Mahatma Gandhi: readings in a postmodern light

- By Abhinnshyam Tiwari*

Abstract

There is held a common notion of considering Gandhi as a traditionalist and an orthodox idol. This essay, however, attempts to prove the exact contrary of this fallacious presupposition. Gandhi's impact on Indo-Anglian literature has been so pervasive that even if he had not written a single word in English, he would still be establishing himself in the writings of Indian writers in English. Gandhian literature, for example his Hind Swaraj, provides oneself to look upon Gandhi as a theorist who identified ‘modern civilization’ and found it lacking. The confidence for the ability to carry out a precise predication of the future by the modernists was shattered in the havoc and carnage of World War I. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi challenged the idea of progress as presented in modern civilization, calling for a return to a more natural values and ways of life, which he claimed would be more sustainable and harmonious. Gandhi's thinking was in line with the postmodern belief that there is no such thing as objective reality. He helped to pioneer this perspective in the early days of the movement. In this paper, an attempt has been made to read Gandhi in a contemporary postmodern light. The paper is divided in three sections: 1) it attempts to define what one means when using the term ‘postmodern’; 2) an attempt to relate Gandhian thought to postmodernism by giving a brief analysis of his views on truth, his seminal work Hind Swaraj, and throwing light on his epistemological contention against Nehruvian Modernism. After acquiring an adequate knowledge of the depth of Gandhian thought, the paper reiterates the point that Gandhian thought should justifiably be considered as an advent to postmodern thinking

I

Gandhian literature provides oneself to look upon Gandhi as a theorist who identified ‘modern civilization’ and found it lacking. The confidence for the ability to carry out a precise predication of the future by the modernists was shattered in the havoc and carnage of World War I. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi challenged the idea of progress as presented in modern civilization, calling for a return to a more natural values and ways of life, which he claimed would be more sustainable and harmonious. However, one would make a fallacious interpretation in judging Gandhi to be anti-scientific. His contention was never against the scientific enquiry but ‘against the direction that the spirit had taken. It has chiefly concerned itself with the exploration of laws and methods conducing to the merely material advancement of its clientele.’ (Bonaventura 50). James Scott, in his seminal work Seeing like a state, differentiates modernism from the scientific spirit at the outset:

High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term "ideology" implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production (Scott 4)

Scott, before the differentiation, attempts to define what ‘high modernism’ as a term means. Intensively taken:

It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. (Scott 4)

It is in somewhat similar sense Gandhi takes modernism to present itself to the world, specifically the east.

The second aspect in which this essay attempts to place Gandhi as a ‘postmodern’ theorist is his refusal to adopt traditional modern epistemological notion of truth, which was associated mainly with Newtonian physics, Hobbesian Liberalism and Cartesian methodology. Descartes, nonchalantly questioning his presuppositions, refutes scepticism on the account of him possessing a ‘clear and distinct’ idea of Cogito Ergo Sum. From this solipsistic position, he at once proves that the idea of God and, consequently, all the truths of mathematics and natural sciences, do have an entity to correspond in the now-proven real world:

...And now I seem to glimpse a path by which, from this contemplation of the true God, in whom indeed all the treasures of the sciences and wisdom lie hidden, we can pass to the knowledge of other things. (Descartes 24)

In Descartes' quest for certain knowledge, the objective (‘things out there’) is the focus, while the subjective (‘our thoughts and feelings’) is pushed to the margins. Descartes' method of treating all natural objects—even human bodies—as machines led to his success. He promised that with his method, we could become masters of nature and possessors of its resources. This spirit of certainty carried itself from the enlightenment to the 19th century, finding its culmination in Comte’s ‘positivism’, which gave science the last laugh on truth. Modernity ‘as defined by its 17th- and 18th-century lineages is epitomized by the view that scientific thinking yields objective knowledge and universal truths’ (Lloyd 5)

Gandhi, like almost all the thinkers in the history of postmodernism, took truth to be rooted in the social and cultural context and, therefore, contingency. His definition of truth lies in the theory of Karma yoga i.e., ‘truth in action’; this is a concept that locates the meaning of truth in the particular facts and circumstances¹. Gandhi’s definition of ‘Truth is God’ (Gandhi et al.15) should also be comprehended with the definition which Gandhi ascribes to ‘Truth’ and ‘God’. Gandhi often equivocates the understanding of an absolute truth to the understanding of infinity in calculus. The Absolute truth, like the idea of infinity, or the Euclidean line, was ‘without breadth ... [that] no one has so far been able to draw and ... never will. All the same it is only by keeping the ideal in mind that we have made progress in geometry. What is true here is true of every ideal’. (Gandhi, India of My Dreams, 78).

The final aspect in which Gandhi relates to postmodernity is because of his hermeneutical interpretation of Bhagwat Gita as a ‘poem’ rather than a prose work. This interpretation, according to Gandhi, lets us acknowledge the fact that a holy text can have a multitude of meanings; ‘The deeper you dive into it, the richer the meanings you get. It is meant for the people at large, there is pleasing repetition... The seeker is at liberty to extract from this treasure any meaning he likes so as to enable him to enforce in his life the central teaching.’ (Desai 134). Krishna, according to Gandhi, is shown not as a historical figure but ‘perfection and right knowledge personified’ (Desai 124).

II

Mahatma Gandhi’s seminal work Hind Swaraj is taken to be a nationalistic tract which was suitable for the time it was written. Dietmar Rothermund, a prominent Gandhian scholar, interprets the text as a time bound ‘strategic’ piece of work confined to the socio-political circumstances under which it was produced². However, it would be a mistake to read Hind Swaraj as a text narrowed down to a single country’s political scenario; Gandhi believed that the motif he lays down in the essay is implicitly shared by ‘many Indians’ and a ‘thousand Europeans’. He tells us that Leo Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindoo had a profound impact on his work. Since this links Tolstoy to Gandhi and both to efforts that continue to this day to replace violence with non-violence as the basis of civilization, it seems limiting to view Hind Swaraj solely as a time-bound or nationalistic treatise; it goes far beyond Indian nationalism, transcending and transforming the nature of "modernity".

Relating with this line of thought is the abyss-like divide between Gandhi’s vision of ‘village republic’ and Nehruvian ‘High modernism’ consisting of urbanity, city-life and technological progress. The differences between these two theorists became visible in October and/or November 1915 when Gandhi asked Nehru to meet him to discuss goals for an independent India.³ Gandhi’s main contention with Nehru lies embedded in his vision which he conceived in Hind Swaraj, that if ‘India is to attain true freedom and through India the world also, then sooner or later the fact must be recognized that people will have to live in villages, not in towns, in huts, not in palaces’ (Gandhi, Selected Letters 104). The village which Gandhi conceived was not of village of ‘today’ but rather it existed in his imagination. Gandhi's imagined village was another of his many experiments with truth. He believed that if people were given the opportunity to choose to live in a voluntary community, they would be more likely to behave truthfully. Nehru, however, outrightly rejects Gandhi’s optimism for ‘village republic’:

I do not understand why a village should necessarily embody truth and non-violence. A village, normally speaking, is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment. Narrow-minded people are much more likely to be untruthful and violent. (Nehru 507)

For Nehru, Hind Swaraj was everything but a practical vision for a free India. It was considered as non-progressive, and encumbered in its own dreams; in Nehru’s own words, ‘it seemed to me completely unreal.’ (Nehru 507). Nehru’s politically imagined India, however, soon began to fade away in the 1970s. the IT sectors and the NGOs proved to a potential aspect for rejuvenating an idea of Gandhi’s ‘imagined village’ but the radical critique of Hind Swaraj on modernity is still relevant enough to re-interpreted

III

After reading the above two sections, one might draw conclusions to accommodate Gandhi in a body of postmodern thought. However, there are some major aspects in postmodernism which differentiate it, quite radically, from Gandhian thought. Postmodernism is, as defined by Lyotard, ‘an incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard 14). It has localism as one of its important facets. Derrida’s deconstruction is an ‘undoing’ of western philosophical binaries and allows us to break down the dichotomous and hierarchical conceptual creations like ‘male-female’, ‘reality-appearance’, etc. For the Postmodernists, truth is not something to be discovered but rather something to be created within a dynamic process. Gandhi apparently takes this approach to the notion of truth; however, relativizing truth to some extent does not make Gandhi a postmodernist:

For me truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth (Gandhi et al. 64)

Gandhi is a true Vedantin who admits degree of realities. Two contradictory facts can be true at the same time for the contradiction lies only in the empirical world.

Truth is ‘a vast tree, which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it…The quest for that Truth is the summum bonum of life’ (Gandhi et al 66).

Another fact which takes Gandhian thought away from Postmodern thinking is of grand narratives. Gandhian thought comprises, besides Truth, the grand narrative of Ahimsa i.e., non-violence. Rather, ‘This ahimsa is the basis of the search for truth’ (Gandhi et al. 165). Ahimsa is an act of the empirical world which leads to the realization of Truth in the transcendental world. Gandhi holds a difference between an act-ideal and an objective-ideal; ‘ahimsa is the means; Truth is the end’ (Gandhi et al. 158). The postmodernists advocate localism and anti-essentialism as ends in themselves, providing no ground of an Absolutist position. Gandhi, however, firms his belief ‘in advaita…in the essential unity of man and, for that matter, of all that lives’ (Gandhi et al. 286). Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization is not a criticism on the whole modernity or instrumentality; but rather it only of the technological activities which makes humans mere handicaps against machines. He is not against machines as such, but is rather against the craze ‘for what they call labour-saving machinery’ (Gandhi 301).

Conclusion

This paper was an attempt to briefly analyze the contemporary considerations of Gandhi as a postmodern theorist. It showed how one can interpret Gandhian thought along with postmodern ideals but cannot attribute Gandhi as a postmodern by himself. If we would have to label Gandhi as someone related to modernism, the best possible label for him would be a ‘pre-modern’ or rather ‘anti-modern’ theorist. This labelling, too, is not indubitable for the definition of what constitutes ‘modernity’ and what actually makes a person ‘modern’ would have to be precisely laid down before dwelling into the controversial issue. This paper, due to limitation on its length, would not attempt to do any sort of similar enquiry.

Notes

1. Chatterjee Margaret and John Hick. Gandhi's Religious Thought. University of Notre Dame Press 1983, to read about the concept of Karma Yoga as related to societal circumstances.
2. Diether Commentary at Conference on Contemporary Meanings of Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad Academy, New Delhi, 22 January 1996. Rothermund’s positioning of Hind Swaraj is evident in his shorter English and longer German biographies, Mahatma Gandhi: An Essay in Political Biography, New Delhi: Manohar, 1991
3. Some helpful readings regarding their discourse can be looked up in: B.R. Nanda’s chapter on ‘Man versus Machine’ in his Gandhi and His Critics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. Also Raj Krishna’s article, ‘The Nehru-Gandhi Polarity and Economic Policy’ in B.R. Nanda et al. (eds), Gandhi and Nehru, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979, is a very comprehensive view about their differences on empirical and ideological levels

References

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2. Descartes René and Mike Moriarty. Meditations on First Philosophy : With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Oxford University Press, 2008
3. Gandhi Gandhi and R. K Prabhu. India of My Dreams. Rev. and enl. ed. Navajivan Pub. House 1959.
4. Gandhi, M.K. Selected Letters of Mahatma Gandhi. Navjivan Publishing House, 1968
5. Gandhi, Mahatma, et al. The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi. Navajivan Trust : Made Available through Hoopla, 2014.
6. Gandhi, Mahatma. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi :Publications Division, 2017
7. Lyotard Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition : A Report on Knowledge : Condition Postmoderne. University of Minnesota Press 1984.
8. Nehru Jawaharlal and Gandhi. A Bunch of Old Letters Written Mostly to Jawaharlal Nehru and Some Written by Him. [1st American ed.] ed. Asia Pub. House 1960.
9. Rudolph Lloyd I and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays : Gandhi in the World and at Home. University of Chicago Press, 2006
10. Santos Boaventura de Sousa. The End of the Cognitive Empire : The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press, 2018.

* Abhinnshyam Tiwari is a student at Department of Philosophy, University of Lucknow | Email: abhinnshyam74@gmail.com