Gandhian Nationalism

Gandhian Nationalism
LESSON ­ 1
Gandhian Nationalism
 
                        —Amaresh Ganguli
 
Objectives
 
After reading this article you will be familiar with:
Gandhi’s idea of the Indian National Identity
The Gandhian imperatives for fostering a strong nationalist identity and spirit
in the context of the freedom struggle against the British
The main elements of his nationalist program
 
Introduction
 
We take for granted our nationalist identity as Indians. We know we have a
government and a state and an army to protect us from external aggression. We
cheer our cricket team and feel proud at the achievements of fellow Indians in
various fields. Today the nationalist identity and feeling among the people is well
established and has taken deep roots.
But this was not always so. Like other social phenomenon nationalism also evolved
historically. Along with the emergence of social and historical conditions
communities came up in various parts of the world. They often came up through
tribal, slave and feudal phases of social existence. At a certain stage of social,
economic and cultural development nations came into being. It was distinguished
by certain specific characteristics such as
(a)    an organic whole of the members of the nation living in a distinct territory
(b)   a single economy
(c)    a consciousness of a common economic existence
(d)   a common language and
(d)   a common language and
(e)    naturally a  common culture which evolved.
And this process developed from sixteenth century onwards as a part of the
development of human history. Generally speaking development of nationalism in
various counties was a prolonged historical process.  It is in the development of
historical conditions that nation states developed. And development of
nationalism in different countries was determined by its social ad cultural history
‐ its political, economic and social structures. And the character of its various
classes, which played the role of vanguard of struggle for a national social
existence. Therefore every nation was born and forged in unique way. The history
of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century  India is primarily the history of
formation of a nation and the struggle against internal and external obstacles in
that process. 
Indian nationalism is a modern phenomenon. It came into being during the British
period as a result of various subjective and objective factors and forces, which
developed within the Indian society under the conditions of British rule and the
impact of world forces.
Pre‐  British  India  was unique. It sharply differed from the pre‐capitalist medieval
societies of  Europe. It was a vast country inhabited by huge population speaking
many languages with different religions. Socially it was dominated by a population
which was Hindu in character, but there was no homogeneity. This extreme
social, religious division of the Hindus in particular and the Indian sin general
presents a peculiar background to the growth of Indian nationalism. It was under
the conditions of political subjection that the British introduced for its own
purposes certain changes which introduced new social forces which radically
changed the economic structure of the Indian society. It established 
(a)      centralised state  (modern civil service, centralised administration,
judiciary, new land ownership laws, zamindari system etc)
(b)   introduced modern education (establishment of universities and colleges)
(c)      modern means of transport and communication (postal system, railways,
roads etc)
(d)   modern press
(e)    slow development of industries (introduction of just, tea etc)
and it is the combination of these very social forces along with its character of
exploitation which emerged under the part of the British rule and became the
basis of the rise and development of Indian nationalism.  It is the British colonial
rule under East Indian Company and subsequently under the British government
from 1858 that the Indian people entered into a period of severe repression and
exploitation. It is in this background that we see a number of peasant rebellions,
which was prominent in the history of eighteen‐century  India  including a large
number of famines for example.    
Prof. Irfan Habib has succinctly commented:
‘The unification of the country on an economic plane by the construction of
‘The unification of the country on an economic plane by the construction of
railways and the introduction of the telegraph in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, undertaken for its own benefit by the colonial regime, and the
centralisation of the administration which the new modes of communications and
transport made possible, played their part in making Indians view India as a
prospective single political entity. Modern education (undertaken in a large part
by indigenous effort) and the rise of the press disseminated the ideas of  India’s
nationhood and the need for constitutional reform. A substantive basis for  India’s
nationhood was laid when nationalists like Dadabhoy Naoroji (Poverty and
UnBritish Rule in India, 1901) and R.C. Dutt (Economic History of India, 2 vols.,
1901 and 1903) raised the issues of poverty of the Indian people and the burden of
colonial exploitation, which was felt in equal measure throughout India. 
            We see, then, that three complex processes enmeshed to bring about the
emergence of India as a nation: the preceding notion of India as a country, the influx
of modern political ideas, and the struggle against colonialism. The last was
decisive: the creation of the Indian nation can well be said to be one major
achievement of the national movement.’  (Source:  Irfan  Habib,  ‘The  nation
that is India’, The Little Magazine, Vol III : issue 2)
 
When Gandhiji emerged in the national movement after his South African
experience in the post first world period with the non‐cooperation
movement.  India  by this time had seen through the peasant struggles of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including the revolt of 1857. The social
reform movements ‐ the Brahmo Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati’s Arya Samaj
Movements etc passed into liberal phases subsequently with the formation of the
Indian National Congress in 1885 and leaders like Gokhale, Ranade, Dadabhai
Naoroji, W.C. Banerjee etc. The whole movement was socially forward but
politically backward. It was the militant nationalism of the famous Lal‐Bal‐Pal
with their slogan of ‘Swaraj is my birth right’ to a revolutionary terrorism with
bombs, pistols, individual killings as a method with individual martyrs like Surya
Sen and Bhagat Singh which formed the backround to Gandhi’s emergence.
 
It was only after this that the age of Gandhi began and his continued dominance
and leadership of the national movement as the pre‐dominant leader of the
Indian National Congress till the achievement of independence. Therefore it was a
challenge for the Indian nationalist leadership to develop a national identity, a
method of struggle and transform the movement into a mass movement of the
Indian people.
 
Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi is significant because he could understand and
bring the Indian masses – men and women – urban and rural – into the national
movement. It was a radical break from the earlier methods of struggle.
 
Discussion
Discussion
 
Before we start discussing Gandhi’s views on nation, nationhood, or nationalism it
is necessary to have a brief overview of the whole period of the freedom
movement when Gandhi occupied the centre stage. It is true that Gandhi could
evolve a program of struggle which could recognise the role of the masses and the
mass actions which involved every section of the society and for the first time it
was under his leadership that Indian national movement became a multi‐class
nationalist movement and it was under his leadership that masses came out to
court arrest, jails and cold face police firing and created an undying hatred
against the British rule and a thrust for swaraj or freedom. It should also be
remembered that Gandhi provided a program of action for each sections of the
society. For peasantry, non‐payment of land tax, for students, boycott of
educational institutions, for lawyers, desertion of the courts, for women –
picketing the liquor shops, foreign cloth shops and he asked the people as a whole
to violate ‘lawless laws’ and it is under his call that millions of Indians joined the
demonstrations and marched into jails using methods of satyagraha, non‐
cooperation, and civil disobedience. His use of hunger strikes, mass
demonstrations, deliberate courting of jails were the principal weapons which he
added to the nationalist struggle. The period between 1919 to independence is
marked by three important struggles ‐ Non‐cooperation movement of 1919, Civil
Disobedience movement of 1930, with its call of complete independence and the
famous Quit Indian Movement of 1942.
 
It is in this background we must try to understand Gandhi and his role in terms of
Indian nationalism.    
 
Therefore Gandhi, his technique of struggle, his concept of national identity was
radically different as Professor Bhikhu Parekh has commented:
‘He more or less completely bypassed the dominant nationalist vocabulary and
showed that it was possible to articulate and defend the case for independence in
a very different language. He showed that not every movement for independence
is national, not every national struggle is nationalist and that not every nationalist
movement need articulate itself in the language of European rather than home‐
grown theories of nationalism’.  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political
Philosophy, p. 3)
 
Many of the other leaders who came before Gandhi were western trained lawyers
or intellectuals and saw many positives to the Western British way of life and
were demanding from the British the same liberal system and parliamentary
democracy on the basis of self‐determination that the British had in their own
homeland and also hoped to stop the economic exploitation of colonial rule. But

Gandhi focussed on the way of life of the Indian village and its thousands of years
Gandhi focussed on the way of life of the Indian village and its thousands of years
old substantially self‐contained and self‐sufficient system to argue for a different
kind of national life where that way of life would be valued and protected and it’s
strengths fully taken advantage of in the interest of the nation. He also argued
the basic purpose of life in the Indian national understanding was spiritual growth
(or attaining  moksha) and one of the best facilitators of this moral cultivation
was the simple and sustainable way of life of the Indian village.
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has commented:
‘For Gandhi British imperialism dominated  India  at three related but different
levels. At the political level the arrogant colonial government oppressed the
Indian people and denied their right to run their affairs themselves. At the
economic level it exploited and impoverished them, destroyed their indigenous
industries and subordinated their interests to those of the British economy. In
Gandhi’s view this was far more disturbing than political oppression and could
continue even if  India  became independent. At the most disturbing moral and
cultural level, British imperialism destroyed the identity and integrity of Indian
civilisation and turned the Indians into brown Englishmen. Gandhi was convinced
that the rule of British  civilisation  could continue even if the
British  government  were to stop ruling over  India  and British  capital  to cease
exploiting it. British imperialism was unacceptable not only because of its
political and even economic but moral and cultural consequences. The struggle
against it had therefore to be mounted and independence obtained at all three
levels, especially the last. At the cultural level the anti‐imperialist struggle had
to be fought on two fronts simultaneously. First, British civilisation, which so
infatuated and blinded the Indians to the moral enormity of foreign rule and
legitimised their economic and political domination must be subjected to a
thorough‐going critique. Second, the basic structure of Indian civilisation, which
they largely saw through the biased British perspective, must be sensitively
teased out and defended.
                   
           In interpreting British imperialism in this way, Gandhi integrated and went
beyond the three different types of critique advanced by his predecessors.
Broadly speaking Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendra Nath Banerjee, Gokhale and the so‐
called liberals had welcomed the political and cultural advantages of British rule
but attacked it on the grounds that it had drained  India’s wealth, ruined its
industries, imposed unfair trading arrangements and subordinated its economic
development to British colonial interests. Although mindful of its economic and
cultural consequences, the leaders of the terrorist movements in Bengal
and  Maharashtra  attacked it on political grounds and were the first to develop a
distinctive theory of political as distinct from cultural nationalism. They argued
that the Indians have as much right to run their affairs as the British had to run
theirs, that colonialism was a form of slavery and outrage to Indian dignity and
self‐respect, and that the ‘honour’ of ‘mother India’ demanded that she should
be freed of the ‘foreign yoke’. In a culture which conceptualises energy in
feminine terms and associates activity and restlessness with woman and passivity
and detachment with ma, it was not at all surprising that the votaries of violence
and detachment with ma, it was not at all surprising that the votaries of violence
should have idealised ‘mother’  India  and drawn inspiration from the Godess Kali.
Finally Vivekananda, B.C. Pal, Tilak and the so‐called conservative leaders
concentrated on the need to preserve the integrity of traditional ways of life and
thought. They introduced the concept of Indian civilisation to match the one
championed by the British, sharply distinguished the two and attacked foreign
rule not so much because it involved economic exploitation and violated Indian
pride as because it imposed an alien materialist civilisation on India’s essentially
spiritual one. 
 
                    Gandhi’s critique of British rule encompassed all three.………….He was
even more sensitive to the integrity of Indian civilisation than were the
conservative leaders. Indeed he argued that most of them were even more
interested in the ‘synthesis’ of the two civilisations than in the integrity of their
own, had unwittingly reinterpreted and anglicised it far more than they realised
or cared to admit, and that their critique of British imperialism was half‐hearted
and lacked moral depth. Gandhi’s critique not only included but also related and
integrated the three earlier critiques into a comprehensive theoretical
framework. He argued that political independence was important not only as an
expression of India’s pride and a necessary means to stop its economic exploitation
but also to preserve its civilisation, without which political independence
remained fragile. The economic exploitation had to be ended not only to sustain
Indian independence and improve the living conditions of its people but also to
preserve the social and economic basis of its civilisation.’        (Source:  Bhikhu
Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, pp. 19­20)  
 
In fact Gandhi saw India as a battleground between the immoral western
civilisation of which the British were an excellent example (and which he was
convinced would ultimately not last because it was based on immoral values like
greed which led to violence) and the sustainable moral civilisation of India where
the focus was on helping each soul find his spiritual salvation or God. In fact even
in his own life that was his priority.
 
He wrote once: ‘I count no sacrifice too great for the sake of seeing God face to
face. The whole of my activity, whether it may be called social, political,
humanitarian or ethical, is directed to that end. And as I know that God is found
more often in the lowliest of His creatures than in the high and mighty, I am
struggling to reach the status of these. I cannot do so without their service.
Hence my passion for the service of the suppressed classes. And as I cannot
render this service without entering politics, I find myself in them.’  (Source:
Young India, 1924)
 

His chosen way of reaching God was thus service of the poor and the oppressed
His chosen way of reaching God was thus service of the poor and the oppressed
but in a non‐violent manner because violence would be sinful, non‐spiritual, and
non‐religious. Thus he could not agree with Communists for instance who
suggested that the rich and powerful will not give their relationship of dominance
and exploitation of the poor and the weak without coercion or force because it
was not to their advantage. But Gandhi’s approach was to strive for a change of
heart and shun violence strictly and under all provocations and circumstances.
 
He once told the wife of his British surgeon in 1924: ‘My own motive is to put
forth all my energy in an attempt to save Indian, that is, ancient culture, from
impending destruction by modern, that is, Western culture being imposed upon
India. The essence of ancient culture is based upon the practice of the utmost
non‐violence. Its motto is the good of all including every living thing, whereas
Western culture is frankly based upon violence.’    (Source:  Gandhi  to  Mrs.
Maddock, Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 23, p. 243)
 
While Gandhi was critical of the modern western civilisation and saw it as a
danger he was not a nationalist in the narrow extreme sense, who hated other
countries and wanted domination over them to spread his own version of what is
superior civilisation. He was open to eventually spreading the message of his
understanding of what should be a superior and sustainable civilisation to the
whole world eventually but only after first establishing it well in the country of
it’s origin. In fact he was not averse to using the term Ram Raj even to refer to
the  India  of his dreams even though the term is obviously open to communally
sensitive interpretations.
 
But he had clarified that by ‘..Ramraj  I do not mean Hindu  Raj. I mean
by  Ramraj  Divine  Raj,  The Kingdom of God’.    (Source:  Young  India,  Sept.
19, 1929) Further clarity on his conception of Ram Raj can be obtained from his
other comments like:
‘The  Ramraj  of my dream ensures the rights alike of prince and
pauper.’ (Source: Anand Bazar Patrika, Aug. 2, 1934)
‘There can be no Ramraj in the present state of iniquitous inequalities, in which
a few roll in riches and the masses do not get even enough to eat.’  (Source:
Harijan, June 1, 1947)
‘The ancient ideal of Ramraj is undoubtedly one of true democracy, in which the
meanest citizen could be sure of swift justice without an elaborate and costly
procedure.’ (Source: Young India, Sept. 19, 1929)
 

As is clear from the above, to understand Gandhian nationalism it is important to

As is clear from the above, to understand Gandhian nationalism it is important to
understand his critique of modern western civilisation. Gandhi wanted Indian
nationalism to be about rejecting the British and western model of modern
civilisation and a return to the basics of what he saw as  India’s ancient genius. He
was deeply aware that most people arguing for freedom were not appreciative
quite so much of the glory of that civilisation and merely wanted a change of
political rulers.
 
He once commented: ‘[You] want English rule without the Englishman. You want
the tiger’s nature, not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And
when it becomes English, it will be called not  Hindustan butEnglistan. That is not
the Swaraj I want.’ (Source: Hind Swaraj, p. 15)
 
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has succinctly explained Gandhi’s understanding of modern
civilisation as follows:
‘For Gandhi modern civilisation was propelled by the two inter‐related principles
of greed and want. It was controlled by ‘a few capitalist owners’ who had only
one aim, to make profit, and only one means to do so, to produce goods that
satisfied people’s wants. They had a vital vested interest in constantly whetting
jaded appetites, planting new wants and creating a moral climate in which not to
want the goods daily pumped into the market and to keep pace with the latest
fashions was to be abnormal and archaic. Indeed, since self‐discipline or
restriction of desires, the very emblem of human dignity, threatened to cause
mass unemployment, throw the economic system out of gear and cause human
suffering, it was seen as anti‐social and immoral. Not surprisingly men saw
themselves not as self‐determining moral subjects but as consumers or vehicles
for the satisfaction of externally‐induced wants.
The capitalist search for profits led to mechanisation and ‘industrialism’. For
Gandhi machines relieved drudgery, created leisure, increased efficiency and
were indispensable when there was a shortage of labour. Their use must therefore
be guided by a well‐considered moral theory indicating how men should live,
spend their free time and relate to one another. Since the modern economy
lacked such a theory and was only propelled by the search for profit, it
mechanised production without any regard for its wider moral, cultural and other
consequences. Machines were introduced even when there was no obvious need
for them and were in fact likely to throw thousands out of work. This was
justified either in the name of increased leisure without anyone asking why it was
important and what to do with it, or of cheaper goods, as if man was only a
passive consumer and not an active moral being for whose sanity, self‐respect and
dignity the right to work was far more important than the febrile gratification of
trivial wants.  Treated with the veneration and awe accorded to Gods in primitive
societies, machines had come to cast a magic spell on modern man and followed
their own will. For Gandhi the mechanisation or fetishism of technology was
closely tied up with the larger phenomenon of industrialism, another apparently
self‐propelling and endless process of creating larger and larger industries with no
self‐propelling and endless process of creating larger and larger industries with no
other purpose than to produce cheap consumer goods and maximise profit. He
argued that since modern economic life followed an inexorable momentum of its
own, it reduced men to its helpless and passive victims and represented a new
form of slavery, more comfortable and invidious and hence more dangerous than
the earlier ones.
         Based on the belief that life was continuous motion and movement, that
unless one was constantly on the move one was not alive and that the faster the
tempo of life the more alive one was, modern civilisation was inherently restless
and intolerant of stability. It aimed to conquer time and space and developed
increasingly speedier modes of transport and communication. Cars were replaced
by trains and the later by planes, but no one asked why one needed to travel so
fast and what one intended to do with the time saved. Thanks to its restless and
‘mindless activism’ incorrectly equated with dynamism and energy, modern
civilisation undermined man’s unity with his environment and fellow men and
destroyed stable and long‐established communities. In the absence of natural and
social roots and stable and enduring landmarks which alone gave man a sense of
identity and continuity, modern man had become abstract, indeterminate and
empty. He was not internally or organically related to others and his relations
with them were not grounded in the sentiments of fellow feeling and good will.
Everyone was a stranger to everyone else and no one cared for or knew how to
behave towards others………….
In Gandhi’s view the exploitation of one’s fellow men was built into the very
structure of modern civilisation. Consumers were constantly manipulated into
desiring things they did not need and which were not in their long‐term interest.
Workers were made to do boring jobs at subsistence wages under inhuman
conditions and given little opportunity or encouragement to develop their
intellectual and moral potential. The poor were treated with contempt and held
responsible for their own misfortunes. The weaker races were treated as if they
were animals and bought and sold and brutally exploited. The weaker nations
were conquered, mercilessly oppressed and used as dumping grounds for surplus
goods and as sources of cheap raw materials. For Gandhi imperialism was only an
acute manifestation of the aggressive and exploiting impulse lying at the very
heart of modern civilisation and at work in all areas of human
relationships.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  pp.
22­23)  
 
Gandhi was troubled by the fact that modern civilisation entailed a certain
surrender of the individual to the institutionalised modern state which
undermined the individual’s cultivation of his human powers of self‐
determination, autonomy, self‐knowledge (in the spiritual sense), self‐discipline
and social cooperation. Gandhi was naturally therefore not very impressed by
modern institutions and systems of education, law, medicine, media etc and even
the system of a modern democratic state led by the functioning of a parliament

at the top. Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the education system that the modern
at the top. Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the education system that the modern
British western state had imposed on  India  as can be judged from his following
comment in a letter to an associate:
‘the system of education at present in vogue is wholly unsuited to India’s needs,
is a bad copy of the Western model and it has by reason of the medium of
instruction being a foreign language sapped the energy of youths who have passed
through our schools and colleges and has produced an army of clerks and office‐
seekers. It has dried up all originality, impoverished the vernaculars and has
deprived the masses of the benefit of higher knowledge which would otherwise
have percolated to them through the intercourse of the educated classes with
them. The system has resulted in creating a gulf between educated  India  and the
masses. It has stimulated the brain but starved the spirit for want of a religious
basis for education and emaciated the body for want of training in handicrafts. It
has criminally neglected the greatest need of  India in that there is no agricultural
training worth the name……’  (Source:  Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.
14)  Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the fact that modern western English
education was creating a divide in Indian society between those who were English
educated and those who were not. Professor Judith Brown in her biography of
Gandhi has explained how this led to Gandhi’s search for a common national
language – probably one of the first people to carry out this task. She has
commented:
‘His increasing emphasis on the divisiveness of contemporary Indian education
showed his growing identification with the poor in his homeland rather than with
the educated with whom he would naturally have fitted by virtue of his own
education and professional training. His concern for what education was doing
to  India  and Indians also led him into deeper consideration of the problem of
finding a genuinely national language rather than English, with all its drawbacks
of social exclusiveness and association with the political and cultural rejection of
the nation’s own rich heritage. As early as December 1916 he presided at a
conference on this issue; in October 1917 he was president of aGujarat educational
conference at which he dealt with the question of a national language as well as
wider educational issues. His preference was for Hindi as spoken by north Indians,
Muslim and Hindu, which could be written in either Devanagri or Persian scripts.
This was to be a significant aspect of his work for a new national identity and
true swaraj  until the end of his life’.  (Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –
Prisoner of Hope, p. 107, Oxford University Press)
 
Gandhi was against the whole attitude and approach of modern western
allopathic medical science. In fact in his own personal life he experimented with
Indian healing methods whenever possible in his ashrams and elsewhere and
would be much disturbed if he had to see a doctor either for himself or any of his
family members.                                    
 

Gandhi was also deeply distressed with the British system of law even though he
Gandhi was also deeply distressed with the British system of law even though he
was a  London trained lawyer himself professionally. Bhikhu Parekh has brought out
Gandhi’s objections to the British system of legal dispute resolution rather well:
‘Gandhi thought that … dehumanising phenomenon … was evident in the field of
law. Men were intelligent and moral beings capable of resolving their differences
by discussing them in the spirit of charity and good will or by seeking the
arbitration of widely respected men and women in their community. Instead,
every time he failed to get what he thought was his due, modern man rushed to
the court of law where trained experts in the esoteric body of legal knowledge
conducted expensive and incomprehensible debates about him without his
participation. …the legal establishment reduced him to a case to be discussed as
if he were a child to be tutored into what to say about his own actions and
incapable of participating in their evaluation. … the legal system did little to
develop and mobilise man’s moral impulses and capacities for reflection and
introspection. Instead it required him to alienate them to a central agency telling
him how to run his life and conduct his relations with others, including his own
neighbours, wife, ex‐wife and children. Gandhi found it strange that modern man
who talked so much about his self‐respect and dignity, did not find all this deeply
humiliating.’  (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 27)
 
In fact Gandhi was not convinced even by the western model of the state itself.
 
He once commented: ‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and
organised form. The individual has a soul but the state is a soul‐less machine, it
can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.’(Source:
The Modern Review, Oct.1935)
 
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has explained well the reason why Gandhi saw the modern
state as violent: ‘Gandhi argued that the highly centralised and bureaucratic
modern state enjoying and jealously guarding its monopoly of political power was
a necessary product of modern civilisation. Competitive and aggressive men
ruthlessly pursuing their own interests could only be held together by a well‐
armed state. Since they were all strangers to one another and lacked the bond of
good will and mutual concern, their relations could only be regulated by
impersonal rules imposed and enforced by such a powerful external agency as the
state. The centralisation of production in the modern economy created social and
economic problems of national and international magnitude, and again required a
centralised political agency to deal with them. Unemployment, poverty and the
social and economic inequalities created by the modern economy led to acute and
legitimate discontent and required a well armed state to deter its desperate
citizens from resorting to violence. ‘Shorn of all the camouflage the exploitation
of the masses of  Europe  is sustained by violence’, Gandhi argued. The centralised
modern state was also necessary to protect international markets ad overseas
investments…………..Even as the state monopolised all political power, it tended
to monopolise all morality. Since its atomic and morally depleted citizens lacked
to monopolise all morality. Since its atomic and morally depleted citizens lacked
organic bonds and the capacity to organise and run their social relations
themselves, the state was the sole source of moral order. It alone guaranteed
civilised existence and saved society from social disintegration. As such it came to
be seen as the highest moral institution, whose preservation was a supreme moral
value. ……..
Gandhi argued that, although the state claimed to be a moral institution
transcending narrow group interests and pursuing the well being of the whole
community, it was in fact little more than an arena of conflict between organised
interests manipulated and controlled by the more powerful among them. Since
men of independent spirit and honour generally avoided it, it was largely in the
care of men and women forging convenient alliances with powerful interest
groups and using it to serve their interests. Gandhi thought that in these respects
the democratic governments were no better than the undemocratic and belonged
to the ‘same species’. They were just as vulnerable to the pressures of the
dominant class and just as ‘ruthless’ and ready to use violence in the pursuit of its
interests. In its actual practice a democracy was basically a form of government
in which a ‘few men capture power in the name of the people and abuse it’, a
‘game of chess’ between rival parties with the people as ‘pawns’. Although the
fact that democratic government was periodically elected by and accountable to
ordinary people made a difference, it also served as a ‘camouflage’ hiding the
basic fact that the masses were often ‘exploited by the ruling class….under the
sacred name of democracy’. Democracy thus veiled and conferred moral
legitimacy on the reality of exploitation, and had only a marginal moral edge over
fascism.’ (Source: ibid.,  pp. 28­29)
 
Gandhi believed that parliament is basically a ‘talking shop’ where the political
parties manipulate public opinion to maintain their positions of power and sub‐
serve the interests of powerful people and who followed the party line without
referring issues to the test of their consciences. Gandhi also felt in a electoral
democracy the voters are susceptible to thinking along the lines of short term
interests and were influenced by the media. He saw the media functioning of
modern civilisation with deep suspicion. He once commented on the newspapers
(there was no broadcast media or television at that time and newspapers were
the main media outlets) in Britain:
‘To the English voters their newspapers is their Bible. They take their cue from
their newspapers which are often dishonest. The same fact is differently
interpreted by different newspapers, according to the party in whose interests
they are edited.’ (Hind Swaraj, p. 33)
 
Gandhi believed in a modern capitalist system independence of the press is a
mere slogan and media independence is impossible because the press was owned
by the capitalist class for manufacturing public opinion. They were not concerned

with truth but propaganda of what served the interests of the owners and their
with truth but propaganda of what served the interests of the owners and their
friends and did not serve the purpose of educating public opinion.            
                                                           
Therefore for Gandhi the task was to build a new nation which will preserve its
own civilisation. This strength according to Gandhi was to be found mainly in the
way of life and civilisation of  India’s villages. Bikhu Parekh comments: ‘In Gandhi’s
view every civilisation had its own distinctive natural and social basis. Modern
civilisation was born and could only survive in the cities, and was naturally carried
all over the world by the commercial classes. Indian civilisation had, by contrast,
been cradled and nurtured in the villages, and only the rural masses were its
natural custodians. So long as their way of life was intact, its integrity and
survival was guaranteed. If the villages were to disappear and their traditional
moral and social structure was to be shattered, it would lose its socio‐economic
basis and its fate would be sealed forever. Since the civilisations that had so far
come to  India  were all rural and thus posed no threat to it, it was easily able to
accommodate and enter into a dialogue with them. Modern urban civilisation
presented a deadly and unprecedented challenge and required a most
discriminating and cautious response.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s
Political Philosophy, p. 43)
 
Gandhi was convinced the British could conquer  India mainly due to the selfishness
and lack of unity of Indians and a degeneration in the national character. He thus
saw it as a priority to rebuild the national character. Here his views are almost
identical to what Swami Vivekananda had preached decades before. Gandhi came
on the scene but could never gather much of a national audience for it outside
the educated classes. Gandhi like Swami Vivekananda was particularly exercised
about the degeneration of the Hindu character. He believed Indians (and Hindus
in particular) had lost courage, physical, intellectual and moral. They could not
take the moral decisions to decide what is right and wrong and then whatever the
consequences stand up for it. Thus Indians ended up compromising in all kinds of
indignities and humiliations and violations of the self‐respect and personal
dignity.
 
Gandhi thought Indians had lost the national character and ‘would not fearlessly
walk to the gallows or stand a shower of bullets and yet say “we will not work for
you”’. (Source: Collected Works, Vol 14, p. 510) Gandhi further analysed it
was the lack of courage in the national character that bred suspicion, distrust and
jealousy and said ‘What I would rid ourselves of is distrust of one another and
imputation of motives. Our sin is not our differences but our littleness.... It is not
our differences that really matter. It is the meanness behind it that is
undoubtedly ugly’.  (Source:  Young  India,  16  Feb,  1934)  Again that it was
because of the jealousy and mutual distrust that Indians were most ‘uncharitable
to one another’ and blaming others rather than themselves for their mistakes had
‘become a second nature with them’.  (Source:  Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral
and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987,
and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987,
vol. II, p. 539) Gandhi was convinced the British East Indian Company could not
have established their presence in India leading to the eventual enslavement of
India if different groups of selfish Indians had not done private deals with them
and instead stood up as one in refusing to cooperate with the British empire.
Bhikhu Parekh comments on how Gandhi also saw this as an explanation for the
steady erosion of the ranks of the Hindus also. He says Gandhi felt:
‘Thanks to their preoccupation with narrow personal interests and mutual
distrust, the Indians lacked the capacity to pursue a common cause. Everyone
went his own way and resisted the discipline of a common organisation. They
were ‘like children in political matters….[who] do not understand the principle
that the public good is also one’s own good’. They did not take a long term view
of their interests and appreciate that these were best secured within a larger
organisational framework whose preservation benefited them all. In Gandhi’s
view they only acted in a concerted manner when inspired and organised by great
leaders and broke up into loose atoms once the later disappeared.
Gandhi also pointed to the absence of a social conscience among his countrymen.
They were ‘callous’ about the conditions of the poor and underprivileged. Their
doctrine of the unity of man had remained merely ‘philosophical’ and was rarely
practiced, which is why a large umber of lower caste Hindus had embraced such
egalitarian religions as Islam and Christianity.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,
Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, pp. 47­48)
 
Gandhi’s strong feelings about the inadequacy of the national character can be
gauged from the following words of his:
‘What are our failings, then, because of which we are helpless and cannot stop
the profuse flow of wealth from our country, and in virtue of which our children
get no milk, three crores of our people get only one meal a day, raids occur in
broad daylight in Kheda district, and epidemics like plague and cholera cannot be
eradicated in our country while they can in others? How is it that the haughty Sir
Michael O’Dwyer and the insolent General Dyer can crush us like so many bugs
and the priest in Shimla can write unworthy things about us; how is it that an
intolerable injustice has been done to us in the Punjab?.
           The reason is our inveterate selfishness, our inability to make sacrifices
for our country, our dishonesty, our timidity, our hypocrisy and our ignorance.
Everybody is selfish, more or less, but we seem to be more selfish than others.
We make some self‐sacrifice in family matters, but very little of it for national
work. Just look at our streets, our cities and our trains. In all these, we can see
the condition of the country. How little attention is paid to the condition of
others in streets, in the town as a whole and in trains?. We do not hesitate to
throw refuse out of our courtyard on to the street; standing in the balcony, we
throw out refuse or spit, without pausing to consider whether we are not
inconveniencing the passers‐by. When we are building a house, we take little
thought of the inconvenience that may be caused to our neighbours. In cities, we
keep the tap open, and thinking that it is not our water which flows away, we
keep the tap open, and thinking that it is not our water which flows away, we
allow it to run waste. The same thing is seen in the trains. We secure a seat for
ourselves by hook or crook and, if possible, prevent others from getting in. No
matter if others are inconvenienced, we start smoking. We do not hesitate to
throw banana skins and sugar‐cane peelings right in front of our neighbours. When
we go to draw from a tap, we take little thought for others. Many such instances
of our selfishness can be listed.
Where so much selfishness exists, how can one expect self‐sacrifice? Does the
businessman cleanse his business of dishonesty for the sake of his country? Does
he forgo his profit? Does he stop speculation in cotton for his country’s sake? Is
any effort made to keep down milk prices by giving up the profit from its export?
How many give up a job when necessary, for the sake of the country? .
Where are the men who will reduce their luxuries and adopt simplicity and use
the money so saved for the country? If it is necessary for the country’s sake to go
to jail, how many will come forward? .
Our dishonesty is there for all to see. We believe that business can never be
carried on honestly. Those who have the chance never refuse a
bribe…                                 Our hypocrisy is only a little less than that of the
British. We have experience of this every moment. In our meeting and in all other
activities of our lives, we try to show ourselves other than what we are.
We have made cowardice especially our own. Nobody wants bloodshed in
connection with non‐co‐operation, and yet it is out of this fear of bloodshed that
we do not want to do anything. We are possessed by the fear of the Government’s
armed might that we dare not take any step. And so we submit to force in every
matter and allow dacoits to plunder us in broad daylight.
                      What shall I say about our hypocrisy? It has increased in every field.
Weakness is always accompanied by hypocrisy. Moreover, where the people want
to be upright but can not be so, hypocrisy will naturally increase; for, if we are
not upright, we are anxious to seem so and thus we add another moral weakness
to the one which we already possess. Hypocrisy had entered our religion as well,
and that so fully that the marks which we put on our forehead, the rosary and
things of that kind have ceased to be tokens of piety and become signs of
impiety.’  (Source:  Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral  and  Political  Writings  of
Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987, vol. I, pp.307f)     
 
Gandhi was determined that the most important task in the task of building a
strong national identity and a nationalist character – a process he referred to as
national regeneration, was to reform the character of Indians. And in this he saw
no use in a blind adoption of western modern civilisation. He was of the
conviction that while western civilisation may not all be totally bad (even though
he did think it was inferior to  India’s naturally spiritual minded civilisation) Indians

had to adopt what suited Indians and was good for  . He was of the view the
had to adopt what suited Indians and was good for  India. He was of the view the
Indian civilisation had been evolved by the Indian people and reflected their
unique and historically emerged swabhava.
 
Interestingly Gandhi was also not exactly in favour of going back to the exact
situation of ancient Vedic times as he believed every age had its own  yug­
dharma  and the task of Indians was only to take inspiration and guidance from
the past but device a new yug­dharma for the modern times.
 
He admitted that Indian civilisation had turned static, asleep and inert and the
arrival of the west had awakened us and we got access to the western scientific
spirit of inquiry but once that had happened he wanted Indians to then turn
inwards and find out what the central principles of India’s ancient and powerful
self‐sustaining civilisation was and in the light of that looking at the
circumstances and needs of modern times draw up a well thought out plan of
national regeneration. Gandhi believed  India’s self‐regeneration was the most vital
task because otherwise even ifIndia gained political independence from the British,
it would not last and would be very fragile because we would be beset by internal
unrest and dissensions and external manipulations and aggressions. In fact he
believed Indians should not attain independence till the task of national
regeneration was substantially completed.
 
The Gandhian programme for national regeneration according to Bhikhu Parekh
was ‘highly complex and involved a cluster of inter‐related strategies of which
cultivating the  swadeshi  spirit,  satyagraha  and the Constructive Programme
were the most important.’ Swadeshi was at the heart of Gandhian nationalism
and it is important to understand his understanding of it because even though its
origins predated Gandhi’s entry in the freedom struggle he had a greater impact
in making it widely respected and followed and of course he also redefined it. 
Bikhu Parekh explains Gandhi’s wide meaning of swadeshi beautifully as follows
and deserves to be quoted in full:
‘For Gandhi every man was born and grew up in a specific community with its own
distinct ways of life and thought evolved over a long period of time. The
community was not a mere collection of institutions and practices but an ordered
and well knit whole informed by a specific spirit and ethos. It provided its
members with an organised environment vital for their orderly growth, a ready
network of supportive relationships, a body of institutions and practices essential
for structuring their otherwise chaotic selves, a foci for sentiments and loyalties
without which no moral life was possible and a rich culture. In these and other
ways it profoundly shaped their personalities, modes of thought and feeling,
deepest instincts and aspirations and their innermost being. Every community in
turn was inextricably bound up with a specific natural environment within which
it had grown up, which had cradled and nursed it and in the course of interacting
with which it had developed its distinctive customs, habits and ways of life and
with which it had developed its distinctive customs, habits and ways of life and
thought. The natural environment was not external to it but integrated into its
history and culture and suffused with its collective memories, images, hopes and
aspirations. As Gandhi put it, a community’s culture or way of life constituted its
soul or spirit and its natural habitat its body. The two formed an indissoluble
unity and inescapable basis of human existence.
…Gandhi used the term Swadesh to refer to this unity, swa meaning one’s own
and  desh  the total cultural and natural environment of which one was an
inseparable part. Desh was both a cultural and ecological unit and signified the
traditional way of life obtaining within a specific territorial unit. The territorial
reference was as important as the cultural. Desh did not mean a state or a polity
for a way of life might not be organised in such a manner; nor a mere piece of
territory unless it was inhabited and culturally appropriated by a community of
men sharing a common way of life; nor a cultural group unless it occupied a
specific territorial unit and its cultural boundaries coincided with the territorial.
The castes, religious and cultures constituting the Indian mosaic were
notdeshas; India, a civilisational cum territorial unit, uniting them all in terms of a
common way of life was. In classical Indian political thought every territorial unit
distinguished by a distinct way of life was called a  desh  and  India  was a desh
composed of smaller  deshas, each a distinct cultural and ecological unit but
united with the others by a shared civilisation. Gandhi agreed except that he
thought of the constituent units as pradeshas or subordinate or quasi­deshas.
The  swadeshi  spirit which Gandhi variously translated as the community,
national or patriotic spirit or the sprit of nationality and sharply distinguished
from nationalism, basically referred to the way an individual related and
responded to his  desh. Since he was profoundly shaped by and unintelligible
outside it, he should accept the inescapable fact that it was the necessary basis
and context of his existence and that he owed his humanity to it. He should show
a basic existential loyalty and gratitude to it and accept his share of the
responsibility to preserve its integrity. He should recognise himself as an heir to
the countless generations of men and women whose efforts and sacrifices made it
what it is and cherish his heritage.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s
Political Philosophy, pp.56­57)
 
Prof. Judith Brown has commented that  swadeshi  was an essential part of
Gandhi’s spiritual philosophy of simplicity in material living, which in turn would
make it possible for Indians to rely on their essential strength. She comments: ‘An
integral part of Gandhi’s thinking on simplicity of living was the idea of swadeshi,
literally meaning ‘belonging to one’s own country’. It was a politico‐economic
strategy which had been employed against the British in  India  while Gandhi was
in  South  Africa. But to him it had a far deeper meaning than the mere boycott of
British goods in as attempt to erode the financial aspects of British interests
in  India. For Gandhi it was inextricably tied to the values of simplicity and self‐

reliance, of limiting one’s wants, and of the worth of manual labour.’  (Source:
reliance, of limiting one’s wants, and of the worth of manual labour.’  (Source:
Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –  Prisoner  of  Hope,  pp.90­
91, Oxford University Press)
 Writing in 1909 Gandhi wrote: ‘Swadeshi carries a great and profound meaning. It
does not mean merely the use of what is produced in one’s country….there is
another meaning implicit in it which is far greater and much more
important.  Swadeshi  means reliance on our own strength.’  (Source:  Indian
Opinion, 1909)
 
Satyagraha  was an important part of Gandhi’s national regeneration campaign
and his main tool for political struggle – a method that he devised because he
found it most in tune with the Indian’s character but which has now indeed
become internationally famous and even in this country has undergone a strange
sort of distorted revival at least in popular art because of the popularising of what
has come to be known as ‘Gandhigiri’ after the success of a Bollywood film where
this term was first used. Gandhiji had decided that from the spiritual point of
view non‐violence is sin and unacceptable but one nevertheless had to find a way
for standing up to the truth of exploitation whenever it happened and struggle to
stop it. What was his answer – his answer was what he called satyagraha. He saw
in the strategy of satyagraha many advantages but none of the disadvantages of
military training. It was free from blame of violence but required courage all the
same. It could be carried out at different levels (from simple protest meetings to
even sacrifice of life) and by different sections of the population (from children
to women even). Most importantly it relied for its success on the strength of
numbers, which  India could provide in plenty owing to its huge population. Also it
could be withdrawn easily and rapidly once started and did not necessarily
escalate into a anything bloody involving death. It required a strange kind of
courage based on the quite obstinacy and tenacity of purpose, which Gandhi
probably saw, as one of the main characteristics of Indians, specially the rural
masses. Thesatyagraha strategy had the further advantage that it never need be
declared to have failed once started. One could always withdraw claiming partial
success. As it did not involve a direct forceful challenge to the government, it
denied the latter the excuse to use indiscriminate and massive violence that
could frighten and prematurely kill a movement. Also if the government did
become violent, it lost good will and political mileage. On the other hand if it
agreed to the demands it meant the agitating masses gained a sense of success
and power. Gandhi calledsatyagraha  the ‘trump‐card’ and regarded it as
particularly suited to  India. Gandhi himself had said that he never told the people
involved that they were about to stage a satyagraha, he simply led the protest
and later told them later that they in fact had already launched
a  satyagraha.  Satyagraha  was a fascinating example of the  swadeshispirit
because instead of condemning the lack of courage and some abstractly desirable
qualities of character in the Indian people, it accepted and built on those that
they had in plenty.

 
 
Another important element in Gandhi’s national regeneration idea was to carry
out what he called his Constructive Programme. He believed India needed to be
built up from the very bottom and only that would create the social, economic
and ultimately moral and spiritual revolution that in his idea of Indian nationhood
has to be the priority in contrast with other nations. He believed other nations
may focus on other things but in  India  the task was to preserve and manifest our
spiritual genius. Gandhi identified eighteen essential areas: Hindu‐Muslim unity,
removal of untouchability, a ban on alcohol or prohibition, the promotion and use
of khadi, development of village industries and craft based education, equality
for women, health education for promoting Indian systems of medicine and the
Indian way of healthy living, use of indigenous languages or vernaculars, the
adoption of a common national language for which his preference was hindi, the
promotion of what he called economic trusteeship, building up peasants and
workers organisations, integration of the tribal people into mainstream political
and economic life, a detailed code of conduct for students, helping lepers and
beggars and promoting respect for animals. In this entire list and how Gandhi
proposed to go about them the one major point to remember is that Gandhi
would only accept and approve of non‐violent methods even if they weren’t
practical or productive of concrete results in the short term or a reasonable
period of time. For instance, Gandhi was convinced untouchability could be
abolished by personal example and active promotion of the cause. He was
convinced a change of heart was all that was needed and a non‐violent persuasion
without the least coercion, legal or otherwise, was only morally acceptable and
enough to get rid of even such horrible evils. Similarly with the problem of the
rich‐poor divide and poverty and the continued economic exploitation by the
upper classes Gandhi was for promoting what he called ‘trusteeship’ or the notion
among the rich that they hold the wealth on behalf of the entire people and it
was their duty to personally use only the least bit of it and do the utmost for the
poor. He was not convinced that they may not want to give up their position of
enjoyment of wealth for the public good just by moral sermons and that there
may be needed laws and a state directed, at least partial re‐distribution of
property to eradicate poverty and the class system that perpetuated the riches of
some and the poverty of many. And the reason is all coercion, legal or otherwise,
was violent to him and not in tune with his principle of ahimsa. In fact that was
the stated reason of his for rejecting socialism and communism. He bluntly said:
‘What does communism mean in the last analysis? It means a classless society – an
ideal that is worth striving for. Only I part company with it when force is called to
aid for achieving it.’ (Source: Harijan, March 13, 1937)  Again: ‘Our Socialism
or Communism, should be based on non‐violence and on harmonious co‐operation
of labour and capital, landlord and tenant.’  (Source:  Amrita  Bazar  Patrika,
August  3,  1934)    Or: ‘Communism of the Russian type, that is communism
which is imposed on a people, would be repugnant to  India. If communism came
without any violence, it would be welcome. For, then, no property would be held
by anybody except on behalf the people and for the people. A millionaire may
have his millions, but he will hold them for the people.’  (Source:  Harijan,
March 13, 1941)  So Gandhi was ready to take the risk of having a millionaire
March 13, 1941)  So Gandhi was ready to take the risk of having a millionaire
class many of whose members were financiers of the Congress and Gandhi’s
ashrams and hope that they will stop acting in their own self‐interest and instead
act in the interests of the poor. Some Marxist commentators have suggested that
for Gandhi the priority was a controlled mass movement so that the ruling upper
classes and their advantageous positions were not threatened and the fact that he
never suggested anything very radical was the secret of success of the Gandhian
Congress. Historian Sumit Sarkar for instance has commented: ‘As a politician and
not just a saint, Gandhi in practice sometimes settled for less than complete non‐
violence (as when he campaigned for military recruitment in  1918  in  the hope of
winning post‐war political concessions), and his repeated insistence that even
violence was preferable to cowardly surrender to injustice sometimes created
delicate problems of interpretation. But historically much more significant than
his personal philosophy (full accepted only by a relatively small group of disciples)
was the way in which the resultant perspective of controlled mass participation
objectively fitted in with the interests and sentiments of socially‐decisive sections
of the Indian people. Indian politicians before Gandhi, as we have seen, had
tended to oscillate between Moderate ‘mendicancy’ and individual terrorism
basically because of their social inhibitions about uncontrolled mass movements.
The Gandhian model would prove acceptable also to business, as well as to
relatively better off or locally dominant sections of the peasantry, all of whom
stood to lose something if political struggle turned into uninhibited and violent
social revolution. In more general terms, as we shall see, the doctrine of ahimsa
lay at the heart of the essentially unifying, ‘umbrella‐type’ role assumed by
Gandhi and the Gandhian Congress, mediating internal social conflicts,
contributing greatly to joint national struggle against foreign rule, but also
leading to periodic retreats and some major reverses.’  (Source: Sumit Sarkar,
Modern  India  1885­1947,  pp.179­80)    Bhikhu Parekh has disagreed with
Marxist commentators that Gandhi was a mascot or spokesman of the capitalist
class and has commented Gandhi did agree eventually to use state power, on a
suggestion from a group of socialists led by Prof. Dantwala, in a manner that he
would have generally regarded as immoral and violent in what must be seen as an
evolution of his thoughts. He has pointed out how Gandhi eventually agreed to
impose if necessary trusteeship by law, a very high level of taxation to what was
prevailing in his time and even a nationalising of vital industries.  (Source:
Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  140)  In general on the
nationalist relevance of the Constructive Program he has rightly commented:
‘Although several items in the Constructive Program had only a limited practical
impact, its symbolic and pedagogical value was considerable. First, for the first
time during the struggle for independence, Indians were provided with a clear,
albeit limited, statement of social and economic objectives. Second, they were
specific and within the range of every one of them. In a country long accustomed
to finding plausible alibis for inaction, Gandhi’s highly practical programme had
the great merit of ruling out all excuses. Third, his constant emphasis on it
reminded the country that political independence had no meaning without
comprehensive national regeneration, and that all political power was ultimately
derived from a united and disciplined people. Finally, the Constructive
derived from a united and disciplined people. Finally, the Constructive
Programme enabled Gandhi to build up a dedicated group of grass roots workers
capable of mobilising the masses…As Gandhi understood themsatyagraha  was
primarily concerned with the moral and political, and the Constructive
Programme with the social and economic regeneration of India, and
the  swadeshi  spirit was the overarching principle inspiring and guiding
them.’ (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 63)
 
Swami Vivekananda had coined a term Seva Yoga to suggest that for the times
that they lived in a state of degeneration and imperialist enslavement, apart from
the other four paths of spiritual practice for attaining enlightenment
or  moksha,  that is the paths of  Bhaki,  Raja  and  Gyana  Yoga,  the most
relevant path was national service of the people of India. Gandhi seems to have
developed a similar mindset and philosophy. He observed for instance:
‘Yajna,  dana,  tapas  are obligatory duties, but that does not mean that the
manner of performing them in this age should be the same as in ancient
times. Yajna,  dana  etc are permanent principles. The social practices and the
concrete forms through which they are put into practice may change from age to
age and country to country. The right gift which a seeker of  moksha  in this
country and this age may make is to dedicate his all, body, intellect and
possessions, to the service of the country. And, likewise, the right tapas for this
country and this age consists in burning with agony at the suffering of countless
untouchables and others who are starving for want of food or because of famines.
Anyone who performs these three important duties certainly becomes purified
and he may even have a vision of God’s cosmic form which Arjun had.’ (Source:
Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral  and  Political  Writings  of  Mahatma  Gandhi,
Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987, vol.I , p.88)      
Further that:
‘Every age is known to have its predominant mode of spiritual effort best suited
for the attainment of moksha. Whenever the religious spirit is on the decline, it
is revived through such an effort in tune with the times. In this age our
degradation reveals itself through our political condition….Gokhale not only
perceived this right at the beginning of his public life but also followed the
principle in action. Everyone had realised that popular awakening could be
brought about only through political activity. If such activity was spiritualised, it
could show the path of moksha.
                      In this age, only political  sannyasis  can fulfil and adorn the ideal
of  sannyasa; others will more likely than not disgrace the  sanyasi’s  saffron
garb. No Indian who aspires to follow the way of true religion can afford to
remain aloof from politics. In other words, one who aspires to a truly religious life
cannot fail to undertake public service as his mission, and we are today so much
caught up in the political machine that service of the people is impossible without
taking part in politics. In olden days, our peasants, though ignorant of who ruled
them, led their simple lives free from fear; they can no longer afford to be so
them, led their simple lives free from fear; they can no longer afford to be so
unconcerned. In the circumstances that obtain today, in following the path of
religion they must take into account the political conditions. If our  sadhus,
rishis, munis, maulvis and priests realised the truth of this, we would have a
Servants of India Society in every village, the spirit of religion would come to
prevail all over India, the political system which has become odious would reform
itself.’ (Source: Ibid., vol.II,p p.137f)  He had therefore remarked it seems:
‘That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I
can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who
say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion
means.’ (Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 420)   
 
Gandhi did more than anybody else to create and make popular the idea of an
Indian nation. Unlike western notions of nation that is a homogenous and self‐
conscious ethnic and cultural or ethno‐cultural unit, Gandhi fashioned an idea of
a nation that was a synthesis of many cultures and religious faiths based on an
appeal to the need for preserving the integrity of the way of life and culture of
the Indian village. He argued the Indian village was very flexible in understanding
and adopting influences from other cultures and had done so for thousands of
years and had a traditional and sustainable way of life close to nature that they
must hold on to at all cost. The genius of Gandhi was that he managed to convey
in his own way this understanding of the Indian nation and his passionate
nationalism to the poor and illiterate masses even. Prof. Judith Brown has
concluded well when she writes:
‘Gandhi was an ingenious and sensitive artist in symbols. In his own person as a
self‐denying holy man, by his speeches full of pictorial images and references to
the great Hindu myths, by his emphasis on the  charkha  and on the wearing
of khadi as a uniform to obliterate distinctions of region and caste, he portrayed
and publicized in a world with few mass communications and low literacy, an
ideal of an Indian nation which was accessible even to the poor ad un‐politicised.
For many, at least for a time, the ideal of the nation and a sense of national
identity were lifted out of the rough and often sordid world of politics, although
the inevitable struggles and intrigues accompanying any shifts of power in a
complex polity jostled uneasily with the vision of nationhood and often
threatened to engulf it. A new nation had to be fashioned out of the numerous
loyalties and contests for dominance, which were the stuff of Indian politics.
Gandhi knew this full well as he agonized over political strategies, as he
attempted to minimize conflict among Indians and generate a moral community
which encompassed and purified old loyalties.’
(Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –  Prisoner  of  Hope,  p.  386,  Oxford
University Press)
 
 

 
 
 
Exercise:
 
1. Explain the Gandhian idea of the Indian nation? .

Site: School of Open Learning
Course: Reading Gandhi
Book: Gandhian Nationalism
Printed by: Guest user
Date: Wednesday, 16 January 2019, 4:50 PM
Table of contents
1 Gandhian Nationalism

2 Gandhian Thought and Communal Unity
2.1 Gandhi on Untouchability
2.2 Gandhi on Women
1 Gandhian Nationalism
LESSON ­ 1
Gandhian Nationalism
 
                        —Amaresh Ganguli
 
Objectives
 
After reading this article you will be familiar with:
Gandhi’s idea of the Indian National Identity
The Gandhian imperatives for fostering a strong nationalist identity and spirit
in the context of the freedom struggle against the British
The main elements of his nationalist program
 
Introduction
 
We take for granted our nationalist identity as Indians. We know we have a
government and a state and an army to protect us from external aggression. We
cheer our cricket team and feel proud at the achievements of fellow Indians in
various fields. Today the nationalist identity and feeling among the people is well
established and has taken deep roots.
But this was not always so. Like other social phenomenon nationalism also evolved
historically. Along with the emergence of social and historical conditions
communities came up in various parts of the world. They often came up through
tribal, slave and feudal phases of social existence. At a certain stage of social,
economic and cultural development nations came into being. It was distinguished
by certain specific characteristics such as
(a)    an organic whole of the members of the nation living in a distinct territory
(b)   a single economy
(c)    a consciousness of a common economic existence
(d)   a common language and
(e)    naturally a  common culture which evolved.
And this process developed from sixteenth century onwards as a part of the
development of human history. Generally speaking development of nationalism in
various counties was a prolonged historical process.  It is in the development of
historical conditions that nation states developed. And development of

nationalism in different countries was determined by its social ad cultural history

nationalism in different countries was determined by its social ad cultural history
‐ its political, economic and social structures. And the character of its various
classes, which played the role of vanguard of struggle for a national social
existence. Therefore every nation was born and forged in unique way. The history
of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century  India is primarily the history of
formation of a nation and the struggle against internal and external obstacles in
that process. 
Indian nationalism is a modern phenomenon. It came into being during the British
period as a result of various subjective and objective factors and forces, which
developed within the Indian society under the conditions of British rule and the
impact of world forces.
Pre‐  British  India  was unique. It sharply differed from the pre‐capitalist medieval
societies of  Europe. It was a vast country inhabited by huge population speaking
many languages with different religions. Socially it was dominated by a population
which was Hindu in character, but there was no homogeneity. This extreme
social, religious division of the Hindus in particular and the Indian sin general
presents a peculiar background to the growth of Indian nationalism. It was under
the conditions of political subjection that the British introduced for its own
purposes certain changes which introduced new social forces which radically
changed the economic structure of the Indian society. It established 
(a)      centralised state  (modern civil service, centralised administration,
judiciary, new land ownership laws, zamindari system etc)
(b)   introduced modern education (establishment of universities and colleges)
(c)      modern means of transport and communication (postal system, railways,
roads etc)
(d)   modern press
(e)    slow development of industries (introduction of just, tea etc)
and it is the combination of these very social forces along with its character of
exploitation which emerged under the part of the British rule and became the
basis of the rise and development of Indian nationalism.  It is the British colonial
rule under East Indian Company and subsequently under the British government
from 1858 that the Indian people entered into a period of severe repression and
exploitation. It is in this background that we see a number of peasant rebellions,
which was prominent in the history of eighteen‐century  India  including a large
number of famines for example.    
Prof. Irfan Habib has succinctly commented:
‘The unification of the country on an economic plane by the construction of
railways and the introduction of the telegraph in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, undertaken for its own benefit by the colonial regime, and the
centralisation of the administration which the new modes of communications and
transport made possible, played their part in making Indians view India as a
prospective single political entity. Modern education (undertaken in a large part
by indigenous effort) and the rise of the press disseminated the ideas of  ’s
by indigenous effort) and the rise of the press disseminated the ideas of  India’s
nationhood and the need for constitutional reform. A substantive basis for  India’s
nationhood was laid when nationalists like Dadabhoy Naoroji (Poverty and
UnBritish Rule in India, 1901) and R.C. Dutt (Economic History of India, 2 vols.,
1901 and 1903) raised the issues of poverty of the Indian people and the burden of
colonial exploitation, which was felt in equal measure throughout India. 
            We see, then, that three complex processes enmeshed to bring about the
emergence of India as a nation: the preceding notion of India as a country, the influx
of modern political ideas, and the struggle against colonialism. The last was
decisive: the creation of the Indian nation can well be said to be one major
achievement of the national movement.’  (Source:  Irfan  Habib,  ‘The  nation
that is India’, The Little Magazine, Vol III : issue 2)
 
When Gandhiji emerged in the national movement after his South African
experience in the post first world period with the non‐cooperation
movement.  India  by this time had seen through the peasant struggles of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including the revolt of 1857. The social
reform movements ‐ the Brahmo Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati’s Arya Samaj
Movements etc passed into liberal phases subsequently with the formation of the
Indian National Congress in 1885 and leaders like Gokhale, Ranade, Dadabhai
Naoroji, W.C. Banerjee etc. The whole movement was socially forward but
politically backward. It was the militant nationalism of the famous Lal‐Bal‐Pal
with their slogan of ‘Swaraj is my birth right’ to a revolutionary terrorism with
bombs, pistols, individual killings as a method with individual martyrs like Surya
Sen and Bhagat Singh which formed the backround to Gandhi’s emergence.
 
It was only after this that the age of Gandhi began and his continued dominance
and leadership of the national movement as the pre‐dominant leader of the
Indian National Congress till the achievement of independence. Therefore it was a
challenge for the Indian nationalist leadership to develop a national identity, a
method of struggle and transform the movement into a mass movement of the
Indian people.
 
Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi is significant because he could understand and
bring the Indian masses – men and women – urban and rural – into the national
movement. It was a radical break from the earlier methods of struggle.
 
Discussion
 

Before we start discussing Gandhi’s views on nation, nationhood, or nationalism it

Before we start discussing Gandhi’s views on nation, nationhood, or nationalism it
is necessary to have a brief overview of the whole period of the freedom
movement when Gandhi occupied the centre stage. It is true that Gandhi could
evolve a program of struggle which could recognise the role of the masses and the
mass actions which involved every section of the society and for the first time it
was under his leadership that Indian national movement became a multi‐class
nationalist movement and it was under his leadership that masses came out to
court arrest, jails and cold face police firing and created an undying hatred
against the British rule and a thrust for swaraj or freedom. It should also be
remembered that Gandhi provided a program of action for each sections of the
society. For peasantry, non‐payment of land tax, for students, boycott of
educational institutions, for lawyers, desertion of the courts, for women –
picketing the liquor shops, foreign cloth shops and he asked the people as a whole
to violate ‘lawless laws’ and it is under his call that millions of Indians joined the
demonstrations and marched into jails using methods of satyagraha, non‐
cooperation, and civil disobedience. His use of hunger strikes, mass
demonstrations, deliberate courting of jails were the principal weapons which he
added to the nationalist struggle. The period between 1919 to independence is
marked by three important struggles ‐ Non‐cooperation movement of 1919, Civil
Disobedience movement of 1930, with its call of complete independence and the
famous Quit Indian Movement of 1942.
 
It is in this background we must try to understand Gandhi and his role in terms of
Indian nationalism.    
 
Therefore Gandhi, his technique of struggle, his concept of national identity was
radically different as Professor Bhikhu Parekh has commented:
‘He more or less completely bypassed the dominant nationalist vocabulary and
showed that it was possible to articulate and defend the case for independence in
a very different language. He showed that not every movement for independence
is national, not every national struggle is nationalist and that not every nationalist
movement need articulate itself in the language of European rather than home‐
grown theories of nationalism’.  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political
Philosophy, p. 3)
 
Many of the other leaders who came before Gandhi were western trained lawyers
or intellectuals and saw many positives to the Western British way of life and
were demanding from the British the same liberal system and parliamentary
democracy on the basis of self‐determination that the British had in their own
homeland and also hoped to stop the economic exploitation of colonial rule. But
Gandhi focussed on the way of life of the Indian village and its thousands of years
old substantially self‐contained and self‐sufficient system to argue for a different
kind of national life where that way of life would be valued and protected and it’s
strengths fully taken advantage of in the interest of the nation. He also argued
strengths fully taken advantage of in the interest of the nation. He also argued
the basic purpose of life in the Indian national understanding was spiritual growth
(or attaining  moksha) and one of the best facilitators of this moral cultivation
was the simple and sustainable way of life of the Indian village.
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has commented:
‘For Gandhi British imperialism dominated  India  at three related but different
levels. At the political level the arrogant colonial government oppressed the
Indian people and denied their right to run their affairs themselves. At the
economic level it exploited and impoverished them, destroyed their indigenous
industries and subordinated their interests to those of the British economy. In
Gandhi’s view this was far more disturbing than political oppression and could
continue even if  India  became independent. At the most disturbing moral and
cultural level, British imperialism destroyed the identity and integrity of Indian
civilisation and turned the Indians into brown Englishmen. Gandhi was convinced
that the rule of British  civilisation  could continue even if the
British  government  were to stop ruling over  India  and British  capital  to cease
exploiting it. British imperialism was unacceptable not only because of its
political and even economic but moral and cultural consequences. The struggle
against it had therefore to be mounted and independence obtained at all three
levels, especially the last. At the cultural level the anti‐imperialist struggle had
to be fought on two fronts simultaneously. First, British civilisation, which so
infatuated and blinded the Indians to the moral enormity of foreign rule and
legitimised their economic and political domination must be subjected to a
thorough‐going critique. Second, the basic structure of Indian civilisation, which
they largely saw through the biased British perspective, must be sensitively
teased out and defended.
                   
           In interpreting British imperialism in this way, Gandhi integrated and went
beyond the three different types of critique advanced by his predecessors.
Broadly speaking Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendra Nath Banerjee, Gokhale and the so‐
called liberals had welcomed the political and cultural advantages of British rule
but attacked it on the grounds that it had drained  India’s wealth, ruined its
industries, imposed unfair trading arrangements and subordinated its economic
development to British colonial interests. Although mindful of its economic and
cultural consequences, the leaders of the terrorist movements in Bengal
and  Maharashtra  attacked it on political grounds and were the first to develop a
distinctive theory of political as distinct from cultural nationalism. They argued
that the Indians have as much right to run their affairs as the British had to run
theirs, that colonialism was a form of slavery and outrage to Indian dignity and
self‐respect, and that the ‘honour’ of ‘mother India’ demanded that she should
be freed of the ‘foreign yoke’. In a culture which conceptualises energy in
feminine terms and associates activity and restlessness with woman and passivity
and detachment with ma, it was not at all surprising that the votaries of violence
should have idealised ‘mother’  India  and drawn inspiration from the Godess Kali.

Finally Vivekananda, B.C. Pal, Tilak and the so‐called conservative leaders
Finally Vivekananda, B.C. Pal, Tilak and the so‐called conservative leaders
concentrated on the need to preserve the integrity of traditional ways of life and
thought. They introduced the concept of Indian civilisation to match the one
championed by the British, sharply distinguished the two and attacked foreign
rule not so much because it involved economic exploitation and violated Indian
pride as because it imposed an alien materialist civilisation on India’s essentially
spiritual one. 
 
                    Gandhi’s critique of British rule encompassed all three.………….He was
even more sensitive to the integrity of Indian civilisation than were the
conservative leaders. Indeed he argued that most of them were even more
interested in the ‘synthesis’ of the two civilisations than in the integrity of their
own, had unwittingly reinterpreted and anglicised it far more than they realised
or cared to admit, and that their critique of British imperialism was half‐hearted
and lacked moral depth. Gandhi’s critique not only included but also related and
integrated the three earlier critiques into a comprehensive theoretical
framework. He argued that political independence was important not only as an
expression of India’s pride and a necessary means to stop its economic exploitation
but also to preserve its civilisation, without which political independence
remained fragile. The economic exploitation had to be ended not only to sustain
Indian independence and improve the living conditions of its people but also to
preserve the social and economic basis of its civilisation.’        (Source:  Bhikhu
Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, pp. 19­20)  
 
In fact Gandhi saw India as a battleground between the immoral western
civilisation of which the British were an excellent example (and which he was
convinced would ultimately not last because it was based on immoral values like
greed which led to violence) and the sustainable moral civilisation of India where
the focus was on helping each soul find his spiritual salvation or God. In fact even
in his own life that was his priority.
 
He wrote once: ‘I count no sacrifice too great for the sake of seeing God face to
face. The whole of my activity, whether it may be called social, political,
humanitarian or ethical, is directed to that end. And as I know that God is found
more often in the lowliest of His creatures than in the high and mighty, I am
struggling to reach the status of these. I cannot do so without their service.
Hence my passion for the service of the suppressed classes. And as I cannot
render this service without entering politics, I find myself in them.’  (Source:
Young India, 1924)
 
His chosen way of reaching God was thus service of the poor and the oppressed
but in a non‐violent manner because violence would be sinful, non‐spiritual, and
non‐religious. Thus he could not agree with Communists for instance who
suggested that the rich and powerful will not give their relationship of dominance
suggested that the rich and powerful will not give their relationship of dominance
and exploitation of the poor and the weak without coercion or force because it
was not to their advantage. But Gandhi’s approach was to strive for a change of
heart and shun violence strictly and under all provocations and circumstances.
 
He once told the wife of his British surgeon in 1924: ‘My own motive is to put
forth all my energy in an attempt to save Indian, that is, ancient culture, from
impending destruction by modern, that is, Western culture being imposed upon
India. The essence of ancient culture is based upon the practice of the utmost
non‐violence. Its motto is the good of all including every living thing, whereas
Western culture is frankly based upon violence.’    (Source:  Gandhi  to  Mrs.
Maddock, Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 23, p. 243)
 
While Gandhi was critical of the modern western civilisation and saw it as a
danger he was not a nationalist in the narrow extreme sense, who hated other
countries and wanted domination over them to spread his own version of what is
superior civilisation. He was open to eventually spreading the message of his
understanding of what should be a superior and sustainable civilisation to the
whole world eventually but only after first establishing it well in the country of
it’s origin. In fact he was not averse to using the term Ram Raj even to refer to
the  India  of his dreams even though the term is obviously open to communally
sensitive interpretations.
 
But he had clarified that by ‘..Ramraj  I do not mean Hindu  Raj. I mean
by  Ramraj  Divine  Raj,  The Kingdom of God’.    (Source:  Young  India,  Sept.
19, 1929) Further clarity on his conception of Ram Raj can be obtained from his
other comments like:
‘The  Ramraj  of my dream ensures the rights alike of prince and
pauper.’ (Source: Anand Bazar Patrika, Aug. 2, 1934)
‘There can be no Ramraj in the present state of iniquitous inequalities, in which
a few roll in riches and the masses do not get even enough to eat.’  (Source:
Harijan, June 1, 1947)
‘The ancient ideal of Ramraj is undoubtedly one of true democracy, in which the
meanest citizen could be sure of swift justice without an elaborate and costly
procedure.’ (Source: Young India, Sept. 19, 1929)
 
As is clear from the above, to understand Gandhian nationalism it is important to
understand his critique of modern western civilisation. Gandhi wanted Indian
nationalism to be about rejecting the British and western model of modern
civilisation and a return to the basics of what he saw as  India’s ancient genius. He

was deeply aware that most people arguing for freedom were not appreciative
was deeply aware that most people arguing for freedom were not appreciative
quite so much of the glory of that civilisation and merely wanted a change of
political rulers.
 
He once commented: ‘[You] want English rule without the Englishman. You want
the tiger’s nature, not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India English. And
when it becomes English, it will be called not  Hindustan butEnglistan. That is not
the Swaraj I want.’ (Source: Hind Swaraj, p. 15)
 
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has succinctly explained Gandhi’s understanding of modern
civilisation as follows:
‘For Gandhi modern civilisation was propelled by the two inter‐related principles
of greed and want. It was controlled by ‘a few capitalist owners’ who had only
one aim, to make profit, and only one means to do so, to produce goods that
satisfied people’s wants. They had a vital vested interest in constantly whetting
jaded appetites, planting new wants and creating a moral climate in which not to
want the goods daily pumped into the market and to keep pace with the latest
fashions was to be abnormal and archaic. Indeed, since self‐discipline or
restriction of desires, the very emblem of human dignity, threatened to cause
mass unemployment, throw the economic system out of gear and cause human
suffering, it was seen as anti‐social and immoral. Not surprisingly men saw
themselves not as self‐determining moral subjects but as consumers or vehicles
for the satisfaction of externally‐induced wants.
The capitalist search for profits led to mechanisation and ‘industrialism’. For
Gandhi machines relieved drudgery, created leisure, increased efficiency and
were indispensable when there was a shortage of labour. Their use must therefore
be guided by a well‐considered moral theory indicating how men should live,
spend their free time and relate to one another. Since the modern economy
lacked such a theory and was only propelled by the search for profit, it
mechanised production without any regard for its wider moral, cultural and other
consequences. Machines were introduced even when there was no obvious need
for them and were in fact likely to throw thousands out of work. This was
justified either in the name of increased leisure without anyone asking why it was
important and what to do with it, or of cheaper goods, as if man was only a
passive consumer and not an active moral being for whose sanity, self‐respect and
dignity the right to work was far more important than the febrile gratification of
trivial wants.  Treated with the veneration and awe accorded to Gods in primitive
societies, machines had come to cast a magic spell on modern man and followed
their own will. For Gandhi the mechanisation or fetishism of technology was
closely tied up with the larger phenomenon of industrialism, another apparently
self‐propelling and endless process of creating larger and larger industries with no
other purpose than to produce cheap consumer goods and maximise profit. He
argued that since modern economic life followed an inexorable momentum of its

own, it reduced men to its helpless and passive victims and represented a new
own, it reduced men to its helpless and passive victims and represented a new
form of slavery, more comfortable and invidious and hence more dangerous than
the earlier ones.
         Based on the belief that life was continuous motion and movement, that
unless one was constantly on the move one was not alive and that the faster the
tempo of life the more alive one was, modern civilisation was inherently restless
and intolerant of stability. It aimed to conquer time and space and developed
increasingly speedier modes of transport and communication. Cars were replaced
by trains and the later by planes, but no one asked why one needed to travel so
fast and what one intended to do with the time saved. Thanks to its restless and
‘mindless activism’ incorrectly equated with dynamism and energy, modern
civilisation undermined man’s unity with his environment and fellow men and
destroyed stable and long‐established communities. In the absence of natural and
social roots and stable and enduring landmarks which alone gave man a sense of
identity and continuity, modern man had become abstract, indeterminate and
empty. He was not internally or organically related to others and his relations
with them were not grounded in the sentiments of fellow feeling and good will.
Everyone was a stranger to everyone else and no one cared for or knew how to
behave towards others………….
In Gandhi’s view the exploitation of one’s fellow men was built into the very
structure of modern civilisation. Consumers were constantly manipulated into
desiring things they did not need and which were not in their long‐term interest.
Workers were made to do boring jobs at subsistence wages under inhuman
conditions and given little opportunity or encouragement to develop their
intellectual and moral potential. The poor were treated with contempt and held
responsible for their own misfortunes. The weaker races were treated as if they
were animals and bought and sold and brutally exploited. The weaker nations
were conquered, mercilessly oppressed and used as dumping grounds for surplus
goods and as sources of cheap raw materials. For Gandhi imperialism was only an
acute manifestation of the aggressive and exploiting impulse lying at the very
heart of modern civilisation and at work in all areas of human
relationships.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  pp.
22­23)  
 
Gandhi was troubled by the fact that modern civilisation entailed a certain
surrender of the individual to the institutionalised modern state which
undermined the individual’s cultivation of his human powers of self‐
determination, autonomy, self‐knowledge (in the spiritual sense), self‐discipline
and social cooperation. Gandhi was naturally therefore not very impressed by
modern institutions and systems of education, law, medicine, media etc and even
the system of a modern democratic state led by the functioning of a parliament
at the top. Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the education system that the modern
British western state had imposed on  India  as can be judged from his following
comment in a letter to an associate:

‘the system of education at present in vogue is wholly unsuited to India’s needs,

‘the system of education at present in vogue is wholly unsuited to India’s needs,
is a bad copy of the Western model and it has by reason of the medium of
instruction being a foreign language sapped the energy of youths who have passed
through our schools and colleges and has produced an army of clerks and office‐
seekers. It has dried up all originality, impoverished the vernaculars and has
deprived the masses of the benefit of higher knowledge which would otherwise
have percolated to them through the intercourse of the educated classes with
them. The system has resulted in creating a gulf between educated  India  and the
masses. It has stimulated the brain but starved the spirit for want of a religious
basis for education and emaciated the body for want of training in handicrafts. It
has criminally neglected the greatest need of  India in that there is no agricultural
training worth the name……’  (Source:  Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.
14)  Gandhi was deeply disturbed by the fact that modern western English
education was creating a divide in Indian society between those who were English
educated and those who were not. Professor Judith Brown in her biography of
Gandhi has explained how this led to Gandhi’s search for a common national
language – probably one of the first people to carry out this task. She has
commented:
‘His increasing emphasis on the divisiveness of contemporary Indian education
showed his growing identification with the poor in his homeland rather than with
the educated with whom he would naturally have fitted by virtue of his own
education and professional training. His concern for what education was doing
to  India  and Indians also led him into deeper consideration of the problem of
finding a genuinely national language rather than English, with all its drawbacks
of social exclusiveness and association with the political and cultural rejection of
the nation’s own rich heritage. As early as December 1916 he presided at a
conference on this issue; in October 1917 he was president of aGujarat educational
conference at which he dealt with the question of a national language as well as
wider educational issues. His preference was for Hindi as spoken by north Indians,
Muslim and Hindu, which could be written in either Devanagri or Persian scripts.
This was to be a significant aspect of his work for a new national identity and
true swaraj  until the end of his life’.  (Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –
Prisoner of Hope, p. 107, Oxford University Press)
 
Gandhi was against the whole attitude and approach of modern western
allopathic medical science. In fact in his own personal life he experimented with
Indian healing methods whenever possible in his ashrams and elsewhere and
would be much disturbed if he had to see a doctor either for himself or any of his
family members.                                    
 
Gandhi was also deeply distressed with the British system of law even though he
was a  London trained lawyer himself professionally. Bhikhu Parekh has brought out
Gandhi’s objections to the British system of legal dispute resolution rather well:
‘Gandhi thought that … dehumanising phenomenon … was evident in the field of
law. Men were intelligent and moral beings capable of resolving their differences
law. Men were intelligent and moral beings capable of resolving their differences
by discussing them in the spirit of charity and good will or by seeking the
arbitration of widely respected men and women in their community. Instead,
every time he failed to get what he thought was his due, modern man rushed to
the court of law where trained experts in the esoteric body of legal knowledge
conducted expensive and incomprehensible debates about him without his
participation. …the legal establishment reduced him to a case to be discussed as
if he were a child to be tutored into what to say about his own actions and
incapable of participating in their evaluation. … the legal system did little to
develop and mobilise man’s moral impulses and capacities for reflection and
introspection. Instead it required him to alienate them to a central agency telling
him how to run his life and conduct his relations with others, including his own
neighbours, wife, ex‐wife and children. Gandhi found it strange that modern man
who talked so much about his self‐respect and dignity, did not find all this deeply
humiliating.’  (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 27)
 
In fact Gandhi was not convinced even by the western model of the state itself.
 
He once commented: ‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and
organised form. The individual has a soul but the state is a soul‐less machine, it
can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.’(Source:
The Modern Review, Oct.1935)
 
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh has explained well the reason why Gandhi saw the modern
state as violent: ‘Gandhi argued that the highly centralised and bureaucratic
modern state enjoying and jealously guarding its monopoly of political power was
a necessary product of modern civilisation. Competitive and aggressive men
ruthlessly pursuing their own interests could only be held together by a well‐
armed state. Since they were all strangers to one another and lacked the bond of
good will and mutual concern, their relations could only be regulated by
impersonal rules imposed and enforced by such a powerful external agency as the
state. The centralisation of production in the modern economy created social and
economic problems of national and international magnitude, and again required a
centralised political agency to deal with them. Unemployment, poverty and the
social and economic inequalities created by the modern economy led to acute and
legitimate discontent and required a well armed state to deter its desperate
citizens from resorting to violence. ‘Shorn of all the camouflage the exploitation
of the masses of  Europe  is sustained by violence’, Gandhi argued. The centralised
modern state was also necessary to protect international markets ad overseas
investments…………..Even as the state monopolised all political power, it tended
to monopolise all morality. Since its atomic and morally depleted citizens lacked
organic bonds and the capacity to organise and run their social relations
themselves, the state was the sole source of moral order. It alone guaranteed

civilised existence and saved society from social disintegration. As such it came to
civilised existence and saved society from social disintegration. As such it came to
be seen as the highest moral institution, whose preservation was a supreme moral
value. ……..
Gandhi argued that, although the state claimed to be a moral institution
transcending narrow group interests and pursuing the well being of the whole
community, it was in fact little more than an arena of conflict between organised
interests manipulated and controlled by the more powerful among them. Since
men of independent spirit and honour generally avoided it, it was largely in the
care of men and women forging convenient alliances with powerful interest
groups and using it to serve their interests. Gandhi thought that in these respects
the democratic governments were no better than the undemocratic and belonged
to the ‘same species’. They were just as vulnerable to the pressures of the
dominant class and just as ‘ruthless’ and ready to use violence in the pursuit of its
interests. In its actual practice a democracy was basically a form of government
in which a ‘few men capture power in the name of the people and abuse it’, a
‘game of chess’ between rival parties with the people as ‘pawns’. Although the
fact that democratic government was periodically elected by and accountable to
ordinary people made a difference, it also served as a ‘camouflage’ hiding the
basic fact that the masses were often ‘exploited by the ruling class….under the
sacred name of democracy’. Democracy thus veiled and conferred moral
legitimacy on the reality of exploitation, and had only a marginal moral edge over
fascism.’ (Source: ibid.,  pp. 28­29)
 
Gandhi believed that parliament is basically a ‘talking shop’ where the political
parties manipulate public opinion to maintain their positions of power and sub‐
serve the interests of powerful people and who followed the party line without
referring issues to the test of their consciences. Gandhi also felt in a electoral
democracy the voters are susceptible to thinking along the lines of short term
interests and were influenced by the media. He saw the media functioning of
modern civilisation with deep suspicion. He once commented on the newspapers
(there was no broadcast media or television at that time and newspapers were
the main media outlets) in Britain:
‘To the English voters their newspapers is their Bible. They take their cue from
their newspapers which are often dishonest. The same fact is differently
interpreted by different newspapers, according to the party in whose interests
they are edited.’ (Hind Swaraj, p. 33)
 
Gandhi believed in a modern capitalist system independence of the press is a
mere slogan and media independence is impossible because the press was owned
by the capitalist class for manufacturing public opinion. They were not concerned
with truth but propaganda of what served the interests of the owners and their
friends and did not serve the purpose of educating public opinion.            
                                                           
Therefore for Gandhi the task was to build a new nation which will preserve its
Therefore for Gandhi the task was to build a new nation which will preserve its
own civilisation. This strength according to Gandhi was to be found mainly in the
way of life and civilisation of  India’s villages. Bikhu Parekh comments: ‘In Gandhi’s
view every civilisation had its own distinctive natural and social basis. Modern
civilisation was born and could only survive in the cities, and was naturally carried
all over the world by the commercial classes. Indian civilisation had, by contrast,
been cradled and nurtured in the villages, and only the rural masses were its
natural custodians. So long as their way of life was intact, its integrity and
survival was guaranteed. If the villages were to disappear and their traditional
moral and social structure was to be shattered, it would lose its socio‐economic
basis and its fate would be sealed forever. Since the civilisations that had so far
come to  India  were all rural and thus posed no threat to it, it was easily able to
accommodate and enter into a dialogue with them. Modern urban civilisation
presented a deadly and unprecedented challenge and required a most
discriminating and cautious response.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s
Political Philosophy, p. 43)
 
Gandhi was convinced the British could conquer  India mainly due to the selfishness
and lack of unity of Indians and a degeneration in the national character. He thus
saw it as a priority to rebuild the national character. Here his views are almost
identical to what Swami Vivekananda had preached decades before. Gandhi came
on the scene but could never gather much of a national audience for it outside
the educated classes. Gandhi like Swami Vivekananda was particularly exercised
about the degeneration of the Hindu character. He believed Indians (and Hindus
in particular) had lost courage, physical, intellectual and moral. They could not
take the moral decisions to decide what is right and wrong and then whatever the
consequences stand up for it. Thus Indians ended up compromising in all kinds of
indignities and humiliations and violations of the self‐respect and personal
dignity.
 
Gandhi thought Indians had lost the national character and ‘would not fearlessly
walk to the gallows or stand a shower of bullets and yet say “we will not work for
you”’. (Source: Collected Works, Vol 14, p. 510) Gandhi further analysed it
was the lack of courage in the national character that bred suspicion, distrust and
jealousy and said ‘What I would rid ourselves of is distrust of one another and
imputation of motives. Our sin is not our differences but our littleness.... It is not
our differences that really matter. It is the meanness behind it that is
undoubtedly ugly’.  (Source:  Young  India,  16  Feb,  1934)  Again that it was
because of the jealousy and mutual distrust that Indians were most ‘uncharitable
to one another’ and blaming others rather than themselves for their mistakes had
‘become a second nature with them’.  (Source:  Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral
and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987,
vol. II, p. 539) Gandhi was convinced the British East Indian Company could not
have established their presence in India leading to the eventual enslavement of

India if different groups of selfish Indians had not done private deals with them
India if different groups of selfish Indians had not done private deals with them
and instead stood up as one in refusing to cooperate with the British empire.
Bhikhu Parekh comments on how Gandhi also saw this as an explanation for the
steady erosion of the ranks of the Hindus also. He says Gandhi felt:
‘Thanks to their preoccupation with narrow personal interests and mutual
distrust, the Indians lacked the capacity to pursue a common cause. Everyone
went his own way and resisted the discipline of a common organisation. They
were ‘like children in political matters….[who] do not understand the principle
that the public good is also one’s own good’. They did not take a long term view
of their interests and appreciate that these were best secured within a larger
organisational framework whose preservation benefited them all. In Gandhi’s
view they only acted in a concerted manner when inspired and organised by great
leaders and broke up into loose atoms once the later disappeared.
Gandhi also pointed to the absence of a social conscience among his countrymen.
They were ‘callous’ about the conditions of the poor and underprivileged. Their
doctrine of the unity of man had remained merely ‘philosophical’ and was rarely
practiced, which is why a large umber of lower caste Hindus had embraced such
egalitarian religions as Islam and Christianity.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,
Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, pp. 47­48)
 
Gandhi’s strong feelings about the inadequacy of the national character can be
gauged from the following words of his:
‘What are our failings, then, because of which we are helpless and cannot stop
the profuse flow of wealth from our country, and in virtue of which our children
get no milk, three crores of our people get only one meal a day, raids occur in
broad daylight in Kheda district, and epidemics like plague and cholera cannot be
eradicated in our country while they can in others? How is it that the haughty Sir
Michael O’Dwyer and the insolent General Dyer can crush us like so many bugs
and the priest in Shimla can write unworthy things about us; how is it that an
intolerable injustice has been done to us in the Punjab?.
           The reason is our inveterate selfishness, our inability to make sacrifices
for our country, our dishonesty, our timidity, our hypocrisy and our ignorance.
Everybody is selfish, more or less, but we seem to be more selfish than others.
We make some self‐sacrifice in family matters, but very little of it for national
work. Just look at our streets, our cities and our trains. In all these, we can see
the condition of the country. How little attention is paid to the condition of
others in streets, in the town as a whole and in trains?. We do not hesitate to
throw refuse out of our courtyard on to the street; standing in the balcony, we
throw out refuse or spit, without pausing to consider whether we are not
inconveniencing the passers‐by. When we are building a house, we take little
thought of the inconvenience that may be caused to our neighbours. In cities, we
keep the tap open, and thinking that it is not our water which flows away, we
allow it to run waste. The same thing is seen in the trains. We secure a seat for
ourselves by hook or crook and, if possible, prevent others from getting in. No
matter if others are inconvenienced, we start smoking. We do not hesitate to
matter if others are inconvenienced, we start smoking. We do not hesitate to
throw banana skins and sugar‐cane peelings right in front of our neighbours. When
we go to draw from a tap, we take little thought for others. Many such instances
of our selfishness can be listed.
Where so much selfishness exists, how can one expect self‐sacrifice? Does the
businessman cleanse his business of dishonesty for the sake of his country? Does
he forgo his profit? Does he stop speculation in cotton for his country’s sake? Is
any effort made to keep down milk prices by giving up the profit from its export?
How many give up a job when necessary, for the sake of the country? .
Where are the men who will reduce their luxuries and adopt simplicity and use
the money so saved for the country? If it is necessary for the country’s sake to go
to jail, how many will come forward? .
Our dishonesty is there for all to see. We believe that business can never be
carried on honestly. Those who have the chance never refuse a
bribe…                                 Our hypocrisy is only a little less than that of the
British. We have experience of this every moment. In our meeting and in all other
activities of our lives, we try to show ourselves other than what we are.
We have made cowardice especially our own. Nobody wants bloodshed in
connection with non‐co‐operation, and yet it is out of this fear of bloodshed that
we do not want to do anything. We are possessed by the fear of the Government’s
armed might that we dare not take any step. And so we submit to force in every
matter and allow dacoits to plunder us in broad daylight.
                      What shall I say about our hypocrisy? It has increased in every field.
Weakness is always accompanied by hypocrisy. Moreover, where the people want
to be upright but can not be so, hypocrisy will naturally increase; for, if we are
not upright, we are anxious to seem so and thus we add another moral weakness
to the one which we already possess. Hypocrisy had entered our religion as well,
and that so fully that the marks which we put on our forehead, the rosary and
things of that kind have ceased to be tokens of piety and become signs of
impiety.’  (Source:  Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral  and  Political  Writings  of
Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987, vol. I, pp.307f)     
 
Gandhi was determined that the most important task in the task of building a
strong national identity and a nationalist character – a process he referred to as
national regeneration, was to reform the character of Indians. And in this he saw
no use in a blind adoption of western modern civilisation. He was of the
conviction that while western civilisation may not all be totally bad (even though
he did think it was inferior to  India’s naturally spiritual minded civilisation) Indians
had to adopt what suited Indians and was good for  India. He was of the view the
Indian civilisation had been evolved by the Indian people and reflected their
unique and historically emerged swabhava.
 

Interestingly Gandhi was also not exactly in favour of going back to the exact
Interestingly Gandhi was also not exactly in favour of going back to the exact
situation of ancient Vedic times as he believed every age had its own  yug­
dharma  and the task of Indians was only to take inspiration and guidance from
the past but device a new yug­dharma for the modern times.
 
He admitted that Indian civilisation had turned static, asleep and inert and the
arrival of the west had awakened us and we got access to the western scientific
spirit of inquiry but once that had happened he wanted Indians to then turn
inwards and find out what the central principles of India’s ancient and powerful
self‐sustaining civilisation was and in the light of that looking at the
circumstances and needs of modern times draw up a well thought out plan of
national regeneration. Gandhi believed  India’s self‐regeneration was the most vital
task because otherwise even ifIndia gained political independence from the British,
it would not last and would be very fragile because we would be beset by internal
unrest and dissensions and external manipulations and aggressions. In fact he
believed Indians should not attain independence till the task of national
regeneration was substantially completed.
 
The Gandhian programme for national regeneration according to Bhikhu Parekh
was ‘highly complex and involved a cluster of inter‐related strategies of which
cultivating the  swadeshi  spirit,  satyagraha  and the Constructive Programme
were the most important.’ Swadeshi was at the heart of Gandhian nationalism
and it is important to understand his understanding of it because even though its
origins predated Gandhi’s entry in the freedom struggle he had a greater impact
in making it widely respected and followed and of course he also redefined it. 
Bikhu Parekh explains Gandhi’s wide meaning of swadeshi beautifully as follows
and deserves to be quoted in full:
‘For Gandhi every man was born and grew up in a specific community with its own
distinct ways of life and thought evolved over a long period of time. The
community was not a mere collection of institutions and practices but an ordered
and well knit whole informed by a specific spirit and ethos. It provided its
members with an organised environment vital for their orderly growth, a ready
network of supportive relationships, a body of institutions and practices essential
for structuring their otherwise chaotic selves, a foci for sentiments and loyalties
without which no moral life was possible and a rich culture. In these and other
ways it profoundly shaped their personalities, modes of thought and feeling,
deepest instincts and aspirations and their innermost being. Every community in
turn was inextricably bound up with a specific natural environment within which
it had grown up, which had cradled and nursed it and in the course of interacting
with which it had developed its distinctive customs, habits and ways of life and
thought. The natural environment was not external to it but integrated into its
history and culture and suffused with its collective memories, images, hopes and

aspirations. As Gandhi put it, a community’s culture or way of life constituted its
aspirations. As Gandhi put it, a community’s culture or way of life constituted its
soul or spirit and its natural habitat its body. The two formed an indissoluble
unity and inescapable basis of human existence.
…Gandhi used the term Swadesh to refer to this unity, swa meaning one’s own
and  desh  the total cultural and natural environment of which one was an
inseparable part. Desh was both a cultural and ecological unit and signified the
traditional way of life obtaining within a specific territorial unit. The territorial
reference was as important as the cultural. Desh did not mean a state or a polity
for a way of life might not be organised in such a manner; nor a mere piece of
territory unless it was inhabited and culturally appropriated by a community of
men sharing a common way of life; nor a cultural group unless it occupied a
specific territorial unit and its cultural boundaries coincided with the territorial.
The castes, religious and cultures constituting the Indian mosaic were
notdeshas; India, a civilisational cum territorial unit, uniting them all in terms of a
common way of life was. In classical Indian political thought every territorial unit
distinguished by a distinct way of life was called a  desh  and  India  was a desh
composed of smaller  deshas, each a distinct cultural and ecological unit but
united with the others by a shared civilisation. Gandhi agreed except that he
thought of the constituent units as pradeshas or subordinate or quasi­deshas.
The  swadeshi  spirit which Gandhi variously translated as the community,
national or patriotic spirit or the sprit of nationality and sharply distinguished
from nationalism, basically referred to the way an individual related and
responded to his  desh. Since he was profoundly shaped by and unintelligible
outside it, he should accept the inescapable fact that it was the necessary basis
and context of his existence and that he owed his humanity to it. He should show
a basic existential loyalty and gratitude to it and accept his share of the
responsibility to preserve its integrity. He should recognise himself as an heir to
the countless generations of men and women whose efforts and sacrifices made it
what it is and cherish his heritage.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s
Political Philosophy, pp.56­57)
 
Prof. Judith Brown has commented that  swadeshi  was an essential part of
Gandhi’s spiritual philosophy of simplicity in material living, which in turn would
make it possible for Indians to rely on their essential strength. She comments: ‘An
integral part of Gandhi’s thinking on simplicity of living was the idea of swadeshi,
literally meaning ‘belonging to one’s own country’. It was a politico‐economic
strategy which had been employed against the British in  India  while Gandhi was
in  South  Africa. But to him it had a far deeper meaning than the mere boycott of
British goods in as attempt to erode the financial aspects of British interests
in  India. For Gandhi it was inextricably tied to the values of simplicity and self‐
reliance, of limiting one’s wants, and of the worth of manual labour.’  (Source:
Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –  Prisoner  of  Hope,  pp.90­
91, Oxford University Press)

 Writing in 1909 Gandhi wrote: ‘Swadeshi carries a great and profound meaning. It
 Writing in 1909 Gandhi wrote: ‘Swadeshi carries a great and profound meaning. It
does not mean merely the use of what is produced in one’s country….there is
another meaning implicit in it which is far greater and much more
important.  Swadeshi  means reliance on our own strength.’  (Source:  Indian
Opinion, 1909)
 
Satyagraha  was an important part of Gandhi’s national regeneration campaign
and his main tool for political struggle – a method that he devised because he
found it most in tune with the Indian’s character but which has now indeed
become internationally famous and even in this country has undergone a strange
sort of distorted revival at least in popular art because of the popularising of what
has come to be known as ‘Gandhigiri’ after the success of a Bollywood film where
this term was first used. Gandhiji had decided that from the spiritual point of
view non‐violence is sin and unacceptable but one nevertheless had to find a way
for standing up to the truth of exploitation whenever it happened and struggle to
stop it. What was his answer – his answer was what he called satyagraha. He saw
in the strategy of satyagraha many advantages but none of the disadvantages of
military training. It was free from blame of violence but required courage all the
same. It could be carried out at different levels (from simple protest meetings to
even sacrifice of life) and by different sections of the population (from children
to women even). Most importantly it relied for its success on the strength of
numbers, which  India could provide in plenty owing to its huge population. Also it
could be withdrawn easily and rapidly once started and did not necessarily
escalate into a anything bloody involving death. It required a strange kind of
courage based on the quite obstinacy and tenacity of purpose, which Gandhi
probably saw, as one of the main characteristics of Indians, specially the rural
masses. Thesatyagraha strategy had the further advantage that it never need be
declared to have failed once started. One could always withdraw claiming partial
success. As it did not involve a direct forceful challenge to the government, it
denied the latter the excuse to use indiscriminate and massive violence that
could frighten and prematurely kill a movement. Also if the government did
become violent, it lost good will and political mileage. On the other hand if it
agreed to the demands it meant the agitating masses gained a sense of success
and power. Gandhi calledsatyagraha  the ‘trump‐card’ and regarded it as
particularly suited to  India. Gandhi himself had said that he never told the people
involved that they were about to stage a satyagraha, he simply led the protest
and later told them later that they in fact had already launched
a  satyagraha.  Satyagraha  was a fascinating example of the  swadeshispirit
because instead of condemning the lack of courage and some abstractly desirable
qualities of character in the Indian people, it accepted and built on those that
they had in plenty.
 

Another important element in Gandhi’s national regeneration idea was to carry

Another important element in Gandhi’s national regeneration idea was to carry
out what he called his Constructive Programme. He believed India needed to be
built up from the very bottom and only that would create the social, economic
and ultimately moral and spiritual revolution that in his idea of Indian nationhood
has to be the priority in contrast with other nations. He believed other nations
may focus on other things but in  India  the task was to preserve and manifest our
spiritual genius. Gandhi identified eighteen essential areas: Hindu‐Muslim unity,
removal of untouchability, a ban on alcohol or prohibition, the promotion and use
of khadi, development of village industries and craft based education, equality
for women, health education for promoting Indian systems of medicine and the
Indian way of healthy living, use of indigenous languages or vernaculars, the
adoption of a common national language for which his preference was hindi, the
promotion of what he called economic trusteeship, building up peasants and
workers organisations, integration of the tribal people into mainstream political
and economic life, a detailed code of conduct for students, helping lepers and
beggars and promoting respect for animals. In this entire list and how Gandhi
proposed to go about them the one major point to remember is that Gandhi
would only accept and approve of non‐violent methods even if they weren’t
practical or productive of concrete results in the short term or a reasonable
period of time. For instance, Gandhi was convinced untouchability could be
abolished by personal example and active promotion of the cause. He was
convinced a change of heart was all that was needed and a non‐violent persuasion
without the least coercion, legal or otherwise, was only morally acceptable and
enough to get rid of even such horrible evils. Similarly with the problem of the
rich‐poor divide and poverty and the continued economic exploitation by the
upper classes Gandhi was for promoting what he called ‘trusteeship’ or the notion
among the rich that they hold the wealth on behalf of the entire people and it
was their duty to personally use only the least bit of it and do the utmost for the
poor. He was not convinced that they may not want to give up their position of
enjoyment of wealth for the public good just by moral sermons and that there
may be needed laws and a state directed, at least partial re‐distribution of
property to eradicate poverty and the class system that perpetuated the riches of
some and the poverty of many. And the reason is all coercion, legal or otherwise,
was violent to him and not in tune with his principle of ahimsa. In fact that was
the stated reason of his for rejecting socialism and communism. He bluntly said:
‘What does communism mean in the last analysis? It means a classless society – an
ideal that is worth striving for. Only I part company with it when force is called to
aid for achieving it.’ (Source: Harijan, March 13, 1937)  Again: ‘Our Socialism
or Communism, should be based on non‐violence and on harmonious co‐operation
of labour and capital, landlord and tenant.’  (Source:  Amrita  Bazar  Patrika,
August  3,  1934)    Or: ‘Communism of the Russian type, that is communism
which is imposed on a people, would be repugnant to  India. If communism came
without any violence, it would be welcome. For, then, no property would be held
by anybody except on behalf the people and for the people. A millionaire may
have his millions, but he will hold them for the people.’  (Source:  Harijan,
March 13, 1941)  So Gandhi was ready to take the risk of having a millionaire
class many of whose members were financiers of the Congress and Gandhi’s
class many of whose members were financiers of the Congress and Gandhi’s
ashrams and hope that they will stop acting in their own self‐interest and instead
act in the interests of the poor. Some Marxist commentators have suggested that
for Gandhi the priority was a controlled mass movement so that the ruling upper
classes and their advantageous positions were not threatened and the fact that he
never suggested anything very radical was the secret of success of the Gandhian
Congress. Historian Sumit Sarkar for instance has commented: ‘As a politician and
not just a saint, Gandhi in practice sometimes settled for less than complete non‐
violence (as when he campaigned for military recruitment in  1918  in  the hope of
winning post‐war political concessions), and his repeated insistence that even
violence was preferable to cowardly surrender to injustice sometimes created
delicate problems of interpretation. But historically much more significant than
his personal philosophy (full accepted only by a relatively small group of disciples)
was the way in which the resultant perspective of controlled mass participation
objectively fitted in with the interests and sentiments of socially‐decisive sections
of the Indian people. Indian politicians before Gandhi, as we have seen, had
tended to oscillate between Moderate ‘mendicancy’ and individual terrorism
basically because of their social inhibitions about uncontrolled mass movements.
The Gandhian model would prove acceptable also to business, as well as to
relatively better off or locally dominant sections of the peasantry, all of whom
stood to lose something if political struggle turned into uninhibited and violent
social revolution. In more general terms, as we shall see, the doctrine of ahimsa
lay at the heart of the essentially unifying, ‘umbrella‐type’ role assumed by
Gandhi and the Gandhian Congress, mediating internal social conflicts,
contributing greatly to joint national struggle against foreign rule, but also
leading to periodic retreats and some major reverses.’  (Source: Sumit Sarkar,
Modern  India  1885­1947,  pp.179­80)    Bhikhu Parekh has disagreed with
Marxist commentators that Gandhi was a mascot or spokesman of the capitalist
class and has commented Gandhi did agree eventually to use state power, on a
suggestion from a group of socialists led by Prof. Dantwala, in a manner that he
would have generally regarded as immoral and violent in what must be seen as an
evolution of his thoughts. He has pointed out how Gandhi eventually agreed to
impose if necessary trusteeship by law, a very high level of taxation to what was
prevailing in his time and even a nationalising of vital industries.  (Source:
Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  140)  In general on the
nationalist relevance of the Constructive Program he has rightly commented:
‘Although several items in the Constructive Program had only a limited practical
impact, its symbolic and pedagogical value was considerable. First, for the first
time during the struggle for independence, Indians were provided with a clear,
albeit limited, statement of social and economic objectives. Second, they were
specific and within the range of every one of them. In a country long accustomed
to finding plausible alibis for inaction, Gandhi’s highly practical programme had
the great merit of ruling out all excuses. Third, his constant emphasis on it
reminded the country that political independence had no meaning without
comprehensive national regeneration, and that all political power was ultimately
derived from a united and disciplined people. Finally, the Constructive
Programme enabled Gandhi to build up a dedicated group of grass roots workers
Programme enabled Gandhi to build up a dedicated group of grass roots workers
capable of mobilising the masses…As Gandhi understood themsatyagraha  was
primarily concerned with the moral and political, and the Constructive
Programme with the social and economic regeneration of India, and
the  swadeshi  spirit was the overarching principle inspiring and guiding
them.’ (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 63)
 
Swami Vivekananda had coined a term Seva Yoga to suggest that for the times
that they lived in a state of degeneration and imperialist enslavement, apart from
the other four paths of spiritual practice for attaining enlightenment
or  moksha,  that is the paths of  Bhaki,  Raja  and  Gyana  Yoga,  the most
relevant path was national service of the people of India. Gandhi seems to have
developed a similar mindset and philosophy. He observed for instance:
‘Yajna,  dana,  tapas  are obligatory duties, but that does not mean that the
manner of performing them in this age should be the same as in ancient
times. Yajna,  dana  etc are permanent principles. The social practices and the
concrete forms through which they are put into practice may change from age to
age and country to country. The right gift which a seeker of  moksha  in this
country and this age may make is to dedicate his all, body, intellect and
possessions, to the service of the country. And, likewise, the right tapas for this
country and this age consists in burning with agony at the suffering of countless
untouchables and others who are starving for want of food or because of famines.
Anyone who performs these three important duties certainly becomes purified
and he may even have a vision of God’s cosmic form which Arjun had.’ (Source:
Raghavan  Iyer,  The  Moral  and  Political  Writings  of  Mahatma  Gandhi,
Oxford: Claredon Press, 1987, vol.I , p.88)      
Further that:
‘Every age is known to have its predominant mode of spiritual effort best suited
for the attainment of moksha. Whenever the religious spirit is on the decline, it
is revived through such an effort in tune with the times. In this age our
degradation reveals itself through our political condition….Gokhale not only
perceived this right at the beginning of his public life but also followed the
principle in action. Everyone had realised that popular awakening could be
brought about only through political activity. If such activity was spiritualised, it
could show the path of moksha.
                      In this age, only political  sannyasis  can fulfil and adorn the ideal
of  sannyasa; others will more likely than not disgrace the  sanyasi’s  saffron
garb. No Indian who aspires to follow the way of true religion can afford to
remain aloof from politics. In other words, one who aspires to a truly religious life
cannot fail to undertake public service as his mission, and we are today so much
caught up in the political machine that service of the people is impossible without
taking part in politics. In olden days, our peasants, though ignorant of who ruled
them, led their simple lives free from fear; they can no longer afford to be so
unconcerned. In the circumstances that obtain today, in following the path of
unconcerned. In the circumstances that obtain today, in following the path of
religion they must take into account the political conditions. If our  sadhus,
rishis, munis, maulvis and priests realised the truth of this, we would have a
Servants of India Society in every village, the spirit of religion would come to
prevail all over India, the political system which has become odious would reform
itself.’ (Source: Ibid., vol.II,p p.137f)  He had therefore remarked it seems:
‘That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I
can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who
say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion
means.’ (Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 420)   
 
Gandhi did more than anybody else to create and make popular the idea of an
Indian nation. Unlike western notions of nation that is a homogenous and self‐
conscious ethnic and cultural or ethno‐cultural unit, Gandhi fashioned an idea of
a nation that was a synthesis of many cultures and religious faiths based on an
appeal to the need for preserving the integrity of the way of life and culture of
the Indian village. He argued the Indian village was very flexible in understanding
and adopting influences from other cultures and had done so for thousands of
years and had a traditional and sustainable way of life close to nature that they
must hold on to at all cost. The genius of Gandhi was that he managed to convey
in his own way this understanding of the Indian nation and his passionate
nationalism to the poor and illiterate masses even. Prof. Judith Brown has
concluded well when she writes:
‘Gandhi was an ingenious and sensitive artist in symbols. In his own person as a
self‐denying holy man, by his speeches full of pictorial images and references to
the great Hindu myths, by his emphasis on the  charkha  and on the wearing
of khadi as a uniform to obliterate distinctions of region and caste, he portrayed
and publicized in a world with few mass communications and low literacy, an
ideal of an Indian nation which was accessible even to the poor ad un‐politicised.
For many, at least for a time, the ideal of the nation and a sense of national
identity were lifted out of the rough and often sordid world of politics, although
the inevitable struggles and intrigues accompanying any shifts of power in a
complex polity jostled uneasily with the vision of nationhood and often
threatened to engulf it. A new nation had to be fashioned out of the numerous
loyalties and contests for dominance, which were the stuff of Indian politics.
Gandhi knew this full well as he agonized over political strategies, as he
attempted to minimize conflict among Indians and generate a moral community
which encompassed and purified old loyalties.’
(Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi  –  Prisoner  of  Hope,  p.  386,  Oxford
University Press)
 
 
 
 
 
Exercise:
 
1. Explain the Gandhian idea of the Indian nation? .
2 Gandhian Thought and Communal Unity
LESSON ­ 2
Gandhian Thought and Communal Unity
 
                                                                                                          
—Amaresh Ganguli
 

Objectives

 
After reading this article you will be familiar with:
Gandhi’s thoughts on communal unity and his specific thoughts/definition of
communal unity
Gandhi’s concept of the urgency and imperative for communal unity
The Gandhian strategy for fostering unity
 
Introduction
 
Gandhi has been called the ‘father of the nation’ and one of the main areas of his
concerns and contributions is the role he played in fostering communal unity.
Gandhi had a definite and strategic political purpose in working for communal
unity quite apart from any private spiritual motivations that he may have had. He
knew and understood more urgently than any other leader of the national struggle
that before independence can be gained from the British, Indians will have to
have a certain basic minimum level of national unity. He identified many aspects
of Indian society that prevented that. Just as he identified untouchability as a
severe underlying blockage in the goal of a united national identity he also saw
communal divisions in Indian society particularly between the different religious
communities that exist in India as a source of crippling weakness and he genuinely
felt independence would have no meaning unless Indians found at least a basic
minimum level of harmony in their life as a nation to successfully demand,
achieve and run an independent political union.
 

Discussion  
In fact most nations of the world at that time had basic affinities among her
peoples like a common language or faith etc but India was the total opposite and so
in search of a new kind of nationalism also, from that available in  Europe, Gandhi

had to find a way of reconciling communal divisions and particularly the Hindu‐
had to find a way of reconciling communal divisions and particularly the Hindu‐
Muslim divide. As Bhikhu Parekh has commented: 
‘Like the other Indian leaders he knew that India was radically different from every
European country. It was vast in size, highly uncentralised, deeply divided, had a
long and chequered history and consisted of different and not fully integrated
ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural groups. Since it was not united in terms
of religion, language, race, ways of life, common historical memories of
oppression and struggle or any of the several other factors…………Gandhi
instinctively knew that the (that) language of nationalism not only did not make
sense in India but was bound to have fatal consequences. He was acutely aware of
the fact that when Hindus flirted with nationalism during the first two decades of
the 20th century, they frightened away not only the Muslims and other minorities
but also some of the lower castes. And he hardly needed to be reminded of the
confusion and mischief caused by Jinnah’s introduction of nationalist language
into Indian politics. That Gandhi and most other Indian leaders preferred the
relaxed, even chaotic, plurality of Indian life to the homogeneity of the modern
European state was a further factor pulling them away from European
nationalism.  
Accordingly Gandhi turned to the vaguer but politically more relevant and, to
him, morally more acceptable concept of civilisation. Not race, ethnicity,
language, religion or customs but the plural, evolving, civilisation….united the
Indians. …foreign rule was unacceptable because it choked and distorted  India’s
growth and imposed a way of life incompatible with its basic
character.  India  needed independence in order to undertake the long and painful
task of revitalising its civilisation and regenerating its people. Its independence
was desirable only in so far as it created the conditions for its autonomous moral
growth, and it signified not a millennium but an invitation to decades of hard
work. Since the civilisation Gandhi wanted the Indian state to nurture was
synthetic, tolerant, spiritual and open, his vision of India had little in common
with the collectivist, monolithic, aggressive and xenophobic nationalism of some
of the Western and central European countries. ……he rarely used the term
‘nation’ except when forced to do so by such antagonists as Jinnah, and then
largely to refer to the fact that India was not a motley collection of groups but
consisted of people sharing common aspirations and interests and a vague but
nonetheless real commitment to the kind of spiritual civilisation discussed earlier.
When he occasionally used the term ‘nationalism’ he largely meant ‘love of one’s
country’. For the most part he preferred to speak of swadeshi spirit which
captured the interrelated ideas of collective pride, ancestral loyalty, mutual
responsibility and intellectual and moral openness. It is true that this conception
of Indian civilisation was narrow and limited and, although not anti‐Muslim, it had
a strong Hindu orientation. However, it had nothing in common with the ethnic or
even cultural nationalism of Tilak and Aurobindo, let alone such Hindu
fundamentalists as Savarkar. Thanks to the non‐nationalist philosophical
framework within which he conceptualised the independence movement, the
latter did not throw up a Hindu nationalism to match that of the (Muslim) League,
but guaranteed full protection to Muslims even under the greatest provocation,
laid the foundations of a secular state..’.
laid the foundations of a secular state..’.
(Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 194)  
Bhikhu Parekh also makes the point that because of his background and his
experience in South Africa Gandhi was anyway someone who could not understand
why Hindu’s and Muslims should fight and therefore could very easily think of
building an alliance between the two communities when he came back to India to
join the national struggle. He comments:
‘Another reason why Gandhi had difficulty appreciating the nature and basis of
the Hindu Muslim conflict had to do with his South African experiences, which
distorted his understanding of the Indian situation and whose irrelevance he took
years to recognise. He had gone there as an employee of a Muslim firm and had
led and established excellent relations with the Muslim migrants. Most of them
came from Gujrat and spoke his language, shared his culture and followed a way
of life very similar to his own. They all faced the common problems of a minority
settled in a foreign country and were too deeply involved in making money and
fighting racist laws to worry much about internal differences. As Gandhi wrote to
Gokhale in 1907, the ‘struggle we are undergoing here has resulted in making us
feel that we are Indians first and Hindus, Mohameddans, Tamils, Parsis etc
afterwards. Three years later he wrote on the basis of his South African
experience that to ‘create among the inhabitants of  India  the consciousness of
their being one nation, no Herculean efforts are necessary. We are of course a
single nation and brothers as among ourselves’. He argued that nationality had
nothing to do with religion or language and was entirely a matter of culture,
which Muslims, being ‘simply converts from Hinduism’, shared in common with
Hindus.
When Gandhi returned to  India  he made two assumptions, both based on illicit
generalisations of his South African experience. First, Indian Muslims were all like
Gujrati Muslims he had met in South Africa, and second, Muslims and Hindus primarily
thought of themselves as Indians. It took him early ten years to realise that the
assumptions on which he had hitherto based his action were profoundly mistaken.
Muslims in north  India were acutely conscious of their ethnic and cultural identity.
It was true that the two communities had evolved a common culture as they had
done in  Gujarat. However, in Gujarat Muslims had largely fitted into the Hindu
culture, whereas the opposite was generally the case in the north. Again the two
communities, especially the Muslims, defined themselves in religious and not
political terms, and unlike  South  Africa  all the power of the colonial government
in  India was used to perpetuate this state of affairs.’  (Source: Bhikhu Parekh,
Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  186­87)  In fact Bhikhu Parekh beautifully
notes the great irony of Gandhi’s life: ‘…his close boyhood friend and hero was a
Muslim, his mother belonged to the Pranami sect which was influenced by Islam,
he owed his first worthwhile job to a Muslim firm, was deeply indebted to Muslims
for fighting in his  satyagraha  in South Africa and for helping him acquire a
national and international reputation that stood him in good stead on his return
to India, and he was eventually killed by a Hindu for being pro‐Muslim’. (Source:

Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  183)  The irony being that
Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  183)  The irony being that
Muslims on the other hand asked for a separate homeland for  Pakistan because they
felt he and the Congress under his leadership were out to Hinduise  India  and had
betrayed them and they thus could not be part of the substantially Hindu nation
that Gandhi conceived.         
Gandhi adopted many methods to create a reconciliation between Hindus and
Muslims. On a day to day level he was always asking and cajoling Hindus, in his
public speeches and utterances, to be friendly and decent with Muslims by
avoiding playing music outside mosques or taking out processions and he would in
turn ask Muslims to avoid cow slaughter. At a personal level he had close
relationships with many Muslims and of course people from other faiths who
usually maintained their lifelong friendships and loyalties to him which shows his
feelings towards them were most likely entirely genuine and not part of any
symbolism or political agenda necessarily. At the level of Congress politics his
great move was seeking and making an alliance with Muslim groups for the
Khilafat cause which he hoped would unite the two communities into one fighting
political force. Later for various reasons his attempts failed.  
Bhikhu Parekh is of the opinion that for Gandhi, Hindu‐Muslim divisions were
unacceptable because his idea of Indian fundamentally had as one of its elements
the harmonious co‐existence and co‐operation of different communities which
functioned and lived together while at the same time maintained their distinct
ideas and roles. He comments:  
‘………Indian civilisation was for him plural and synthetic and not only tolerated
and respected but positively cherished diversity and differences. It had provided a
hospitable framework within which different communities, cultures and religions
had lived side by side and made their distinct contributions. With all its
limitations and occasional quarrels, India had been a ‘happy’ family to which all its
children were privileged to belong.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s
Political  Philosophy,  p.  184)  Gandhi was passionate to uphold this view of
what constituted Indian civilisation. His depth of feeling on the matter can be
gauged from some of the following definitions of swaraj that he gave in 1921 in the
Gujarati publication Navajivan:
(It may be noted Gandhi used to advance various definitions of  swaraj  to make
his ideas clearer.)      
‘Swaraj means that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, and Jews should all
be able to follow their own faith and should respect those of others.’  
‘Complete disappearance of the evil passions in the hearts of Hindus and Muslims.
This means that a Hindu should respect Muslim’s feelings and should be ready to
lay down his life for him, and vice versa. Muslims should not slaughter cows for
the purpose of hurting Hindus; on the contrary, they should on their own refrain
from cow‐slaughter so as to spare the latter’s feelings. Likewise, without asking
for anything in return, Hindus should stop playing music before mosques with the
purpose of hurting Muslims, should actually feel proud in not playing music while

passing by a mosque.’  
passing by a mosque.’  
  (Source:  Navajivan,  14­08­1921,    Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.
20, p. 506)  
A major part of his strategy was to work on removing the daily irritants in the
relationship between Hindus and Muslims. He genuinely believed if Hindus and
Muslims start behaving well with each other in a spirit of genuine friendship and
decency and mutual tolerance for some time, then nothing would come in the
way – not the British policy of ‘divide and rule’ nor the deep distrust between the
two communities with its roots in history. His main appeal and attempt can be
understood for instance from the following writing of his that was published in his
journalYoung India in 1921:  
‘That unity in strength is not merely a copybook maxim but a rule of life is in no
case so clearly illustrated as in the problem of Hindu–Muslim unity. Divided we
must fall. Any third power may easily enslave  India  so long as we Hindus and
Mussulmans are ready to cut each other’s throats. Hindu‐Muslim unity means not
unity only between Hindus and Mussulmans but between all those who
believe  India  to be their home, no matter to what faith they belong. I am fully
aware that we have not yet attained that unity to such an extent as to bear any
strain. It is a daily growing plant, as yet in delicate infancy, requiring special care
and attention. The thing became clear in  Nellore when the problem confronted me
in a concrete shape. The relations between the two were none too happy. They
fought only about two years ago over what appeared to me to be a small matter.
It was the eternal question of playing music whilst passing mosques. I hold that
we may not dignify every trifle into a matter of deep religious importance.
Therefore a Hindu may not insist on playing music whilst passing a mosque. He
may not even quote precedents in his own or any other place for the sake of
playing music. It is not a matter of vital importance for him to play music whilst
passing a mosque. One can easily appreciate the Mussulman sentiment of having
solemn silence near a mosque the whole of the twenty‐four hours. What is a non‐
essential to a Hindu may be an essential to a Mussulman. And in all non‐essential
matters a Hindu must yield for the asking. It is criminal folly to quarrel over
trivialities. The unity we desire will last only if we cultivate a yielding and a
charitable disposition towards one another. The cow is as dear as life to a Hindu;
the Mussulman should therefore voluntarily accommodate his Hindu bother.
Silence at his prayer is a precious thing for a Mussulman. Every Hindu should
voluntarily respect his Mussulman brother’s sentiment. This however is a counsel
of perfection. There are nasty Hindus as there are nasty Mussulmans who would
pick a quarrel for nothing. For these we must provide  panchayats  of
unimpeachable probity and imperturbability whose decisions must be binding on
both parties. Public opinion should be cultivated in favour of the decisions of
such panchayatsso that no one would question them.  
I know that there is much, too much distrust of one another as yet. Many Hindus
distrust Mussulman honesty. They believe that swaraj means Mussulman raj, for
they argue that without the British, Mussulmans of India will aid Mussulman

powers to build a Mussulman empire in  . Mussulmans on the other hand fear
powers to build a Mussulman empire in  India. Mussulmans on the other hand fear
that the Hindus, being in an overwhelming majority, will smother them. Such an
attitude of mind betokens impotence on either’s part. If not their nobility, their
desire to live in peace would dictate a policy of mutual trust and mutual
forbearance. There is nothing in either religion to keep the two apart. The days
of forcible conversion are gone. Save for the cow, Hindus can have no ground for
quarrel with Mussulmans. The latter are under no religious obligation to slaughter
a cow. The fact is we have never before now endeavoured to come together to
adjust our differences and to live as friends bound to one another as children of
the same sacred soil.’
(Source: Young India, May 11, 1921)                    
It was one of Gandhi’s main strategic moves to take up the issue of Khilafat which
excepting a very small rather fundamentalist fringe, the vast majority of Muslims
were not really very enthusiastic about as it involved the questions of far away
Turkey and did not really touch the lives of the average Indian Muslim. Gandhi
hoped that Khilafat will endear Hindus to Muslims and remove the deep distrust
and chasm in terms of identity. The move to adopt the Khilafat cause surprised
Hindus and even many in the Congress but Gandhi was adamant that it should be
taken up with full energy. He even linked it to the Hindu’s desire to see cow‐
slaughter end and told them the way forward was through Khilafat. For instance
in a speech in  Kanpur in 1921 he said: ‘…Cow protection also depends on Khilafat.
Hindus must be prepared to make sacrifices for Khilafat without desiring anything
in return. Every morning I pray for the cows. Cow slaughter is the result of the
sins committed by Hindus; it is owing to these sins that we are deprived of the
sympathy of our brethren. We must repent for those sins. For a satisfactory
solution of the Khilafat question it is of utmost importance that there should be
Hindu‐Muslim unity. Khilafat alone will unite the two communities’.  (Source:
Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 20, p. 482)            
Interestingly Gandhi was not shy to state his political aims and intensions openly.
He wrote in 1920: ‘I hope my alliance with the Mahomedans to achieve a
threefold end – to obtain justice in the face of odds with the method of
Satyagraha and to show its efficacy over all other methods, to secure Mahomedan
friendship for the Hindus and thereby internal peace also, and last but not least
to transform ill‐will into affection for the British and their constitution which in
spite of its imperfections has weathered many a storm.’  (Source:  Judith  M.
Brown,  Gandhi,  p.  141ff)    But throughout he was careful to ensure that it
wasn’t interpreted by Muslims as a temporary political move as can be gauged
from the following:
‘This unity cannot be a mere policy to be discarded when it does not suit us. We
can discard it only when we are tired of  swaraj. Hindu‐Muslim unity must be a
creed to last for all time and under all circumstances.’ (Source: Young India,
Dec 2, 1920)                          

‘Hindu‐Muslim unity consists in our having a common purpose, a common goal and
‘Hindu‐Muslim unity consists in our having a common purpose, a common goal and
common sorrows. It is best promoted by cooperating to reach the common goal,
by sharing one another’s sorrows and by mutual toleration.’(Source:  Young
India, Feb 25, 1920)                        
‘What can be more natural than that Hindus and Mussalmans, born and bred in
India, having the same adversities, the same hopes, should be permanent friends,
brothers born of the same Mother India? The surprise is that we should fight, not
that we should unite.’
(Source: Young India, Aug 21, 1924)                            
‘For good or ill, the two communities are wedded to  India, they are neighbours,
sons of the soil. They are destined to die here, as they are born here. Nature will
force them to come together voluntarily.’  (Source:  Harijan,  October  29,
1938)                        
He was clear in his message to Hindus that they had to be the first to attempt to
win the love and trust of Muslims and that he was attempting to lead them into so
doing by example, even though for this move of his he began attracting the
hostility of Hindu nationalists and was ultimately killed:
‘I am striving to become the best cement between the two communities. My
longing is to be able to cement the two with my blood, if necessary. But before I
can do so, I must prove to the Mussulmans that I love them as well as I love the
Hindus. My religion teaches me to love all equally’.    (Source:  Young  India,
Sept 25, 1924)                 
It was Gandhi’s claim that Hinduism fundamentally was open and tolerant and
absorbent of all faiths and indeed allowed itself to be influenced by what is good
in other faiths and that was the secret of the strength of openness of Indian
civilisation and culture. He argued the Indian culture was deep down a believer in
truth and non‐violence and thus could absorb other faiths and not seek to
suppress them. Indeed he argued that was the reason Hinduism is not a
‘missionary faith’. He wrote: ‘Hinduism is not an exclusive religion. In it, there is
room for the worship of all the prophets of the world. It is not a missionary
religion in the ordinary sense of the term…..Hinduism tells everyone to worship
God according to his own faith or Dharma, and so it lives at peace with all the
religions.’ (Source: Young India, Oct 6, 1921). Or that: ‘..the Hindusim of my
conception is no narrow creed. It is a grand evolutionary process as ancient as
time, and embraces the teaches of Zoraster, Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Nanak
and other prophets.’  (Source:  Young  India,  March  8,
1942)                                                                  
Bhikhu Parekh has argued that Gandhi’s viewpoint of Hinduism and its basics and
the influence of Islam and its absorption may have been innocent, deeply felt and
even basically right, but it did not necessarily play out politically in the way
Gandhi would have wanted it to, as Muslim sensitivities were not always accepting
Gandhi’s views as such. He comments:

‘…….India was not (Gandhi argued) a nation but a civilisation which had over the
‘…….India was not (Gandhi argued) a nation but a civilisation which had over the
centuries benefited from the contributions of different races and religions and
was distinguished by its plurality, diversity and tolerance. It was a community of
communities, each enjoying considerable autonomy within a larger and shared
framework. As for Hindus and Muslims, they had lived side by side in the villages
and cities for centuries without ever feeling that they were enemies or oppressed
one by the other.  India was a united country long before the Muslims came, and it
was absurd to argue it had ceased to be so afterwards. What was more, most
Muslims were converted Hindus and their claim to nationhood was no more valid
than would be that of a section of English citizens converted to Islam to a
separate state in  England. As Gandhi wrote to Jinnah, ‘I find no parallel in history
for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from
the parent stock. If India was one nation before the advent of Islam, it must remain
one in spite of a change of the faith of a very large body of her children’.
                 Gandhi’s and other Congress leaders’ description of Muslims as ‘ex‐
Hindus’, ‘converts’ and ‘basically Hindus’ caused much misunderstanding and
resentment. The Muslims construed it as an implicit denial of their separate
cultural identity and a sign of Hindu imperialism. They were both right and
wrong, for Gandhi and the Congress used this term in two very different senses
which they did not clearly distinguish. First, they used it in areligious  sense
implying that Muslims had once been Hindus who had later converted to Islam out
of fear or hope of reward. In this sense the terms implied that they had betrayed
their ancestral religion and were inauthentic Muslims, and carried derogatory
overtones. The second sense of the term was  cultural  or civilisation‐al and had
quite different associations. It grew out of a search for the deeper bonds binding
the two communities. Since the vast majority of Muslims had once been Hindus,
they shared in common with them their beliefs, customs, social practices, values,
and ways of life, and thought, in a word a civilisation. Their conversion to Islam
changed their religious identity but could not and did not affect the deeper
cultural continuity between the two communities. Indeed, they carried their old
culture with them to their new religion and profoundly Indiansied it. They were
therefore not just Muslims but Indian Muslims, Indians not merely in a territorial
but cultural sense, and co‐heirs with the Hindus to Indian civilisation. It is this
that Gandhi intended to emphasise in describing them rather clumsily as ‘ex‐
Hindus’ or ‘basically Hindus’. Since he did not clearly distinguish the two senses,
and since many of his followers generally used the terms in their accusatory
sense, their use was a source of irritation to Muslims.’ (Source: Bhikhu Parekh,
Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy,  p.  177ff)    Bhikhu Parekh has made the point
that Gandhi may have attempted to unite the two communities to remove one of
the fundamental blockages in a national political identity but in his approach
there was a fundamental problem – he relied on the what he thought is the basic
Hindu character and did not really try to or was in a position to reconcile the
deep historical divide. He comments:

‘Although Gandhi himself did not put it this way, Indian history for him began
‘Although Gandhi himself did not put it this way, Indian history for him began
with the arrival of the Aryans and continued for several thousand years during
which it developed a rich Hindu culture. The Muslim and British periods were
largely aberrations made possible by Hindu decadence, and significant because of
their revitalising influence on Hinduism. The Muslims were basically converted
Hindus whose religion was but an icing on their essentially Hindu cake. And as for
British rule, it imported an alien civilisation unsuited to the Indian genius of which
the culturally revitalised  India was only to assimilate a few elements. The Muslim
perception of Indian history and identity was diametrically opposite to Gandhi’s.
In their view they were outsiders in both their historical origins and cultural
sympathies and of a different stock from the Hindus. While some had inter‐
married with Hindus, many had for centuries retained their ethnic ‘purity’. It was
true that a significant number of them were Hindu converts. However, the
conversion was not a mere credal change but a process of profound
transformation that de‐Hinduised them, gave them a wholly new identity and
marked a drastic rupture with their past. For the Muslims their history had begun
outside  India and was continued and flourished in it for several centuries before it
was interrupted by British rule. Deeply divided about their past, their present
became a shaggy terrain on which they jousted for their divided future. They
needed a balanced view of Indian history capable of recognising the rich
contributions each had made to the development of Indian civilisation. Gandhi
was obviously not in a position to provide it. …..It is true that unlike Tilak,
Aurobindo, Savarkar, and others for whom Hinduism was to be the basis of Indian
unity, Gandhi took a genuinely plural view of India. His India was a creative synthesis
of many civilisations and a happy home of different religious, linguistic, and
ethnic groups. However, when it came to articulating the nature of the synthesis
and the manner of their co‐existence, he unwittingly fell back on Hinduism. The
cultural synthesis was for him a uniquelyHindu  achievement and a tribute to
the  Hindu  way of tolerance. Furthermore, since Gandhi’s approach to life was
essentially moral and spiritual, the differences in culture, customs, habits of
thought, literature and forms of art between the two communities disappeared at
that highly abstract level and never really entered his perceptual universe. Rather
than recognise and reconcile the historically generated differences, he took his
stand on a trans‐historical plane and simply ignored them. A view of history that
left out history itself could hardly be expected to unite those haunted by it. To be
sure unlike Tilak and Aurobindo Gandhi left a large and autonomous cultural
space for Muslims. However, it was a space within a basically Hindu framework.
They were given the fullest freedom to preserve their identity and grow, but not
integrated into and seen as a vital and indispensable  component of the larger
Indian identity. Unlike the Hindu fundamentalists who Hinduised  India, Gandhi
genuinely tried to Indianise Hinduism and opened it up to Muslim and other
influences. While this was a momentous step in the right direction,
his  India  continued to rest on a Hindu foundation.’  (Source:  Ibid.    p.  189ff)   
Thus in the opinion of Bhikhu Parekh who is regarded as one of the most
authoritative scholars on Gandhi, this was a great lacunae in the Gandhian
approach to dealing with the problem of communal unity. He comments: ‘Gandhi
could have avoided this if he had done two things. First, rather than equate pre‐
could have avoided this if he had done two things. First, rather than equate pre‐
Muslim  India with Hinduism he should have seen it as a home of many cultures, of
which the dominant Hindu culture was but one. While recognising the great Hindu
contribution to the development of  India, this would have allowed him to separate
the two, challenge Hindu possessiveness about  Indiaand to provide a broad
framework within which the non‐Hindus could claim to be just as authentically
Indian as the Hindus. Secondly, he should have appreciated more fully than he did
that ‘Hinduism’ was not an undifferentiated whole but a loose and complex
structure of beliefs, values, rituals, and practices evolved out of the sediments
left behind by many an indigenous and foreign civilisation. It was a continually
evolving and an incredibly diverse and open tradition so that one could be a Hindu
in several different and sometimes incompatible ways. TheVaishnavites,
the Saivites, the Tantric schools of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ and the others, who
shared little in common, not even belief in the  Vedas, rebirth, and
the varnashramadharma, were all Hindus. The orthodox, orsanatani, Hindu is
therefore a contradiction in terms. Indeed, insofar as it imposes an unwarranted
credal unity, the term Hinduism itself is inaccurate and does injustice to Hindus.
….Of the two essential steps Gandhi needed to take in order to arrive at a
historically accurate view of  India, he did not take the first and took the second
only to a limited degree. This was not at all because he shared the Hindus’
possessiveness about  India or took a parochial view of Hinduism. On the contrary,
his views of both  India and Hinduism were remarkably… open. What got in the way
were his limited knowledge of Indian history, inadequate historical imagination
and the failure of the earlier generations of leaders to do the necessary
spadework. Gandhi could hardly be blamed for not doing what none before had
done and none since either.’    (Source: Ibid. ,  p. 190ff)                 
 
Politically even when gradually the Congress under Gandhi’s leadership was losing
its authority to speak for India’s muslims, Gandhi was fairly uncompromising for a
very long time in his basic stance that the Congress and he had the right to
represent India’s Muslims as much as the Muslim League or other Muslim parties
and political outfits. As late as 1946 when as per the negotiations of the Cabinet
Mission Plan, an Executive Council was to be formed, the Congress nominated a
Muslim to represent the Congress to which Jinnah objected and refused to go
along with it, his argument being only the Muslim League had a right to represent
Muslim and nominate a Muslim. When the Viceroy Wavell requested Gandhi to ask
the Congress to waive the right to nominate a Muslim as Jinnah was obstinately
objecting (and it may lead to violence) even though he himself had no problems
with the basic position of the Congress, Gandhi refused and wrote to Wavell:
‘You recognised fully the reasonableness of the Congress position, but you held
that it would be an act of high statesmanship if the Congress waive the right for
the sake of peace. I urge that if it was a question of waiving a right it would be a
simple thing. It was a question of non‐performance of a duty which the Congress
owed to non‐League Muslims.’  (Source:  Wavell’s
Journal, Oxford University Press)  
Even though Gandhi was firm in his publicly argued principled positions he had
Even though Gandhi was firm in his publicly argued principled positions he had
begun to sense that the communal problem was going out of the hands of the
national leaders and the Congress even in the 1920s. Bhikhu Parekh has
researched this well and explains:
‘Around 1926, Gandhi’s views began to undergo a decisive change. In that year he
wrote to Nehru that the two communities were going ‘more and more away from
each other’. He told a meeting in  Bengal  a year later that the ‘Hindu‐Muslim
problem had passed out of human hands into God’s hands’. He told Jinnah a few
months later that he wished he could do something, but was ‘utterly hopeless’.
He kept striving for unity, but increasingly felt that the British policy of ‘divide
and rule’ stood in the way and that nothing could be done until after
independence. He told Ansari in 1930 that ‘the third party, the evil British power’
was creating the difficulties. Over a year later he wrote that ‘the moment the
alien wedge is removed, the divided communities are bound to unite’. He
repeated the view as late as 1942 and thought that ‘unity will not precede but
succeed freedom’. This was why he kept urging Jinnah to delay partition until
after independence and assured him that if things did not work out, he would
have his Pakistan. Gandhi remained convinced until the end of his life that since the
two communities shared common civilisational, ethnic and other bonds, nothing
substantial divided them save the British policy of ‘divide and rule’ and ‘small’
misunderstandings.’ (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political  Philosophy,
p. 187)
Gandhi’s answer throughout to the problem was to change behaviours and hearts.
He fell back on his old techniques, which clearly were proving ineffective. As
Judith Brown has commented: ‘As communal tension heightened and politics
became polarised on communal lines, Gandhi was painfully aware of his own
powerlessness, however profoundly he still hoped for communal unity: all he felt
he could do was pray. His personal non‐violence seemed incapable of altering the
situation; nor did his colleagues in the Congress seem to take seriously his
suggestion that the only way to win Muslim hearts was by serving Muslims,
particularly in the villages, as opposed to the superficial ways of making mass
political contacts or contriving high level political compromises’.      (Source:
Judith M. Brown, Gandhi, p. 296) In fact Bhikhu Parekh feels it was this basic
approach which explains why Gandhi was not very successful in dealing with the
communal problem: ‘Thanks to the basic limitation of his approach, Gandhi was
unable adequately to conceptualise, let alone resolve, the Hindu‐Muslim conflict.
He could not see why men should quarrel at all, especially members of the same
national family. He could not appreciate the deeper economic and historical roots
of the conflict either, and attributed it to narrow hearts and emotional
insensitivity. He thought that if Muslims stopped killing cows and Hindus ceased
playing music outside mosques, most of their quarrels would disappear. He could
not see that his sincere attempts to establish cordial and even friendly relations
with individual Muslims made no impact on the relations between the two groups.
Nor did he have much insight either into the deepest fears and suspicions Muslims
had entertained about Hindus since 1857, or the painful historical memories of

Muslim persecution nursed by the latter. Every time a conflict occurred he turned
Muslim persecution nursed by the latter. Every time a conflict occurred he turned
to the Hindus and asked for heroic sacrifices. Since they were in a majority,
better educated and more advantaged, he asked them to ‘yield up to the
Mohammedans and what the later desire and ….rejoice in so doing’. Their
sacrifices, he insisted, must not be ‘cheap and tawdry’ and based on ‘mere
reciprocation’, but should spring from ‘love’ and ‘generosity’. When they
resisted, he felt hurt and sought to ‘purify’ their consciences by means of fasts
and plaintive appeals. This inherently precarious method worked for a while, but
soon began to provoke strong feelings of resentment and bitterness among
them.’. (Source: Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 186ff) 
For all the scholarly analyses of the limitations of Gandhi’s approach Gandhi’s
actions against communal tensions were often extremely heroic and moving and
also very effective. His great fast at  Calcutta  to stop the communal killings when
partition riots had started had been very effective in controlling it and in fact he
had managed to send a powerful message throughout the Indian sub‐continent
when he could end his fast after the warring sides agreed to stop killing each
other and peace was achieved. Historian Sumit Sarkar has described this period of
Gandhi’s life for his attempts at dowsing the flames of communal hatred in the
midst of partition as ‘The Mahatma’s finest hour’.(Source:  Sumit  Sarkar,
Modern India, p. 437)   Gandhi was deeply stirred by the communal divide and
to what extent he remained ever ready to go to achieve communal unity.
Ultimately it can be said in conclusion he laid down his life for the cause.  
    
Exercise:
1. Explain Gandhi’s views on the problem of communal unity and the approach he
adopted to deal with it.
2.1 Gandhi on Untouchability
LESSON ‐ 3
Gandhi on Untouchability
 
                                                                                           
                — Amaresh Ganguli
 

Objectives

 
After reading this article you will be familiar with:
Gandhiji’s thoughts on the evil of untouchability
The urgency for elimination of this social evil in the Gandhian plan for national
reconstruction and forging national unity
The Gandhian strategy for dealing with the problem 
 

Introduction

 
Of all the social evils that beset  India  of his times perhaps none moved Gandhi
quite as much as untouchability. He saw it as one of the principal obstructions in
reforming and uniting Hindus and by extension the whole of the Indian nation. He
realised the whole moral basis for asking for freedom from the colonial masters
would be rendered void and hollow if Indians continued to condone and acquiesce
in the practice of untouchability. Hence Gandhi focussed on removal of
untouchability with an energy and zeal that was unprecedented in the history of
Indian social and political movements.
 

Discussion
 
Before understanding the Gandhian approach to untouchability and how he
proposed to deal with it is necessary to understand Gandhi’s understanding and
estimation of the Hindu caste system or varnashram. It is instructive perhaps to
begin by studying some of his utterances on the issue remembering the fact of
course that he was a declared follower of the Hindu Sanatan Dharma. As such
he would have perhaps approached the caste division idea with a positive frame
of mind at least at the beginning to try and understand its benefits. It is also of
course true that like all human beings Gandhi evolved in his thoughts over the
course true that like all human beings Gandhi evolved in his thoughts over the
period of his life.
 
Writing in 1920 he somewhat defensively wrote:
‘Man, being a social being, has to devise some method of social organisation. We
in  India  have evolved caste; they inEurope  have organised class. Neither has the
solidarity and naturalness of a family, which, perhaps, is a God‐ordained
institution. If caste has produced certain evils, class has not been productive of
anything less.’ (Source: Young India, December 29, 1920)
But then he was also quick to argue: ‘The beauty of the caste system is that it
does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth possessions……..Caste is but an
extension of the principle of the family. Both are governed by blood and
heredity’.    (Source: Young India, December 29, 1920) Also:
‘The spirit behind caste is not one of arrogant superiority; it is the classification
of different systems of self‐culture. It is the best possible adjustment of social
stability and progress.’
‘Caste does not connote superiority or inferiority. It simply recognises different
outlooks and corresponding modes of life. But it is no use denying the fact that a
sort of hierarchy has been evolved in the caste system.’      (Source:  Young
India, December 29, 1920)
 
Gandhi was indeed quite open in seeing positive aspects in the caste system. For
instance he regarded it as scientifically organised. He commented: ‘Caste system
has, in my opinion, a scientific basis. Reason does not revolt against it. If it has
disadvantages, it also has its advantages. It does not prevent a  Brahmin  from
serving his  Shudrabrother. Caste creates a social and moral restraint. The
doctrine of caste cannot be extended. I would restrict it to four divisions. Any
multiplication would be an evil.’   (Source: Young India, march 12, 1925)   
Or that: ‘From the economic point of view, its value was once very great. It
ensured hereditary skill; it limited competition. It was the best remedy against
pauperism. And it had all the advantages of trade guilds. Although it did not
foster adventure or invention there, it is not known to have come in the way
either.’  (Source: Young India, January 5, 1921)   
 
Indeed Gandhi looked forward to offer the caste system for emulation by the rest
of the world as he said: ‘Historically speaking, caste may be regarded as man’s
experiment or social adjustment in the laboratory of Indian society. If we can
prove it to be a success, it can be offered to the world as a heaven and as the
best remedy against heartless competition and social disintegration born of
avarice and greed’. (Source: Young India, January 5, 1921)  
 
The reader of the above utterances sitting in this day and age may be surprised
The reader of the above utterances sitting in this day and age may be surprised
and even shocked but let us remember at the time Gandhi expressed the above
views, caste system  was the reality of the Indian social order. Indeed unlike now
when it may be totally politically incorrect and a taboo even among educated
circles to refer to caste in positive terms, it was the opposite then and anybody
suggesting anything critical of the caste system was seen as breaking the well
established social conventions and uttering very threatening anti‐social and
possibly anti‐religious statements. Indeed Gandhi was attacked when he later got
somewhat fed up with the rigidities of the caste system and its fall out of the evil
of untouchability and if today we live in a society that is relatively free from
these evils we have only Gandhi and the leadership and the social reformers of
that era to thank. Gandhi in contrast to what one might conclude from the views
given above attempted later to redefine in a social, political and spiritual sense
the Indian Hindu caste system and eventually did more than any other leader in
Indian history perhaps to publicly attack and fight the evil of untouchability at the
level of social reforms without the aid of legal fiat.    
 
Gandhi clearly as will be clear from the following quotes never accepted as a
valid Hindu practice in a religious and spiritual sense the caste system as
practiced in his time (and indeed to a large extent as it continues to be practiced
to this day) and thus even his positive views on aspects of the caste system are
open to interpretations that may not be obvious on the face of it, for most of the
above quotations, from the early 1920s. He commented for instance in 1931: ‘I do
not believe in caste in the modern sense. It is an excrescence and a handicap on
progress.’     (Source: Young India, June 4, 1931)
Then again: ‘Caste in so far at it connotes distinctions in status, is an
evil.’ (Source: Young India, June 4, 1931)
He denied caste system had a religious basis: ‘Caste has nothing to do with
religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know, and do not need to know. But I
do know that it is harmful, both to spiritual and national growth.’    (Source:
Harijan, July 18, 1936)
With time he turned more and more scathing (and presumably could take the risk
of taking positions that would have been risky given the conservative society
before). He commented in 1946  ‘Soil erosion eats up good soil. It is bad enough.
Caste erosion is worse; it eats up men and divides men from men.’  (Source:
Harijan, May 5, 1946)       
 
Gandhi realised that for the cause of forging a national identity and a national
spirit the leadership will have to eliminate or dilute social divisions. And one of
the worst divisions unique to  India was the caste divide with untouchability as its
ugliest manifestation. Thus as a matter of political strategy for the cause of the
freedom struggle it was an urgency to fight the caste divide and eliminate
untouchability. Also as a social reformer who believed the key to national
regeneration was a rebuilding of the national character, particularly the Hindu
regeneration was a rebuilding of the national character, particularly the Hindu
character, he saw it as a vital imperative to eliminate the evils of caste and
untouchability. Also as somebody who had it as one of his goals the spiritual
revival of the Hindu religion, he came to see it vital and most urgent that
untouchability be eliminated and the caste rigidities diluted. But as has been
explained above, as a follower of the Hindu sanatan dharma he never for one
moment would have thought that some kind of caste system or varnashram can
not exist or that can not be devised that would be good and for the benefit of
society. He also probably in all likelihood thought it’s true meaning may have
been lost by Hindus over thousands of years of abuse and social degradation. He
attempted to draw the contours of what would be an acceptable system to him.
He commented in 1926 for instance: ‘I do not believe in caste as it is at present
constituted, but I do believe in the four fundamental divisions regulated
according to the four principal occupations. The existing innumerable divisions,
with the attendant artificial restrictions and elaborate ceremonial, are harmful to
the growth of a religious spirit, as also to the social well‐being of the Hindus and,
therefore, also their neighbours.’        (Source:  Young  India,  Feb  25,
1926)        
 
It was Gandhi’s case that the caste system had to be purified and corrected from
the abusive and distorted form it had taken. This was his position both because he
wished to reform and save Hinduism from its degraded state and raise the
character of the Hindu for the sake of both Hindus and the Indian national cause
but also because he realised the first step in fighting the British must be removing
the blockages in the unity of the nation and one of the major divisions was caste.
Of course he was not suggesting abolishing of the caste system and was only
pleading for a mitigation of its worst aspects. One of the aspects that disturbed
him most was the tendency of Indians to keep increasing the number of caste
divisions. He made his impatience clear with the practice of sub‐dividing the four
castes again and again. His attempt at giving a new meaning to caste
or  varnaashrama  can be judged from the following comments of his as
illustration:
‘The divisions or classes are four and no more, and these classes are known all the
world over. One is the repository of knowledge, the other is that of power, the
third is that of wealth and the fourth is that of service. All these four labours are
regarded as duties to be discharged by everyone of them for the protection and
advancement ofDharma; and everyone who performs his duty to the best of his
knowledge and ability, gains equal merit with the rest, if the latter, too, do
likewise. The merit, therefore, consists, not in being one or the other, but in the
performance of the duty assigned to it. Here, there is no untouchability. There is
no superiority. And this is the essence of  Varna Dharma.’    (Source:  Harijan
,March 4, 1933)

‘According to my conception of Varna, all inequality is ruled out of life. Inequality

‘According to my conception of Varna, all inequality is ruled out of life. Inequality
of intellect or in material possessions ought not to mean inequality of social
status. I do most emphatically maintain that man is not made to choose his
occupation for ‘rising in the social scale’. He is made to serve his fellow‐man and
earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. And since the primary wants of all
are the same, all labour should carry the same value.’        (Source:  Harijan,
March 11, 1933)
‘Life is a duty, not a bundle of rights and privileges. That religion is doomed to
destruction which bases itself upon a system of gradations, high and low. Such is
not the meaning for me of Varnashrama.’ (Source: Young India, November
5, 1925)
‘The divisions define duties, they confer no privileges. It is, I hold, against the
genius of Hinduism to arrogate to oneself a higher status or assign to another a
lower. All are born to serve God’s creation. – a  Brahmin  with his knowledge,
a Kshatriya with his power of protection, a Vaishya with his commercial ability
and a Shudra with bodily labour.’ (Source: Young India, October 6, 1921)
‘Varnashrama is not a vertical line, but that it is a horizontal plane on which all
the children of God occupy absolutely the same status, though they may be
engaged in different pursuits of life and though they may have different qualities
and different tastes.’ (Source: Harijan, Feb 18, 1933)                  
But Gandhi was very vehement in opposing the practice of  varnashrama  as it
then was in his time:
‘Varnashrama seems to me to be an ideal system conceived for the highest good
of society. What we see to day is a travesty and a mockery of the original. And
if  Varnashram  is to abide, Hindus must sweep away the mockery and
restore  Varnashrama  to its pristine dignity.’  (Source:  Young  India,
November 5, 1925)
Or that: ‘Varna  has nothing to do with caste. Caste is an excrescence, just like
untouchability, upon Hinduism.’(Source:  Wit  and  Wisdom  of  Mahatma
Gandhi, p. 142)    
 
While arguing for a reform of the caste system Gandhi was careful to explain he
was not asking that they start eating together and inter‐marrying. Perhaps he
knew it would be realistically in a social and political sense too much to expect or
perhaps he only wished to remove the really ugly edges of the system and had no
real repulsion for a substantial portion of it, if it was suitably reformed. The
answers to these question will remian open to interpretation and research but
what is certain he had absolutely not the slightest hesitation and doubt in calling
for the total abolition of untouchability which he saw as completely immoral,
inhuman, repugnant to Hindu basics, a great barrier in national unity, a sin and
without reason. He also believed we as a people could not ask for freedom from
the British on the basis of equality of all men when we ourselves were  ready to
treat a substantial part of our own people as unequal.
treat a substantial part of our own people as unequal.
 
Gandhi’s attack on the worst aspects of the caste system and untouchability had
mainly two sides to it. He argued on the one hand that it was not in conformity
with the basics of Hindu  advaita  principles and on the other that socially and
politically it would be indefensible if we are to ask for freedom from the British
when almost one fifth of our own people we were not ready to see as free people.
 
To argue the case from the point of Hinduism’s basics he relied on Advaita
Vedantic principles exactly as Swami Vivekananda had done before him. He
pointed out that as per advaita all men were equal and the same because they
were part of the same cosmic unity or divine:
‘I believe in advaita, I believe in the essential unity of man and for that matter
of all that lives. Therefore, I believe that if one man gains spiritually, the whole
world gains with him and, if one man falls, the whole world falls to that
extent.’ (Source: Young India, December 4, 1924)               
Bhikhu Parekh has commented on how Gandhi’s attempt to reorient the practice
of Hinduism as follows:
‘In these and other ways Gandhi profoundly redefined Hinduism and gave it a
radically novel orientation. Not God, not Man, but men were made its centre, and
self‐purification and their active service in the spirit of love constituted its
content. Gandhi thus rationalised Hinduism and reduced it to a set of such basic
moral principles as love, truth,ahimsa, and social service. He marginalised
the sastras and deprived them of their religious and moral authority. He rarely
referred to them to support his views, poured contempt on the endless debates
about the meanings of their isolated passages and interpreted them as he thought
proper. He thereby undermined the traditional religious basis of Brahmanic
authority and liberated Hinduism from their stranglehold. The Brahmins had
stressed the authority of the  sastras; Gandhi argued that they, including even
the Vedas, were subject to the test of reason and conscience. They had insisted
on the eternal validity of the revealed knowledge; Gandhi contended that
every yuga had is own unique dharma and periodically needed to reinterpret the
eternal moral principles. They had concentrated on the ritual and ceremonial
aspect of religion; Gandhi made social service its basis. The Brahmins glorified the
intellectual and spiritual and condemned manual activities; Gandhi insisted that
the latter were an integral part of the cosmicyajna  and that whoever avoided
them was a ‘thief’ and a ‘parasite’. They regarded certain activities and the
people engaged in them as polluted; Gandhi rejoined that only those engaged in
the ‘lowly’ activities truly served their fellow men and made the untouchables,
not the Brahmins, the privileged ‘children of God’. Gandhi turned Hinduism
upside down in a way no‐one had done before, and did it with such consummate
skill and authority that the Brahmins were thoroughly outsmarted.’  (Source:
Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s PoliticalPhilosophy)    
 
 
But it is interesting to note he was always careful to not suggest anything that
would be too much disruptive of the social reality. For instance once addressing
his own Vaishnav community in Gujrat in 1921 he said:
‘Some Vaishnavs  believe that I am destroying varnashram. On the contrary, I
believe that I am trying to cleanse it of impurities and so reveal its true form. I
am certainly not advocating abolition of restrictions on eating and drinking in
company with anyone and everyone or on inter‐marrying among communities. I
merely say that the idea that physical contact with some person is a sin is itself
sinful.’
So he was quite blunt however when it came to condemning untouchability. He
went on:
‘… If anyone avoided contact with an Antyaj who had been engaged in sanitary
work and had not bathed or otherwise cleansed himself after the work, or, in case
he had contact with such an Antyaj, went and had a bath, I can understand the
idea. But my conscience can never accept the idea that  dharma  requires us to
keep away scrupulously from everyone born an Antyaj.
The inspiration of the Vaishnav way is compassion. I do not see a trace of this in
our treatment of the  Antyaj. Many among us never address an  Antyaj  except
with a word of contempt. If an  Antyaj  is ever found sitting in the same
compartment with other Hindus, there will be a rain of abuse on him. We offer
hem food left over on our plates, as we do to cattle. If an Antyaj has fever or is
bitten by a serpent, our vaids and doctors will refuse to go to his place and treat
him. If anyone should get ready to go, we would do everything in our power to
stop him. For their residence, the  Antyajas get the worst localities, with no
amenities like light and public streets. They are provided with no wells for their
use. They cannot use public wells and dharamshalas and cannot attend schools.
We expect from them the most difficult of services and pay them the least. The
sky above and the earth below is all that they have by way of cruelty ?. The
British Government, against which you have launched non‐cooperation, does not
treat us with such contempt. We actually cherish our Dyerism towards Antyajas
as dharma.
                      Speaking for myself, I believe we are reaping as we sowed. Treating
the  Antyajas with contempt, we have become objects of the entire world’s
contempt.
The ides of untouchability is unacceptable to reason. It is contrary to truth and
non‐violence and, therefore, is certainly not dharma. The very idea of our being
high and others low is base. He is no true Brahmin who lacks the quality of the
Sudra; readiness for service. He alone is a Brahmin who possesses the quality of
all others, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya and the Sudra and, in addition, has
knowledge. A Sudra is not altogether devoid of knowledge. Readiness for service
is predominant in him over his other qualities. The  varnashrama­dharma  has
no room for distinctions of high and low. The  Vaishnava  tradition knows
of Bhangis  and  Chandals  who attained deliverance. How can a dharma which
of Bhangis  and  Chandals  who attained deliverance. How can a dharma which
holds that the entire universe is permeated by Vishnu believe that He is not
present in theAntyaj ?.  
I have no desire, however, to interpret the sastras to you. I do not claim to be a
man of learning. Every shastri is welcome to have the better of me in interpreting
the Shastras. I know with confidence that I have had some experience of what the
way of compassion means. This way can have simply no room in it for an attitude
of contempt for  Antyajas.’  (Source:  A  report  in  Gujrati  newspaper
Navajivan  dt.  03­07­1921  from  the  Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.
20, p. 319­20) 
 
In fact Gandhi believed if untouchability was not dealt with it could lead to the
destruction of Hinduism itself and when Rajagopalachariar, a close associate
advised him to slow down his work for  harijans  and against untouchability he
replied: ‘but how can I rest? How can one have rest with a raging fire within? How
can any Hindu, knowing that Hinduism is on the brink of an active volcano, afford
to have a moment’s rest?’.    (Source:  Speech,  2  January  1935,  Collected
Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 60, pp. 46­7)  He wrote in 1936: ‘Untouchablity is
a blot upon Hinduism and must be removed at any cost. Untouchability is a poison
which, if we do not get rid of it in time, will destroy Hinduism.’    (Source:
Harijan, June 20, 1936)
 
Gandhi turned himself into a full‐fledged program for the uplift of Harijans. He
not only led by personal example embracing the people from the lower
untouchable castes in his ashrams but he also invariably set up the ashrams in
harijan dominated villages where it was his endeavour to improve the quality of
village life. It was his firm belief that the key to his goal was to alleviate the
poverty and degradation of harijan villages for them to come up. He also started
opening temples for harijans but believed it would be even better if upper caste
hindus could permit harijans to visit their own temples. In fact he was desperate
to reform Hindu society and was sure harijans would leave the fold of Hinduism if
they were not embraced back. When Ambedkar, the great leader of the dalits and
untouchables who publicly disagreed with Gandhi, and called his efforts cosmetic
charity rather then real radical reform, advised his fellow harijans to move to
other faiths like Buddhism he opposed and argued against conversion warning it
could not be genuine. He said for instance:
‘But religion is not like a house or a cloak which can be changed at will. It is more
an integral part of one’s self than of one’s body. Religion is the tie that binds one
to one’s Creator and whilst the body perishes…..religion persists even after
death.’ (Source: Gandhi to E. Menon, 5 January 1935, Collected Works of
MK Gandhi, Vol. 60, p.57) 
 

In fact he felt it was untouchability in particular that put Hinduism at a huge

In fact he felt it was untouchability in particular that put Hinduism at a huge
disadvantage vis‐à‐vis other faiths that were on an evangelical preaching mission.
He had written:
‘And why do I say that untouchability is a curse, a blot and a powerful poison that
will destroy Hinduism? It is repugnant to our sense of humanity to consider a
single human being as untouchable by birth. If you were to examine the scriptures
of the world and the conduct of people other than Hindu, you do not find any
parallel to untouchability.’
(Source: Harijan, June 20, 1936)
 
Even though Gandhi in public as has been mentioned above never promoted too
radical measures like marriage between castes etc, later in his life to his most
close associates he had even moved beyond that and suggested the possibility of
considering arranged inter‐marriages. For instance he once said regarding the
arranging of marriages for young people by his close associates: ‘The barriers
ought to be broken. When the whole country is ours, why should we keep
ourselves confined to one community or region.’  (Source:  Gandhi  to
Gangabehn  Vaidya,  3  August  1937,  Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.
66, p. 9)
 
Gandhi was convinced untouchability was an aberration that had happened much
later and was not a part of the original practice of  sanatan  dharma.  He had
strongly opined: ‘There is an ineffaceable blot that Hinduism today carries with
it. I have declined to believe that it has been handed down to us from
immemorial times. I think that this miserable, wretched, enslaving spirit of
untouchability must have come to us when we were in the cycle of our lives at
our lowest ebb…. That any person should be considered untouchable in this sacred
land, passes one’s comprehension.’      (Source:  Speeches  and  Writings  of
Mahatma Gandhi, p. 387)    
 
Gandhi was clear that he wanted Hindus to see untouchability as a sin in the
religious Hindu sense and his powerful spiritual appeal on the issue can be gauged
from the following:
‘They are not untouchables, we are untouchables. They eat and drink and think
and feel even as we do. If a sum total of their virtues and vices and the privileges
they are denied were to be made and compared with our virtues and vices and
the privileges we enjoy and deny to them, I am sure in God’s books we should find
our debit side far heavier than theirs.’   (Source: Young India, May 13, 1926)
‘It is a sin to believe that anyone else is inferior or superior to ourselves. We are
all equal. It is the touch of sin that pollutes us, and never that of a human being.
None are high and none are low for one who would devote his life to service. The
distinction between High and low is a blot on Hinduism, which we must
obliterate.’  (Source: The Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 286)  
obliterate.’  (Source: The Diary of Mahadev Desai, p. 286)  
‘I do want moksha. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should
be born as an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and the
affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them
from that miserable condition….If I should die with any of my desires unfulfilled,
with my service of the untouchables unfinished, with my Hinduism unfulfilled, I
may be born again amongst the untouchables to bring my Hinduism to
fulfilment.’ (Source: Harijan, Sept 12, 1936)  
 
Gandhi in his national propaganda against untouchability had carried out three
fasts or hunger strikes to highlight the issue out of his total seventeen fasts for
various causes. Sometimes he had to deal with the most interesting questions and
objections. For instance he would be asked if untouchables are treated
differently who will do the sanitary work. He had replied once to such a question:
‘When untouchability has disappeared altogether, it is not feared
that Bhangis will refuse to do sanitary work, if they are properly paid and well
treated. Sanitary work is done well enough, if not better, in other parts of the
world. But assuming that the Bhangis, on the bar sinister being removed, refuse
to do or scavenging, we must be prepared to do it ourselves. The removal of
untouchability implies that there is no sin or shame in cleaning for other people,
even as it is no sin for a mother to clean her baby or for a paid nurse to clean her
or his patient.’   (Source: Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 20, pp.261­
62)  Similarly he was asked in response to his suggestion of education for
untouchables, ‘who will then do their work?’. His angry but patient and careful
response was: ‘This question itself shows the frightfulness of untouchability as we
understand it today. There is nothing but scorn of untouchables in our everyday
behaviour towards them. I think the very notion that education would make them
give up being sweepers is wrong. The reason for it, however, lies in ourselves. We
look down on the profession of a Bhangi,  but, in fact, it is sacred work as it is
concerned with cleanliness. A mother is regarded with all the greater feeling of
sanctity because she removes the faeces of the child. We respect a woman who
nurses the sick and is engaged in removing things which smell most offensively.
Should we not worship the person who always cleans our lavatories and thereby
helps us to remain free from disease?. By treating such persons as low, we have
sunk low ourselves. Anyone pushing another into a well himself falls into it along
with others We have no right, thus, to look down on the Bhangis and others like
them as belonging to low castes.
Even though Bhoja Bhagat was a was Mochi, we sing his devotional songs with
love and revere him. Which reader of the  Ramayana  does not worship the
hunter for his devotion to Rama?. Moreover, if Bhangis and others give up their
profession, we need not oppose them or get alarmed. We shall not be fit for
swaraj so long as we seek to force any work on people. We should learn to keep
our lavatories clean. They will be as clean as our reading room when we feel
ashamed of keeping them dirty. The filth in our lavatories, the foul odour and the
gases which are generated in consequence works as a blot on our culture and
gases which are generated in consequence works as a blot on our culture and
bespeak our ignorance of the laws of hygiene. The condition of our lavatories is a
proof of our unworthy attitude to the  Antyajas  and the cause of many of the
diseases from which we suffer. The idea that contact with members of other
communities will make us lose our caste or defile us betrays our weakness.
Contact is unavoidable so long as we are in the world, and the test of the reality
of dharma for us lies in our remaining pure in spite of it. The way of compassion
requires that we educate the  Bhangis  and other communities like them to be
clean, that we work for their advancement and treat them with respect. To do
this, it is not necessary to sit down to meals with any member of such
communities; what is required is a change of heart.’(Source:  Collected Works
of MK Gandhi, Vol. 20, pp.391­92)                                                     
                      
 
Gandhi was eventually convinced removal of untouchability was one of the three
most important goals that had to be pursued to create a strong national character
and pursue swaraj. After a period in Yeravada Jail when he is thought to have
pondered and reflected deeply on the priorities of the national struggle he said
in  1925  in  a speech: ‘the purpose is that I should…..put before you the fruit of
profound meditation in prison, namely, the key to swaraj lies in fulfilling three
conditions alone – in the spinning wheel, Hindu‐Muslim unity, and in the removal
of untouchability.’    (Source:    Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.  25,  p.
536)
 
It is interesting that while Gandhi was strenuously attempting a change of heart
to deal with untouchability he was not at first for legal force by way of
reservations etc or a role for the state but later he agreed probably realising the
enormity of the problem. For instance he had once said: ‘I am not prepared for
any concessions like reservations etc, to the untouchables because I believe that
it would be perpetuating untouchability. Let the future legislatures of Free India
be filled with untouchables alone, but let them come in as equals. Unless we raise
them to our level, our freedom will be futile.’    (Source:  Speeches  and
Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, p.905) But later he accepted that there may be
a role of the state and the law. He went on a fast at his ashram in the early 30s to
protest separate electorates for harijans and their own representatives or
candidates, a plan of the British. His fast was called a political stunt by
Ambedkar. But later Gandhi agreed to a proposal which formed the basis for what
is known as the ‘Poona Pact’ between the Congress and Ambedkar. He accepted a
system where there would be reserved seats for Harijans but not separate
electorates. In fact even though Ambedkar drove a hard bargain and managed to
extract for the dalits double the number of reserved seats than had been
originally planned, it was Gandhi’s persuasion of the Congress that clichéd the
deal. In fact under his advise and guidance the Congress ratified the pact and
passed a resolution drafted by Gandhi himself that said, no Hindu should be
regarded as untouchable because of his birth, and that all those who had once
regarded as untouchable because of his birth, and that all those who had once
been untouchables would now have equal access with other Hindus to all public
institutions, including wells, roads and schools. This was clearly a major
revolutionary step. Later at the Round Table Conference in 1931 Gandhi clearly
was asking and anticipating state and legal provisions for untouchables when he
said:
‘I am afraid that for years to come India would be engaged in passing legislation
in order to raise the downtrodden, and the fallen, from the mire into which they
have been sunk………Look at the condition, if you will, of the untouchables, if the
law comes to their assistance and sets apart miles of territory. At the present
moment they hold no land; they are absolutely living at the mercy of the so called
higher castes, and also, let me say, at the mercy of the state. They can be
removed from one quarter to another without complaint and without being able
to seek the assistance of law. Well, the first act of the Legislature will then be to
see that in order somewhat to equalise conditions, these people are given grants
freely.’  (Source:  Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 32, p. 150)
 
From the political point of view Gandhi’s most powerful argument that he rightly
argued with the people of the nation was that we were asking for freedom from
the British on the basis of the doctrine of equality but we were not ready to apply
it ourselves to a large portion of our population. He argued just as the British
assume they were born to rule because Indians were less civilised don’t we have
that same attitude towards the harijans. Then how can we without being guilty
of hypocrisy lecture the British when we ourselves are doing exactly the same. He
also argued we had no right to ask the aid of God when we ourselves were
denying the existence of a large number of her children. He had said for instance:
‘Swaraj is a meaningless term if we desire to keep a fifth of  India under perpetual
subjugation, and deliberately deny to the most deserving among His creatures the
rights of humanity. Inhuman ourselves, we may not plead before the (British)
Throne for deliverance from the inhumanity of others.’   (Source: Young India,
May  25,  1921,  Collected  Works  of  MK  Gandhi,  Vol.  20,  p.  136)  He also
genuinely believed something would definitely go wrong in the nationalist build
up if our national unity had terrible fault lines and fissures in it like
untouchability. He had commented: ‘It is easy to decide whether or not a
particular issue should be taken up in the national struggle. There is no choice but
to solve a problem which, if left unsolved, would block our progress. I am 
positively of the view that, had I not taken up the problem of untouchability, our
struggle would have made no headway. We simply could not mount the heaven‐
bound plane, leaving behind those six crores of people whom, in our profound
ignorance, we regard as untouchables and exploit to the utmost. They would cling
to the plane and, as they are buried in the ground, it could not take off at all. I
would not have taken up this question (of untouchability) had I felt that they
could have been carried along somehow, hanging on to the plane.’      (Source: 
Collected Works of MK Gandhi, Vol. 20, p. 507­8)

 
 
Professor Judith Brown has summed up well the Gandhian involvement with the
problem of untouchability:
‘His primary social concern…was the problem of untouchability, the rejection of a
whole group of the poorest and the most menial in society as a result of Hindu
ideas of hierarchy, and purity and pollution. Now, as he travelled widely, he saw
in harsh practice the power of this social division, and the poverty and
degradation it caused, though he had rejected the whole idea far earlier and
inveighed and worked against it even in South Africa. Once home in India, having
tested the temper of public opinion, he was aware of the strength of Hindu
orthodoxy and he took care not to equate his campaign against untouchability
with the question of caste as a whole for fear of holding back the work on what
he saw as the most vital and urgent reform. Rather, he argued, his was a
campaign to purify and strengthen caste by abolishing this pernicious custom. For
Gandhi untouchability was primarily a religious problem. He believed that there
was no warrant for it in the scriptures: it was a late and evil accretion which
actually harmed and threatened the Hindu tradition he so treasured, and its
observance was positively sinful. If it continued he feared that Hinduism would
not survive. However, he was also clear that its observance impeded India’s
journey to swaraj at an obvious level, for such a profound fissure in Hindu society
might well generate violent rebellion among untouchables against the higher
castes, and would give leverage to any imperial authority wishing to maintain
Indian divisions in order to rule’.
 
Bhikhu Parekh has critically commented on the Gandhian program on
untouchability and has pointed out one basic and very surprising aspect to it –
that the movement wasn’t really organised along the lines of non‐violent protest
or satyagraha that Gandhi taught  India  and the world. Why? . Was he concerned
about maintaining national unity and what he stressed on again and again –
‘harmony’ ?.
Bhikhu Parekh has commented:  
‘Gandhi’s reform of untouchability suffered from a similar limitation. He did more
than any other Indian to undermine it, yet his attack had a profound weakness.
He saw it as a blot on the Hindu religion and made it the sole responsibility of the
high caste Hindus to fight against it. The untouchables themselves, reduced to
passive and pathetic symbols of high caste Hindu tyranny, were not involved in
the struggle for their emancipation, a strange attitude in a man who everywhere
else wanted the victims to fight for themselves. As a result they had no
opportunity to work and fight alongside the Hindus, and they neither occupied
important positions in the Harijan Sevak Sangh and the Congress nor set up an
independent and effective organisation of their own. Not surprisingly they hardly
grew under Gandhi’s shadow, and a man who created so many great leaders was
unable to create a single Harijan leader of equal stature. Ambedkar, one of the
few exceptions, was not his favourite Harijan and grew in opposition to
him.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy      p.  210­
him.’  (Source:  Bhikhu  Parekh,  Gandhi’s  Political  Philosophy      p.  210­
11)                     
 
    
Exercises:
 
1. What were the main arguments against untouchability that Gandhi placed
before the nation and what were the main methods that he used to eradicate it. 
2.2 Gandhi on Women
LESSON ‐ 4
Gandhi on Women
 
                                                                                                           —Amaresh
Ganguli
 Objectives
 After reading this article you will be familiar with:
Gandhi’s thoughts on the role of women and women’s emancipation
His strategy and efforts for raising the status of women in Indian society
 

Introduction  
Gandhi had identified eighteen essential areas where he thought there needed to
be special efforts by the people ofIndia  for what he called  national
regeneration and for reforming and making strong the character of Indians. One
of the three areas along with untouchability eradication for instance or promotion
of hand spinning or khadi was ‘equality for women’. Gandhi brought women into
the national movement as a political stratagem but also thereby hoped to
emancipate women. He had strong views on many social evils that women were
victims of like dowry etc and he made energetic efforts to change the societal
attitudes.  
Discussion   
It is important to understand that Gandhi’s himself evolved as a man during his
lifetime and his own ideas and attitudes evolved and changed. To begin with he
was quite as much a man of his time as one might expect – paternalistic, feudal
and traditional in the basic attitude towards women seeing women’s role as one
of lifetime obedient service to man. In fact he himself admitted this once in a
letter to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur while referring to his wife Kasturba (or Ba as he
called her). He had written to her:
‘If you women would only realise your dignity and privilege, and make full use of
it for mankind, you will make it much better than it is. But man has delighted in
enslaving you and you have proved willing slaves till the slaves and the slave‐
holders have become one in the crime of degrading humanity. My special function
from childhood has been to make women realize her dignity. I was once slave‐
holder myself, but Ba proved an unwilling slave and thus opened my eyes to my
mission.’ (Source: Letters to Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, p. 100)  

Before we proceed further let us examine what sort of a conservative mindset he

Before we proceed further let us examine what sort of a conservative mindset he
may have had to begin with. Gandhi has himself admitted in his autobiography for
instance, that in  South  Africa  early in his life as a young man when he once had a
fierce argument with his wife Kasturba when she refused to do some cleaning job
that he had assigned her he threatened to push her out of his house. This is
exactly the traditional unequal relationship that women in this country have been
suffering and possibly still do when they are threatened with being sent back to
their maiden homes or kicked out of in‐law’s houses by husbands and which is a
cause of women’s lack of sufficient empowerment.    (Source: See Gandhi, An
Autobiography, p. 232)       
 
While one may be disappointed reading the above, scholars have pointed out we
have to remember Gandhi was at least to begin with a man of his times. Prof.
Judith Brown for instance has commented:
‘Indeed, modern feminists accuse Gandhi of confirming women’s dependent
position by his use of traditional Hindu models of feminity, by his appeals to
women to play a public and private role distinct from men and not in competition
with them, and by his rejection of modern forms of birth control. Further, his
reliance on women devotees also confirmed the subservience of women in the
context of nationalist politics. Such criticism from the perspective of the late
twentieth century is misplaced. Gandhi was a man of his own time, indeed a
Victorian by birth, and many of his ideas about women were genuinely reformist if
not radical in that context.’      (Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi,
391)            
By far the most ‘radical’ of the ideas he had it has to be argued was asking
women to come out of their homes and out of purdahs to participate in
the  satyagraha  agitations against the British which could entail women being
jailed and thus staying away from their families. For those times, this was clearly
a major step as there were deep seated traditional notions of women’s purity and
its link to family honour and how that might be endangered if a woman stayed a
night away from home on her own or in the custody of men (even the authorities),
other than of those from her own family.
Gandhi also had a political calculation behind the idea of getting women involved
which he first developed in South Africa in 1913 when he realised women
participating would arouse the moral sense of Indians and even those who were
otherwise indifferent. The very sight of even women taking part in a struggle
would inspire many people to join who otherwise may have remained indifferent.
Also Gandhi had found out women made very good loyal, committed and
unquestioning political workers and so would be great as volunteers and
participants in the  satyagrahaagitations etc. Particularly during the Civil
Disobedience Movement of 1930, Gandhi’s call to women worked and women’s
participation reached never before levels. Prof. Mridula Mukherjee has
commented: ‘Before his arrest, Gandhiji had already called for a vigorous boycott
of foreign cloth and liquor shops, and had especially asked the women to play a
leading role in this movement. ‘To call women the weaker sex is a libel: it is
leading role in this movement. ‘To call women the weaker sex is a libel: it is
man’s injustice to women’, he had said; and the women of  India  certainly
demonstrated in 1930 that they were second to none in strength and tenacity of
purpose. Women who had never stepped unescorted out of their homes, women
who had stayed in purdah, young mothers and widows and unmarried girls,
became a familiar sight as they stood from morning to night outside liquor shops
and opium dens and stores selling foreign cloth, quietly but firmly persuading the
customers and shopkeepers to change their ways.’  (Source:  Mridula
Mukherjee,  in  India’s  Struggle  for  Independence  by  Bipan  Chandra  and
others, p. 276)            
Also Gandhi had led the program of promoting khadi, which was most dear to him,
and rejection of foreign cloth. He would have realised such a program could only
be made successful by women not just because women wear saris which consumes
the maximum amount of cloth but also because women would be ideal for starting
the sort of home spinning movement that Gandhi was promoting. So even from
the point of view of shrewd political calculations Gandhi saw the use of changing
women’s role, which, obviously in the context of the times would have meant de
facto  emancipation, however little, especially judging from our own vantage
point in this day and age.           
Apart from the reasons of national political mobilisation Gandhi also did his bit for
the social causes relating to women’s emancipation that many other social
reformers had also worked on even before him ‐ chiefly of eradicating female
infanticide and the dowry system which he understood were linked as was the
desire for male children.
It is important not to underestimate the depth of difficult conditions for women
prevailing then. Prof Judith Brown has summed up the environment well:
‘The other great social issue with which Gandhi felt bound to grapple in his grass‐
roots work for swaraj was the place and treatment of women in Indian society.
Here he faced a complex problem, where tradition was reinforced by economic
constraints on women. Whatever the high value placed on womanhood in Hindu
scripture, and the possible equality of women and men at the earliest stages of
Hindu civilisation, in practice by the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries Hindu women were treated as adjuncts of the males in a family, and
primarily as bearers and rearers of children. A woman’s spiritual identity was
achieved through marriage and motherhood, and widows were not permitted to
remarry. Further, the control of women through arranged marriages was a
powerful buttress of the caste system. Women were so poorly educated that they
had little chance of individual development or achievement and were often seen
as economic burden on their families, except in their capacity for domestic and
agricultural labour. In poor rural households they were often staggeringly
overworked in the house and the fields, over and above their frequent
pregnancies; while in rich households they all too easily became ideal gossip and
display stands for lavish jewellery, which reflected the family’s status. A host of
inter‐related social problems therefore faced the would be reformer: most

families’ initial preference for baby boys rather than girls, knowing the eventual
families’ initial preference for baby boys rather than girls, knowing the eventual
financial burden of a marriage and a dowry; arranged marriages between child
brides and much older men to conform to caste restrictions on choice; the plight
of child widows unable to remarry; the harsh conditions often suffered by older
widows; and women’s general seclusion and lack of participation in public life, to
name only the most pressing.’  (Source:  Judith  M.  Brown,  Gandhi,
208)                               
What was Gandhi’s response to these problems: he did not ask women to walk out
of their homes and launch agitations, personal or public, against their plight or
a satyagraha  within their exploitative domestic environments or outside nor to
seek the help of the British legal system or anything remotely very radical. As
with most problems his approach was to work with the status quo in Indian society
slowly, avoiding directly threatening any class of the Indian people, even those
who may be committing evil and injustice. Whether this was with a concern for
maintaining national unity or because of a commitment to non‐violence (or non‐
coercion) of even the most remote kind or a certain traditional mindset that he
may himself have had at least at the beginning of his life or anything else or a
combination of reasons is hard to say with certainty. What is certain is that
whatever the reasons for his approach, his approach was, like with many other
issues, to work using Indian Hindu value systems or their purified reformed
versions (often crafted by he himself) which were also often the lines of least
resistance. To get an idea of his approach this is what he said in a speech to
women in 1921:
‘It is not in the hands of the Brahmins, or of men, to preserve  dharma. It is
entirely in the hands of women to do so. The foundation on which society rests is
the home and dharma is to be cultivated in the home. The fragrance in the home
will spread all over society. A city may have flourishing trade and a big population
but, if the homes there were not well‐kept, I would unhesitatingly say that that
city was not good. Women are the presiding deities of the home. If they do not
follow  dharma, the people would be totally destroyed.’      (Source:  Collected
Works of M.K. Gandhi, p. 63)     
But Gandhi was also clear that dharma does not mean a brutish behaviour from
men treating women as chattel which he saw as a cause of the weakness of
character of Indian society:
‘Man has converted woman into a domestic drudge and an instrument of his
pleasure, instead of regarding her as his helpmate and better half. The result is
semi‐paralysis of our society.’  (Source: Harijan, 12 Feb, 1939) 
‘To me, this domestic slavery of woman is a symbol of our barbarism. In my
opinion the slavery of the kitchen is a remnant of barbarism mainly. It is high
time that our womankind was freed from this incubus. Domestic work ought not
to take the whole of a woman’s time.’ (Source: Harijan, 08 June, 1940) 

Generally he never lost an opportunity to use his position to change the basic
Generally he never lost an opportunity to use his position to change the basic
respect that society had for women and to raise the estimation of her capabilities
and potentials:
‘To call women the weaker sex is a libel; it is a man’s injustice to women. If by
strength is meant brute strength, then indeed woman is less brute than man. If by
strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. Has
she not greater intuition, is she not more self‐sacrificing, has she not greater
powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? . Without her, man could not
be. If non‐violence is the law of our being, the future is with women.  (Source:
Young India, Apr 10, 1930)      
‘Women is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has
the right to participate in very minutest detail in the activities of man, and she
has an equal right of freedom and liberty with him.’  (Source:  Speeches  and
Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 423)       
‘Woman in our country is brought up to think that she is well only with her
husband or on the funeral pyre. I would far rather see  India’s women trained to
wield arms than that they should feel helpless’.  (Source:  Harijan,  27  Oct,
1946)                 
To women themselves his advice was suffused with a call to them to act from the
spiritual and religious depths of purity etc of Hindu ideals as can be confirmed
from the following:
‘Women may not look for protection to men. They must rely on their own
strength and purity of character and on God, as did Draupadi of old.’  (Source:
Gandhi, The Role of Women, p. 111) 
‘Why should Indian women feel so helpless? Is bravery the monopoly of men only?
Women, of course, do not generally carry swords, though the Rani of Jhansi did
and outdid all her contemporaries in the valour of the sword. Still, all cannot
become Ranis of Jhanis. But all women can emulate the example of Sita, who
even the mighty Ravana dared not touch. Ranis of  Jhansi  could be
subdued.’   (Source: Harijan, 27 June, 1946) 
‘Women is the incarnation of Ahimsa. Ahimsa means infinite love, which again
means infinite capacity for suffering. Who but women, the mother of man, shows
this capacity in the largest measure? Let her forget that she ever was or can be
the object of man’s lust. And she will occupy her proud position by the side of
man as his mother, maker and silent leader.’  (Source:  Young  India,  Oct  17,
1929)
‘Women is nothing if she is not self‐sacrifice and purity personified’.  (Source:
Young India, Nov 19, 1925) 
‘Women must cease to consider herself the object of man’s lust. The remedy is
more in her hands than man’s. She must refuse to adorn herself for men,
including her husband, if she will be an equal partner with man. I cannot imagine
Sita ever wasting a single moment on pleasing Rama by physical
charms’.   (Source: Young India, July 21, 1921)  
charms’.   (Source: Young India, July 21, 1921)  
 
Gandhi was particularly concerned that Indian women should maintain their
attitude of maintaining purity:
‘If you (women) want to play your part in the worlds affairs, you must refuse to
deck yourselves for pleasing man. If I was born a woman, I would rise in rebellion
against any pretension on the part of man that woman is born to be his
plaything’.  (Source: Young India, Feb 20, 1920)                                 
‘Refuse to decorate yourselves, don’t go in for scents and lavender waters; if you
want to give out the proper scent, it must come out of your heart, and then you
will captivate not man, but humanity. It is your birthright. Man is born of woman,
he is flesh and bone of her bone. Come to your own and deliver your message
again.’  (Source: ibid.)
‘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.’    (Source:  Harijan,  March  1,
1942)               
‘When a pure woman adds bravery and motherliness to her purity, she becomes at
once a magnet in a way no man can…For woman is sacrifice personified. When she
does a thing in the right spirit, she moves mountains.’  (Source: Young India,
Dec 22, 1921)      
Also as far as roles of men and women were considered Gandhi’s views were what
would be regarded as very traditional and patriarchal by the standards of modern
feminists:
‘I do believe that women will not make her contribution to the world by
mimicking or running a race with man. She can run the race, but she will not rise
to the great heights she is capable of by mimicking man. She has to be the
complement of man.’   (Source: Harijan, Feb, 1937)        
‘Whilst both are fundamentally one, it is also equally true that in the form there
is a vital difference between the two. Hence, the vocations of the two must also
be different. Her duty of motherhood….requires qualities which man need not
possess. She is passive, he is active. She is essentially mistress of the house. He is
the bread winner, she is the keeper and the distributor of the bread. She is the
caretaker in every sense of the term. The art of bringing up the infants of the
race is her special and sole prerogative. Without her care, the race must become
extinct.’    (Source: Harijan, Feb 24, 1940)                              
‘In my opinion it is degrading both for man and woman, that woman should be
called upon or induced to forsake the hearth and shoulder the rifle for the
protection of that hearth…There is as much bravery in keeping one’s home in
good order and condition, as there is in defending it against attack from
without.’   (Source: ibid.)

Or that:
Or that:
‘The husband’s earnings are the joint property of husband and wife, as he makes
money by her assistance if only as a cook.’  (Source:  The  Diary  of  Mahadev
Desai, p. 189)        
‘I admit no distinction between man and woman except as has been made by
Nature and can be seen with human eyes.’   (Source: ibid.)      
‘My ideal of a wife is Sita and of a husband Rama. But Sita was no slave of Rama.
Or, each was slave of the other.’  (Source: Young India, Oct 21, 1926)      
From the above it should be very obvious why Judith Brown has commented as
follows to sum up Gandhi’s views on women:
‘However, his female ideal was not the ‘modern woman’, liberated from
traditional social, economic and physical restraints by birth control, the right to
divorce and a new economic independence. He would have seen no moral good in
claims by later twentieth century feminists for ‘freedom’ to rule their own lives
and to compete with men. Indeed he stated specifically that there was much in
tradition which should be retained and cherished: ‘we should not give up the
ideal of woman’s duty while espousing the cause of her rights’. The symbol of his
ideal woman was drawn from Hindu epic tradition – Sita, the wife of King Rama,
who was cruelly rejected by him, nonetheless maintained a brave constancy and
purity, courageously bearing her ordeal until they were reunited. So within the
symbolism of tradition Gandhi preached female virtues of bravery and
independence, and a capacity to bear suffering; the model he offered to Indian
women was the virtuous and faithful wife.’ (Source: Judith M. Brown, Gandhi,
209­10)                               
Gandhi, apart from bringing women into the struggle for swaraj, which he must
have realised would also mean that children, the future of the country, would get
trained in that idea as well, was very vehement and fairly relentless in coming
down on various social ills effecting women like child marriage, the dowry system
and female infanticide or the treatment of widows. While commenting on child
marriage for instance he had once said: ‘The custom of child marriage is both a
moral as well as a physical evil. For it undermines our morals and induces physical
degeneration. By countenancing such customs, we recede from God as well
as Swaraj.’ (Source: Young India, August 26, 1926)             
On the evil of the dowry system he was very severe on men who would agree to
the custom:
‘Any young man who makes dowry a condition for marriage, discredits his
education and his country and dishonours womanhood.’  (Source: Young India,
August 26, 1926)  
‘A strong public opinion should be created in condemnation of the degrading
practice of dowry, and young men, who soil their fingers with such ill‐gotten gold,
should be excommunicated from society’.        (Source:  Young  India,  June  21,
1928)             
His advice to parents was to educate girls against the evil:
His advice to parents was to educate girls against the evil:
‘The parents should so educate their daughters that they would refuse to marry a
young man who wanted a price for marrying, and would rather remain spinsters
than be party to the degrading terms. The only honourable terms in marriage are
mutual love and mutual consent.’      (Source:  Young  India,  January  15,
1927)              
As might be expected he saw the preference for a male child reprehensible and
evil:
‘Women is described as man’s better half. As long as she not has the same rights
in law as man, as long as the birth of a girl does not receive the same welcome as
that of a boy, so long we should know that  India is suffering from partial paralysis.
Suppression of women is a denial of Ahimsa.’  (Source: Harijan, August  18,
1940)                              
‘Hankering for male offspring is almost universally present in Hindu society. In
this present age of sex‐equality, this sort of invidious discrimination against the
female sex is an anachronism. I fail to see any reason for jubilation over the birth
of a son and for mourning over that of a daughter. Both are God’s gifts. They have
an equal right to live, and are equally necessary to keep the world
going.’  (Source: Harijan, May 28, 1938)                                    
The main contribution of Gandhi as far as women are concerned was firstly that
he saw the lack of a public presence of women as a real problem and told the
nation as such encouraging the participation of women in the national struggle
and secondly that he devised and advocated ways that took into account the
social realities and on the face of it his proposals and exhortations did not upset
the social structure too much as to be totally unacceptable. Thus to a large
extent he was effective and successful in his reforms.
Judith Brown has summarised well the Gandhian approach as follows:
‘As in the matter of caste, he consciously and selectively used elements of
tradition to enable a new response to a changing situation. He was convinced that
Indian women must draw on the deep resources available within themselves as
women and within their religious inheritance to participate in public life, and in
particular to play the vital role he saw for them in the struggle for swaraj. Unless
they did so and unless society tackled the evils in contemporary treatment of
women, he argued that there could be no real swaraj When the question of the
priority of political or social reform was raised he refused to distinguish between
them or place one before the other: social, economic, and political reform must
proceed simultaneously. ‘The sooner it is recognised that many of our social evils
impede our march towards swaraj, the greater will be our progress towards our
cherished goal. To postpone social reform till after the attainment of swaraj is
not to know the meaning of swaraj.’ All through the 1920s he hammered home
that purdah, enforced seclusion of women, practised among some Hindu castes
as well as Muslims, was inhumane, immoral, and deprived the emerging nation of
the work for swaraj which its women could perform. Indian women must become
conscious of their potential, must exercise their right and duty to serve outside as
conscious of their potential, must exercise their right and duty to serve outside as
well as inside the home, and must participate on equal terms with men in the
work for swaraj. He realised that this changing role would need readjustments by
men unused to working with women, and by women who would have to learn how
to work in formal organisations and not bring to that work bitchiness, suspicion
and intrigues; indeed he noted wryly that even Indian men found selfless and
open‐handed organisation of public work difficult.
            It was not just that the seclusion of women in private domain prevented
half of  India from working for swaraj. Gandhi believed profoundly that there were
certain particularly female qualities and capacities which were much needed in
the radical labour for a new society and polity. He often spoke of women having a
special capacity for self‐sacrfice, learned early in the cause of the family, which
must now be put to use of the emerging nation. It was little wonder that the
apostle of satyagraha, of self‐imposed suffering in the cause of truth, should see
women as his natural allies. Moreover he felt women so socially situated that they
were particularly fitted to work at the three central elements of his national
programme: reviving the art of spinning and making honourable the weaving
ofkhadi, treating untouchables as fellow humans, and extending hands of simple
friendship across communal boundaries, where men’s work in public meetings and
speeches had failed. Increasingly in the 1920s Gandhi became aware of his need
for more women workers, and it was partly because of this that he cared so
deeply about the attitudes of women in the ashram, and exposed them to the
new experiences of equality with men, communal living and fraternity across
traditional social boundaries.
As Gandhi toured  India, often speaking at women’s meetings and encouraging
women to break out of some traditional social moulds and follow him into public
work, he became more deeply aware of the attitudes and suffocating practices
which restricted women and reduced their self‐esteem in their own eyes as well
as those of men. Inevitably too his public position meant that he was asked very
specific questions about the treatment of women. He was not slow in response,
and as on the question of untouchability he argued that there was no religious
warrant for many of the practices he condemned, and that their abolition would
purify and strengthen Hindu society. Of course he was not alone in arguing for
change: there was a tradition of social reformers and their organisations
stretching well back into the nineteenth century. But Gandhi argued so strongly in
the context of Indian and Hindu values that he could never be accused of
‘Westernising’ or undermining traditional values with foreign influences; and he
placed social reform squarely in the centre of the work to achieve swaraj,
whereas earlier social reform movements had been kept apart from the political
work for fear of alienating the orthodox.’ (Source: Judith M. Brown, Gandhi,
pp. 210­11)      
Some scholars like Bhikhu Parekh has critically commented on the Gandhian
approach as one that reinforced stereotypes (while largely agreeing that his
efforts for Indian women and his public positions contributed a lot without doubt
in the journey of Indian women towards emancipation):
‘…………he saw and honoured women largely as mothers, never as wives or lovers.
‘…………he saw and honoured women largely as mothers, never as wives or lovers.
When he said that he wanted to become a woman, he had in mind nothing more
than nursing the sick and raising children. He did bring women into public life in a
way no one had before, but largely to play motherly roles; even
in  satyagrahas  they fought and suffered as mothers and sisters fiercely
defending their children and brothers, but not as wives and sweethearts
defending their husbands and lovers. While improving the condition of women,
Gandhi also reinforced the traditional sexual stereotypes and roles.’  (Source:
Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, p. 210)      
   
Exercise:
1. Discuss Gandhi’s view on the role of women and the ways and means he
thought of including women in the freedom struggle? .