Gandhi in Bombay 1944. Courtesy Getty Images
Ashoak Upadhyay
(An updated version of essay that appeared October 7 2019)
I
n an incisively provocative essay the late literary critic Varis Alvi attempted to find links in the responses to riots, pogroms and cruelties inflicted on the helpless and weak across cultures in the ‘modern’ age. He began by asking a question: “When, at My Lai, the skull of a wounded child is blown to bits from a distance scarcely eight feet away, or, at Ahmadabad, an entire family of ten, children included, is burned alive in just one house–exactly what is one supposed to feel?”
Should one feel sadness, fear, stupefied anger perhaps rage at the visuals of horrific cruelty we find irresistible on our drawing room TVs or on our mobiles and social media? To express those emotions would require in us traces of what Alvi called “tragic majesty”, an expression laced with ethical considerations of good and evil that drive not simply the spectator witnessing the atrocity but the one committing it. Violence–Alvi calls it “our violence”–is “as meaningless as our agony and our pain are senseless.”
Stripped of those ethical considerations of good and evil we greet “our violence” with ridicule, with laughter; our violence becomes spectacle with its violent denouements evoking laughter indifference and often, approbation. Alvi cites the case of a young participant in the Ahmedabad riots recalling with great amusement the death throes of a victim set on fire. Instances of this kind abound and are repeated with increasing frequency across India as mobs beat, lynch, torch as crowds watch, the insensate acts of murder captured on social media for the vicarious thrill of an audience numbed by the the banality of violence heaped on the weak. Compassion drains away into helplessness that leaches into indifference as our consciousness is flooded with visions of the spectacular and their transitoriness; violence, rape, lynching and torching become spectacles to pass the time before another “reality show” sweeps across the screen to seduce us.
For the viewer the victim of the grotesque and insensate is not a human; he/she has become an abstraction; not only is the victim stripped of agency but also of those qualities that make us human. That writhing torched victim is stripped of history, of consciousness, as life ebbs away in flames. Alvi asserts that the perpetrator too is not human in this sense but an abstraction.
“Man has offered up his sound and enduring human relationships as a sacrifice at the tenuous and abstract altar of political concepts and ideals. Rather than being a flesh-and-blood entity, a complete being, Man has thus come to be viewed as a political unit, an abstract idea.”
For Alvi, this is the most vivid, if tragically horrendous example of the dehumanization of man; the carnage at My lai, Ahmedabad and, we might add Rwanda and various parts of this great republic repeatedly, was not committed by man but by a “dominant political abstraction…[that]… killed Man in his fullness, thinking all the while that its victim was none other than a concept-disguised, accidentally, as a man”
And so…
“Our violence and our atrocities have risen so far above all ethical consideration of good and evil, and reached such an extreme form, that they appear laughable.”
In Alvi’s estimation, shame, anger, remorse are human emotions that a ‘political abstraction’ which is what we have been reduced to, do not feel. Riots, like looting in war, are in the infamous words of George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff that happens.” You witness a lynching on youtube, you read the victorious cries of jubilation by the perpetrators of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan’s lynching, acquitted of their heinous crime and you think, ‘That’s Life for you!” Your helplessness turns to indifference as you read on about the way the odds against their indictment were stacked, from the way the entire criminal justice system on the ground worked. And you turn to the Sports page.
It is tempting to assume like Alvi did, that our reactions to the barbarism we inflict on our fellow human beings. Responses such as laughter, helplessness, indifference are outcomes of our dehumanization, our transformation into political abstractions. Our reactions to a lynching are elements of a politics of representation that is abstract in the extreme. A lynching, a riot is viewed as an element in the ‘politics sof hate’: the victims, the perpetrators and the spectators, helpless or complicit observers, from close up or via the media are, at the end of the day, pawns in the play of politics-as-power: the perpetrators of Pehlu Khan’s lynching raised slogans in praise of the Prime Minister, “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. The torch-wielding white supremacists at Charlottesville in the United States two years ago chanted the Nazi slogan, “Blood and Soil!” In Christchurch, New Zealand the mass-shooting perpetrator echoed such sentiments when he wrote that nonwhites from the global South were “overproducing” and “invading” US and Europe to besmirch the West’s cultural purity.
For Alvi, W.B. Yeats who cites Thoman Mann’s epigraph about politics being the destiny of man at the start of his poem “Politics” got it right. Love distracts from the grime of politics: “How can I, that girl standing there/My attention fix/On Roman or on Russian/Or on Spanish politics?” And then Alvi puts his own spin on Yeats’ refusal to bow to the political anarchy that raged around him:
“In other words, whether war, politics, prejudice, or hatred-none stands any comparison to the embrace of a beautiful young woman. The embrace, in its highest form, is emblematic of the human relationships that result from living together, trusting someone, pledging to live and die with that someone. It is these relationships that receive the severest blow in communal rioting, and it is mutual trust that suffers most. After all, it is in the trust of one’s neighbors that one feels safe and sleeps peacefully. But, today, numberless people are killed as they sleep…”
II
Who better to tell us about the discovery of trust, humanity, than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the last man standing, over a century and half years old, a figure from our past with a lantern lighting the way to a future we must reclaim?
At Noakhali and Bihar standing tall in the midst of the worst carnage the subcontinent had known, Gandhi sees the communal riots as a human problem not a political one. For him, man is not a political abstraction, but a human entity and his appeal is therefore a human non-abstract one: our task is focused on the restoration and rediscovery of agency, the capacity to think, feel and act.
As Nirmal Kumar Bose notes in My Days with Gandhi while his counterparts were busy becoming political abstractions in New Delhi, at Noakhali in the midst of the bloodbath, Gandhi was reasserting the moral vision, insisting that non-violence had to become a weapon of the strong.
“After his stay at Srirampur for nearly a month and ahalf, Gandhiji began to feel that the next step which he should take was to try and live among the Muslim peasants in their own villages and convince them by his friendly acts that he was as much concerned about their welfare as of the Hindus. His original idea was to set forth on a walking tour unaccompanied by any of his companions and depend upon what help might actually be given to him by the villagers themselves. But as this was likely to be too uncertain in character, it w.as decided that he should travel on foot from village to village, meet people in their own homes and in his prayer meetings, and see what came out of it ultimately.”
“With this end in view, he left Chandipur on the 7th of January 1947, to encamp at one village for one night and carry with him his message of peace and goodwill among men. During the early morning prayer on that day, Gandhiji asked Manu to sing his favourite Gujarati hymn entitled V aishnav jana to tene kahiye : (‘The true Vaishnav is he who feels the sufferings of others’). He also said that the word Vaishnav should be replaced by Muslim, lsai (i.e.christian) now and then during the chorus. As the little group sang, we suddenly heard Gandhiji himself joining the chorus from within his curtained bed. The pitch of his voice was low, but the tune was quite correct. His voice could be heard above our own.” (My Days, 138)
“Gandhiji’s advice to the Hindus uniformly was that they should purify their own hearts of fear and prejudice, and also set right their social and economic relations with others ; for only could this internal purification give them adequate courage, as well as the moral right, to live amidst a people [Muslims] who now considered them to be their exploiters and enemies.”
Gandhi’s assertion of “purification” by the victims of the riots may seem foolhardy, even cruelly misplaced given the circumstances and even so from the perspectives of contemporary binaries of victimhood and oppression; and yet in a moment of extreme political abstraction, where humans were being dehumanized into pawns of political-nationalist ambitions, his vision of intervention for the assertion of the human is awe-inspiring. It reveals Gandhi’s confidence, (perhaps misplaced, as history would tragically and repeatedly remind us,) in man’s infinite capacity for spiritual progress. That spirituality for Gandhi may have found inspiration from and sustenance in religious texts per se but it was firmly grounded in the power of dialogue and conversation with oneself and with the Other that stands in non-violent opposition to the various forms of non-dialogical conflicts of political abstractions. In this sense Gandhi was one with Tagore who felt the divine lay in humanity.
That dialogic faith, in which we learn not just to tolerate the Other as much as accept his Otherness and engage with it requires courage, an inner strength unlike the non-dialogical discourse of a riot that simply requires the illusion of strength fostered by political abstractions such as nationalism and fantasies of promised lands untainted by ‘Other’ ‘enemy faiths and ways of living.
For Gandhi, the communal riot and violence was the killing fields of the kingdom of the weak.
As Bose tells us: “The Hindus had, first of all, to remove the taint of untouchability, and to this end, he advised every woman to have her food and drink consecrated by the touch of a so-called untouchable before she partook of her meals every day. This was the least penance we could do for having sinned against one section of our brethren. In the same manner, he advised them to fraternize with Muslim women and rescue them from the thraldom of the purdah. For, as he said, true purdah resided in the heart and had little to do with its external observance. If half of a population remained paralysed through an ignorant and evil custom, how could we ever aspire to be free and great?” [140]
On the fourth of January, he reasserted the human and the ethical once again. I have not come he said “to talk to the people of politics, nor to weaken the influence of the Muslim League and increase that of the Congress, but in order to talk to them of little things in their daily life.”
But exhorting the human wasn’t enough; it could be considered idle talk unless the human, depolitcised man acquired agency and autonomy that could foster the capacity for self-empowerment. And amidst the carnage of Noakhali Gandhi offers a vision of constructive engagement with dignity.
He tells the evacuees in refugee camps, not to accept charity nor to “offer a free gift to anyone” but to work and “shed the habit of dependence on public charity.”
In a letter to the local magistrate who was considering a proposal to close down the refugee camps, Gandhi provides a plan for constructive engagement, a template for cooperative planning of local economic rejuvenation through employment. Unlike the development discourse that followed independence, Gandhi’s plan restores to labour its own fruits cutting through an alienation historically accumulated and that we now know was carried to its extreme limits with multinationals enjoy the fruits of labour in the peripheries.
In Noakhali, during the barbaric riots that gripped the land and many of whose sites Gandhi visited and camped in, his message was clear: barbarism cannot be repaid with barbarism. It is not a sign of manliness. Hear Bose again:
“Gandhiji expressed his surprise that he had received a telegram warning him that he must not condemn Hindusin Bihar, for what they had done was purely from a sense of duty. He had no hesitation in saying that the writer did no good to India or to Hinduism by issuing the warning.
He spoke as a Hindu having a living faith in his own religion and he claimed to be a better Hindu for claiming to be a good Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew, as he was a Hindu. And he invited every one of his audience to feel likewise. As such, he felt that he would forfeit his claim to be a Hindu if he bolstered up the wrong-doing of fellow Hindus or any other fellow being.” (Bose, 163)
III
Varis Alvi echoes Yeats citing Thomas Mann about the perniciousness of man’s destiny as a political being, an abstract and mindless automaton devoid of humanity. But then Aristotle had said nearly two and a half centuries earlier: “Man is ‘zoon politikon’ a political animal. And sensibly so. As Ramin Jahanbegloo reminds us in The Disobedient Indian “…[w]ithout a sense of the political mankind descends into disorder, chaos and barbarity.” The political is the arena for the organizing of society but in modern societies it has become a synecdoche for politics, the contest and conflict between different and often hostile interest groups for power. It is Politics that corrals the human into serving specific partisan objectives, a process that in turn transforms the living into an abstract unit serving those interests.
It is possible to view the Political as an art of organizing resistance and cooperation: questioning and resisting the radical evils committed in the name of organized poer in the arena of Politics and organizing society for peaceful ends, and to promote the “spiritual-ethical” promise of man through cooperation and living together.
If Politics is the platform for the contest and appropriation of power and authority, the Political is the arena for autonomous humans to figure out how to cooperate with one another. If Politics rests on the assumption of power to wrest power, the Political expands the potential of agency. If Politics is the space for domination the Political is the arena for conversation and therefore freedom. If Politics privatizes power, the Political decentralizes it by expanding the publicness of dialogue and living together. Politics excludes the political; the political checks the politics of power by exposing it to the public gaze. Politics therefore turns the human into an abstraction; the Political restores humanity unto itself. And by doing so, it reasserts humanity’s lost expropriated gift for questioning and conversation. Politics divides us into abstract units mutually hostile; the Political unites us in our diversity.
The political as publicness: the political as dialogue.
Socrates viewed dialogue as an antidote to violence. So does Gandhi. In dialogue he locates freedom and solidarity. At Noakhali, in Bihar and all through his life, Gandhi held the publicness of conversation to be an ethical pathway to empathy and freedom from violence. Conversations induced solidarity and shared purpose resulting in the constriction of the divisive and exclusivist power of Politics and the expansion of harmonious living.
Walking these pathways leads individuals into what Jahanbegloo calls “solidary obligations” transforming egoistic individuals into conscious and committed citizens.
For Gandhi the communal holocaust was the arena for transformative praxis. His plea to Hindus to clean toilets and cleanse themselves of untouchability, to embrace Muslims as Muslims, his advice to a Hindu victim to raise a Muslim child in his faith and not as a Hindu were elements of that belief in the capacity of egoistic individuals to engage in the public sphere of the Political rejecting the life-denying abstractions of Politics.
One is tempted to believe that the politics Thomas Mann and Yeats reject as anti-human and that ALvi condemns for its abstraction of the individual is Politics as the “organization of hatreds” transmitted through the ballot box or through the barrel of a gun,
In Gandhi’s life we get a clear discourse of an alternative that is humanizing in all its critical elemnts: the Political is the public sphere, open and transparent to all willing to shed egos, enter this realm of publicness and engage in non-violent interventions with twin objectives: curbing the violence of Politics as an expression of corporatized power (reflected in the Nation-State and its apparatuses) while enhancing the bonds of empathy and solidarity through dialogic discourses embedded in non-violence.
The Political sphere then was a space whose grammar of discourse had to be located in resistance and cooperation; resistance to the organised institutional arms of Politics and cooperation amongst the expanding and diverse members of that publicness. For Gandhi as for his forbears, Tolstoy, John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, and those he inspired such as Martin Luther King Jr., resistance to organized power had to be rooted in non-violent modes empathy-creating modes of intervention. For Gandhi it was not enough to legislate the abolition of untouchability: the upper castes had to render it obsolete through their own actions. That constituted the retrieval of agency.
In the event, the Political has a profoundly ethical dimension to it; its non-violent modes of resistance to the “organization of hatreds” and its dialogic interventions to foster love and trust among the diverse communities inhabiting that public sphere constitute a bridgehead to what Gandhi called “the highest moral law.” Aldous Huxley once said that Gandhi understood man to be “of no great size and, in most cases, of very modest abilities.” But he also knew that “…these physical and intellectual limitations are compatible with a practically infinite capacity for spiritual progress.”
Gandhi’s life and teachings are profoundly political. But his was not the politics premised on narrow sectarian ideology; it was guided by a deeply moral compass of self-transformation through self-criticality, Its goal was not to seek power but to empower the public realm, to create an ethical political discourse in which civility, acceptance of the other and non-violent dialogic interventions between diverse communities can guide our search to ‘live in truth’.
Varis Alvi was right about the abstract man. In this age of post-Truths and alchemists that turn falsehoods into simulacra of verisimilitude: the human becomes a Category, a construct in the modern discourse of organized politics that pivots on violence. But he is also wrong in assuming that such politics’ corruptible seed is all there is. Gandhi shows us it isn’t. In Gandhi we get the notion of the Political sired on the retrieval of self-worth and agency and in a growing publicness that guides humanity towards its potential for ethical and moral behavior through love for the Other and dissent and resistance to the politics of power that alienates, to the “Organization of Hatreds.”
“The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall see truth in fragment and from different angles of vision. Conscience is not the same thing for all. Whilst, therefore, it is a good guide for individual conduct, imposition of that conduct on all will be an insufferable interference with everybody’s freedom of conscience.”
Notes Varis Alvi quotes from the essay Riots and the Artist in The Beacon. Read in full here: https://www.thebeacon.in/2017/12/17/riots-and-the-artist-between-the-lines/ Nirmal Kumar Bose: My Days With Gandhi.Calcutta 1953 Accessed at: https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/my-days-with-gandhi-nirmalkumar-bose.pdf Ramin Jahanbegloo: The Disobedient Indian. Towards a Gandhian Philosophy of Dissent. 2018. Speaking Tiger. New Delhi
Also read: https://www.thebeacon.in/2017/09/30/in-bloodbath-moral-vision-reasserted-between-the-lines/
https://www.thebeacon.in/2018/09/15/imagining-utopia-the-importance-of-love-dissent-and-radical-empathy-personal-notes/ https://www.thebeacon.in/2017/09/30/transcending-identity-pursuing-a-different-freedom-between-the-lines/
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