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A thought about Gandhi


I've been reading recently about Mohandas Gandhi -- chiefly because I accidentally encountered a fascinating article by a fellow named Eljiro Hazama, published last year in the journal MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, a journal published out of Cambridge University. Hazama says the usual account of Gandhi's philosophy (with its two key components, satyagraha and ahimsa) is a myth.

Satyagraha means something like "force of truth" in Sanskrit. Ahimsa means "without killing," and usually refers to dietary and ritualistic matters.

The "myth" that Hazama is complaining about consists of the view that these are old Hindu religious principles that Gandhi learned in the course of a religious education as a child, and that his life consists simply of a series of applications.

Hazama argues that Gandhi nowhere uses "ahimsa" in the political sense of "non-violence" as an element in a political philosophy until he is in his mid 40s. He used it for more than half of his life, at least until the period of the first world war, simply in discussions of the dietary and ritualistic issues that are its primary use in that religious tradition.

In his time in South Africa, Gandhi did believe in the force of truth. He did not especially connect that with non-violence and he did not use the old Sanskrit words in discussing such matters. He described his views in English and with an acknowledged debt to Tolstoy.

Once Gandhi got back to India it became pragmatically beneficial for him to re-package his views as old Hindu views. Thus, we see the elevation (with a Tolstoian shift in meaning) of "ahimsa".

None of this means we cannot or should not embrace large parts of Gandhian philosophy -- or all of it, if we like. It means we might want to apply to his life the wisdom of Immanual Kant: "out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." The development of his ideas was a crookeder fact than he let on.

[Crookeder? Is that a word? I don't see a red line under it, so I'll keep it.]


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