senses of personal loyalty to him that was keeping them back from an expression of the independent views and preventing them from voting against any resolution whatsoever that was fathered by Mahatmaji.” …
GANDHI ON WAR PATH
Having achieved a victory which cost him more than a defeat, Gandhi has returned to the attack in his article “The Cult of the Bomb.” We will give it our closest attention before proceeding further. That article consists of three things, his faith, his opinion and his arguments. We will not discuss what is a matter of faith with him because reason has little in common with faith. Let us then take such of his opinions as are backed by arguments and his arguments proper, against what he calls violence and discuss them one by one.
DO THE MASSES BELIEVE IN NON-VIOLENCE?
He thinks that on the basis of his experience during his latest tour in the country, he is right in believing that the large masses of Indian Humanity are yet untouched by the spirit of violence and that non-violence has come to stay as a political weapon. Let him not delude himself on the experiences of his latest tour in the country. Though it is true that the average leader confines his tours to places where only the mail train can conveniently land him, while Gandhi has extended his tour limit to where a motor car can take him, the practice, of staying only with the richest people in the places visited, of spending most of his time on being complimented by his devotees in private and public and of granting Darshan, now and then, to the illiterate masses, whom he claims to understand so well, disqualifies him from claiming to know the mind of the masses. No man can claim to know a people’s mind by seeing them from the public platform and giving them Darshana and Updesh. He can at most claim to have told the masses what he thinks about things. Has Gandhi, during recent years mixed in the social life of the masses? Has he sat with the peasant round the evening fire and tried to know what he thinks? Has he passed a single evening in the company of a factory labourer and shared with him his vows? We have, and therefore we can claim to know what the masses think. We assure Gandhi, that the average Indian, like the average human being, understands little of the fine theological niceties about “ahimsa” and “loving one’s enemy.” The way of the world is like this. You have a friend: you love him, sometimes so much that you even die for him. You have an enemy, you shun him, you fight against him and if possible, kill him. The gospel of the revolutionaries is simple and straight. It is what it has been since the days of Adam and Eve and no man has any difficulty about understanding it. We affirm that the masses of India are solidly with us because we know it from personal experience. The day is not far off when they will flock in their thousands to work the will of the revolution. …
NO BULLYING PLEASE
Gandhi has called upon all those who are not past reason to withdraw their support from the revolutionaries and condemn their actions so that “our deluded patriots may, for want of nourishment to their violent spirit, realize the futility of violence and the great harm that violent activities have every time done.” How easy and convenient it is to call people deluded, to declare them to be past reason, to call upon the public to withdraw its support and condemn them so that they may get isolated and be forced to suspend their activities, specially when a man holds the confidence of an influential section of the public! It is a pity that Gandhi does not and will not understand revolutionary psychology in spite of his life-long experience of public life. … To think that a revolutionary will give up his ideals if public support and appreciation is withdrawn from him, is the highest folly. Many a revolutionary has, ere now stepped on to the scaffold and laid his life down for the cause, regardless of the curses that the constitutionalist agitators rained plentifully upon him. If you will have the revolutionaries suspend their activities, reason with them squarely. This is the one and only way. For the rest let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind. A revolutionary is the last person on earth to submit to bullying. …
VICTORY OR DEATH
There is no crime that Britain has not committed in India. Deliberate misrule has reduced us to paupers, has “bled us white.” As a race and a people we stand dishonored and outraged. Do people still expect us to forget or forgive? We shall have our revenge—a people’s righteous revenge on the Tyrant. Let cowards fall back and cringe for compromise and peace. We ask not for mercy and we give no quarter. Ours is a war to the end—to Victory or Death.
Long live revolution!
[Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937, 206–207, 208, 209–210, 214–215, 216.]
One of the most unusual thinkers, statesmen, and reformers of twentieth-century India, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), was born into the Untouchable Mahar (village servants) caste of Maharashtra. The key to his rise was education. At a time when less then one percent of his caste was literate, Ambedkar secured a BA in Bombay, an MA and PhD from Columbia University in New York, and a DSc from London University; he was also called to the bar from Grey’s Inn, London. This extraordinary education, added to his great faith in parliamentary democracy and his lifelong commitment to improving the lives of Untouchables, enabled him not only to stamp his mark on his own caste, but also to improve the status of all of India’s lowest castes by means of the Constitution and legal system of his country.
Ambedkar’s father had left the traditional low-status work of the Mahars to join the British army. The birth of Bhimrao, his fourteenth child, coincided with a time when a number of Mahars had freed themselves from the village structure and begun to protest the limitations of their status. Ambedkar, pushed by his family and aided by caste Hindu reformers, secured the education that enabled him to organize and dominate this burgeoning movement. The direction was set in the early 1920s: organization for social and political activity, attempts to secure civil and religious rights, and the building of pride and self-respect. In his thirty-five years as a leader of the movement, Ambedkar’s activities paralleled those of African American leaders in the United States: the scholarship and literary interests of W. E. B. DuBois, and the charisma and innovative methods of Martin Luther King.
His earliest efforts included a newspaper, an organization of all “Depressed Classes” in Bombay to present grievances to government, the opening of a hostel to facilitate the education of Untouchables, testimony to government commissions investigating political conditions and education, and the holding of conferences for the Depressed Classes all over the Marathi-speaking area. Not until the 1930s did Ambedkar become an all-India personage. He was selected by the British as a delegate to the London Round Table Conferences (1930–1933), and there, confronted with demands for separate electorates by all the minorities of India, he stated his case for the Untouchables as a minority entitled to its own electorate.
The granting of special electorates for the Untouchables was unacceptable to Gandhi, who began a fast in 1932 against their separation from the Hindu body politic. Faced with the possibility of causing Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar very reluctantly capitulated, accepting Gandhi’s offer of separate electorates during primary elections, an increased number of reserved seats for Untouchables, and joint electorates for assembly seats. This involved drawing up a schedule of those castes needing special representation, and “Scheduled Castes” became thereafter the governmental name for Untouchables.
From this time on, Gandhi and Ambedkar pursued distinctly separate paths—Gandhi giving the name “harijan” (people of God) to Untouchables and pleading with caste Hindus to abolish Untouchability, and Ambedkar planning a political party. Ambedkar first joined others in attempting to secure temple entry and religious rights for Untouchables. When that failed, he rejected Hinduism and continued the drive toward education. Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party won fourteen seats in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1937; those elected under its banner included eleven Scheduled Caste members. The party attempted to abolish hereditary discrimination in village economic structures, to ban the use of the term “harijan,” and to secure family-planning measures. Because it was a small minority party, it was unsuccessful, and although Ambedkar never lost faith in the party system, he never found the key to political power for a group that was, by definition, a permanent minority.
More conferences, including one to discuss conversion to another religion, broadened the movement during the 1930s, but Ambedkar also concerned himself with other issues. As Member for Labour in the viceroy’s Executive Council, he worked on labor laws and dam projects. He taught at the Government Law College in Bombay. He wrote on the need to reform and liberalize the university system, and on the hypocrisy of the Congress and Gandhi. In 1945 he founded the People’s Education Society; a year later he opened Siddharth College in Bombay. But as India drew near to independence, he again stressed separatism from other Hindu groups as the way to empower the Scheduled Castes in the battle for equality and integration. He was now known all over India as Babasaheb (“respected sir”), the champion of the Untouchables.
In December 1935 Ambedkar was invited to present his ideas on the “problem of caste” at the Annual Conference in Lahore of an organization of Hindu social reformers called the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal. Prior to the conference, which was to have been held in May 1936, members of the Mandal withdrew the invitation, since many caste Hindus of Lahore anticipated Ambedkar’s views and strenuously objected. In the following selection, Ambedkar reiterates many of the points that he had prepared to advance in the Mandal speech. One of the elements of Gandhi’s attitude that most disgusted Ambedkar was the former’s idealization of the chatur (four) varna system. Gandhi believed that all people could be classed according to occupations of equal dignity within the four broad rubrics of Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and that the Untouchables, who fall outside the classical varna system, should be included as Shudras. This, of course, was unacceptable to Ambedkar.
I appreciate greatly the honour done me by the Mahatma in taking notice in his Harijan of the speech on Caste which I had prepared for the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal. From a perusal of his review of my speech, it is clear that the Mahatma completely dissents from the views I have expressed on the subject of Caste. … Whatever the Mahatma may choose to say, my object in publishing the speech was to provoke the Hindus to think, and take stock of their position. I have never hankered for publicity, and if I may say so, I have more of it than I wish or need. But supposing it was out of the motive of gaining publicity that I printed the speech, who could cast a stone at me? Surely not those who, like the Mahatma, live in glass houses. …
The principal points which I have tried to make out in my speech may be catalogued as follows: (1) That Caste has ruined the Hindus; (2) That the reorganization of the Hindu Society on the basis of Chaturvarnya is impossible … ; (3) That the reorganization of the Hindu Society on the basis of Chaturvarnya is harmful …; (4) That the Hindu Society must be reorganized on a religious basis which would recognize the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; (5) That in order to achieve this object the sense of religious sanctity behind Caste and Varna must be destroyed; (6) That the sanctity of Caste and Varna can be destroyed only by discarding the divine authority of the Shastras. It will be noticed that the questions raised by the Mahatma are absolutely beside the point, and show that the main argument of the speech was lost upon him.
Let me examine the substance of the points made by the Mahatma. The first point made by the Mahatma is that the texts cited by me are not authentic. I confess I am no authority on this matter. But I should like to state that the texts cited by me are all taken from the writings of the late Mr. Tilak, who was a recognized authority on the Sanskrit language and on the Hindu Shastras. His second point is that these Shastras should be interpreted not by the learned but the saints; and that as the saints have understood them, the Shastras do not support Caste and Untouchability.
As regards the first point, what I [would] like to ask the Mahatma is, what does it avail to anyone if the texts are interpolations, and if they have been differently interpreted by the saints? The masses do not make any distinction between texts which are genuine and texts which are interpolations. The masses do not know what the texts are. They are too illiterate to know the contents of the Shastras. They have believed what they have been told, and what they have been told is that the Shastras do enjoin as a religious duty the observance of Caste and Untouchability.
With regard to the saints, one must admit that howsoever different and elevating their teachings may have been as compared to those of the merely learned, they have been lamentably ineffective. They have been ineffective for two reasons. Firstly, none of the saints ever attacked the Caste System. … They were not concerned with the struggle between men. They were concerned with the relation between man and God. They did not preach that all men were equal. They preached that all men were equal in the eyes of God—a very different and very innocuous proposition, which nobody can find difficult to preach or dangerous to believe in.
The second reason why the teachings of the saints proved ineffective was because the masses have been taught that a saint might break Caste, but the common man must not. A saint therefore never became an example to follow. …
The third point made by the Mahatma is that a religion professed by Chaitanya, Jnyandeo, Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar, Ramkrishna Paramahansa, etc., cannot be devoid of merit as is made out by me, and that a religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced. …
The argument of the Mahatma that Hinduism would be tolerable if only many were to follow the example of the saints is fallacious. … By citing the names of such illustrious persons as Chaitanya, etc. what the Mahatma seems to suggest in its broadest and simplest form is that Hindu society can be made tolerable and even happy without any fundamental change in its structure if all the high caste Hindus can be persuaded to follow a high standard of morality in their dealings with the low caste Hindus. I am totally opposed to this kind of ideology. I can respect those of the caste-Hindus who try to realize a high social ideal in their life. Without such men India would be an uglier and less happy place to live in than it is. But nonetheless anyone who relies on an attempt to turn the members of the caste-Hindus into better men by improving their personal character is in my judgement wasting his energy and hugging an illusion. … As a matter of fact, a Hindu does treat all those who are not of his Caste as though they were aliens, who could be discriminated against with impunity and against whom any fraud or trick may be practiced without shame. This is to say that there can be a better or a worse Hindu. But a good Hindu cannot be. This is so not because there is anything wrong with his personal character. In fact what is wrong is the entire basis of his relationship to his fellows. The best of men cannot be moral if the basis of relationship between them and their fellows is fundamentally a wrong relationship. To a slave his master may be better or worse. But there cannot be a good master. …
Does the Mahatma practice what he preaches? … The Mahatma is a Bania by birth. His ancestors had abandoned trading in favour of ministership, which is a calling of the Brahmins. In his own life, before he became a Mahatma, when [the] occasion came for him to choose his career he preferred law to [a merchant’s] scales. On abandoning law, he became half saint and half politician. He has never touched trading, which is his ancestral calling. His youngest son—I take one who is a faithful follower of his father—born a Vaishya, has married a Brahmin’s daughter, and has chosen to serve a newspaper magnate. The Mahatma is not known to have condemned him for not following his ancestral calling. …
Why does the Mahatma cling to the theory of everyone following his or her ancestral calling? He gives his reasons nowhere. But there must be some reason, although he does not care to avow it. Years ago, writing on “Caste versus Class” in his Young India, he argued that Caste System was better than Class System on the ground that Caste was the best possible adjustment of social stability. If that be the reason why the Mahatma clings to the theory of everyone following his or her ancestral calling, then he is clinging to a false view of social life. …
Some might think that the Mahatma has made much progress, inasmuch as he now only believes in Varna and does not believe in Caste. It is true that there was a time when the Mahatma was a full-blooded and a blue-blooded Sanatani Hindu. He believed in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures; and therefore, in avatars and rebirth. He believed in Caste, and defended it with the vigour of the orthodox. He condemned the cry for inter-dining, inter-drinking, and inter-marrying, and argued that restraints about inter-dining to a great extent “helped the cultivation of will-power and the conservation of a certain social virtue.” It is good that he has repudiated this sanctimonious nonsense and admitted that caste “is harmful both to spiritual and national growth,” and maybe his son’s marriage outside his caste has had something to do with this change of view. But has the Mahatma really progressed? … What is the difference between Caste and Varna, as understood by the Mahatma? I find none. As defined by the Mahatma, Varna becomes merely a different name for Caste, for the simple reason that it is the same in essence—namely, pursuit of [one’s] ancestral calling. … I am sure that all his confusion is due to the fact that the Mahatma has no definite and clear conception as to what is Varna and what is Caste, and as to the necessity of either for the conservation of Hinduism. He has said—and one hopes that he will not find some mystic reason to change his view—that Caste is not the essence of Hinduism. Does he regard Varna as the essence of Hinduism? One cannot as yet give any categorical answer. …
The real reason why the Mahatma is suffering from this confusion is probably to be traced to two sources. The first is the temperament of the Mahatma.
He has in almost everything the simplicity of a child, with the child’s capacity for self-deception. Like a child, he can believe in anything he wants to believe. We must therefore wait till such time as it pleases the Mahatma to abandon his faith in Varna, as it has pleased him to abandon his faith in Caste. The second source of confusion is the double role which the Mahatma wants to play—of a Mahatma and a politician. As a Mahatma, he may be trying to spiritualize politics. Whether he has succeeded in it or not, politics have certainly commercialized him. A politician must know that Society cannot bear the whole truth, and that he must not speak the whole truth; if he is speaking the whole truth it is bad for his politics. The reason why the Mahatma is always supporting Caste and Varna is because he is afraid that if he opposed them he will lose his place in politics. …
The Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking. He prefers to follow the saints. Like a conservative with his reverence for consecrated notions, he is afraid that if he once starts thinking, many ideals and institutions to which he clings will be doomed. One must sympathize with him. For every act of independent thinking puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. But it is equally true that dependence on saints cannot lead us to know the truth. The saints are after all only human beings, and as Lord Balfour said, “the human mind is no more a truth finding apparatus than the snout of a pig.”33 Insofar as he [the Mahatma] does think, to me he really appears to be prostituting his intelligence to find reasons for supporting this archaic social structure of the Hindus. He is the most influential apologist of it, and therefore the worst enemy of the Hindus.
[Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, 20 vols. (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 1:86–93, 95.]
Gandhi’s two-part reply to Ambedkar appears in his publication Harijan, for July 11 and 18, 1936.
The readers will recall the fact that Dr. Ambedkar was to have presided last May at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal of Lahore. But the conference itself was cancelled because Dr. Ambedkar’s address was found by the Reception Committee to be unacceptable. How far a Reception Committee is justified in rejecting a President of its choice because of his address that may be objectionable to it is open to question. The Committee knew Dr. Ambedkar’s views on caste and the Hindu scriptures. They knew also that he had in unequivocal terms decided to give up Hinduism. Nothing less than the address that Dr. Ambedkar had prepared was to be expected from him. The committee appears to have deprived the public of an opportunity of listening to the original views of a man who has carved out for himself a unique position in society. Whatever label he wears in future, Dr. Ambedkar is not the man to allow himself to be forgotten.
Dr. Ambedkar was not going to be beaten by the Reception Committee. He has answered their rejection of him by publishing the address at his own expense. He has priced it at 8 annas. I would suggest a reduction to 2 annas or at least 4 annas.
No reformer can ignore the address. The orthodox will gain by reading it. This is not to say that the address is not open to objection. It has to be read if only because it is open to serious objection. Dr. Ambedkar is a challenge to Hinduism. Brought up as a Hindu, educated by a Hindu potentate, he has become so disgusted with the so-called savarna Hindus for the treatment that he and his have received at their hands that he proposes to leave not only them but the very religion that is his and their common heritage. He has transferred to that religion his disgust against a part of its professors.
But this is not to be wondered at. After all one can only judge a system or an institution by the conduct of its representatives. What is more, Dr. Ambedkar found that the vast majority of Savarna Hindus had not only conducted themselves inhumanly against those of their fellow religionists whom they classed as untouchables, but they had based their conduct on the authority of their scriptures, and when he began to search them he had found ample warrant for their belief in untouchability and its implications. The author of the address has quoted chapter and verse in proof of his threefold indictment—inhuman conduct itself, the unabashed justification for it on the part of the perpetrators and the subsequent discovery that the justification was warranted by their scriptures.
No Hindu who prizes his faith above life itself can afford to underrate the importance of this indictment. Dr. Ambedkar is not alone in his disgust. He is its most uncompromising exponent and one of the ablest among them. He is certainly the most irreconcilable among them. Thank God, in the front rank of the leaders, he is singularly alone and as yet but a representative of a very small minority. But what he says is voiced with more or less vehemence by many leaders belonging to the depressed classes. Only the latter, for instance Rao Bahadur M. C. Rajah and Dewan Bahadur Srinivasan, not only do not threaten to give up Hinduism but find enough warmth in it to compensate for the shameful persecution to which the vast mass of Harijans are exposed.
But the fact of many leaders remaining in the Hindu fold is no warrant to disregarding what Dr. Ambedkar has to say. The Savarnas have to correct their belief and their conduct. Above all those who are by their learning and influence among the Savarnas have to give an authoritative interpretation of the scriptures. The questions that Dr. Ambedkar’s indictment suggests are:
1. What are the scriptures?
2. Are all the printed texts to be regarded as an integral part of them or is any part of them to be rejected as unauthorized interpolations?
3. What is the answer of such accepted and expurgated scriptures on the question of untouchability, caste, equality of status, interdining and intermarriages?
(These have been all ably examined by Dr. Ambedkar in his address.)
I must reserve for the next issue my own answer to these questions and a statement of the (at least some) manifest flaws in Dr. Ambedkar’s thesis.
[CWMG 63:134–136.]
Many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as authentic. The scriptures properly so called can only be concerned with eternal verities and must appeal to any conscience, i.e. any heart whose eyes of understanding are opened. Nothing can be accepted as the word of God which cannot be tested by reason or be capable of being spiritually experienced. And even when you have an expurgated edition of the scriptures, you will need their interpretation. Who is the best interpreter? Not learned men surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.
Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth. Varna and Ashrama are institutions which have nothing to do with castes. The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful, and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin—spiritual teacher—and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God and at one time seems to have carried identical reward before man. Both were entitled to their livelihood and no more. … Arrogation of a superior status by any of the varnas over another is a denial of the law. And there is nothing in the law of varna to warrant a belief in untouchability. (The essence of Hinduism is contained in its enunciation of one and only God as Truth and its bold acceptance of ahimsa as the law of the human family.)
I am aware that my interpretation of Hinduism will be disputed by many besides Dr. Ambedkar. That does not affect my position. It is an interpretation by which I have lived for nearly half a century and according to which I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to regulate my life.
In my opinion the profound mistake that Dr. Ambedkar has made in his address is to pick out the texts of doubtful authenticity and value and the state of degraded Hindus who are no fit specimens of the faith they so woefully misrepresent. Judged by the standard applied by Dr. Ambedkar, every known living faith will probably fail.
In his able address, the learned Doctor has over-proved his case. Can a religion that was professed by Chaitanya, Jnanadeva, Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, Vivekanand and a host of others who might be easily mentioned, be so utterly devoid of merit as is made out in Dr. Ambedkar’s address? A religion has to be judged not by its worst specimens but by the best it might have produced. For that and that alone can be used as the standard to aspire to, if not to improve upon.
[CWMG 63:153–154.]
Sometimes referred to as EVR, but more often as Periyar (“Great Man”), E. V. Ramasami (1879–1973) was born into an affluent orthodox Hindu family of Erode, Tamil Nadu. Like Gandhi, his early education, travels, and independent spirit led him to criticize Hinduism, especially the institution of Untouchability, and he soon devoted his life to social and political reform. As an advocate of social equality, he moved quickly from leadership in local politics to a strong commitment to the Indian National Congress, where he showed a Gandhian flair for involving the masses. He championed the Non-cooperation Movement in 1920, sharing all of its goals, including its loyalty to Gandhi’s leadership. By 1922, though, as this phase of the freedom struggle ended, the first signs of his disenchantment with the Congress appeared. Focusing on his primary concern of caste reform, he clashed sharply with Brahman Congress leadership in Madras; but soon his opposition to them was augmented by his disillusionment with Gandhi. As Ambedkar also discovered, at this time Gandhi was not ready to oppose unequivocally all the caste institutions of Hinduism. Periyar quickly became a genuine radical in this respect. His sweeping social critique took him even further than Ambedkar, since he attacked not only Gandhi, the Brahmanical caste system, and Hinduism, but all religion. His special ire was reserved for people of his own, Hindu background; he seems not to have targeted Islam or Christianity, but he criticized the Rāmāyana and the Laws of Manu for their oppressive stances toward non-Brahmans and non-elites.
In 1925 Periyar started his own “Self-Respect Movement.” This led him, like Gandhi, to imprisonment for his resistance to unjust laws, but Periyar concentrated on the injustice of the Brahmanical social system rather than that of British rule. Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Periyar were all three prominent critics of caste, but the last was the most extreme, as well as the only one among them who led an anti-Brahman effort, known as the Dravidian movement, in the heart of the conservative south of Tamil Nadu. When he left Congress, Periyar expressed his creed and policy in heretical terms: “No god; no religion; no Gandhi; no Congress; and no Brahmins.”34 Among our responders to Gandhi, this decree might have been shared completely only by M. N. Roy, because even Ambedkar had his religion, and accommodated Congress.
After years of service in state and national politics, and nearly two decades of involvement in the social reformist Justice Party, in 1939 Periyar demanded an independent Dravida Nadu, which would be free from the domination of Brahmans, caste hierarchy, and Hindi-language imposition. In 1944 he changed the name of his party to Dravida Kazhagam, and in 1948 this split to give rise to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). Largely because of agitation spearheaded by his party, the compulsory learning of Hindi was abolished in 1948, and the separate state of Tamil Nadu was carved out of the Union in 1956.
In an incisive comparative analysis of the ideas of Periyar, Ambedkar, and Gandhi, Nicholas B. Dirks makes it clear that although all three critics of caste recognized its profound roots in traditional India, and strongly opposed the tyranny of social hierarchy, Gandhi’s persistent defense of varnashrama dharma was intolerable to the other two. This was the tipping point, or the test that Gandhi failed. With the same logic and language that led Gandhi, the caste reformer, to defend and embrace the inclusive spirit of Hinduism, both Periyar and Ambedkar deemed Hinduism hopeless, incapable of eradicating its worst evil. Both were “obsessed,” as Dirks observes,35 with Gandhi’s dominant role in the whole project of Indian nationalism. They came to view him as ingenuous or misguided, and moved off in a different direction. From their perspective, Gandhi argued that “caste must go,” but then offered up, as a sop to hierarchical Hinduism, a perverse interpretation of varnashrama dharma. Far better than this, in their view, would be a democracy, free of all vestiges of caste and Untouchability.
The excerpts from Periyar below show that his definition of both India’s damnation and its hope for future redemption revolved around principles of equality and justice, always tested in the context of caste and Brahmanism.
Although initially a Gandhi supporter and member of the Tamilnadu Congress Party Committee, in the mid-1920s Periyar broke with both over the issue of guaranteed reservations for low- or out-caste people in a putative free India. The first two selections show his change in attitude between 1926 and 1927.
Some people ask me why I continue to stay in the Congress. I do so only because of the desire to reconvert the Congress that [presently] works for Brahmin career opportunities into the organization that existed prior to the past couple of years, the Mahatma Gandhi Congress. This worked for the welfare of everyone, and is therefore the real Congress of Non-cooperation. If such a reconversion occurs, then the selfish leaders of today will disappear. When one listens to Gandhi’s words sometimes the precarious hope remains that such a restoration is still possible. If the hope completely disappears I will leave Congress.
[Kudi Arasu, 8 August 1926, 22; page numbers here and below refer to S. V. Rajadhurai and V. Geetha, Periyar: Suyamariyathai Samatharmam (Coimbatore: Vidyal Pathipagam, 1999), trans. Rajan Krishnan and slightly emended for English by R. F. McDermott.]
Periyar, like many other critics, faulted Gandhi for his sacrifice of political to religious principles.
Giving up his own basic principles for the sake of consensus and unity, Mahatma withdrew himself into his ashram like an ascetic or a Sankaracharya. It led to a situation that resembled a religious Mutt [ashrama] where rituals are regularly performed and devotees go to sing the praise of the saint and are rewarded with fame and glory. The reason why Gandhi’s principles came to be undervalued and the Gandhi Mutt was established is because of the lunacy of seeking consensus and unity at the cost of principles. Since lunacy is a mark of a saint, it might suit Mahatma Gandhi. He could still return to his original principles but now that seems unlikely. I am certain that any institution, individual or country divorced from its core principles can only go astray, and Gandhi has lost sight of his.
[Kudi Arasu, 12 June 1927, 23.]
Late in life, when asked to ruminate on Gandhi’s legacy, Periyar made the following observations.
Why did the Brahmins make Gandhi Mahatma?
Comrade Gandhi proclaimed: 1) I am a conservative Hindu; 2) I believe in the prescriptions of the Vedas and the Epics; 3) I believe in the various incarnations of God; 4) I believe in the Varnashrama Dharma as laid down in the Vedic texts; 5) I believe in worshipping these idols. He also acted in accordance with these beliefs. Therefore, he was made a Mahatma.
Why did the Brahmins assassinate him?
He came to say that: 1) I don’t believe that something like the traditional concept of God exists; 2) There is no truth exclusive to Hinduism; 3) Both Allah and Ram are the same; 4) It is not the privilege of only Brahmins to be educated; 5) I value the Koran as much as I value the Vedas; 6) The mosques seized by force should be vacated and returned to Muslims. Therefore, he was killed.
[Viduthalai, 12 April 1951, 735.]
Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), Indian political leader and head of a provisional government of free India during World War II, worked in the Indian National Congress for two decades before the war, but was impatient with Gandhi’s non-violence and leadership. Bose was born in Cuttack, Orissa, a high-caste Bengali of the Kayastha caste.
He grew up during the Swadeshi period in Bengal, and his heroes were Swami Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose. Expelled from Presidency College for his role in assaulting a British professor who he thought had insulted India, Bose graduated later from another college with high honors.
His father sent him to England to take the Indian Civil Service examination, which he passed with brilliant marks. But since Bose felt that the Raj represented slavery for India, he decided not to accept an appointment into the elite service of the Raj. He met Gandhi upon his return from England, and although he was not completely satisfied with Gandhi’s approach, he joined the Congress movement nonetheless.
In Calcutta, Bose worked in the Congress; as a favored lieutenant of C. R. Das, he was chosen Chief Executive Officer of the Calcutta Corporation in 1924. He worked for Hindu–Muslim amity and the improvement of civic life, but was jailed for involvement with acts of violence against the British Raj. No formal charges were made, but Bose served about three years in jail, two of them under unpleasant circumstances in Mandalay, Burma. Released for health reasons in 1927, and with Das now dead, Bose quickly rose to the leadership of the Bengal Provincial Congress. In 1928 he was chosen as a general secretary of the Indian National Congress, helped to prepare the Nehru Report on Indian self-rule, and became a widely popular leader of the younger leftists. He had strong support from urban workers, middle-class nationalists in Calcutta and towns through the countryside, women, and students. Bose pressed Gandhi to move more quickly and forcefully for complete independence. He began to call himself a socialist, and advocated a socialist program for the reconstruction of India once independence was gained.
As commander of the Congress volunteers at the 1928 Congress session, he drilled young Indians to help control the meeting. Some of these Indians later formed an underground revolutionary group, the Bengal Volunteers, or BV, which carried out acts of violence. Bose’s ties to this group, along with his mass following as a Congress leader, made him a marked man to officials in the Raj and untrustworthy to Gandhi.
Bose was in and out of jail from 1930 to 1933, and was even elected mayor of Calcutta in 1930 while imprisoned. He spent a good deal of the period from 1933 to 1937 in Europe recovering his health. While in Europe he wrote The Indian Struggle, an account of Indian politics from 1920 to 1934, and An Indian Pilgrim, a brief, insightful autobiography. Based in Vienna, he also did propaganda work for Indian nationalism and visited many countries of Europe, including Italy and Ireland, where he was warmly welcomed. Bose was impressed at how both communism and fascism were pushing their societies rapidly into the modern world. But he was neither a fascist nor a communist. Closer to the ideal for India, he thought, was the modernizing dictatorship of Turkey’s Mustapha Kemal Pasha, lauded as Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”).
Bose’s career both paralleled and rivaled that of his older contemporary Jawaharlal Nehru. The younger Nehru formed a close tie to Gandhi, which Bose never did. Both Subhas and Jawaharlal agitated for Congress to adopt the goal of complete independence (as opposed to dominion status) in the late 1920s; both were interested in spreading socialist ideas and in bringing the youth of the country into the nationalist movement; and both suffered numerous imprisonments for their active roles in that movement.
In 1938, with Gandhi’s contingent blessing but not his complete confidence, Bose became president of the Indian National Congress. He took the initiative in forming the Planning Committee of the Congress. The next year he decided to run again, against Gandhi’s wishes. With the support of the left, and strong support in some provinces outside his native Bengal, he defeated Gandhi’s candidate, P. Sitaramayya, but then felt compelled to resign his presidency after a Gandhi-inspired controversy about the selection of the Working Committee, the executive body of the Congress. Bose formed the Forward Bloc, a group within the Congress pressing for immediate direct action against the Raj.
Imprisoned again in 1940, Bose fasted, and was released in December. With World War II under way, convinced that the British would never leave India peacefully, Bose determined to flee India and work with some foreign power hostile to the British. He hoped to recruit and train a military unit which would combine with forces within India to drive the British out by violent means. On January 17, 1941, he slipped out of his Calcutta house, reached the Indian frontier, and walked into Afghanistan. Receiving Italian, German, and Russian help, he traveled to Berlin as Orlando Mazzotta, where he set up the Free India Center, a propaganda operation, and the Indian Legion, a small fighting force recruited from Indian prisoners taken in North Africa. Unhappy in Europe, Bose was finally allowed by Hitler to leave for Southeast Asia in February 1943. Traveling by German and then Japanese submarines, and next by air, he reached Tokyo in spring 1943. He courted and impressed Prime Minister Tojo, who supported his efforts to reconstitute the Indian National Army (INA) and set up the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, or Free India. Bose’s army was constituted mainly from Indian prisoners taken at Singapore and was supported by the Indian Independence League, a nationalist organization backed by the Indian community of Southeast Asia. Beloved by his followers, he was called Netaji (“Revered Leader”). He also recruited a regiment of women that he named after the Rani of Jhansi (who is discussed in chapter 2), and placed it under the command of Lakshmi Swaminathan; the women were trained to fight, but never entered combat. Bose worked diligently for communal harmony between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs within his army, and continued his broadcasts back to India, which he had begun in Germany.
In an endeavor to fulfill his slogan of “Chalo Delhi,” or “On to Delhi,” Bose induced the Japanese to invade eastern India in 1944. Their forces briefly entered India, but this effort ended in a catastrophic defeat for the Japanese and the INA. Bose fled and was fatally burned in a plane crash in Taiwan in August 1945. In late 1945 the Raj put three officers of the INA on trial for participating in a rebellion against the kingemperor. The Sikh, G. S. Dhillon, the Hindu, Prem Sahgal, and the Muslim, Shah Nawaz Khan, were convicted, sentenced to transportation for life, but then released. The nationwide demonstrations against the trial of these three, who were seen as patriots by nationalists of all persuasions, showed the British to be out of touch with the political force of Indian nationalism.
For several decades the myth of Bose’s imminent return was spread among Indians who hoped that he would emerge to help India combat its many problems. Bose was one of those Indian nationalists who believed that violence in a noble cause would not corrupt the end sought.
The comments that follow come from chapter 16 of Bose’s The Indian Struggle, originally written in 1933 and then revised and extended in 1942.
The role which a man plays in history depends partly on his physical and mental equipment, and partly on the environment and the needs of times in which he is born. There is something in Mahatma Gandhi, which appeals to the mass of the Indian people. Born in another country he might have been a complete misfit. What, for instance, would he have done in a country like Russia or Germany or Italy? His doctrine of non-violence would have led him to the cross or to the mental hospital. In India it is different. His simple life, his vegetarian diet, his goat’s milk, his day of silence every week, his habit of squatting on the floor instead of sitting on a chair, his loin-cloth—in fact everything connected with him—has marked him out as one of the eccentric Mahatmas of old and has brought him nearer to his people. Wherever he may go, even the poorest of the poor feels that he is a product of the Indian soil—bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. When the Mahatma speaks, he does so in a language that they comprehend, not in the language of Herbert Spencer and Edmund Burke, as for instance Sir Surendra Nath Banerji would have done, but in that of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Ramayana. When he talks to them about Swaraj, he does not dilate on the virtues of provincial autonomy or federation, he reminds them of the glories of Ramarajya (the kingdom of King Rama of old) and they understand. And when he talks of conquering through love and ahimsa (non-violence), they are reminded of Buddha and Mahavira and they accept him.
But the conformity of the Mahatma’s physical and mental equipment to the traditions and temperament of the Indian people is but one factor accounting for the former’s success. If he had been born in another epoch in Indian history, he might not have been able to distinguish himself so well. For instance, what would he have done at the time of the Revolution of 1857 when the people had arms, were able to fight and wanted a leader who could lead them in battle? The success of the Mahatma has been due to the failure of constitutionalism on the one side and armed revolution on the other. Since the eighties of the last century, the best political brains among the Indian people were engaged in a constitutional fight, in which the qualities most essential were skill in debate and eloquence in speech. In such an environment it is unlikely that the Mahatma would have attained much eminence. With the dawn of the present century people began to lose faith in constitutional methods. New weapons like Swadeshi (revival of national industry) and Boycott appeared, and simultaneously the revolutionary movement was born. As the years rolled by, the revolutionary movement began to gain ground (especially in Upper India) and during the Great War there was an attempt at a revolution. The failure of this attempt at a time when Britain had her hands full and the tragic events of 1919 convinced the Indian people that it was no use trying to resort to the method of physical force. The superior equipment of Britain would easily smash any such attempt and in its wake there would come indescribable misery and humiliation.
In 1920 India stood at the cross-roads. Constitutionalism was dead; armed revolution was sheer madness. But silent acquiescence was impossible. The country was groping for a new method and looking for a new leader. Then there sprang up India’s man of destiny—Mahatma Gandhi—who had been biding his time all these years and quietly preparing himself for the great task ahead of him. He knew himself—he knew his country’s needs and he knew also that during the next phase of India’s struggle, the crown of leadership would be on his head. No false sense of modesty troubled him—he spoke with a firm voice and the people obeyed.
The Indian National Congress of today is largely his creation. The Congress Constitution is his handwork. From a talking body he has converted the Congress into a living and fighting organisation. It has its ramification in every town and village in India, and the entire nation has been trained to listen to one voice. Nobility of character and capacity to suffer have been made the essential tests of leadership, and the Congress is today the largest and the most representative political organisation in the country.
But how could he achieve so much within this short period? By his single-hearted devotion, his relentless will and his indefatigable labour. Moreover, the time was auspicious and his policy prudent. Though he appeared as a dynamic force, he was not too revolutionary for the majority of his countrymen. If he had been so, he would have frightened them, instead of inspiring them; repelled them, instead of drawing them. His policy was one of unification. He wanted to unite Hindu and Moslem; the high caste and the low caste; the capitalist and the labourer; the landlord and the peasant. By this humanitarian outlook and his freedom from hatred, he was able to rouse sympathy even in his enemy’s camp.
But Swaraj is still a distant dream. Instead of one, the people have waited for fourteen long years. And they will have to wait many more. With such purity of character and with such an unprecedented following, why has the Mahatma failed to liberate India?
He has failed because the strength of a leader depends not on the largeness—but on the character—of one’s following. With a much smaller following, other leaders have been able to liberate their country—while the Mahatma with a much larger following has not. He has failed, because while he has understood the character of his own people, he has not understood the character of his opponents. The logic of the Mahatma is not the logic which appeals to John Bull. He has failed, because his policy of putting all his cards on the table will not do. We have to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—and in a political fight the art of diplomacy cannot be dispensed with. He has failed, because he has not made use of the international weapon. If we desire to win our freedom through nonviolence, diplomacy and international propaganda are essential. He has failed, because the false unity of interests that are inherently opposed is not a source of strength but a source of weakness in political warfare. The future of India rests exclusively with those radical and militant forces that will be able to undergo the sacrifice and suffering necessary for winning freedom. Last but not least, the Mahatma has failed, because he had to play a dual role in one person—the role of the leader of an enslaved people and that of a world-teacher, who has a new doctrine to preach. It is this duality which has made him at once the irreconcilable foe of the Englishman, according to Mr. Winston Churchill, and the best policeman of the Englishman according to Miss Ellen Wilkinson. …36
In spite of the unparalleled popularity and reputation which the Mahatma has among his countrymen and will continue to have regardless of his future political career, there is no doubt that the unique position of the Mahatma is due to his political leadership. The Mahatma himself distinguishes between his mass-popularity and his political following and he is never content with having merely the former. Whether he will be able to retain that political following in the years to come, in the event of the British attitude being as unbending as it is today, will depend on his ability to evolve a more radical policy. Will he be able to give up the attempt to unite all the elements in the country and boldly identify himself with the more radical forces? In that case nobody can possibly supplant him. The hero of the present phase of the Indian struggle will then be the hero of the next phase as well.
[Subhas Chandra Bose, “The Role of Mahatma Gandhi in Indian History,” from The Indian Struggle, 1920–1942, reproduced in Netaji Collected Works, 11 vols. (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1981), 2:327–331.]
Mahatmaji,
Now that your health has somewhat improved, and you are able to attend to public business to some extent, I am taking the liberty of addressing a few words to you with a view to acquainting you with the plans and the activities of patriotic Indians outside India.
Before I do so I would like to inform you of the feelings of deep anxiety which Indians throughout the world had for several days after your sudden release from custody on grounds of ill-health. After the sad demise of Shrimati Kasturbaiji in British custody it was but natural for your countrymen to be alarmed over the state of your health. It has, however, pleased Providence to restore you to comparative health, so that three hundred and eighty-eight millions of your countrymen may still have the benefit of your guidance and advice.
I should like to say something about the attitude of your countrymen outside India towards yourself. What I shall say in this connection is the bare truth and nothing but the truth.
There are Indians outside India, as also at home, who are convinced that Indian Independence will be won only through the historic method of struggle. These men and women honestly feel that the British Government will never surrender to persuasion or moral pressure or non-violent resistance. …
From my experience of the British Government while I was inside India—from the secret information that I have gathered about Britain’s policy while outside India—and from what I have seen regarding Britain’s aims and intentions throughout the world, I am honestly convinced that the British Government will never recognise India’s demand for Independence. Britain’s one effort today is to exploit India to the fullest degree, in her endeavour to win this war. During the course of this war, Britain has lost one part of her territory to her enemies and another part to her friends. Even if the Allies could somehow win the war, it will be United States of America, and not Britain that will be top dog in future and it will mean that Britain will become a protege of the U.S.A.
In such a situation the British will try to make good their present losses by exploiting India more ruthlessly than ever before. In order to do that, plans have been already hatched in London for crushing the nationalist movement in India once for all. It is because I know of these plans from secret but reliable sources that I feel it my duty to bring it to your notice. …
There is no Indian, whether at home or abroad, who would not be happy if India’s freedom could be won through the method that you have advocated all your life and without shedding human blood. But things being what they are I am convinced that if we do desire freedom we must be prepared to wade through blood.
If circumstances had made it possible for us to organise an armed struggle inside India through our own efforts and resources that would have been the best course for us. But Mahatmaji, you know Indian conditions perhaps better than anybody else. So far as I am concerned, after twenty years’ experience of public service in India, I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to organise an armed resistance in the country without some help from outside—help from our countrymen abroad, as well as from some foreign power or powers.
Prior to the outbreak of the present war, it was exceedingly difficult to get help from a foreign power, or even from Indians abroad. But the outbreak of the present war threw open the possibility of obtaining aid—both political and military—from the enemies of the British Empire. Before I could expect any help from them however I had first to find out what their attitude was towards India’s demand for freedom. British propagandists, for a number of years, had been telling the world that the Axis Powers were the enemies of freedom and, therefore, of India’s freedom. Was that a fact? I asked myself. Consequently, I had to leave India in order to find out the truth myself and as to whether the Axis Powers would be prepared to give us help and assistance in our fight for freedom.
Before I finally made up my mind to leave home and homeland, I had to decide whether it was right for me to take help from abroad. I had previously studied the history of revolutions all over the world, in order to discover the methods which had enabled other nations to obtain freedom. … In 1940 I read my history once again, and once again, I came to the conclusion that history did not furnish a single instance where freedom had been won without help of some sort from abroad. As for the moral question whether it was right to take help, I told myself that in public, as in private life, one can always take help as a loan and repay that loan later on. Moreover, if a powerful Empire like the British Empire, could go round the world with the begging bowl what objection could there be to an enslaved, disarmed people like ourselves taking help as a loan from abroad?
I can assure you, Mahatmaji, that before I finally decided to set out on a hazardous mission, I spent days, weeks and months in carefully considering the pros and cons of the case. After having served my people so long to the best of my ability, I could have no desire to be a traitor, or to give anyone a justification for calling me a traitor. …
By going abroad on a perilous quest, I was risking—not only my life and my whole future career—but what was more, the future of my party. If I had the slightest hope that without action from abroad we would win freedom, I would never have left India during a crisis. If I had any hope that within our life-time we would get another chance—another golden opportunity for winning freedom as during the present war, I doubt if I would have set out from home. But I was convinced of two things: firstly that such a golden opportunity would not come within another century—and secondly, that without action from abroad we would not be able to win freedom, merely through our own efforts of home. That is why I resolved to take the plunge. …
Father of our nation! In this holy war for India’s liberation we ask for your blessings and good wishes. Jai Hind.
[Sisir K. Bose and Sugata Bose, The Essential Writings of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 300–303, 309.]
Nathuram Godse (1910–1949), though rarely discussed in histories of modern India, ranks among its significant figures, if only as the assassin of Gandhi and popularizer of the teachings of his own mentor, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the inventor of “Hindutva.” As early as 1927, Savarkar had ridiculed the philosophy of non-violence, writing,
The exit from the Indian world of a powerful personality like Lokamanya Tilak [1920] ushered in the mad intoxication of Khilafat agitation conspiring with the cult of the Charka as a way to Swaraj in one year. It is to be won by the perverse doctrine of non-violence and truth. The Non-cooperation Movement for Swaraj based on these twin principles was a movement without power and was bound to destroy the power of the country. It is an illusion, a hallucination, not unlike the hurricane that sweeps over a land only to destroy it. It is a disease of insanity, an epidemic and megalomania.37
As Ashis Nandy notes in his brilliant analysis,38 Godse’s life is filled with intriguing ironies or paradoxes: a militant member of the extremist right-wing Hindu Mahasabha, which vehemently opposed Muslim influence in India, his assassination of Gandhi in Delhi spared the lives of countless Muslims by effectively ending communal warfare in northern India, and certainly in its capital.39 Although directly opposed to Gandhi on the principle and practice of non-violent action in politics, he remained from birth an orthodox Brahman who, like Gandhi, could strongly criticize Hinduism on fundamental issues such as caste, “maintain[ing] that all Hindus should be treated with equal status as to rights social and religious.” Again, in Gandhi’s terms, he acted out of devotion to serve his people, as a patriot and even as a humanitarian. Their strong criticism of Hindu institutions even as devout Hindus, or their unqualified patriotism and firm opposition to partition, are not the only striking parallels between them. When Gandhi and Godse stood trial, in 1922 and 1948 respectively, they both not only pleaded guilty, without appeal for mercy, on the basis of moral principle and political necessity; they also demanded from their judges maximum penalties for their self-acknowledged offenses, assuming sole responsibility for their admittedly drastic actions. Both insisted on representing themselves and offered eloquent testimony in their defense. In their trial testimonies, as in their lives, they presented themselves as authentic and highly disciplined, literally celibate men of principle, selflessly determined to act on the creed each had thoughtfully adopted. They convey not random mindlessness but calculated, heroic pursuit of a cause.
Essential tenets nonetheless divided them: whatever concessions to tactical violence Gandhi may have made at various points in his life, he, unlike Godse, theorized and demonstrated the mass power of non-violent action, and never committed an act of violence. Godse, like his mentor Savarkar, was committed to national independence and deemed British rule “an unnatural yoke and unjustifiable[,] and any means to remove it from India’s neck are justifiable.”40 These transparent differences over the use and ethos of violence, and the corresponding clash of interpretations over the relationship of means and ends, were central to their ideological disagreements. Godse claimed never to have disliked Gandhi as a person; but he did, without hesitation, shoot him to death. He and Gandhi revered the Bhagavad Gītā, but Godse found it a justification for political violence, holding Gandhi’s opposing interpretation of it in contempt. Godse vehemently attacked “the infatuation of Gandhiji for the Muslims and his incorrigible craving for Muslim leadership,”41 as also his consequent betrayal of “Hindustan,” but in his view these differences could only be resolved through murder, not dialogue. For Godse, universal religious freedom was a dire threat to India; for Gandhi, it was a pillar of swaraj, ensured by a creedal affirmation of satyagraha.
Gopal Godse, younger brother of Nathuram and himself a convicted co-defendant who served fifteen years in prison, compiled and published in 1978 the latter’s trial speech with accompanying introductory comments and related documents. In the introduction, he found pride and consolation in Justice G. D. Khosla’s reflections on the trial. Khosla reported later that Nathuram’s trial speech so profoundly moved the courtroom’s large audience that he had no doubt that had they constituted a jury, the verdict would have been not guilty by an overwhelming majority. But Godse was sentenced to hang and the execution carried out.
I had never made a secret about the fact that I supported the ideology or the school which was opposed to that of Gandhiji. I firmly believed that the teachings of absolute “ahimsa” as advocated by Gandhiji would ultimately result in the emasculation of the Hindu Community and thus make the community incapable of resisting the aggression or inroads of other communities, especially the Muslims. To counteract this evil I resolved to enter public life and formed a group of persons who held like views. … It was not so much the Gandhian “ahimsa” teachings that were opposed to by me and my group, but Gandhiji while advocating the views always showed or evinced a bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu Community and its interests. I have fully described my point of view hereafter in detail and have quoted numerous instances which unmistakably establish how Gandhiji became responsible for a number of calamities which the Hindu Community had to suffer and undergo. …
Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had been intensely proud of Hindudom as a whole. Nevertheless as I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitions allegiance to any “ism,” political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I publicly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus should be treated with equal status as to rights social and religious, and should be high or low on their merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession. I used publicly to take part in organised anti-caste dinners in which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Chamars and Bhangis broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other. …
We felt in our heart of hearts that time had come when we should bid goodbye to Veer Savarkar’s lead and cease to consult him in our future policy and programme, nor should we confide to him our future plans.
Just after that followed the terrible outburst of Muslim fanaticism in the Punjab and other parts of India. The Congress Government began to persecute, prosecute, and shoot the Hindus themselves who dared to resist the Muslim forces in Bihar, Calcutta, Punjab and other places. Our worst fears seemed to be coming true; and yet how painful and disgraceful it was for us to find that the 15th of August 1947 [the day on which India received her independence from Britain] was celebrated with illumination and festivities, while the whole of Punjab was set by the Muslims in flames and Hindu blood ran rivers. The Hindu Mahasabhaites of my persuasion decided to boycott the festivities and the Congressite Government and to launch a fighting programme to check Muslim onslaughts. …
While the Congress Government continued to be sheepishly under the thumb of Gandhiji and while Gandhiji could thrust his anti-Hindu fads on that Congressite Government by resorting to such a simple trick as threatening a fast, it was clear to me that any common front under such circumstances was bound to be another form of setting up Gandhiji’s Dictatorship and consequently a betrayal of Hindudom. …
The first item was to organise a series of powerful though peaceful demonstrations against Gandhiji so as to make him feel the impact of organized Hindu discontent, and to create confusion and disorder by demonstrative protests, etc. in his obnoxious prayer-meetings through which he then carried out his anti-Hindu propaganda. …
Gandhiji … still lived in the hope of being the common leader both of the Hindus and Muslims and the more he was defeated, the more he indulged in encouraging the Muslims by extravagant methods…. He also went on conceding one undemocratic demand after another to the Muslim League in the vain hope of enlisting its support in the national struggle. …
Gandhiji continued to pursue the same policy of appeasement, my blood boiled, and I could not tolerate him any longer. I do not mean to use hard words against Gandhiji personally nor do I wish to conceal my utter dissent from and disapproval of the very foundation of his policy and methods. Gandhiji in fact succeeded in doing what the British always wanted to do in pursuance of their policy of “Divide and Rule.” He helped them in dividing India. …
The accumulating provocation of 32 years culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately. …
Many people thought his policies were irrational but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or to place their intelligence at his feet to do what he liked with it. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility Gandhiji was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure and disaster after disaster. No one single political victory can be claimed to his credit during 33 years of his political predominance. …
In my opinion S. C. Bose is the supreme hero and martyr of modern India. He kept alive and fostered the revolutionary mentality of the masses, advocating all honorable means, including the use of force when necessary for the liberation of India. Gandhiji and his crowd of self-seekers tried to destroy him. It is thus entirely incorrect to represent the Mahatma as the architect of Indian Independence. …
All his fasts were to coerce Hindus. …
Gandhiji’s fast for the Hindu–Muslim Unity was announced on 13th January 1948, and then I lost nearly all my control on my feelings. …
There was no enmity between Gandhiji and myself on any personal grounds. To those who speak of Gandhiji’s honest motive in supporting Pakistan, I have only to say that I had nothing but the purest interest of our nation at my heart in taking the extreme step against the person of Gandhiji, who was the most responsible and answerable person for the terrible event culminating in the creation of Pakistan. …
After handing over crores of Hindus to the mercy of the Muslims of Pakistan Gandhiji and his followers have been advising them not to leave Pakistan but continue to stay on. The Hindus thus were caught in the hands of Muslim authorities quite unawares and in such circumstances series of calamities followed one after the other. When I bring to my mind all these happenings my body simply feels a horror of burning fire, even now. …
I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me. I do not also wish that anyone on my behalf should beg for mercy towards me.
Several persons are arraigned along with me in this trial as conspirators. I have already said that in the act I did, I had no companions and I alone am solely responsible for my act. …
May the country properly known as Hindusthan be again united and be one, and may the people be taught to discard the defeatist mentality leading them to submit to the aggressors. This is my last wish and prayer to the Almighty.
[Nathuram Godse, May It Please Your Honour (Pune: Shri Gopal Godse, 1978), 36–37, 44–45, 52, 54, 55, 69, 73, 74, 75, 123, 136, 145, 147, 161, 163.]
Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), a high-caste Bengali, was a leading Indian intellectual of the twentieth century, but one who was self-taught, a late bloomer, and a published author for the first time only in his fifties. He published an insightful article, “The ‘Martial Races’ of India,” in the early 1930s, and helped his friend Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay complete the Apu novels, which were later made into classic films by Satyajit Ray. Chaudhuri was hired by Sarat Chandra Bose as private secretary in the mid-1930s, partially because of his superb English. After World War II began, Chaudhuri gained a post at All-India Radio commenting on military affairs. He shifted from Calcutta to Delhi, where he lived for two decades.
After the war and Indian independence, Chaudhuri wrote his first and possibly best book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, published in 1951. He was now launched on his literary career, since he gained fame and some fortune both in Britain and India. Its dedication to the memory of the British Empire in India also brought him the ire of Indian patriots, as had some of his actions and words in Calcutta and later at All-India Radio. In the Autobiography, he scathingly depicted how Gandhi brought to the surface an older and rancorous nationalism that spread widely but generated hates and divisions in Indian society. Through these same pages he interwove a very useful account of Hindu–Muslim relations. He completed his picture of India under British rule by contrasting the England of his imagination (which he learned of through literature) with the behavior of Britishers in India. Finally he presented a pessimistic and cyclical theory of the death of cultures—Aryan, Muslim, European—in an Indian environment. It is a book of sweep and intelligence, vivid portraiture, and moral passion.
Chaudhuri worked as a translator for the French Embassy in New Delhi and continued writing, with A Passage to England (1960) and numerous essays. In 1970 Chaudhuri moved to Oxford and lived and wrote there for the remainder of his long life. His works in this period included The Continent of Circe (1965), a book about Robert Clive, a biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Müller (1974), and numberless articles. Later in life, he completed the second volume of his autobiography, “Thy Hand, Great Anarch!” (1987). Highly opinionated, with a rich and vigorous English style, Chaudhuri feared no sacred cows: he attacked his fellow Hindus and most Indian leaders, reserving his most abusive feelings for those who, like himself, were what he called Anglicized. He thought, with Macaulay, that no Bengali would ever fight for his country, so he dismissed claims that the Indian National Army in World War II or the Mukti Bahini during the Bangladesh War of Independence ever fought.
The piece excerpted below about violence and non-violence in Indian civilization is typical of Chaudhuri’s views and style.
Every Hindu is divided against himself, and it would seem throughout his historical existence he has been. The human personality is indeed contradictory everywhere, but normally one set of traits can push their opposites into the background and become dominant. But with the Hindus the opposites almost neutralize one another, and the indecisive tug-of-war stultifies all their actions.
It is on account of the presence of such opposites that I have taken the Roman god Janus as the symbol of the Hindu character. But it does not present only two faces. It has a whole series of them, going in pairs. For this reason the Hindu personality might be called not even Janus Quadrifrons, but Janus Multifrons.
Among the large number of antithetical though connected traits which shape Hindu behaviour, I shall mention here, by way of example, only those which are influencing their politics, both domestic and foreign. These are the following: A sense of Hindu solidarity with an uncontrollable tendency towards disunity within the Hindu order; collective megalomania with self-abasement; extreme xenophobia with an abject xenolatry; authoritarianism with anarchic individualism; violence with non-violence; militarism with pacifism; possessiveness with carelessness about property owned; courage with cowardice; cleverness with stupidity.
I shall have to examine these contradictions when discussing Hindu national and international politics. Here, just to induce belief in the thesis of the dichotomy, I shall describe that contradiction which is least suspected and which gives a particular appositeness to the symbol of Janus. The current belief is that the Hindus are a peace-loving and non-violent people, and this belief has been fortified by Gandhism. In reality, however, few human communities have been more warlike and fond of bloodshed. I know this will not be believed, for Hindu militarism lies buried under a mound of mythical notions about their ahimsa, non-violence, as the Assyrian kingdom lay under mounds of sand until Layard began to unearth it. I cannot expose the whole of it, but I shall at least dig a few trenches to reveal the existence of a new Assyria.
About twenty-five words in an inscription of Asoka have succeeded in almost wholly suppressing the thousands in the rest of the epigraphy and the whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus. Their political history is made up of blood-stained pages. …
Between this unnecessary proclamation of non-violence in the third century B.C. and its reassertion, largely futile, in the twentieth century by Mahatma Gandhi, there is not one word of non-violence in the theory and practice of statecraft by the Hindus. Read all the inscriptions, and you will find that when they are not bare records of gifts or genealogy, they are proclamations of the victories and the conquests of the kings concerned.
The martial boasting is found not only among the Hindu kings, but equally among the Buddhist: Harsha, Dharmapala, or Devapala, who were no less warlike than the Guptas. Mudgagiri-samāvāsita-jayaskandhāvārāt—from the camp of victory pitched at Monghyr, Dharmapala announced that his cavalry was raising the dust to the skies.
The whole of Sanskrit literature, from the epics down to the latest long poems, is full of accounts of battles and exultation over war and conquest. These were the business of Hindu kings. They were always praised for having exterminated all their enemies, and one uniform formula of glorification for them is that they raised universal lamentation among the wives of the enemy folks. All over Aryavarta there was a voice heard, wives weeping for their husbands and would not be comforted, because they were not. …
But the realistic Hindu practice of war had its idealistic theory, which was developed very early. Frightened by the militaristic violence and the proneness to bloodshed of their people, the ancient Hindu moralists tried to restrain and purify it by formulating a moral concept of war as a war of righteousness, or, as they called it, Dharma Yuddha. This theory, though religious in its complexion, was something like the chivalry of the middle ages. It was proclaimed as the duty of the warrior, the Kshatriya, that he should defend and succour the distressed. …
I am giving these facts only to lead to a consideration of the current situation in which Hindu militarism is a genuine and powerful force, influencing Indian foreign policy. It is all the more dangerous because it is unanalysed, unexposed, and insidious. No one is likely to understand the actions of the Hindu government of India in the international sphere during the last fifteen years without recognizing the existence of a strong under-current of militarism among the people of the country. In fact, it was only natural that the Hindu militarism, after remaining suppressed but smouldering during British rule, should, as soon as an opportunity for a voluntary and unfettered choice presented itself, reassert itself and strongly influence the attitude of the Hindus in their international relations, sweeping aside the temporary, artificial, and largely opportunistic profession of non-violence in politics. One significant fact about the new militarism should be specially noted: that today it is most assertive and irresponsible precisely in that class in Hindu society which was the least militaristic in the past and most devoted to non-violence, and this, not of the refurbished Gandhian kind, but traditional—namely, in the Hindus of the lower middle-class and trading castes of the Gangetic plain. They have now also become the sons of Moloch, in addition to being the sons of Mammon.
[Nirad Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe: Being an Essay on the Peoples of India by Nirad C. Chaudhuri (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 97–100, 104–105.]
Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979), India’s most popular postindependence political figure next to Nehru, left the ruling Congress Party in 1948, then in 1954 abandoned politics altogether in favor of Gandhian “constructive work” (sarvodaya) at the village level. His urge to spur sweeping political reforms resurfaced in the mid-1970s, and he played a major role both in precipitating Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” of 1975 to 1977, and in leading the coalition that defeated her party in 1977. In 1979 the coalition broke apart, and soon thereafter Jayaprakash (or “JP,” as he was affectionately known), died of kidney and heart failure. His contributions to political thought won him a worldwide audience; even today they continue to influence those who seek to infuse the economic, social, and political life of the future with greater equality, justice, and respect for the individual and the local community.
Jayaprakash (“the light of victory”) Nayaran was born in a village in eastern India now in the state of Bihar. His father, an official superintending the operation of irrigation canals, was required by his work to move from place to place. Probably for health reasons (his eldest son died of cholera and his eldest daughter succumbed to the plague), he left young Jayaprakash in his native village with the boy’s step-grandmother while the rest of the family moved away. At six, Jayaprakash started his education in the village primary school. When he was nine, his father sent him to the Collegiate School at Patna, Bihar’s major city. The shy and dutiful son worked diligently, and won a merit scholarship to Patna College at the age of sixteen. He had considered himself a political extremist from the age of fourteen; at nineteen, when Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement arrived in Patna, Jayaprakash threw away his schoolbooks and prepared to join it. His father wanted him to continue studying, and had him enrolled in a newly founded nationalist school called the Bihar Vidyapith.
In the following year, 1922, Gandhi suspended the non-cooperation movement, and Jayaprakash was deeply disillusioned. In addition, he was finding his new school insufficiently equipped with the apparatus for experiments he needed to carry on his studies in the natural sciences. A friend wrote him from the University of Iowa, urging him to complete his higher education in the United States.
In 1924, at the University of Wisconsin, he discovered the writings of Marx, and was especially influenced by Marx’s claim to have found the “inevitable” solution to the problem of poverty. Jayaprakash soon became a regular reader of M. N. Roy’s New Masses magazine and the US Communist Party’s Daily Worker. He switched from natural science to sociology, and from Wisconsin to Ohio State, where he took his BA in 1928 and MA in 1929. He wanted to go on for a PhD, but his mother was critically ill, and so he returned home.
At once he was drawn into the mainstream of nationalist politics: his wife took him to meet Gandhi; he met Nehru, the next Congress president, and the two became friends. Nehru invited him and his wife to live in Allahabad and help with the work of the Congress, and in 1932, when most other leaders of the Congress were in jail, he served as its general secretary until he, too, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. In 1934 he and other leftists founded a group within the Congress that they named the Congress Socialist Party; Jayaprakash became its chief organizer and traveled all over India to recruit and teach new members. From 1936 he encouraged the newly legalized communists to enroll as Congress socialists, but by 1940 he was fed up with their maneuvering for power and sudden changes in policy in obedience to dictates from the Soviet Union. At the same time he was impatient with the Congress under Gandhi’s moderating influence—so much so that he courted and received two successive prison sentences from 1940 to 1942 for his fiery speeches urging factory workers to start a general strike, stop paying taxes, and set up their own police, courts, and government.
Jayaprakash became a national hero in 1942 when he and five other prisoners climbed over the seventeen-foot-high wall of their jail on the night of Diwali (the festival of lights) and escaped capture. Undetected, he visited the major cities of India to instruct guerrilla fighters and issue proclamations urging struggle against British rule. Within a year he was arrested at Lahore and subjected to prolonged torture in a vain attempt to make him talk about his activities. Although he was released only in 1946, a year after most of the Congress leaders, he remained determined to oust the British through a massive uprising of the people.
Thirteen years younger than Nehru, equally intellectual and even more idealistic, Jayaprakash could easily have become Nehru’s right-hand man and ultimately his successor as India’s prime minister. Yet he shared that part of Gandhi which could instinctively rebel against the official exercise of political power (he was never a candidate for public office). In 1948 he led his socialist followers out of the Congress, and from then on steadily lost interest in political activity. Instead, he gravitated toward Gandhian work at the village level, beginning with the Bhudan (land-gift) Movement begun by Gandhi’s disciple Vinoba Bhave. In 1954 he founded his own ashram in a rural part of Bihar to try to apply Gandhi’s methods of village economic improvement, and by the 1960s he was sending workers to train in Israel and Japan in order to adapt modern technology to villagers’ needs.
Jayaprakash never ceased to reflect and speak on his ideals for India’s future. At the core of his vision lay a blend of Marx’s and Gandhi’s dreams: unselfish and altruistic individuals living in self-supporting communities, undisturbed by either centralized government or exploitative capitalism. He repeatedly refused opportunities to serve in the government, but his restless nature moved him to try to solve or mediate problems in one area after another—Kashmir, Nagaland, and throughout his home state of Bihar. He played the role of gadfly to both state and central governments, and attracted huge crowds of youthful sympathizers when he called for an end to corruption, police terrorism, and the misuse of power. The size of these crowds, and his vague but catchy call for “total revolution” in 1975, provoked an extreme clampdown by Indira Gandhi and her government that left a scar on India’s record as a liberal-democratic polity.
Jayaprakash’s Gandhian ideals of swaraj, satyagraha, and sarvodaya remain for future generations to reexamine or reactivate in the spirit of social and political change.
In his longest piece of theoretical writing, entitled “A Plea for the Reconstruction of Indian Polity,” Jayaprakash set forth in 1959 his plan for the radical decentralization of his country’s government and economy. It draws heavily on Gandhi’s dream for independent India, connecting individual freedom and social responsibility in a democracy that is here called communitarian.
I propose in this paper to describe the main outline of the polity which to my mind is not only most suited for us, but is also most rational and scientific. …
My search here has been for the forms of social life, particularly of political life, that would assure the preservation of human values about which there is hardly any dispute in the world today; and my approach has been non-partisan and non-sectarian. …
First of all, let it be pointed out that the problem of democracy is basically, and above all, a moral problem. Constitutions, systems of government, parties, elections—all these are relevant to the business of democracy. But unless the moral and spiritual qualities of the people are appropriate, the best of constitutions and political systems will not make democracy work. The moral qualities and mental attitudes most needed for democracy are: (1) concern for truth; (2) aversion to violence; (3) love of liberty and courage to resist oppression and tyranny; (4) spirit of co-operation; (5) preparedness to adjust self-interest to the larger interest; (6) respect for other’s opinions and tolerance; (7) readiness to take responsibility; (8) belief in the fundamental equality of man; (9) faith in the educability of human nature.
These qualities and attitudes are not inborn in man. But he can be educated in them and trained to acquire and practise them. …
When there is liberty it leads to abuse and necessitates State interference, and when there is State interference it leads to curtailment of liberty. How then to preserve liberty and prevent its abuse? There are no political means by which the dilemma can be resolved, there are only moral means. The obverse side of the medal of liberty is responsibility. If the individual is not prepared to take social responsibility, if he uses liberty for self-aggrandisement and neglects or hurts the interests of others, some form of state-ism becomes inevitable. It is here that the pertinence and wisdom of Gandhiji’s concept of trusteeship becomes evident. The only democratic answer to state-ism and totalitarianism is trusteeship. But trusteeship cannot be practised without voluntary limitation of wants. An individual cannot function as a trustee unless he is prepared to share his possessions with his fellowmen; this he cannot do unless he has learned to curtail his wants. Thus voluntary limitation of wants, in other words, the rejection of materialism or the unlimited pursuit of material satisfactions, is essential for the achievement and preservation of democracy. …
It should be remembered that democracy does not consist merely in its formal institutions. It lives really and truly in the life of the people; it is a way of life. It is not only through the representative assemblies and elected governments that democracy works, but in an equally true sense through the voluntary associations and actions of the citizens which they carry on and establish to deal with their problems, promote their interests and manage their affairs. …
Democracy is not merely a question of political rights and people’s part in government. Particularly since the First World War, democracy has come to mean more and more social and economic justice, equal opportunity, industrial democracy. … This is not to suggest that democracy is bound up with any such politico-economic ideologies as socialism or communism. It is true that these ideologies had promised full democracy in the sense used above. But … if communism and socialism have failed so far to lead human society to these goals, the endeavour to reach them must continue to form part of the quest for democracy. It has been indicated above that the answer is moral rather than political or economic. …
A word that figures boldly on the ancient sign-post is dharma. Indian polity held that the State was subject to the dharma, which it was its duty to uphold and protect.
Unless life in India is again organised on the basis of self-determining and mutually coordinating and integrating communities, that organic self-regulation of society which the concept of dharma represented will not be possible. To that extent democracy will remain distantly removed from the life of the people. … [If] the village becomes a community … only then will it be possible for the village to adopt as its dharma the welfare of all the villagers, so that none goes without food, clothing, a roof over his head, work to do; no child goes without the benefit of a knowledge of the three R’s; none goes without the benefit of a minimum health service. …
If man decided that instead of being herded together in large cities it was better to live in small communities, instead of being automatons it was better to be conscious human beings, instead of being a grain in the sand-heap it was better to be a member of a community, it should not be difficult for scientists to evolve the appropriate [small-scale industrial] technology.
Thus the society we are visualising here will be neither “urban” nor “rural,” it will be, if a name has to be given to it, communitarian. In other words, it will truly be society. Development of science has made it possible for the distinction between urban and rural to be abolished. The communities of the future will have a balance of agriculture and industry; they will be agro-industrial; they will make full use of science and technology so as to serve the ends of their life and no more. Owing to geographical and historical conditions agriculture may predominate in one and industry in another, but a balance between them will be the ideal of all. The present monstrosities, the big cities, will have to be decentralised as far as possible to relieve congestion and create healthy conditions of life; and for the rest, they will have to be so re-organised as to be made federations of smaller sized communities. To the extent this is not possible, the big cities will have to be endured, care being taken to see that they do not become bigger, and no new big cities come up. …
The next step in the building up of an integrated society is for a number of neighbouring primary communities to come together and cooperate amongst themselves to build, let us say, a regional community. … Thus the regional community comes into existence by an organic process of growth. The circle of community is widened. … The regional community, however, is not a superior or higher body that can control, or interfere with, the internal administration of the primary communities. Each in its sphere is equally sovereign.
The regional community in its turn will do all that is within its competence. But again, there will be many things which will be beyond its competence, such as running a techno-agricultural college, a major irrigation project, production of electricity, manufacture of machines, etc. In order that these tasks be tackled a number of regional communities will have to come together to form a still larger community—the district community, let us say. The district community too will be an integrated community and its relationship with the regional communities be of a pattern similar to that of the latter with the primary communities.
In this manner the district communities in their turn would federate together to form the provincial community. The provincial communities would come together to form the National Community. A day might come when the national communities might federate together to form the World Community. …
However, a treatment of the polity would be incomplete without a brief description of the economy that would underlie it. Society is a complex whole, as man himself is; and, therefore, social and human reconstruction requires an all-sided approach. …
The community is an enlarged family, and like the family it represents the eternal flow of life. Just as the family is interested not only in its present members but even in those who are unborn, so the community thinks of future generations. Its economy, therefore, is not wasteful. It is particularly careful about the non-renewable resources of nature which are being wasted at such a criminal rate by the so-called advanced nations of the world. A balanced economy concerned with future generations of men, that is, with life rather than death, would try to do its best to return to nature what it takes from it. It will, therefore, try to restrict consumption as far as possible to renewable resources and use as little as possible of the resources it cannot put back. The economy of the community is in co-operative harmony with nature, while present-day economy both of the West and East is at perpetual and destructive war with nature. …
The economic life of the communitarian society would be so organised that human needs are satisfied as near at home as possible: first, in the primary community, then in the regional, district, provincial, national and international community—in that ascending order. This means that each expanding area of community would be as self-sufficient as possible. Incidentally, this would save much of the unnecessary energy and time devoted today to the business of commerce, advertisement, etc. …
A word about private enterprise. Private enterprise, in the sense of purushartha, the individual’s spirit of enterprise, would have fullest scope in the community. But in the community the individual would be imbued with the spirit of community. Therefore, private enterprise in a communitarian society would also partake of that spirit and work for private as well as communal good. Further, private enterprise would also be subject to the principles of self-government and responsibility to, and integration with, the community. …
The picture drawn here of the polity for India, and of social organization in general, might perhaps appear to be idealistic. If so, I would not consider that to be a disqualification. An ideal cannot but be idealistic. The question is if the ideal is impractical, unscientific or otherwise ill-conceived. I have tried in the preceding pages to show that all relevant considerations lead irresistibly towards it.
The achievement of this ideal would, however, be a colossal task. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of voluntary workers would be needed over a number of years to accomplish it. The Government should lend its full support; but it is necessary to remember that the main burden of the task would have to be borne by voluntary political and social workers and institutions. The heart of the problem is to create the “spirit of community,” without which the whole body politic would be without life and soul. This is a task of moral regeneration to be brought about by example, service, sacrifice and love. Those who occupy high places in society—-in politics, business, the professions—bear the heavy responsibility of leading the people by personal example.
The task also is one of social engineering, needing the help of the State; of scientists, experts, educationists, businessmen, experimenters; of men and women; of young and old.
It is a task of dedication; of creation; of self-discovery. It is a task that defines India’s destiny. It spells a challenge to India’s sons and daughters. Will they accept the challenge?
[From Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialism, Sarvodaya, and Democracy, ed. Bimla Prasad (New York: Asian Publishing House, 1964), 192–193, 196, 197–199, 206–207, 211–212, 213–214, 219, 220–221, 224, 238.]
