“Our besetting sin is not our differences;
it is our littleness. We wrangle over words. We fight often for the shadow and
lose the substance.”
~Mohandas K. Gandhi
I like to rile people up. During my graduation days, in an attempt to rile
up an activist friend of mine, I went up to her and told her that I had found
the answer to all of the world’s problems—climate change, gender
discrimination, racism, etc.—all of them, looking visibly excited as I said
this to her.
“What is the answer?” she quipped.
“It’s the lack of love,” I said.
There is an institution in New Delhi called
Gandhi Peace Foundation. I frequented that place a lot during my time in Delhi.
A picture of Gandhi used to hang in their auditorium with a quote written
alongside it in Hindi, “इंसान इंसान से डरे ये कितना भयानक है…” (That humans should be afraid of humans is such a horrific thought). At
the time I considered it to be a general statement about fraternity and
cooperation. It was only later that I could fit the statement in the larger
picture of Gandhi’s metaethics.
As I read Gandhi, I realized that
perhaps I had inadvertently captured Gandhi’s praxis in that insincere remark I
made to my friend about the problems of the world. Gandhi wasn’t a theorist,
but if he were one, perhaps he would have described his theory of life as the
“Singularity of Love, Truth, and God” or something along those lines. This
isn’t too far-fetched an assumption. After all, he did say that “God is Truth”
and later reformulated the statement to conclude that “Truth is God,” thus
refining his theoretical conceptualization of the two words. He further
articulated in one of his speeches that he considered the ‘Law’ and the ‘Lawgiver’
to be the same. This means that he didn’t believe in the anthropomorphic idea
of God as a supreme being who created the rules that govern the universe.
Instead, the underlying order of the universe itself was, for him, Truth or
God, and our ‘duty’ as sentient beings was to align ourselves with this Truth.
How this alignment of the self (Atman) with the Truth (Brahman) could be
attained thus became the central question of his life. His answer was best
captured in Kabir’s words:
“दास कबीर जतन करि ओढी,
ज्यों कीं त्यों धर दीनी चदरिया”
(Kabir wore the fabric of life so diligently,
he returned it to God just as he had received it)
The idea of Shunyavada
(Zero-ness) or absolute surrender to God through self-effacement was the praxis
that Gandhi developed to align himself with Truth. The self was a barrier to
realizing the Truth and, therefore, had to be sacrificed in service. Speaking
of India in Hind Swaraj, he said, “We shall become free only through
suffering.” This suffering was to be directed toward service—service to Truth
in whatever way possible. So prominent was this thought in Gandhi’s psyche that
even his model of an ideal state was one of “Concentric Circles,” where one
unit of the state could sacrifice itself in service to the other larger units
of the state, and so on.
Gandhi’s praxis of “service” to align with Truth/God manifested itself as the idea of “Non-Alienation” — the belief that nothing in the world was the ‘other’ and, therefore, alien to us. If the Truth of life was one, then all perversions and deviations from that Truth, no matter where they occurred, were also a personal concern for him. To resist such deviation, he developed the instrument of “Soul-Force,” exercised through Satyagraha (literally meaning an urge for Truth).
The only way to resist the temptation to alienate the ‘other’ was to love. To feel a spiritual oneness with all matter and life, and to protest against any deviation from that oneness through Satyagraha, became his method of choice. It was this non-alienation that led him to ascribe equal importance to the life of a goat or a cow, the sanctity of nature, the dignity of the lower castes, and a nation’s demand for self-rule. However, national self-rule would mean nothing to him if it wasn’t preceded by rule over the self, which could only be achieved through non-alienation with one’s soul. To love was, therefore, a radical, revolutionary act. To love was the only way to embody the Truth that constituted the world. Hate and violence could only breed where Untruth and Ignorance prevailed.
Gandhi’s favorite form of
self-effacement was fasting. He fasted whenever he witnessed violence and
alienation in the world. Through fasting, he believed he was sacrificing
himself to counter the untruth and alienation that had led to the violence. His
last fast (only a few days before his death) was intended to end the violence
and hatred of communal discord in Delhi.
After the Poona Pact, he undertook
a fast against himself! This fast was against his own ignorance of the
intricacies of Caste discrimination. Ignorance led to untruth and the fast was
meant to purify his soul of this untruth. He views on Caste changed radically
after this fast against the self. He ended up creating an organization called
the “Harijan Sevak Sangh”.
An essential feature of
non-alienation that distinguished Gandhi’s social theory from that of Western
political philosophers was his insistence that society should not be based on
‘tolerance’ or ‘compromise.’ Hindus and Muslims shouldn’t merely tolerate each
other, as that would imply the continued existence of alienation between them.
They would only live in harmony for practical reasons, not out of enlightened
self-interest. This was also why he was disappointed with the Congress
leadership as India approached Independence. He realized that people had
followed his path of non-violence only because they found it politically and
strategically feasible, not because they understood the metaethical foundation
of his praxis.
Finally, his condemnation of modernity and modern
institutions such as railways, the judicial system and lawyers, hospitals and
doctors, as well as the industrial economy, was based on the same principle of
non-alienation. All these entities were evil in his eyes, as they mechanized
life and alienated humans from themselves. An explication of how they do so can
be found in Hind Swaraj. The sin of modernity for him was its emphasis
on the material while sacrificing the spiritual. Even religion was divested of
its spiritual power in modern society, with only its empty skeleton of lifeless
customs and practices assimilated into modern life. Most disastrously for him,
religion became an instrument of identity, whereas he had always viewed
religion as an instrument of self-effacement, of losing one’s identity in
service to Truth.
Gandhi has a question for us, the
practitioners of modernity. It’s written on a signboard in Wardha at the
Sevagram Ashram. Unless we can answer him, we must engage with him.
