MODERN INDIA

ASSIGNMNET-2

Discuss the political philosophy of Gandhi with reference to the intellectual

influences that shaped his ideas.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was known to his followers as Mahatma, or “the
great-souled one”. He began his activism as an Indian immigrant in South Africa in
early 1900s and later became the leading figure in India’s struggle to gain
independence from Great Britain. He was known for his ascetic lifestyle, he was
imprisoned many times during his pursuit of non-cooperation, and undertook a
number of hunger strikes to protest the oppression of India’s poorest classes,
among other injustice. After Partition (1947), he continued to work towards peace
between Hindus and Muslims and was shot to death in Delhi in January 1948 by a
Hindu fundamentalist.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, Gujrat,

India. He belonged to a Hindu wealthy family of the higher castes. He was the
fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, chief minister to the raja of three small city-
states, and Purtlibai. His mother was a deeply religious woman who attended
temple service daily. The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and
King Harishchandra had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In May 1883,
when he was 13yr old he got married to Kasturbai. His ambition was to study
medicine, but as this was considered beneath his caste, his father persuaded him to
study law instead at the age of 19. He left home to study law in London and he set
up a law practice in Bombay. He took his studies seriously and tried to brush up on
his English. The transition from rural atmosphere of Rajkot to the cosmopolitan
life of London was not easy for him. As he struggled painfully to adapt himself to
Western food, dress and etiquette. Later, when he returned to India he got a
position with an Indian firm that sent him to South Africa for nearly 20 years along
with his wife and children.

Gandhi was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian immigrant

in South Africa. In a Durban court he was asked by the European magistrate to
take off his turban; he refused and left the courtroom. On a train voyage to
Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and beaten up by
a white stagecoach driver after refusing to give up his seat for a European
passenger. That train journey served as a turning point for Gandhi he would not
accept injustice, would defend his dignity as an Indian and as a man and he soon
began developing and teaching the concept of satyagraha as a way of non-
cooperation with authorities. After witnessing racism, prejudice and injustice
against Indians in South Africa, he began to question his place in society and his
people’s standing in British Empire. He molted the Indian community of South
Africa into a unified political force. In 1906, Transvaal government promulgated a
new Act compelling registration of colony’s Indian population. Gandhi adopted
methodology of Satyagraha for the first time. The community adopted this plan
and many were jailed, logged or shot for striking etc. Later, South African leader
Jan Christian Smuts negotiated to compromise with Gandhi. He opposed the idea
that Indians should be treated at the same level as native Africans while in South
Africa. He therefore increased his interest in politics.

During his years in South Africa, his way of thought and life underwent changes.
Every time he came across a new idea he asked if it was worth living up to. This
approach deeply influenced his attitude to books. He read only what was
practically relevant, but when a book gripped his imagination, he meditated on it
made it his bible put its central ideas into action and grew from truth to truth. He
mainly read religious and moral literature and some of the books that influenced
him deeply during his stay in South Africa were Henry David Thoreau’s On the
Duty of Civil Disobedience a ‘masterly treatise’, Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of
God is within You, which overwhelmed him and in which he claimed to have first
discovered the doctrine of non-violence and love, and John Ruskin’s Unto This
Last (1862) whose ‘magical influence’ was a turning point in his life. Inspired by
Ruskin, he decided to live an austere life on a commune. He derived his political
ideas from all these sources and drew inspiration from reading of Western thinkers
like mentioned earlier and Raplh Waldo Emerson.
Gandhi decided to create a place for civil resisters to live in a group environment,
called it the Tolstoy Farm. By this time he had abandoned Western dress for
traditional Indian garb. Two of his final legal achievements in Africa were a law
declaring Indian marriages valid and the end of a tax on Indian labor. Gandhi
regarded his work in South Africa as completed. And he returned to India.

Gandhi was a deeply religious thinker. For him, Truth or cosmic spirit was beyond
all qualities including the moral. As his mother was a deeply religious and he was
brought up seeing her. Shrimad Rajchandra, a Jain philosopher who became
Gandhi’s spiritual mentor, convinced him of “the subtlety and profundity”
of Hinduism, the religion of his birth. And it was the Bhagavadgita, which Gandhi
had first read in London that became his “spiritual dictionary” and exercised
probably the greatest single influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words in
the Gita particularly fascinated him. One was aparigraha (“non-possession”),
which implies that people have to jettison the material goods that cramp the life of
the spirit and to shake off the bonds of money and property. The other
was samabhava (“equability”), which enjoins people to remain unruffled by pain
or pleasure, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or fear of
failure. When he went to London he read many attempts were made him accept
Christianity as his religion. But he remained firm. However, he also studied Bible
and Quran and came to conclusion that the principle tenets in all religions are
same. He firmly rejected any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and
is in conflict with morality.

According to D. K. Dutta religion, for Gandhi, is to be searched out in the service

of mankind. He dedicated and devoted his whole life to the service of the masses,
which, in fact was the essence of his religion’. His mother’s religious beliefs and
rituals made a positive impact on Gandhi; he was later initiated into “Ramanama”
by his caretaker Rambha Tai. His household was a meeting ground for Jains and
Muslims, friends and visitors, which made Gandhi to understand the ‘supreme’ in
various forms and ways. The rendering of the Holy Scriptures like ‘Ramayana’ and
various hymns instilled in him a deep understanding of one’s dharma. The readings
of Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of The Gita into ‘Song Celestial’ and ‘The Light
of Asia’, ‘The New Testament’, Thomas Carlyles’ essay on ‘The Hero as Prophet’
all made a deep impact on his understanding of religion and how all the religions
preached one language of love, morality and truthfulness was thoroughly
understood by him. The Bhagavad Gita or the Gita was the most influential source
of Gandhi’s religious thought. He was greatly influenced by its teachings in every
walk of life. Gandhi accorded equal respect for and interest in all religions. To
him, all religions are more or less true, proceed from the same God and converge
to the same point. He had some interesting interactions with people from other
religions, following different faiths. Gandhi viewed in all religions a basic unity,
simplicity and humanity, an essential teaching of all religions. He considered Geeta
as a source of solution to all the problems he faced from time to time. Without
inner purification, Gandhi stressed, there would neither be ahimsa nor the satya.
Keeping in mind the unity of all existence, Gandhi emphasized that ‘identification
with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-
purification, the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream,
God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart’.
Gandhi observed Islam ‘to be a religion of peace’, love and above all, that of
brotherhood of man. He was very much impressed with its tenets of faith in only
the God and its unqualified submission to God. He was taught that Islam has
spread not by the power of the sword, but by the prayerful love of an unbroken line
of its saints and fakirs.’ Islam highlighted the virtue of prayer, fasting, almsgiving,
hospitality and code of personal conduct. This had a profound impact on Gandhi
and found many of the injunctions of the discipline of Celibacy. Virtues like
obedience to parents, avoidance of adultery, cheating and lying, refraining from
theft, murder, etc. are also emphasized in Islam to which Gandhi too prescribed in
the code of ethical virtues.
Gandhi was much impressed and inspired by Christianity as it contained the gospel
of love and a spirit of sacrifice. His Satyagraha which was a forceful non-violent
means to conquer evil was based on some of the tenets of Christianity. The gospel
of personal suffering to win over the enemy was a lesson that was learnt by his
readings of The New Testament. He was deeply touched by the ‘Sermon on the
Mount’, which he considered ‘as the gift of Christianity’ to the world. To him, it
was almost akin to the reading of ‘The Gita’. He was convinced that the
‘Christianity’s particular contribution is that of active love. No other religion says
so firmly that God is love’ Gandhi’s interactions with the Christian brethren during
his stay in London and South Africa brought him closer to them in his effort to
imbibe the teachings.
Jainism and Buddhism, as Gandhi viewed them very much similar to Hinduism.
The influence of Jainism bore the most visible impact on Gandhi. His concepts of
non-violence and fasting were mostly in consonance with its traditions. The moral
and spiritual dimension of the religion strengthened Gandhi’s ideas of non-
violence towards all beings. The other ethical virtues related to Jainism such as
purity, chastity, celibacy, non-possession, compassion, truth, non-stealing, non-
attachment have had a direct impact on Gandhi. Fasting too constitutes an
important part of the Jains’ tradition of ‘Vratas’. They also require abstinence from
any physical adornments and temptations to physical desires. As regarding
Buddhism, Gandhi was attracted by its ‘non-recognition of the caste distinctions’.
Gandhi was impressed with ‘the one thing that Buddha showed India was that God
was not a God who can be appeased by the sacrifice of the innocent animals’.
Those who do so, were guilty of double sin, as he viewed it. Buddha preached and
practiced Ahimsa in true letter and spirit. Since anger begets anger and hatred
begets hate, the source of all evil, it may be countered by Ahimsa through the right
conduct as prescribed by Buddha. Buddhism also emphasizes self-discipline and
moral conduct, through its eight-fold path. The universalistic and humanistic
message of Buddhism was deeply imbibed by Gandhi.
All these inspired him and he stood the entire renouncer tradition and refused to
don the ochre robe instead stick to white khadi. He renounced the world not to save
his soul but to liberate the peoples of India and South Africa from imperialism,
racial discrimination, poverty, equal rights, justice etc.

Gandhi was referring to Western/European civilization when he used the words

“what is known as civilization”. He believed that Western civilization was only in
name. In the Hind Swaraj, he launched an attack on every aspect of western
civilization in order to prove how evil and harmful it was. He attacked a particular
form of Western civilization the one that emerged with Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution. He interpreted the industrial revolution as having brought
about a radical transformation in people’s lives and in their attitudes to themselves
and to the world around them. The capitalist search for profits led to mechanization
and ‘industrialism’. In Gandhi’s view, machines relieved drudgery, created leisure,
increased efficiency, and were indispensable when there was a shortage of labour.
Their use should therefore be guided by a well-considered moral theory indicating
how human beings should live, spend their free time, and relate to one another.
Since modern civilization lacked such a theory and was only propelled by the
search for profit, it mechanized production without any regard for the wider moral,
cultural, and other consequences. Machines were introduced even when there was
no obvious need for them and they were likely to throw thousands out of work. In
Gandhi’s view, modem civilization denuded morality of its vital internal dimension
and ignored what he called the quality of the soul. For Gandhi another great
weakness of modem civilization was its failure to understand the nature and limits
of reason. Gandhi’s advantages were also his disadvantages. Since he largely
concentrated on the darker side of modem civilization, he overlooked some of its
great achievements and strengths.

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915 he spent an entire year travelling India,
understanding the condition of people. For Gandhi rational discussion and
persuasion were the best way to resolve conflict which was peaceful, non-violence
and respected moral intergrity. His first great experiment in satyagraha came in
1917 in Champaran, looking at the condition of indigo planter he fought with them
and won his first battle of civil disobedience in India. In all his satyagraha’s non-
violence was easily accepted because ahimsa articulated the anti-British feeling, in
the form of Satyagraha. He also introduced method of fasting that this was a form
of suffering love. One of the greatest contributions of Gandhi was his attempt to
unity Hindu-Muslim. For him religion is a personal matter which should not have
place in politics.
There were few critiques by M.N Roy, Rabindranath Tagore and B. R. Ambedkar.
Roy provides a Marxist critique of Gandhi while Tagore’s critique of Gandhi is
most creative, both indigenous and Western-influenced. M.N Roy provided the
best and well-argued Marxist critique of Gandhi’s social and political ideas. Roy’s
attempt was to mix nationalism with what he drew from Marxism. He returned to
India with the sole goal of participating in nationalist struggle, he even founded his
own party- Radical Democratic Party which was later dismantled. According to the
inability of Gandhi to comprehend the changing nature of social and political
forces opposed to prevalent nationalist movement remained at the root of its
failure. He was also critical of the alternative Gandhi offered and critical of the
ideology of non-violence and satyagraha for being politically restrictive; and yet
he found in Gandhi the most effective political leadership in extending the
constituencies of nationalist politics by involving the peripheral sections of society.
Roy was convinced that this Congress-led movement was bound to fail since it
aimed at protecting the exploiting classes, ignoring ‘the political rights of the
workers and peasants’. Roy’s analysis of Gandhi’s constructive programmes
clearly suggests his view of them as basically verbal and couched in sentiment,
rather than as effective programmes involving the masses. In view of these serious
weaknesses, the programmes thus failed to achieve the goals that the Mahatma had
so assiduously set for the masses. According to Roy, these programmes ‘should be
such as to appeal to the immediate interests of the masses of the people’. Roy put
forward a well-argued theoretical model that explained the predicament of the
Gandhi-led nationalist leadership due to its failure to comprehend the mass fervour
confronting both the colonial power and also the indigenous vested interests. Yet
Roy’s analysis of Gandhi from a strictly Marxist point of view, though creative,
failed to understand ‘the cultural power of Gandhi’, and the Mahatma’s ability to
fashion weapons of political struggle out of unorthodox material. This led him to
misconstrue what, in retrospect, was the strength of Gandhi’s politics as ‘an
impotent mysticism’.
While M.N. Roy evaluated Gandhi’s social and political ideas Rabindranath
Tagore critique on India’s cultural heritage and plural ways of life. His critiques
were based on some readings of Indian civilization and struggle against
imperialism. Tagore’s criticism of the boycott of English education. Tagore’s
critique of the aim of the Non-Cooperation Movement drew on his own perception
of the ‘constructive work’ that he experimented with during the 1905–8 swadeshi
movement in Bengal. He was opposed to coercion because his experience of the
swadeshi mobilization had shown him its adverse consequences. He even argued
against charkha and believed that it is not competent to bring us the swaraj or
remove poverty because it was a false expectation that people will automatically be
drawn to spinning, seeking to delink swaraj from charkha. He was critical of the
Mahatma since these neither provided an appropriate alternative to the masses nor
adequately addressed the problem of poverty. It was largely ‘a hollow political
slogan’, as Tagore believed, given the obvious adverse political and economic
consequences on the masses if forced on them. Tagore was perhaps first to
confront the devastating consequences of the application of the principle of
nationalism in the context of the swadeshi movement of 1903–8 in Bengal, when
the schism between the Hindus and Muslims was articulated in a nationalist
language. While Ambedkar introduced new critique by drawing on the dalit
perspective.

CONCLUSION
This tells about the way Gandhi was brought up and his passion to help poor and to
stand against injustice. His life is South Africa was the turning point which made
him raise voice for the first time that was the time when he started his life in
politics. And how religious he was and he respected and tried to gain knowledge
from all religion and made their teachings in his life. When he came to India
looking at the condition here he stood up for justice and equal rights for the poor.
He struggled a lot and was jailed many times but nothing stopped him to fight
back. Most importantly people trusted and united for their rights. For him to gain
the trust he first became like them boycotted western clothes and wore khadi, he
addressed each section of the class and tried to solve their problems without any
non-violence and followed the path of ahimsa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Sekhar Bandyopandhyay
From Plassey to Partition and After
- Bipin Chandra
History of Modern India
- Bidyut Chakarbarty
Social and Political thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi
- Bhikhu Parekh
Gandhi (article)
- Rundrangshu Mukherjee
Gandhi’s swaraj (article)
- Gandhi’s views on religion (article from - Shodhganga)
- Gandhi’s Religion (J store- M.N Srinivas)
SMRITHI ANNA MATHEW
170316
HISTORY (HONS) 3yr