THE VIOLENCE

OF GANDHIS
NON-VIOLENCE
ANIA LOOMBA

n 2013, as part of a series on the subject of Violence organised

by the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania,
I was asked to deliver a lecture on Gandhi on 2 October, his 144th
birth anniversary. I suppose the idea was to take a look at violence
from the perspective on non-violence. Indeed, in an increasingly
militarised world, non-violence seems urgently necessary, if also
hopelessly romantic. In the preceding decade, as the United
States wrecked havoc in several parts of the world in the name of
revenge, the truth of Gandhis remark, an eye for an eye makes the
whole world go blind seems only too evident. But it also seems
increasingly difficult to insert Gandhis vocabulary into the world
of contemporary politics, in which protests both proliferate and are
marginalised, appropriated and dismantled by ever more powerful
corporate and state systems. Popular culture, state machinery and
establishment scholarship have collectively entrenched the image
of Gandhi as a saint, and effective because a saint, and this makes
our task even harder. There is no shortage of nuanced critiques
of Gandhi, but these are largely marginalised, as Perry Anderson
(2012) has recently alleged, or considered as bad form. Gandhism
has become a religion, which means that its mantra of non-violence
is most passionately invoked by those least committed to it.
I do not wish to discount the very real and very transformatory
powers of Gandhis example, manifest in social and political
movements from the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the
Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the Cesar Chavez-led
United Farm Workers agitation, Occupy Wall Street and the Narmada
Bachao Andolan. Many of these movements adapted his methods
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while others moved away from them, and it is often these departures,
rather than the pious invocations, that manifest the most powerful
attempts to engage with Gandhi. The legacies of Gandhi are myriad
and complex, and any account of him is bound to be contentious.
His collected works run into almost a hundred volumes, and there
are over 400 biographies of him. As one commentator put it, he
lived till 79 and was rarely silent. So it is hardly surprising that he
contradicted himself, often self-consciously, writing that my aim is not
[to] be consistent with my previous statements but with truth as it may
present itself to me at a given momentsince I am called Great Soul
I might as well endorse Emersons saying that foolish consistency is
the hobgoblin of little minds (Anderson, 2012: 30). In my lecture,
upon which this small essay is based, I decided to offer a very personal
approach to Gandhis legacies in order to think about the various forms
of non-violence, some invoked by him and others that he resolutely
turned his back on, as well as the many forms of violence, again some
embraced by Gandhi and others disavowed by him.
There is a telling scene in Richard Attenboroughs hagiographic
film Gandhi. Although, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, this film gives
the impression that all one had to do to achieve Indian independence
was lie down in front of the oppressor, this particular scene allows us
to think about Gandhis tactics (Rushdie, 1991).1 The leaders of the
Indian National Congress, including Mohammad Jinnah, Sardar Patel
and Jawaharlal Nehru, are conferring with Gandhi in Delhi about
their next move against the British authorities. Gandhi makes it clear
that he has never advocated passive anything, and that he wants
an active and provocative resistance. He understands that a day of
prayer and fasting is in effect a general strike. But it is crucial for him
that it not be called a strike, even though a strike is also a non-violent
action. Gandhi had a checkered engagement with strikes; he once led
them in South Africa and later fasted in support of striking Indian
mill workers, but becoming increasingly close to big capitalists, he
pronounced that India had no place for political strikes. The scene
reminds us that the vocabularies Gandhi developed were as cannily
political as they appeared to be high-minded, indeed they were
cannily political because they sounded the way they did, seemingly
eschewing the political.
But Gandhi himself insisted that non-violence was not a
strategy, but an absolute moral position. He writes that since we
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have control over the means and not the end, means are after all
everything. This rhetoric is repeated by the hagiography of much
Gandhi scholarship. Thus Akeel Bilgrami, a philosopher at Columbia
University, writes:
Violence has many sides. It can be spontaneous or planned, it can
be individual or institutional, it can be physical or psychological, it
can be delinquent or adult, it can be revolutionary or authoritarian.
A great deal has been written on violence: on its psychology, on its
possible philosophical justifications under certain circumstances, and
of course on its long career in military history. Non-violence has no
sides at all. Being negatively defined, it is indivisible(2003: 4159).

On the contrary, I shall argue that non-violence is not indivisible

and it should not be negatively defined; it too ranges over a wide
political spectrum. Moreover, it is precisely the Gandhian history of
non-violence that has made it impossible to simply counter-pose it
to violence. Indeed, Gandhi himself acknowledges this, repeatedly
confessing his dilemna: God alone knows what is himsa (violence)
and what is ahimsa (non-violence) and at other times even
suggesting that all killing is not himsa (violence), and that one who
has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing; in other words
one must have the capacity for violence in order for its renunciation
to have any meaning (Gandhi, 1999: vol. 79, 173).
The philosophy and practice of satyagraha embody this
complexity. This is a phrase which Gandhi coined, rejecting his
own earlier term passive resistance which, he says, gave rise to
confusion and it appeared shameful to permit this great struggle to
be known only by an English name. . . . Truth (satya) implies love,
and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym
for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that
is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence
(ibid.: vol. 34, 93). The term was, in fact, not widely adopted
outside India, and passive resistance and non-violence became
more popular. Both of these do not register the force that the term
satyagraha includes, a force that has two components; the first is, of
course, the sheer physical courage involved in satyagraha.
In high school, I, like so many Indians of my generation,
read Jawaharlal Nehrus description of his first experience of a police
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beating with a baton or a lathi in 1928. Such a beating had recently

killed the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai. Nehru describes how he
had to fight hard against his instinct to shelter. Afterwards, he felt
exhilarated, and felt he had come out morally clear-headed and even
superior. But the next day there was a harder attack by mounted
police; the protestors received
a tremendous hammering, and the clearness of vision that I had had
the evening before left me. All I knew was that I had to stay where
I was and must not yield or go back. I felt half blinded with the
blows, and sometimes a dull anger seized me and a desire to hit
out. I thought how easy it would be to pull down the police officer
in front of me from his horse and to mount up myself, but long
training and discipline held, and I did not raise a hand, except to
protect my face from a blow (Nehru, 1941: 137).

Nehrus descriptions of police brutality strengthened his belief that

In spite of its negative name it [ahimsa] was a dynamic method, the
very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrants will. It was not a
cowards refuge from action, but the brave mans defiance of evil and
national subjection (ibid.: 80). And yet, he writes that
the memory that endures with me, far more than that of the beating
itself, is that of many of the faces of those policemen, and especially
of the officers, who were attacking us, full of hate and bloodlust, almost mad, with no trace of sympathy or touch of humanity!
Probably the faces on our side just then were equally hateful to look
at, and the fact that we were mostly passive did not fill our minds
and hearts with love for our opponents, or add to the beauty of our
countenances (ibid.: 138).

Contrary to Gandhis exhortations, Nehru confesses, none of the

satyagrahis had been able to rid themselves of their hatred for their
adversaries.
But, of course, this was the second injunction to a
satyagrahithe removal of hatred and the embracing of ones
oppressor, flouted by many of those who later appropriated
Gandhi. This also baffled many of his followers. There is the
famous incident at Chauri Chaura, the place where 23 policemen
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were burnt to death by an angry mob in February 1922, leading

Mahatma Gandhi to suspend the struggle against the British.
Everyone remembers Gandhis responsehe called off the
struggle and went on a fast to atone for the violence. What has
been forgotten are the rioting peasants, perceived as criminals by
both nationalists and imperialists. As the historian Shahid Amin
puts it in a memorable book, the event itself became the great
unremembered episode of modern Indian history, reduced to
nothing but metaphor for all manner of untrammelled peasant
violence, specifically in opposition to disciplined non-violent mass
satyagrahas (1995: 3). Amin asks us to re-examine the ideologies
and cultures of the peasants who made Gandhi into a Mahatma
and yet were far from being represented by him, and also, to think
about the costs of Gandhis non-violence.
This rethinking is also provoked by Raja Raos 1937 novel
Kanthapura, a powerful and prescient account of Gandhism. Rao
describes how a young man called Moorthy brings the Gandhian
movement to a tiny village in south India. His first and most active
followers are the village women who have previously never left their
homes. They are also the most radical, and Moorthy has a hard time
teaching them Gandhian ways. When the local policeman Bade
Khan starts beating up Moorthy the women cry out:
At him! And they all fall upon Bade Khan and tearing away the lathi,
bang it on his head. And the maistri comes to pull them off and
whips them, and women fall on the maistri and tear his hair, while
Moorthy cries out, No beatings, sisters. No beatings, in the name of
the Mahatma. But the women are fierce and they will tear the beard
from Bade Khans face (Rao, 1963: 59).

The next day, Moorthy, just like Gandhi, goes on a fast to atone for
this violence. The women are puzzled at his insistence that they
must love Bade Khan.
Rangamma did not understand this, neither, to tell you the truth,
did any of us. We would do harm to no living creature. But to love
Bade Khanno, that was another thing. We would not insult him.
We would not hate him. But we could not love him. How could we?
He was not my uncles son, was he? And even if he were

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Gandhi claimed the force of moral right in a way his followers

often could not. Gandhi had few self-doubts about this question:
it has been my experience that I am always true from my point
of view. He goes on to say that therefore his opponents can
also claim a right to truth, and that is the reason not to hate but
to transform them. But as Kanthapura reminds us, there were
material reasons why this was not possible for his followers. In
a remarkable passage, as the women train themselves for the next
confrontation,
Rangamma would say, Now if the police should fall on you, you
must stand without moving a hair, and we would feel a shiver run
down our backs, and we would say, No, sister, that is too difficult,
and Rangamma would say, No, sister, that is not difficult. Does not
the Gita say, the sword can split asunder the body, but never the
soul?... And one day Nanjamma came and said, Sisters, last night
I dreamt my husband was beating me and beating me, and I was
crying and my bangles broke and I was saying, Oh, why does he
beat men with a stick and not with his hands? and then when I saw
him again, it was no more my husband, it was Bade Khan, and
I gave such a shriek that my husband woke me up (ibid.: 107).

Later, precisely this conflation of the domestic and political becomes

part of their training method:
. . . and we stand straight and hold our hands against our breasts,
and Rangamma says, Now, imagine the policemen are beating you,
and you shall not budge a fingers length, and we close our eyes
and we imagine Bade Khan after Bade Khan, short, bearded, lipsmacking, smoking, spitting, booted Bade Khan, and as we begin
to imagine them, we see them rise and become bigger and bigger
in the sunshine, and we feel the lathis bang on us, and the bangles
break and the hair tear and the lips split, and we say, nay, nay, and
we cannot bear it, and Dores wife Sundri begins to cry out and she
is frightened; but Ratna, who is by her, says, Be strong, sister, When
your husband beats you, you do not hit back, do you? You only
grumble and weep. The policemans beatings are the like! and we
say, So they are. And we begin to get more and more familiar with
it (ibid.: 122).

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On the one hand, the analogy between the local police and the
husband allows the women to resist the former, precisely because
satyagraha has to take the form of submission. But while Gandhi
himself was to proclaim that such physical submission did not
imply a moral capitulation, the womens resistance to the police is
rehearsed through their acceptance of domestic violence, on keeping
the domestic hierarchy secure. Indeed, this is the paradox of Gandhis
methodone must simultaneously resist the law and submit to it.
Both in the novel, and in the Gandhian movement, women were
enjoined not to neglect domestic duties, not to question the familial
hierarchy as they ventured into the larger world. In reality, of course,
women did breach established boundaries as they began to participate
in political life in unprecedented numbers. They did attempt to recast
domestic relations, did transgress into previously unacceptable spaces,
but arguably, this they did in spite of Gandhi, not because of him.2
Gandhi himself used a strikingly gendered and violent image
to explain the moral truth of satyagraha: the ideal satyagrahi is the
twentieth century Sati. In this image, non-violent political dissent is
compared to the immolation of a Hindu widow, a Brahmanical rite
that was outlawed by the British, and that many Hindu reformers
also sought to eradicate. It is a curious image. Since there is nothing
that is resisted by the action of a widow who kills herself, no
dominant order that is questioned, no authority whose rights are
questioned, what does Gandhis imagery draw upon, and what does
it result in? It certainly references the immense physical courage and
pain that the widow must endure. But it also draws upon the idea
that the widow possesses sat or the truth. In doing so it suggests
that this pain is voluntarily undertaken by the widow, and is an act
of moral courage. As Indian feminists have argued at great length,
widow immolation is better seen as a submissionoften coerced
to an intensely patriarchal, and intensely violent social order, but its
supporters, till today, still repeat the notion of a satis courage and
morality, and indeed accuse their opponents of being un-Indian,
Westernised, and out of touch with tradition.3
Gandhis pronouncements on sexual violence against women
rehearsed the logic of this earlier comparison of the satyagrahi and sati:
I have always held that it is physically impossible to violate a woman
against her will. The outrage takes place only when she gives way to

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fear or does not realize her moral strength. If she cannot meet the
assailants physical might, her purity will give her the strength to die
before he succeeds in violating her.
Take the case of Sita. Physically she was a weakling before
Ravana, but her purity was more than a match even for his giant
might. He tried to win her with all kinds of allurements, but could
not carnally touch her without her own physical strength or upon a
weapon she possesses, she is sure to be discomfited whenever her
strength is exhausted.4
It is my firm conviction that a fearless woman, who knows that
her purity is her best shield can never be dishonoured. However
beastly the man, he will bow in shame before the flame of her
dazzling purity.
I therefore recommend womento try to cultivate this
courage. They will become wholly fearless if they can and cease to
tremble as they do today at the thought of assaults. Parents and
husbands should instruct women in the art of becoming fearless. It
can best be learnt from a living faith in God. Though He is invisible,
He is ones unfailing protector. He who has this faith is the most
fearless of all 5

If, in the face of the violence against women in India, this seems
grotesque, so does Gandhis controversial letter to the Jewish people
of Germany:
If I were a Jew and were born in GermanyI would refuse to
be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for
doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil
resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were
bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to
accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off
than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an
inner strength and joythe calculated violence of Hitler may even
result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to
the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be
prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined
could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had
wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For
to the God-fearing, death has no terror(Homer, 1956: 319, 320).

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Unfortunately, Gandhis statements about sexual violence have been

institutionalised in modern India; they were required reading for
undergraduates when I started my teaching career. Later, a colleague
at Jawaharlal Nehru University repeated them to a young graduate
student who wanted to work on sexual violence; he told her that
the project was bankrupt since a good Hindu woman could not be
raped. After the notorious rape of a woman in Delhi in December
2012, an RSS leader announced that such rapes are only a part of
urban and Westernised India. They do not exist in Bharat (the Hindi
term for the country). The well-known postcolonial thinker Ashis
Nandy also said there was some truth is this statement. The point
here is that Gandhis legacy has legitimised a kind of commonsense
about sexual violence and its supposed links with female purity as
well as allowing a horrific romanticisation of rural India, and this
commonsense can be shared across the political spectrum.
At the same time, as many scholars have suggested, Gandhis
methods of resistance, and his own example, remoulded the
ideal of a freedom fighter from hyper-masculine and aggressive to
vulnerable, passive and, therefore, feminine. In fact, as the passage
from Nehru that I quoted earlier attests, his male followers had to
unlearn traditional masculine privilege and masculine behaviour
in order to practice satyagraha. Certainly, Gandhis own body was
remoulded over the years from that of a sophisticated Westernised
barrister to the image of an average poor peasant, vulnerable in his
nakedness and poverty. One the one hand, this has been an abiding
legacy for political activists in Indiathe simple white clothes, the
shunning of ornaments and ostentation, the paring down of ones
needsa certain asceticism became part of the nationalist movement
in general, defining the political culture of large segments of the left,
for example, and large sections of the feminist movement as well.
But we must remember the gap between form and contentof
course Gandhi was no fakir; he simulated a prototype of an Indian
peasant, just as his ashrams were the simulation of an ideal village
community. As historian Tanika Sarkar (2011) points out,
Gandhis practical resolution to the problem of inequality was
to short-circuit a social process by a personal example: to be
self-sufficient in all forms of labour that are necessary for the
reproduction of daily life. He hoped to live without exploitation.

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What Gandhi and his associates did was a matter of personal

conviction and choice. The self-chosen poverty of the great leader
did not question the brutal lack in their lives. It morally privileged
and aestheticized them.Gandhi himself lived in ashrams that
were simulated rural communities, but ones that were free of actual
contradictions that actual villages faced.

This is a crucial point; when, in the novel Kanthapura, the women

satyagrahis find it impossible to love Bade Khan the local policeman,
they are simply pointing out that ones relationship with the colonial
masters who live far away is one thing, but its translation at the local
level, where antagonistic and oppressive social relations permeate
every aspect of ones being, quite another.
In the village of Kanthapura, as in India, possibly the most
violent and intractable contradiction is that of caste. Although Gandhi
believed that poverty is the worst kind of violence, and certainly
recognised the violence of caste, his solutions did not involve a
rewriting of the existing social or economic conditions of their
existence. Indeed, he used considerable forceone may even say
violenceto ensure their continuance, as was pointed out by B. R.
Ambedkar, his most radical interlocutor. Ambedkars legacy challenges
Gandhis, indeed it challenges the privilege of the postcolonial ruling
classes, and thus has been systematically excluded from postcolonial
education. I feel ashamed that while I was growing up, I knew little
of Ambedkars work, and have had to systematically unlearn much of
what I had been taught in order to approach it.
Ambedkar pointed out that Gandhis caste-work was directed
at ensuring the continuance of the system as a whole. Just as Gandhi
argued for a moral awakening on the part of the rich, who should, he
said, regard their property as held in a trust for the poor, he insisted
that caste was a matter of reform of upper-caste Hindu consciousness.
He insisted that Dalits were a part of Hindu societybut this was not
necessarily a moral stance. Without their inclusion, Hindus would
not have had a clear majority in the country. Ambedkar pointed out
that Gandhi repeatedly affirmed his personal faith in the caste system
as a whole; he quotes Gandhi as writing:
I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because it
is founded on the caste system.

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The seeds of Swaraj (self-rule) are to be found in the caste

system. Different castes are like different sections of the military
division. Each division is working for the good of the whole .
To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European
social system means that Hindus must give up on the principle of
hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. It
will be a chaos if everyday a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra
and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin.6

These views are, if we look closely, derived from colonial

anthropologists of caste. All of them believed that caste was the glue
that held India together. H. R. Risley, the British census commissioner
who tried to measure caste groups using the racist colonial methods of
anthropometry writes that caste
forms the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian
society.... Were its cohesive power withdrawn or its essential
ties relaxed, it is difficult to form any idea of the probable
consequences. Such a change would be more than a revolution;
it would resemble the withdrawal of some elemental force like
gravitation or molecular attraction. Order would vanish and chaos
would supervene (1915: 278).

This is neither to undermine nor to disparage Gandhis personal

disgust at the inequities and hypocrisies of the caste system. Take,
for example, his challenge to the manual scavenging of human
feces, which was both decreed as the work of the Untouchables,
and declared as the cause of their ritual pollution. Gandhi started
cleaning latrines in South Africa, and insisted that everyone in his
ashram do the same, including his pregnant wife Kasturba. From
what we know, she reacted as if this demand was a violent assault
upon her sensibilities. But then Gandhi declared that he loved
scavenging himself, and that scavengers born to this occupation
must also love it: You should realize you are cleaning Hindu society,
he told them. Ambedkar pointed out that if a Brahmin cleaned
human waste, he would not become an Untouchable:
For in India a man is not a scavenger because of his work. He is a
scavenger because of his birth irrespective of the question whether

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he does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavenging

is a noble profession with the object of inducing those who refuse
to engage in it, one could understand it. But why appeal to the
scavengers pride and vanity in order to induce him and only him
to keep on scavenging.To preach that poverty is good for the
shudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for the
Untouchables and for none else, and to make them accept these
onerous impositions as voluntary purposes in life is an outrage
and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr. Gandhi
can perpetuate with equanimity and impunity (see note 6).

Ambedkar writes powerfully about the sheer violence of the caste order.
The sanctity and the infallibility of the Vedas, the Smritis and
Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of karma and the
senseless law of status by birth are to the Untouchables veritable
instruments of torture which Hinduism forged against the
Untouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated,
blasted and blighted the life of Untouchables are to be found intact
and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism.

Indeed, Gandhis naming of the Untouchables as Harijans, or

children of God, was a kind of violence in itself inasmuch as it
claimed that those who were blighted by man were loved by God;
instead, the name that emerged from anti-caste struggles is Dalit,
or broken people, that names the very real brutality of caste. At the
time of Ambedkars writing, he noted, some of the provinces in India
have laws which make refusal by a scavenger to do scavenging a
crime for which he can be tried and punished by a criminal court.
Ambedkar could only see Gandhis non-violence as a refusal
to hurt the propertied class. Gandhi has no passion for economic
equality.The owners need not deprive themselves of their
property. All that they need to do is to declare themselves Trustees
for the poor.7 He suggested that
Gandhism may well be suited to a society which does not accept
democracy as its ideal.Under Gandhism the common man must
keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In
short, Gandhism with its calls of back to nature, means back to

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nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance

for the vast majority of the peopleclass structure in Gandhism is
not a mere accident. It is its official doctrine

Ambedkar concluded that

Gandhism is a paradox. It stands for freedom from foreign
domination which means the destruction of the existing political
structure of the country. At the same time it seeks to maintain intact
a social structure which permits the domination of one class by
another on a hereditary basis which means a perpetual domination
of one class by another.

It is this paradox that explains the violence of Gandhis nonviolence. When Ambedkar appropriated Gandhian weapons but for
a far more radical agenda, organising a series of satyagrahas where
Dalits claimed the use of tanks and roads close to temples, distanced
himself firmly. No Harijan need fast against anyone nor need
satyagraha be offered by them.Let them not engage in quarrels
with local caste Hindus. Their behaviour should be at all times
courteous and dignified. They should embark on internal reforms:
untouchables ought to give up alcohol, bathe more often, stop
eating beef and carrion (the availability of carrion as food was one of
the few occupational advantages of being a scavenger), educate their
children, and improve their methods of scavenging and tanning. As
Daniel Immerwahr notes (2007: 275301):
Gandhis hope for quietism on the part of untouchables was
accompanied by a grim view of their capacities as political actors.
The poor Harijans have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of
difference between God and not God, he explained to an aghast
C. F. Andrews. To think that they could act as a group would be
absurd. To the missionary John R. Mott, Gandhi insisted that
untouchables lacked the mind and intelligence to understand
what you talked and thus could never be the subjects of genuine
conversion. Would you preach the Gospel to a cow? he asked.
Pessimistic about any possibility for real political action on the part
of the untouchables, Gandhi denied that Ambedkar, an outspoken
radical with an Ivy League education, could ever represent them.

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For Gandhi, it was the saint in the loincloth, not the lawyer in jacket
and tie, who must speak for the downtrodden people of India.8

Gandhi was prepared to go to any lengths to prevent the realisation

of Ambedkars demand for a separate electorate for Dalits. If this
were to happen, he speculated that Dalits would join hands with
Muslim hooligans and kill upper-caste Hindus (Desai, 1996: 167).
Thus in 1932, when separate electorates became a possibility,
he used his ultimate weapon against ita fast unto death. The
effect was sensational, as it was calculated to be. Ambedkar was
cornered:
There was before me the duty, which I owed as a part of common
humanity, to save Gandhi from sure death. There was before me the
problem of saving for the untouchables the political rights which
the Prime Minister had given them. I responded to the call of
humanity (Immerwahr, 2007: 288).

Ambedkar later regretted his capitulation: there was nothing noble

in the fast. It was a foul and filthy act. The fast was not for the benefit
of the Untouchables. It was against them and was the worst form of
coercion against a helpless people (Ambedkar: 72). Gandhi also
admitted later that his fast did unfortunately coerce some people
into action which they would not have endorsed without my fast.
But such conduct is of daily occurrence in the ordinary affairs of
life. As Perry Anderson points out, Gandhi never undertook a fast
against the actions of upper-caste Hindus. It is important to note
that whenever the policy of affirmative action in favour of Dalits has
been implemented, there has been a rash of upper-caste suicides,
although self-immolation has been the preferred method, sati-like,
rather than fasting.
It is commonplace to compare Gandhi with Martin Luther
King. Its effect is to suggest a comparison between the colonised
subjects of India and the Blacks of the United States. Daniel
Immerwahr astutely points out that such a comparison elides the
place of the untouchables entirely; it was warmly embraced by both
Indian nationalists and black activists. Lala Lajpat Rai, for example,
abandoned the comparisons he once used to make between Dalits
and American Blacks in favour of those between all Indians and
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Blacks. Immerwahrs work reminds us of the enormous institutional

and financial networks that created Gandhism as an international
creed, and of its costs-one of them is the Black Power movement
which did not, surprisingly, engage with the question of caste at
all. On the other hand, Dalits did engage with the Black Panther
movement, but that is another story.
We cannot end without thinking about the violence of Gandhis
death. Nathuram Godse, who shot him, believed that Gandhis
ideology would emasculate Hindus and dismantle their traditions
of anti-Islamic militancy. Gandhis last fast, protesting the unfair
treatment of Pakistan in the process of Partition, was for him, the last
straw. Godse calls Gandhi a violent pacifist which Ambedkar himself
might have suggested as an apt phrase for Gandhis philosophy and
practice. But Godse spoke in the voice of militant Hindusim, rather
than in protest against it. For this version of Hinduism, Ramchandra
Guha writes: Gandhi was a heterodox Hindu, who was detested
by the priestly orthodoxy so much so that the Sankaracharyas once
even organized a signature campaign that asked the British to declare
Gandhi a non-Hindu (2013). Today, the Hindu Right still detests
Gandhi, though it has learnt to opportunistically use him. But the
problem is that Gandhi himself created some of the terrain on which
they act. By insisting on using Ramarajya as his image of a just order,
he participated in the construction of India as a fundamentally
Hindu nation, one in which Muslims were younger siblings needing
protection, and in which Dalits could hardly be any better. This is the
vocabulary that has been systematically appropriated and hardened
by the Hindu Right, which of course has no pretensions to nonviolence at all, and is devoted to establishing an aggressive Hinduism.
But beyond the extreme right, even liberal intellectuals in India have
participated in white-washing the issues at hand. Thus Guha goes on
to proclaim that
For all their lapses and departures from orthodoxyor perhaps
because of themGandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru were the three
20th century figures who did most to rid Hinduism of its ills and
excesses, who worked most heroically to nurture the spirit of equal
citizenship that the Laws of Manu so explicitly deny. The work that
they, and the equally remarkable reformers who preceded them,
did, are what Hindus should be most proud of.

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This neatly side-steps the enormous difference between Gandhi and

Ambedkar, without which such easy extolling of Gandhis positions
on caste is impossible.
Perhaps the last word on violence can be literary. In a moving
story, Shishu, Mahasweta Devi describes how Adivasis have been
literally and figuratively crippled in modern India. In this story, a
well-meaning development officer called Singh goes to distribute
food in a relief camp in the Adivasis forests. He finds that every
night his supplies are stolen. So one night he plans to stay awake to
catch the thief. And he sees little bodies come in from the dark and
surround him.
Fearstark, unreasoning, naked feargripped him. Why this
silent creeping forward? Why didnt they utter one word? Why
were they naked? And why such long hair? Children, he had always
heard of children, but how come that one had white hair? Why did
the womenno, no, girlshave dangling, withered breasts?. We
are not children. We are Agarias of the Village of Kuva. There are
only fourteen of us left. Our bodies have shrunk without food. Our
men are impotent, our women barren. Thats why we steal the relief.
Dont you see we need food to grow to a human size again?.
They cackled with savage and revengeful glee. Cackling, they
ran around him. They rubbed their organs against him and told him
they were adult citizens of India.
Singhs shadow covered their bodies. And the shadow brought
the realization home to him.
They hated his height of five feet and nine inches.
They hated the normal growth of his body.
His normalcy was a crime they could not forgive.
Singhs cerebral cells tried to register the logical explanation but
he failed to utter a single word. Why, why this revenge? He was just
an ordinary Indian. He didnt have the stature of a healthy Russian,
Canadian or American. He did not eat food that supplied enough
calories for a human body. The World Health Organization said
that it was a crime to deny the human body of the right number of
calories.

Today, large numbers of such forest dwellers, crippled and

disfigured, their iron rich lands invaded first by the Indian state, and
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now by Indian and multinational companies, have taken to the gun.

They havent come out of the blue; their insurgency is a version of
the miltiant rebellions by peasants, women, hill people, workers,
and indeed intellectuals, since the beginning of the 20th century.
They are being hunted not just by state and military guns but also
by the rhetoric of non-violence. Anyone who supports them is asked
to declare their position on violence. The situation is not, of course,
unique. Thus, as I was writing this essay, I also happened to watch
a powerful Swedish documentary, Black Power Mixtape, that tracks
African-American militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. In this, the
legendary Angela Davis is interviewed. At the time of the interview,
she was still in prison, and the interviewer asks her if she approves
of violence. In reply, Davis simply describes in detail the bombings
of her Black and poor Birmingham neighbourhood by white
supremacists. She recalls how her mother was called by a friend to
pick up the remains of four young girls blown to smithereens by
such bombs. She then asks the interviewer, And you want to know
my position on violence?
The problem I have been highlighting is that Gandhis remarks
on non-violence are directed always towards the dissentor; while
one could argue that he is hardly concerned with preaching to the
oppressor, that his constituency is those who dissent, we need to think
hard about the effect of directing the plea of non-violence, or often the
charge of violence, towards those who are protesting against injustice
in the first place. Gandhis most powerful legacy is not some absolute
insistence on non-violence. Gandhi invoked the morality of dissent
when it suited him. To disobey an oppressor is a right, he intoned,
and it is also moral obligation. We should appropriate this legacy by
questioning Gandhis own vocabularies, by asking where the violence
lies, and what true non-violence might mean today.

NOTES

1.

See also Richard Greniers brilliant review of the film. http://www.

commentarymagazine.com/article/the-gandhi-nobody-knows/:
[Accessed 14 March 2014].

2.

See Tanika Sarkars fine essay in Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (eds.)
(2011).

3.

For an overview of some of these debates on sati, see Ania Loomba (1993).

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4.

Harijan, 1 September 1940, 266. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/

chap62.htm

5.

Harijan, 14 January 1940. See http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap62.

htm

6.

B.R. Ambedkar. What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,
available at http://www.ambedkar.org/ambcd/41L.What%20Congress%20
and%Gandhi%20CHAPTER%20XI.htm

7.

Gandhi writes: In the struggle between capital and labour, it may be generally
said that more often than not the capitalists are in the wrong box. But when
labour comes to fully realize its strength, I know it can become more tyrannical
than capital. The millowners will have to work dictated by labour, if the latter
could command intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour will
never attain to that intelligence. If it does, labour will cease to be labour and
become the master. The capitalists do not fight on the strength of money alone.
They do possess intelligence and tact (Quoted by Ambedkar in What Congress
and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (see note 6). Max Weber, in his The
Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggests
somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have nothing to lose but their
chains, that they, too, have a world to winthe only problem being that they
have to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable
system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, is characterized by a dread of
the magical evil of innovation. Gandhi also writes in Hind Swaraj: the peasant
observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you
propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Do you want to make him
discontented with . . . his lot?

8.

The relationship between race and caste has produced many debates; the most
productive position, in my view, is that of Gerald D. Berreman (1960). See also
Oliver Coxs letter challenging this position, and Berremans rejoinder in the same
journal, Vol. 66, No. 5, March 1961, 51014.

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