Grand Unification Theory

Publisher: Amaryllis

Price: Rs 795

Pages: 725

Like the subject of its study,Mahatma Gandhi,this book is bursting with creative energy. Indeed,the energy level is almost maniacal. Authors with normal energy levels rarely write a 725-page book,and someone not taking the mysteries of life with utmost seriousness is unlikely to venture an 83-page chapter,the longest in the book,on the meanings of Gandhi’s sexuality and how his attempts to master it were often connected to the larger purposes of peace and non-violence.

Was Gandhi opposed to science and technology? This is the central question the book addresses. In trying to answer,Sudheendra Kulkarni ranges over a terrain so broad that one cannot but marvel at his store of knowledge. Insights emerge from modern science,the Vedas,the Upanishads,the Bhagavad Gita,the Ramayana,scripture in various languages including Kannada,his mother tongue. Great minds,Gandhi’s companions,appear in the narrative with immense speed — Tolstoy,Ruskin,Thoreau,Rolland,Gokhale,Nehru,Jinnah,Mirabehn,private secretary Pyare Lal,grandniece Manu,Charlie Chaplin.

Also,there’s relatively less-known material on the depth of Einstein’s admiration for Gandhi; interviews with creators of the modern world of information technology about how Gandhi was relevant to their mission; works on yogis and sadhus; and we learn that during the freedom movement,Gandhi was involved in encouraging nine young men from families he knew to study at MIT,a legendary institution of scientific learning. Kulkarni’s range is immense,his mind restless,his penchant for detail fierce.

The results are simultaneously dazzling and tiring. The erudition impresses,but Kulkarni needed a good copy editor to trim his prose and rationally rein in his almost mystical enthusiasm and admiration for his subject. I worry that the sheer size of this volume might come in the way of readership. That would be an awful pity. The book deserves wide readership. It deals with a deeply important question,and it has novel things to say.

Kulkarni’s investigation of the relationship between Gandhi and science goes in three directions. He examines Gandhi’s statements from 1909 onwards,when he had worked out a theory of Indian emancipation in Hind Swaraj. He probes Gandhi’s life and finds a scientific temper underlying his “experiments with truth”. And he argues that the Internet-driven information age has resolved any tensions that might have existed between science and Gandhian philosophy. The information age is different from the industrial age.

Hind Swaraj,a seminal Gandhian text,has virtually always been read as an attack on science and modernity. In it,Gandhi called “machinery”,“the chief symbol of modern civilisation”,“a great sin”. He also argued that the British-built railways had “impoverished the country”.

Ten years later,in 1919,Gandhi said he was “not opposed to …improvements in machinery”,but “only concerned what these machines are made for”. Investigating a remarkable range of Gandhi’s statements about science,Kulkarni persuasively argues that if science could serve the cause of mass welfare,Gandhi was willing to embrace it. Gandhi picked the charkha,the spinning wheel,as central to his swaraj campaign,for Lancashire textile machines had destroyed the jobs of millions of Indians,whereas the charkha could reemploy them. The charkha was also culturally and spiritually appropriate.

This logic allows Kulkarni to say that the Internet technology used by 2 billion people potentially dissolves the tension between modernisation and Gandhian philosophy. Unlike industries,nobody owns the Internet or its knowledge. As the Internet becomes available to those not proficient in English,India awaits a new mass revolution. Kulkarni argues that Gandhi would have “embraced the Internet” for its welfare function. In 1889,in London,Gandhi anxiously waited for letters from his family in Gujarat; today,he would have been able to talk to them instantly.

It is Kulkarni’s attempt to link Gandhi’s personal life to science that l find hard to accept. His basic point is that the search for truth via experiment is the foundation of science. Gandhi’s religiosity was not textual or dogmatic. His view about truth evolved from his experiments. It is Gandhi’s experimental conception of truth,says Kulkarni,that makes his life scientific. I am not persuaded.

Scientific experiments establish verifiable truths on the basis of replicability. That is,all others,following the same methodology,must come to the same conclusions. Gandhi’s experiments,including his brahmacharya (sexual restraint) experiments,which Kulkarni discusses at length,did not have a replicable character. Gandhi’s belief that mastery over sexuality could release energies for the difficult tasks of political life,like establishing Hindu-Muslim peace,was not a scientific belief. It made him psychologically stronger but those experiments might not have the same effect on others. Gandhi was deeply religious. Religious men can be great scientists,as Einstein famously argued,but religious experiences are not the same as scientific propositions. One is about inner truths,the other externally demonstrable.

Consider a famous episode in Gandhi’s life. In London,aged 21,Gandhi turned back from the door of a brothel. In a chapter in his autobiography entitled ‘Nirmal ke bal Ram’,Gandhi says that Lord Ram appeared and told him that sex outside marriage was a sin. A religious impulse deterred young Gandhi. It was neither a prior experiment that caused his return,nor a scientific rule.

Kulkarni’s view that a belief in experiments made Gandhi’s approach to politics scientific is also unsustainable. He calls Gandhi’s theory of satyagraha (truthful and non-violent resistance) “a unified theory of truth linking science,religion and social change”.

Satyagraha shook the British and exhausted them. How does one go on hitting those who will not hit back? In his diaries about civil disobedience after the Salt March (1930),the police officer John Court Curry wrote that he felt sick every night. If he did not hit the satyagrahis,the protests would swell; if he hit them,he felt a deep sense of revulsion because the protesters were not violent. He concluded that the British had lost their moral superiority in India. Satyagraha,Gandhi said,would make injustice plain in the eyes of the oppressor and make him doubt the morality of his actions. By and large,this theory had the intended effect on the British.

But can satyagraha defeat every adversary? Could it have worked in Nazi Germany or segregated South Africa? Nelson Mandela wrote that the ANC abandoned satyagraha in 1962-63 because the apartheid regime did not think Africans were human and,therefore,would kill without regret. Similar arguments have also been made about the Jews and Nazi Germany. Nonviolent civil disobedience was Gandhi’s greatest contribution to the world,but it showed the possibility of defeating an enemy,not its certainty or even high probability. It was a statement about what collective commitment and the human spirit can achieve,and has inspired many. But science had little to do with it. Science alone cannot bring about political or social transformation.

The writer is the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University