REVOLUTIONARY NON-VIOLENCE

Abstract

As the supreme leader of the Indian national movement for freedom, the success of which in 1947 set off a whole wave of decolonization in the rest of the British Empire, M. K. Gandhi may be thought to have a claim to be regarded as the Father of the Postcolonial. However, the founding figures of postcolonial discourse have hardly taken any note of him, and there is a deafening silence on Gandhi in the various readers, encyclopedias and companions on the subject. My argument is that this is so mainly because Gandhi, as an unwavering believer in non-violence or ahimsa, succeeded in liberating India without at all adhering to the Marxist model of a violent and bloody revolution such as championed notably by Frantz Fanon and uniformly valorized in the postcolonial and subaltern studies discourses. The views taken of Gandhi's precept and practice of ahimsa by Leela Gandhi, Robert Young and Shahid Amin are examined in particular, as well as the attempt to characterize Gandhi as practising discursive violence himself. In conclusion, the difficulty of practising non-violence is underlined, as is also Gandhi's affirmation of ahimsa and truth as the supreme human values.

Keywords:

• Fanon
• Gandhi
• Marxism
• non-violence (ahimsa)
• postcolonialism
• subaltern studies

Acknowledgements

This essay has been a long time – and distance – in the making. In provisional versions and under varying titles, parts of it were delivered at Wadham College, Oxford on 31 January 2001, at the University of Leeds on 12 May 2003, and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on 31 March 2006, before being re-jigged yet again for a conference on ‘Exploring Violence’ at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 20–22 October 2008. For invitation, hospitality, and last but not least, stimulating questions and comments, I am grateful (in chronological order of intervention) to Robert Young, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Shirley Chew, John McLeod, Andrew Simpson (who kindly sent me a photocopy of the article by Maurice Lancaster), Thomas and Barbara Metcalf, Christi Merrill, Rohit Setty, Peter de Souza and Gangeya Mukherji.

Notes

¹For a comprehensive account of Gandhi's extensive influence, see Hardiman (2011), and also his earlier fuller narrative of Gandhi's life (Hardiman 2003).

²A spectacular recent example of successful Gandhian resistance to authority was the anti-corruption movement launched in India by the Gandhian social activist Anna Hazare. It came to a culmination in August 2011, complete with Hazare himself and thousands of his supporters turning out at popular demonstrations wearing white ‘Gandhi’ caps and with Hazare himself deploying the ultimate Gandhian tactic of going on a fast unto death, which lasted for twelve days. Eventually it obliged the prime minister of India to concede all of Hazare's three demands by getting parliament to pass urgently a special ‘sense of the house’ resolution and by referring to a Standing Committee of parliament a bill drafted by Hazare and his supporters, none of whom is an elected member of parliament. Among numerous reports of the event worldwide, see The Hindu (2011) and India Today (2011).

³For the record, there is in one of Bhabha's more recent essays one reference to Gandhi, to the effect that the policy of non-cooperation that ‘Gandhi was to adopt in November 1919’ was ‘first enunciated’ by Madame Bhikaji Cama in 1907 (Bhabha 2007: 49).

⁴Chakrabarty has recently co-authored an article in which he highlights Gandhi's discourse on The Bhagavad-Gita to demonstrate that the Gita's ‘message of [violent] action is transformed [by Gandhi] into a theory of non-violent resistance’ and that Gandhi ‘wrests’ this foundational Indian text from those advocating violent resistance to appropriate it for ‘the cause of non-violent politics’ (Chakrabarty and Majumdar 2010: 335).

⁵Leela Gandhi (1996–7: 140) observes that while he is regarded as increasingly irrelevant in postcolonial India, Gandhi is outside India often ‘invoked … as a corrective to the emergence – in the public imagination – of the “corrupt politician”’. But only recently the Mahatma has again been invoked in a phenomenally successful campaign against corruption in India; see note 2.

⁶Yashpal (1903–79) was a member and then in 1931–2 the ‘commander-in-chief’ of the revolutionary organization the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army; following an ambush and a shoot-out with an English police officer, he was arrested and sentenced to a long imprisonment. On his release from jail in 1938 at the intervention of a newly elected Congress government, he found his organization in terminal disarray and proceeded to become a political pamphleteer and then a novelist in Hindi. His magnum opus, Jhootha Sach (literally, ‘The False Truth’, in two volumes, 1958, 1960), is probably the greatest novel written on Partition in any language; it has only recently been translated into English by Anand as This Is Not That Dawn (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2010).

⁷Extracts from this poem are reprinted as Appendix 4 to the Hindi translation (Amin 1996: 234–5) of Amin's essay ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, though it was not included in the original English version (1984) for the reason, as Amin explained, that this satirical poem in metre and rhyme would have been difficult to translate. (Personal conversation, 1995.)

⁸For a rare sustained comparison between Gandhi and Fanon, but along philosophical and holistic (rather than political and postcolonial) lines, see Presbey (1996), who discusses the adherence of one of these figures to non-violence and of the other to violence in terms largely of humanism; of notions of health, the body and (non)invasive medical procedures; and in the context of the ‘cultural differences between India and Algeria, Hinduism and Islam’ (283).

⁹Students of a course I taught at the University of Chicago in 2011 on Gandhi and Fanon were particularly struck, for example, by the vital connection Gandhi posited between non-violence and the practice of brahmacharya (primarily celibacy).

¹⁰The comprehensive formulaic phrase ‘in mind, word and deed,’ deriving directly from the Sanskrit manasā vāchā karmanā, is to be found only in the English version and not in the original Gujarati, suggesting that Gandhi may have added it for further emphasis when revising Mahadev Desai's (1929) translation.

¹¹David Hardiman notes Gandhi's ‘creation of a new word in English, … nonviolence’ and the instances he cites of non-violent Gandhian political action around the world include two long fasts, both undertaken in protest against French military action in Algeria, by Lanza del Vasto, a direct disciple of Gandhi and founder of Action Civique Nonviolent, and by Louis Lecoin (Hardiman 2011: 239–40, 252).

¹²This paradiscursive analysis of how and why the ‘violent’ Fanon eclipses the ‘non-violent’ Gandhi in postcolonial and Subaltern discourse needs to be supplemented perhaps with a closer examination of the lives and texts of both these foundational figures themselves in order to demonstrate the precise nature of their respective beliefs and whether there is any possibility of a discursive dialogue between them. (As the phrase goes, I'm working on it!)