Lewis, Martin Deming;
Gandhi: Maker of modern India?
D.C. Heath and Co 1965, 113 pages
topics: | biography | gandhi | history | modern-india | anthology
A number of hard to find essays on Gandhi, many of them critical.
p.15-24; [Visva Bharati Quarterly, 1949] The Parsis and the Sikhs felt they had a share in the British victory of 1857. The Indian intellectuals were so dazzled by European civilization that they attempted to transplant wholesale the culture of Europe to Indian soil. The Anglophile sought to create an Indo-Anglian culture without the cooperation of the Indian people themselves... That he diverted the energy and direction of Indian politics from Europe to India was Gandhiji's greatest achievement. Indians who had worked for the people... served from a pedestal of superiority... Gandhiji did not quarrel with facts. He sought to use them for his own purposes. He accepted the fatalism and passivity of the Indian people but found for them a new political function. Instead of an aggressive and militant struggle, he built up a movement of non-cooperation in which passivity and endurance were turned into sources of strength and energy.
Rajani Palme Dutt, p. 28-43
(Marxist thinker born in England in 1896 of Indo-Swedish parentage)
India Today 1949. 2nd ed Bombay, 1949
[1919: April 6 hartal call by Gandhi a huge success... Amritsar
massacre ... movement called off mid-April after incidents of violence,
Gandhi declared that he had committed "a blunder of Himalayan
dimensions." 1920: Calcutta Congress adopts "nonviolent non-cooperation
inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi, until the said wrongs are righted and
swaraj is established."]
[December 1921] Ahmedabad Congress passed resolutions proclaiming "the
fixed determination of the Congress to continue the campaign of
nonviolent non-cooperation with the greatest vigour... till {\em
swaraj} is established... and placing full dictatorial powers for this
purpose in the hands of "Mahatma Gandhi as the sole executive authority
of the Congress."...
[Early 1922, with mass unrest at its peak and one district, Guntur,
already onto a no-tax mass campaign]. On February 1 Gandhi sent his
letter to the Viceroy to declare that, unless the prisoners were
released and repressive measures abandoned, "mass civil disobedience"
would begin - in Bardoli. Hardly had he done this when, a few days
later, news arrived that at a little village, Chauri Chaura in the UP,
angry peasants had stormed and burned the village police station
resulting in the death of twenty-two policemen... At a hasty meeting of
the Working Committee in Bardoli on February 12, the decision was
reached, in view of the "inhuman conduct of the mob at Chauri Chaura,"
to end, not only the mass civil disobedience, but the whole campaign of
civil disobedience through volunteer processions, holding of public
meetings under ban and the like, and to substitute a "constructive
program of spinning, temperance, reform, and educational activities.
The whole campaign was over. The mountain had indeed borne a mouse.
"He gave us a scare! His program filled our jails, you can't go on
arresting people forever you know -- not when there are 319 million of
them. And if they had taken his next step and refused to pay taxes!
God knows where we should have been!
- Lloyd Lloyd, then Governor of Bombay, in 1939 interview.
The discipline of the mass movement and readiness for decisive
struggle were shown by the example of Guntur, where ... not five
percent of the taxes were collected -- until Gandhi's countermanding order
came... this process would have meant the sweeping away, not only of
imperialism, but also of landlordism.
That these considerations were [decisive] behind the Bardoli decision
is proved by the text of the decision...
Clause 2: "instructs the local Congress Committees to advise the
cultivators to pay land revenue and other taxes, and to suspend every
other activity of an offensive character.
Clause 6: The Working Committee advises Congress workers and
organizations to inform the ryots (peasants) that withholding of rent
payment to the zemindars is contrary to the Congress resolutions and
injurious to the best interests of the country.
Clause 7: The WC assures the zemindars that the Congress movement is
in no way intended to attack their legal rights, and that even where
the ryots have grievances, the Committee desires that redress be sought
by mutual consultation and arbitration.
... Why should a resolution, nominally condemning "violence,"
concentrate so emphatically on this question of the nonpayment of rent
and the "legal rights" of landlords? There is only one answer
possible. The phraseology of "non-violence" is revealed as only in
reality a cover, conscious or unconscious, for class interests and the
maintenance of class exploitation... For half a decade after the blow
of Bardoli the national movement was prostrated.
On January 26, 1930, the first Independence day was celebrated
throughout India in vast demonstrations at which the pledge to struggle
for complete independence was read out.
[After the Dandi march, April 1930] Peshawar was in the hands of the
people for ten days... Most significant was the refusal of the Garhwali
soldiers at Peshawar to fire on the people. Two platoons of the Second
Battalion of the 18th Royal Garhwali Rifles, Hindu troops in the midst
of a Muslim crowd, refused the order to fire, broker ranks,
fraternized with the crowd, and a number handed over their arms.
Immediately after this, the military and police were completely
withdrawn from Peshawar; from April 25 to May 4 ... until powerful
British forces, with air squadrons, were concentrated to "recapture"
Peshawar; there was no resistance. The government subsequently refused
all demands for an enquiry into the incident. Seventeen men of the
Garhwali rifles were subjected by court-martial to savage sentences, one
to transportation for life, one to fifteen years' rigorous imprisonment,
and fifteen to terms varying from three to ten years.
[But Gandhi disapproved of this "demonstration of nonviolence"]: A
soldier who disobeys an order to fire breaks the oath which he has
taken and renders himself guilty of criminal disobedience. I cannot
ask officials and soldiers to disobey... if taught to disobey I should
be afraid that they might do the same when I am in power.'
- Gandhi to a French journalist's question on the Garhwali
soldiers, in Le Monde Feb 20, 1932.
[1931: Winston Churchill's comment at the time of the Gandhi-Irwin
talks:] "the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time
Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the
steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and to parley on
equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor."
The Irwin-Gandhi Agreement secured not a single aim of the Congress
struggle (not even the repeal of the Salt Tax) ... thus repeated the
Bardoli experience on an enlarged scale. Once again the movement was
called off at the moment when it was reaching its height. "Such a
victory has seldom been vouchsafed to any Ciceroy," jubiliated The Times
on March 5. -p.41
From The Genesis of Pakistan [books?id=1R8dAAAAMAAJ], by K. Sarwar Hussain, Secretary
of the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Karachi 1950. p.43-45
Jinnah's intellecual honesty made it impossible for him to follow
Gandhi, whose belief in "soul force" and in his "inner voice" and whose
devotion to the cow, were anathema to him. Gandhi talked in mystic metaphors
and apparently wished to banish modenr science and institutions from India,
and advocated a return to a medieval society.
The life, manners, and speech of Gandhi were those of a Hindu par
excellence, indeed, a self-abnegating Hindu -- a Mahatma... He talked
of Indian independence as the {\em Ram Raj}... the struggle for it was
to him {\em dharma yudh}, which to anyone would mean Hindu religious
war.
Gandhi did not attack, or ask for the liquidation of, the Hindu
system of caste....
The Hindu Mahasabha emerged as the exponent of militant Hinduism,
publicly demanding the virtual suppression of the Muslims. Many of its
leaders were close personal friends of Gandhi and were important leaders
of the Congress also.
From Presidential Speech to the Hindu Mahasabha 1939 [Congress's errors under the "dictatorship of Gandhiji"] [post-Khilafat] These Congressite Hindu leaders did not subordinate swaraj to the Khilafat question only in its figurative aspect but were hand in glove with the Muslim leaders who instigated Amir Amanullah Khan [of Afghanistan] to invade India as he actually did. What is surprising is that these Hindu leaders outbid even the Ali Brothers ... in maintaining that if the Amir succeeded in capturing Delhi, we would have won swaraj -- for, the rule of the Afghans was in itself a swaraj -- "We Hindu Muslims are one -- an indivisible Nation." When the Khilaphat was on his brain, in a reply he gave to Daily Express, London, Gandhiji disclosed his plan of converting the Afghans from fanatical turbulence into a peaceful citizenry thus: "I would introduce the spinning wheel amongst the Afghan tribes also and then that will prevent them from attacking Indian territory. I feel the tribesmen are in their own way God-fearing people."
from What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, [books?id=Z0ydNvMbPI0C]
2nd ed. Bombay 1950 [Ambedkar held doctorates from Columbia and
U.London]
[contrast with Unnithan's summary, below, of why Gandhi viewed caste as
a lesser evil than money-based classes.]
[Quoting Gandhi from an article in the Gujrati Nava-Jivan, 1922:] p.47
1) I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand it is because
it is founded on the caste system.
4) Caste has a ready made means for spreading primary education. Every caste
can take the responsibility for the education of the children of the
caste. Caste has a political basis. It can work as an electorate for a
representative body. Caste can perform judicial functions by electing
persons to act as judges to decide disputes among members of the same
caste. With castes it is very easy to raise a defense force by requiring
each caste to raise a brigade.
5) I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for
promoting national unity.
7) Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment.
Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in the pursuit
of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as
interdining and intermarriage.
8) To destroy caste system and adopt Western European social system means
that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is
the soul of the caste system.
9) The caste system is a natural ordering of society. In India it has been
given a religious coating.
I oppose all who are out to destroy the caste system. "
Gandhi in Feb 1925:
"I gave support to caste because it stands for restraint. But at present
caste does not mean restraint, it means limitations.... the number of
castes are infinite and there is a bar against intermarriage. This is not
a condition of elevation. It is a state of fall... There should be four
such big castes so that we may reproduce our old system of the four {\em
Varnas}. ... I believe that the divisions into Varna is based on
birth. ... There is nothing in the Varna system which stands in the way of
the Shudra acquiring learning or studying military art... What the Varna
system enjoins is that a Shudra will not make learning a way of earning a
living ... to prevent competition and class struggle."
Mr. Gandhi does not wish to hurt the propertied class. He has no passion
for economic equality. ... All that [the owners] need to do is declare
themselves trustees for the poor. Of course, the trust is to be a
voluntary one carrying only a spiritual obligation.... p.49
The ideas which go to make up Gandhism are just primitive.... Their only
merit is their simplicity. As there is always a large corps of simple
people who are attracted by them, such simple ideas do not die, and
there is always some simpleton to preach them... The fact that machinery
and modern civilization have produced many evils may be admitted...
the remedy is not to condemn machinery and civilization but to alter the
organization of society so that the benefits will not be usurped by the
few but will accrue to all.
By calling the Untouchables {\em Harijans}, Mr. Gandhi has killed two
birds with one stone. he has shown that assimilation of the
Untouchables by the Shudras is not possible. He has also by his new
name counteracted assimilation and made it impossible.
Under Gandhism the Untouchables are to be eternal scavengers. .. The
grace in Gandhism is a curse in its worse form.
Gandhi and Free India: A Socio-Economic study (Groningen, 1956), by
T.K.N. Unnithan, Dept of Sociology, U. Rajasthan.
The superiority of the caste system to the class system was that in the
former, money, in the words of Gandhi "the greatest disruptive force in
the world," did not form the basis, whereas differences in wealth did
form the basis of the class system. ... Caste was to Gandhi an extension
of the principle of family, as both were governed by blood and
heredity.... it must not connote superiority or inferiority; it must
only recognize different outlooks and corresponding modes of life.
But caste as an institution had degenerated ... [Gandhi] declared
"Down with the monster of caste that masquerades in the guise of Varna."
Gandhi regarded caste as a "drag upon Hindu progress" and untouchability
as an "excrescence upon {\em Varnasrama.}"
Gandhi's contribution would have been far greater had he directed his
opposition simultaneously against the caste system which has given
sanction to untouchability than to the latter alone.
The non-cooperation movement of 1921:
There is no doubt that it had a very wide response all over the country,
betokening a general mass awakening, the extent and intensity of which was a
revelation, both to the people and the govt. But the credit for this cannot
go to Gandhi alone.
... not even two years had passed since Gandhi had serious entered into
Indian politics
[foundations laid by Swadeshi movement, Home rule movemnt of Tilak and
Besant, growing discontent w the govt] prepared the ground for a vast mass
upsurge such as India never saw since 1857. No sober historian would deny
the influence of these predisposing causes, and hold that Gandhi alone, by
his precepts and exertions, created this mass awakening in the [mere] two
years
[points to his failures, both in calling it off in 1921, and agreeing to
Irwin after the disobedience movement of 1930]
Dhangopal Mukherjee tells how in 1930, he asked how the captain of the Bombay
Youth league explained why they followed Gandhiji:
Gandhi is now marching as Buddha marched through India... When you
walk with him a light seems to emanate from him and fills you with its
deep radiance. It is a new phenomenon, the present incarnation of
Gandhi.
It was not the politician, but the saint Gandhi, a new incarnation of
Buddha, to whom the people's faith and reverence were pledged.
Panikkar argues that in contrast to the early leaders of the Indian freedom struggle, who were all from the educated elite (in fact, so were the followers of Gandhi) - but Gandhi's vision was far more centered on rural India, and involved his army of the educated urban-ites going to the villages and introducing the village-folk to means of sustenance, starting with the charkha. While the mechanics of this idea, rejecting Westernization as a whole, was rejected by later leaders, the very idea of exciting and involving the rural masses, which he continued for 25 years starting with the Quit India movement, had a lasting legacy in the origin of an universal democratic process in India, which has served India well. AM: However, the chasm that Gandhi noted, between urban intellectuals and the rural poor, and which he sought to overcome through this process, continues unabated, one feels. The white sahibs were in fact, replaced by brown ones. While there is a bit of alleviation in the post-colonial generation, there does not seem to be any easy escape from this chasm.