Bending the binary

In India, we seem to be beckoned by Gandhi’s spectre whenever there is another Gandhi-basher around. Speaking of Gandhi-bashing, Gandhi the spectre is back in the news again with the Godse-praising, Gandhi-bashing of Pragya Thakur and others. Seemingly, Gandhi never fades out completely into historical irrelevance.

Mohan and Dwivedi have done a masterful job of avoiding the binary fork — hagiography or vituperation — as much of Gandhi and hagiography comes from a need to spiritualise Gandhi. We need to ask ourselves whether this is a part of the larger tendency to frame Indian thought as “spiritual”.

Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi Bloomsbury Academic India 288 pages

Further, reading Gandhi and Philosophy would make the reader wonder if there is a concerted conspiracy afoot, on the part of Western Orientalists and Indian tradition-huggers, to spiritualise India at all costs, dissing or marginalising materialistic, atheistic and agnostic frames of reference.

One of the brilliant takeaways from the book is the account of “scalology” in Gandhi’s thought. Several passages in the book suggest that for Gandhi, leading a virtuous ahimsic life equals radical slowing down. This involves leading a slow, well-regulated life away from the speeded-up excesses of Western industrialist society.

Reflecting on scalology, many authors are caught in the meshes of “monochronic time” ever since the tyranny of the bourgeois clock. Surely, the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is a brilliant caricature of speed obsession in a monochromic culture:

The Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!”, and dragged her along. “are we nearly there? Alice managed to pant out at last. […] “Now! Now!” cried the Queen. “Faster! Faster!” […] Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!” […] “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

In fact, many aspects of Gandhian thinking fall into place when one applies the speed scalology, including his love-hate relationship with the Indian Railways, the idealised Gandhian village, and the regulation of body functions. This could well mean that speed can be considered as Gandhi’s demon.

Mohan and Dwivedi seem to have unearthed a paradox that is deeply embedded in Gandhian thinking. On the one hand, Gandhi is considered anti-mechanistic; on the other hand, the body appears to be a highly complex machine, and leading a well-regulated life implies knowing how to run this machine. Few other commentators seem to have grappled with this paradox and the reader is left to ponder the deconstruction of this seeming binary of Gandhi’s “anti-machine” stand and his advocacy of the well-regulated machine.

Gandhian Philosophy delves into Gandhian “hypophysics” which involves a conflation of  “is” and “ought”, “fact” and “value”. Earlier critics like David Hume and GE Moore would view such conflation as a cardinal sin. Yet, many disparate philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche and Whitehead would argue that the concept of a bare datum or fact is absurd. Facts are deeply embedded in contexts of value. Unfortunately, Gandhi and Philosophy does not clarify the writers’ stand on this issue.

However, they do talk about Gandhi’s racism at some length — against black South Africans (kaffirs), Dalits and others. Such a position is a real challenge to those who see Gandhi as the founding father of liberation movements in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the USA. Not to mention Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., who saw Gandhi as a major spiritual influence and perhaps chose to ignore or airbrush his racism.

The issue of casteism is closely allied to racism. In the book, Mohan and Dwivedi argue that Gandhi not only upheld caste, but also viewed it as India’s unique contribution to the world! This does not reconcile with his attempt of trying to subvert caste through the act of renaming the “Untouchables” as Harijans. Moreover,

Dr Ambedkar and others have expressed concern that even with all of Gandhi’s attempted challenge to the caste system, he remains a patronising upper caste critic.

One of the most amusing passages in the book refers to the “Gandhian striptease”: Gandhi dressing down from his suited and booted role as a Westernised lawyer to the loincloth-clad Mahatma. The book would have been wholesome if the differences among criticism, critique, and criticalisation were elaborated on. This aspect appears as a fleeting remark.

Gandhi and Philosophy also suggests that Gandhi was in his own way a protagonist of Ramrajya, which in a way would reflect a form of soft Hindutva. As readers, we might need to explore the important differences between Gandhi’s Ramrajya, coloured by his religious universalism and Ramrajya as espoused by the Hindutvavadis. Gandhi and Philosophy deserves debate, dialogue and critical reading from professional philosophers and lay readers alike.

Ayyar is visiting faculty (social sciences and humanities), IIT-Delhi