Transcription
Let me just begin with a couple of very brief announcements for those of you who have just joined the class. I know that there are a few of you who have, because I can tell that from the enrollment figures. If you've just joined the class, the best way to make up is to simply go and watch the lectures, because it's being video streamed. And I want to once again reiterate that you know that all of the lectures are going to be available to you throughout the quarter, until the end of exam week, so you have access. You know, if you've missed any lectures, you can access the lectures very easily, and that's obviously the best way to make up if you're miss classes before, or in the event that you should happen to miss a class in subsequent weeks.
Number two, this is in a way obvious, but I think it needs to be mentioned; namely, that even though the syllabus has apportioned weeks for separate subjects, these are not analytically discrete subjects. In other words, Gandhi's critique of colonialism, his relationship to the West, his critique of modernity—now we address these subjects in separate weeks, but they're all centrally related, right? So one of the things you do have to keep in mind is that, you know, when you get a breakdown of the readings in the syllabus for week two, that doesn't mean that these readings pertain obviously only to week two; they pertain to obviously the rest of the material as well, right? So that's something that you have to keep in mind—that when one begins to study any subject, one has to make certain kinds of analytical choices as to how one is going to obviously treat one subject.
Finally, once again a comment that really should be obvious in many ways, but, but you know, each of these things that we've already looked at—and I'm going to begin by recapitulating the territory that we've already covered very briefly—but each of these can be obviously elaborated upon at much greater length; for example, Gandhi's relationship to Jainism or his relationship to Vaishnava. So if you look here, and this is where I'm going to begin now by recapitulating some of the things that I mentioned in my previous lectures—previous two lectures, particularly last lecture—the culture and religious milieu that one would have to consider in which Gandhi grew up; the influence of Jainism, Vaishnava theology and practice; the influence of his mother and traditions of bhakti. I didn't talk much about the word, "bhakti"—you're going to hear it later on as well. The word "Mukti" means devotion—devotion, right? So that certain kinds of devotional practices, which, for example, if you are—if you're a Catholic, let's say—you would be familiar with; if you're an observant Catholic, you know many, many observant Catholics might, for example, have a—a rosary, okay, and they use the rosary as an aid to meditation, for example, right? So it's—it's this is what I mean when I speak about devotion. I mean, in part, the kinds of devotional practices where you are devoted to the idea of God, to the—to some notion of the transcendent being. That this is—this is exceedingly important in the life of Gandhi, but it's something that we're going to look at in much greater detail when we turn our attention to the religious background in somewhat greater detail in—in the weeks ahead.
Now, when I was going over the intellectual backdrop, the intellectual, political, cultural backdrop to Gandhi's life, I also mentioned his birth in Porbandar, the fact that it's a port city, the role of Gujarati merchants in history, and the Gujarati diaspora, and—and—and—and sure enough, you're going to—you're going to hear a little bit more about that when we—when we look at what Gandhi was doing in South Africa; you know, what was the nature of the Gujarati diaspora in South Africa, and—and then—and finally, within the—within the context of this—of this backdrop, the political and intellectual history of India in the second half of the 19th century—some portion of it going back to the first half of the 19th century—I'd mentioned to you Raja Ram Mohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj merely as an illustration of the kinds of social reform movements that were widely prevalent in India in the 19th century; the nature of administration; the fact that Gandhi came from a princely state rather than from British India; and the role of his father, who was, as you might recall—and if you read his autobiography—he was the divan, or the prime minister, to a native ruler.
Now, there are much more colloquial ways of doing some of these histories. I want to give you just one illustration, and that is, for example, even though the British had been in India when Gandhi is born for something like two hundred years, and they had ruled India for over a hundred years at that point in time, what was the nature of daily interaction between Britishers and Indians? You know, when you read history—so British rule in India—you don't really get a sense of what was the extent to which ordinary Indians would have encountered Englishmen. Did Gandhi encounter Englishmen when he was growing up in Rajkot and in Porbandar? It's an interesting question to ask, because of course that question then leads to many other questions—that yes, a person who's colonized can understand the manner in which colonialism impinges upon his or her life. English becomes, for example, the dominant language, but was it the dominant language for the vast majority of Indians? And the answer is unequivocally no. The number of Indians who would have had access to English education, who grew up learning English, became fluent in its idioms, and then subsequently became fluent in a vast corpus of literature—whether it's literary, or whether it's scientific or technological—written in English, that would have been minuscule—minuscule. And so then therefore this leads to the question: Do we have to revise our estimation of what was a real-life interaction between the British and Indians? Right? To what extent did people like even Gandhi—who came from an educated family—I mean, here after all is someone going to school—because the number of children who would have gone to school at that time would have been very small to begin with, in whatever language you were—becoming acquainted with mathematics, with elementary science—it might have been in Gujarati, might have been in Marathi, or in Tamil if you were in South India—the number of Indians who were going to school would have been really minuscule. And remember that even today—even today, in 2016—the literacy rate in India is 60%, right? So we're talking about 1869 when Gandhi is born—150 years ago. So in other words, what I'm—what am I cautioning you about? What I'm cautioning you about is that that when we read the histories of British rule in India, we read about the institutions, we read about institutional norms, right? So this is what the governor-general was doing; these are the laws that the British passed. Well, how did they touch upon the everyday life of Indians? It's far from clear that most Indians would even have seen an Englishman. If you are living in a relatively small village, the likelihood that you would have actually seen an Englishman is, I think, very small—very, very small, right? So one will have to keep that in mind. Now it has repercussions for what we are going to be thinking through, because one of the questions that we're going to have to address later on in some detail is: What is the manner in which Gandhi was able to communicate to the Indian masses, and why is it that he had such a large following in the countryside? Did he have a similarly large following among the elites? The elites would have been much more Anglicized, and they might have found some of his teachings actually much more uncomfortable than the common people—it's possible. And—and this is where you begin to see the connection of what I'm talking about right now—that—that if we're thinking about his life and the manner in—and the really—the milieu in which he grew up, and we're saying that, well, English rule was dominant by this time—yes, it's dominant in an institutional sense, in a political sense—that India is a colony, and there's obviously some degree of exploitation going on, there's revenue extraction, etc., etc.—but that will not really tell us the extent to which Indians themselves had any real engagement with the institutions and the people behind those institutions of British rule, all right? So those are some additional considerations, and this is what I mean—that we're not gonna be able to exhaust the subject, but we have to think analytically about some of the considerations that become important.
Now what I want to move on to, because what I had done thus far is I had given you this backdrop, right? Um, and let me reiterate yet once again that we are not proceeding strictly chronologically, and we are not really doing a biography of Gandhi's life here, right? So we're going to now essentially move into a domain where we're going to say that, well, alright, we're considering what were the—what were the various factors that helped to shape Gandhi—that's right—that's what that backdrop means—what are the factors that helped to shape his life? Now, you know, there's a word that is used in English which I don't find analytically very useful, but I want to mention the word to you, and that word is "influence." Who are the people who influenced Gandhi? Right? What were the strands of thought that influenced him? And the reason I don't find the word "influenced" analytically very useful—it doesn't have much analytical purchase—because it is a word that is extremely vague, right? It suggests a gamut of readings from saying that, well, I read Marx and I was influenced by him—what would that mean? It could mean that, for example, I read Marx and I was moved by the text—let's say by *Capital* or by the *Communist Manifesto*, whatever the text may have been—I was moved by this text. It could also mean that I was moved to undertake some reform in my life—that now the categories through which I thought about the world began to change; I suddenly realized that there's a relationship between capital and labour which I really hadn't thought about before I read Marx. If I say I was influenced by Marx, it could also mean that I became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, right? It could also mean that I joined a revolution. It could mean any number of these things. So when we say that Gandhi was influenced by such and such, I think that we would have to then ask: What is the analytical purchase that we get? What is the precision, if any, that is involved in this? So what I prefer to talk about is: What was Gandhi's relationship to the West? And when we say the West, what kind of West are we talking about? This is the critical question. And so before I move to an adumbration of what I mean by the other ways, let me—let me suggest to you that when I speak of Western civilization, or when in fact actually most people speak of Western civilization—so if you take a course, let's say at UCLA, "Introduction to Western Civilization"—they do have such a course—well, typically what that would mean is that you would begin with the Greeks. You would begin with the Greeks, if you were doing it in a chronological order, right? You would begin with the Greeks—with—with maybe with the pre-Socratics, but certainly with Aristotle, Plato—the place of Socrates, maybe the Greek tragedies, Herodotus, Thucydides—and then you would move to the Latin writers, we would move to the Roman Empire, you would move to Christianity, the emergence of Christ, right, and what is called the Judeo-Christian tradition, right, and perhaps of course in some cases you might actually, you know, even begin with something like, let's say the Old Testament, possibly, right? And—and you know, who was Moses? You know, what—what is a—what does it mean to think of him as a prophet, as a lawgiver? All of that. And then you gradually move—if you were moving in a chronological way—you would obviously then move from the Latin writers, and you would move to, you know, the—the beginnings of what you might call a serious Christian theology; you would move to writers such as Augustine, for example, and then eventually make your way obviously through—his Western civilization—namely, you would then move to the writers who have helped shape the predominant strands which are to be seen in countries such as the United States, but more eminently of course in Western Europe. Perhaps in Eastern Europe there's a very interesting question: You know, what divides Western Europe from Eastern Europe? Where does the boundary begin? Like, what does it mean to speak of Eastern Europe? But that is going to take us far astray, right? But you see that there is a dominant trajectory there. Now what is interesting about Gandhi is that he certainly had a considerable degree of acquaintance with that history; for example, he translated one of Plato's dialogues into Gujarati—into Gujarati. He translated one of Plato's dialogues—not *The Republic*, which is a huge work, but—but one of the—one of the dialogues which has to do with the last days of Socrates, all right, and he publishes it in what are the newspapers that he founded. So here's an engagement with—with—with Western thought. But—but the whole—what must be said about Gandhi, and this is I think where it starts to get really interesting intellectually, is that his engagement is in fact with what I am calling the "other West." Now, by that I mean very simply the following: That there is a dominant tradition in the West, and this dominant tradition in turn silenced various other strands of Western thought. We have to call it Western thought, because these writers were all located in places such as Britain or Germany, right? And as we're going to see in the United States, some of the people that can be found intellectually interesting to engage with. And when I say the "other West," what I'm saying very simply is the following: That in any dominant intellectual tradition, there are people who are going to get marginalized. So let's take the case of somebody like—I'm gonna take a case that I'm assuming at least half of you are familiar with, if not all of you, because at some point in time, if you went through an American high school, I think it's quite likely that you would have read a little bit of Henry David Thoreau, right? Now Henry David Thoreau is, as I'm sure many of you know, an American thinker and writer in the mid-19th century, most well-known for two things: One, a book called *Walden*, which he wrote at Walden Pond—Walden Pond is—is on the outskirts of Boston, in a place called Concord, right? And Henry David Thoreau, who went to college in that area—he went to Harvard—he was a graduate of Harvard. Harvard was a college; it was not a university at that time. There's a distinction, because it was not a school that conferred graduate degrees; it only conferred undergraduate degrees. So he went to Harvard, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson, who we are also going to—if you look at the list over there, you see him mentioned over there. And Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay which became extremely famous, called "The American Scholar," published in 1836—in fact, it was a—it was a—it was a speech that he delivered at Harvard, where he defines a new vocation for the American scholar, all right? 1836. And Emerson is also a graduate of Harvard. You should know, by the way, that most of these great Ivy League schools were all set up as theological seminaries—principally as theological seminaries. They trained young men—and there were only men at that time who went to these colleges—they trained young men for the ministry, right? Whichever denomination you might belong to—Christian denomination you belong to—but that's what they did fundamentally, right? And so—so the course of study was almost entirely based upon what you might call the intellectual heritage of the West, right? That's what the course of study would have been.
Now Henry David Thoreau is going to go into retreat to Walden Pond; he's gonna live there for two years. Has anybody here read *Walden*, by the way? You have? Alright. So okay, only one of you has read it. It's an absolute masterpiece of American literature, alright? So you really must take a look at it at some point in your life. I'm giving you a lot of time—you know, a lot of latitude—to look at it—okay—at some point in your life, take a look at it; it's an absolute masterpiece. Now he gives the impression of spontaneity in writing *Walden*, but in fact it's far from that, because he actually kept journals, and then he took select pieces from his journals, he put them into this book, and he rewrote it an endless number of times—or an endless number of times. Now the important thing about Henry David Thoreau—this is again not a digression—I'm trying to make you understand what it means to think of the "other West," and to understand in turn what is it that made Mohandas—somebody called the Mahatma eventually—okay? This is one of the many strands that fed into the making of the Mahatma. So Henry David Thoreau really becomes a dissenter in the American tradition; it becomes a dissenter in many ways, but I'll give you two arguments to make you understand what it means to be a dissenter. One: For a Harvard graduate to retreat to Walden Pond and live in isolation for two years and write about the berries and the birds and so forth and so on was considered to be distinctly odd, because by the 19th century—by the 19th century in the United States—the machinery of materialism had become exceedingly important, by which I mean that the idea was that a young man like him, who was well educated, would make something of himself; he would become a businessman, he would become a corporate leader, as they would say today, right? So forth and so on. What does he do? He retreats to Walden Pond, and he writes a book for two years, and he has virtually no engagement with the outside world. He becomes a naturalist, right? So he essentially gave up on the rat race—he gave up the rat race—and I can tell you, by the way, look up a book by Henry Petroski—P-E-T-R-O-S-K-I—who's an engineer, and the book is called *The Pencil*; it's a history of the lead pencil. Henry David Thoreau is the inventor of the lead pencil; he could have been a multi-millionaire at that time because of the royalties that he would have gotten. Okay, read the book by Petroski, which tells you about the making of a pencil, and Henry David Thoreau's role in it. Thoreau didn't have the slightest interest in banking upon this capital and say, "Hey, you know, I can now live comfortably, and I'm the inventor of the modern-day pencil." Didn't have the slightest interest, right? So there's an element of renunciation there. Now the second aspect of Henry David Thoreau which becomes important is that he writes an essay called "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Many scholars have argued that Gandhi took his ideas of nonviolent resistance from Henry David Thoreau. I beg to disagree, and there is actually a considerable scholarship which looks at—well, one, exactly did he read this essay? What is the essay about? Very simply, the essay is occasioned by the fact that the United States had entered into a war with Mexico—remember in the 1840s—and so Henry David Thoreau objects to this war; he objects to a war of expansionism, and he objects, moreover, to his taxes being used to support the U.S. military, and he says that's the occasion for writing the essay. So what did they do? They hauled him into jail. He actually spends a night in jail; he only spends a night in jail, and that's not because he was begging to be released; it's because Ralph Waldo Emerson—his sort of mentor, if I may put it this way, and friend—paid the bail, and Henry David Thoreau is out of jail the following day. But that one single night in jail is enough to set him on a path of reflection, right? Why is it that my taxes are being used in a particular way? What is the relationship that a citizen has to the wider public domain, to the state? How does a citizen register his or her dissent? Right? I mean, I pay taxes, for example, we all do, you know, and—and you know, you can be certain that a certain percentage of your taxes are certainly going to feed this monstrous military machine that the United States has, with an appetite that can never be satisfied, obviously, right? There's no question that—that's where the taxes are going—a considerable portion of your taxes are going to feed that. So even though you might be a pacifist, you might be a conscientious objector, if you're paying taxes, there is—but no question that you are supporting the American military machine. So what does Henry David Thoreau do? He writes this essay, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," right? Now, yes, there are ways in which we can say that Gandhi certainly learned something from that essay. So when I—when I say I beg to disagree, what I beg to disagree with is this argument that there is a straight line from Henry David Thoreau to somebody called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. No, there isn't a straight line, right? And I want to explain now what are the ways in which Thoreau is different from Gandhi. But before I do that, think about the context in which—and speaking about him—Henry David Thoreau is going to become marginalized in the dominant American intellectual tradition. This is what I mean when I say the "other West"—that every tradition marginalizes some figures. Why was Henry David Thoreau marginalized? Partly because he was seen as a bit of a crank, right? This idiosyncratic American writer who's, you know, filled pages and pages on, you know, the bird life at Walden Pond—okay? Pages and pages—what is a man of his talent doing squandering his talent? That was the view about Henry David Thoreau. And when he—by the way—and he had an extraordinary, killing sense of humor. So, for example, when he published *Walden*, so you know, let's say there were a thousand, you know, copies of that—well, most of them remained unsold. So somewhere he writes that I have a library of nine hundred books—well, eight hundred of them are copies of his own book, okay? Right? Eight hundred, because you know, nobody was buying the book at that point in time. Of course, its status as a classic came much later on. So he is someone who is—if I may put it this way—silenced. Now when I say "silenced," you don't need to think that, well, you know, there was a committee of elderly white men who decided that what we're going to silence Henry David Thoreau. No, it's not a conspiracy. When I say "silenced," I mean that some people become marginal to a dominant tradition, because he was somebody who fundamentally renounced what one might call the hyper-materialism of American life in this mid-nineteenth century. That's what he did. And all of these people we're going to look at are, in that sense, people who become marginal to the dominant intellectual traditions of the West.
Now let's go back to Thoreau and the relationship to Gandhi, right? So yes, there are some fundamental ways in which we can say that Gandhi was certainly moved by the text; he was moved by the idea that if the state has passed an unjust law, then your duty is to disobey that law. Now let me be very clear what I mean by that—very, very clear. The argument in Thoreau and in Gandhi is not that our duty is to disobey laws in general—no—and if there is an unjust law in the singular, then your duty is to actually contravene that law—contradict it—not follow it. Yes. Ah, well, they might—then there will be very clear instances. Let me give a simple illustration: If the law states that the punishment, okay, for a certain offense is based on the color of your skin, it's an unjust law, because what is the principle of law? The principle of law is it should be applied impartially—impartially—regardless of who you are. If you—if you are at a westward intersection—westward and LeConte, whatever—and there's a red light, and you—pal—you cross that red light, and you happen to be a white person, and the cop sees you, and you say, "Ah, that's fine," but if you're a black person, you get stopped and pulled over and held, then we say there's a problem. It's not—but here it might simply be a problem in the application of the law, but there may be a law which in fact actually states very clearly that there shall be a different punishment for the same offense depending on who you are. However, this is a simple answer. The more complicated answer is that a law is unjust, according to Henry David Thoreau and according—
To Mohandas Gandhi: If your conscience tells you that I cannot obey this law, I cannot obey this law because if I obey this law, it violates a higher law. And that higher law is the law towards God or towards fellow human beings, right? So, for example, they were Nazi Germany; let's take that illustration. There are laws which clearly discriminate against Jews—that a Jew may not have ownership of property. And if you think you're not a Jew, you are a white Protestant German; you've got Jewish friends, and they come complaining to you that, "Hey, I can't own property any longer; my business is suffering." Then you might say to yourself that, well, this is an unjust law because it is a law which affects only one community rather than all communities, right? Okay. And so, even though you are not affected personally, you might still violate that law. How might you violate that law? You might actually sign over your property to a Jew; you could do that. And this shows how you are violating the law, why? Because you say that the law is unjust. So, so it might be your higher conscience which dictates to you that this law is unjust.
So, Baba's Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, number one, were both in agreement that if your conscience tells you that a law is unjust, you must not observe it. However, let me reiterate this: it does not mean disrespect for the rule of law in general. Okay, they—it does not mean that Gandhi thought that you could violate all laws or that you had carte blanche to not follow laws at all, because in fact, fundamentally, if you cease to do that, you cease to have a community any longer. It is a law, by the way, which stipulates that when you get to a red light, that what shall you do? You shall stop. It is a law which stipulates—said what would happen if you decided not to observe the law? And the answer is not simply that, well, you could get fined, right? We know that, right? Provided somebody was watching you or the camera was watching you, right? Now, it—the problem is much deeper, much deeper than that. It is much deeper because fundamentally, law has a relationship with something called trust. In other words, when I arrive at an intersection and it's green for me but red for the person at the intersection, I sail through it because it's green for me; I trust that person not to violate the law, right? Similarly, he is trusting me to not violate the law. If I have a red—virtually all communities are based on the foundation of something called trust, and this trust applies to everything. You know, if I had a friend and we agreed to meet at Blue Ball at 3 p.m. for a coffee, okay, the guy doesn't show up, right? He doesn't show up; it's 3:30; I leave. Well, alright, once maybe there was a problem; maybe he forgot; maybe forgot; maybe his—you know, he didn't have his phone with him, so he couldn't even know what the time was. Whatever the case might be, let's imagine that the same scenario happens a second time, a third time. You know what's going to happen? You're going to lose your trust in that friend because when you have an agreement, it is based on an implicit promise—an implicit promise: "I will be there at 3 p.m. to see you," alright? And I want you to remember all of these words: trust, promise, because they have a central relationship to something called non-violence, even though that's not typically how it's seen, right?
So, the first area of agreement between Thoreau and Gandhi is clear enough: that you do not follow laws which violate your conscience, but at the same time, you indicate your adherence to the rule of law—to the fact that yes, laws in general must be observed, right? However, there are fundamental areas not of disagreement, but fundamental areas of difference between Thoreau and Gandhi. One of those areas is the fact that Henry David Thoreau was writing this essay as a matter of personal—personal conscience. His conscience tells him that, "Look, I cannot support the American military; I'm not gonna pay taxes, and I'll pay the price for my dissent." However, there is nothing in the essay to suggest that he was thinking of nonviolent resistance as the basis of a society. He's simply saying—and what he's doing is very important—what—let me try to emphasize the importance of what he's doing in a very different language. See, by the 17th century, when European thought—you have the social contract theory, okay? So, social contract theory has various ramifications, various aspects to it. So, for example, one of the very common aspects to it is that I should be at liberty to exercise my freedom without restraint so long as my exercise of my freedom does not obstruct someone else from exercising their freedom, right? Because if you didn't have that provision, right, then obviously you're at liberty to do whatever you want, and no society can obviously permit that. So, the social contract here—in just giving you one aspect of it—is that I'm at liberty to exercise my freedom without restraint so long as the exercise of my freedom does not actually prevent others from the exercise of their freedom or does not impose conditions of oppression on them, right? However, what's going to happen in the 17th century, moving into the 18th and 19th centuries, is that your ability as an individual to reason about these things morally, right, is going to slowly be eviscerated. In other words, you let the state think for you; that's one of the consequences of the social contract theory. In other words, let's just put into place a whole set of length—laws, you know, that—that's one of the things that's happened under modernity is that the set of legal risk agreements has grown enormously, enormously in every sphere of life. In fact, we all live under the sign of the law, as I put it, whether we recognize it or not, because every single thing in your life is more or less regulated by the state in many ways, right? So, what Henry David Thoreau is trying to do, he is trying to restore the place of the conscience instead of the state and its legislative assembly dictating what is proper or not. He is trying to restore the place of the conscience, all right? And this is what Gandhi is going to pick up on. However, to highlight the difference, what I am suggesting to you is that Henry David Thoreau simply said an individual should do what his conscience tells her or him. He is not thinking about having a collectivity using the principles of non-violence to then bring about either resistance to oppression or bring about a new society, necessarily. He's not thinking in the collective in that sense, okay? And that is a difference between Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi, because Henry David Thoreau—let me put it in a different way—at the end of the day was a rugged Yankee individual, right? This strand of individualism—Yankee individualism—is strong. Now, I'm gonna do what I please; I don't actually accept the law, right? But he's not really thinking about building up a society on the principles of non-violence. Gandhi is going to be thinking about building up an entire society based on the principles of non-violence, all right?
Now, we could go through each of these four individuals in a similar way—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I've already mentioned to you, is a transcendentalist thinker. In fact, there's this movement called American transcendentalism, and the two major figures in that movement are, of course, Emerson and Thoreau. There are several others as well; a woman by the name of Margaret Fuller, for example, was quite important, all right? And then you have John Ruskin, who's an art critic—an English art critic. Who are these figures? These are all figures who have become, in some ways, marginalized within the West itself, right? Within the West itself, they have become marginalized because they represent aspects of the West which—which the West wants to disown—wants to disown. Let me explain that by looking at Leo Tolstoy, all right? You get—you'll—you'll understand exactly what I mean when I say they want—that they represented an aspect of the West which the West did not want to recognize as its own. Many of you are familiar with Tolstoy, the novelist, right? The author of books such as *War and Peace*. Tolstoy was the most celebrated novelist in Europe when he was writing; there's just no question about it, right? I mean, he was a man who was constantly—you know, if they had been a celebrity culture at that time—they were—this is a relatively new thing, celebrity culture, right? If there had been one, well, he was a celebrity, invited to every dance, you know, every ball, every party, and he had a kind of a regal bearing about him—aristocratic, impressive-looking. Oh, that large landowner, among other things—that was Leo Tolstoy. Now, there are two Tolstoys: that is one Tolstoy; the other Tolstoy is a Tolstoy who renounced his earlier life completely. The last 20 years of his life have almost no relation, it seems, to the first part of his life—no relation at all. He becomes, for example, a radical Christian thinker who is going to make an argument that you have to distinguish between Christianity and the teachings of Christ, because he saved Christianity as the teachings of Christ are nowhere represented in what is called Christianity. Christianity is simply the institutionalization of Christ's message, and that then, in turn, over centuries, he's going to argue, the church becomes corrupt. And by the way, that argument was not novel to him by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, the Protestant Reformation is partly based on that argument too—that the church has become, in fact, actually corrupt; it's become—and you know, the church was the largest landowner in Europe by far—the largest landowner, right? The—if you—if you look at, for example, what was happening at the time of Elizabeth—Elizabeth the First, right? Who becomes a monarch and is going to be a monarch for—for over four decades. I mean, the—the Catholic Church made numerous attempts to have her assassinated because she, of course, is going to move England towards Protestant Christianity, right? So, you know, there are these histories, and Tolstoy is not the only one, but he is going to suggest that these histories are important, but he's going to make a radical argument, and that radical argument is to say that Christianity and the teachings of Christ are, in fact, two very separate things. He's going to become an—almost an anarchist thinker, and one of the—one of the ways to study his life, by the way, is to look at his support of a group of people called the Dukhobors. If you go to the internet, you'll find information about them. So, the Dukhobors were a radical Christian dissenting group in Russia; they were being persecuted by the Czar. Tolstoy actually gave them quite a bit of money because not only did he get money from his royalties, he was, as I mentioned earlier, a large landowner; he had huge estates, and he earned an income from those estates, right? Now, he supports the Dukhobors. The Dukhobors are distinguished for two things. So, this is a group of radical anarchist Christians who are going to flee Russia. The largest Dukhobor community now in the world is in Canada, okay? So, if you go to Canada, you will find communities of Dukhobors. One of the things that the Dukhobors do every year is they take all the ammunition they can find—rifles, guns—and they make a bonfire of it, and then they burn them, okay, right? They do that; it's a ritual every year. It is a renunciation of arms, and they parade through the streets once a year naked. And we're gonna try to understand why that's important because we'll have to try to understand the relationship between being naked and being shorn of your ego completely, all right? Being shorn of your ego—reducing yourself to zero, as it were—an idea that is very much going to be prevalent in Gandhi's mind as well as when we go through his life. So, Tolstoy is someone who is going to support—and he writes a little book called *The Kingdom of God is Within You*, right? That's—that's one of his major works from the last years of his life. Now, you can understand that in Europe, the reaction was, "Hey, this great novelist has gone mad; he's gone completely mad because he's supporting people like the Dukhobors. You know, he's saying things like, you know, 'The kingdom of God is within you.' He literally believes in—in many of the things that are said in the New Testament, right? 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,' right? Tolstoy is taking expressions like that from the New Testament and elaborating upon them in his book, but in Europe, the reaction was, 'This guy belongs in the rude lunatic asylum; that's where he belongs.'" This is the other West. He is still steeped, remember, in Christian thinking; he knows the Western intellectual tradition, but he's saying that at the heart of the Western tradition is the investment of the Western tradition in the idea of violence; that is what's close to his main argument. This—and so the reaction of the Western intelligentsia is to shun him completely—marginalize him. What does Mohandas Gandhi do? He takes all of these figures who have been marginalized in the Western intellectual tradition, and he is going to see how he can build up an alternative history of the West. And the last comment in respect to that, which is the most critical one, is to understand why he's doing that. He's doing that because Gandhi does not want to set up the other. In other words, if you look at history and if you look at social relations between groups, what do we do? Ordinarily, every group, every community has its other, you know? For whites, it was Black people; for Blacks, it might be white people; for straight people, it may be gays, right? You have your other. Now, Gandhi's proposition very simply is: freedom is indivisible. But he's faced with an intellectual and moral conundrum. The intellectual and moral conundrum is that the West is colonizing India; it is colonizing large parts of the world. If you look at the map of the world in 1900, virtually every place in Africa, right, Asia is under European domination. If it's not the British, it's the French or the Dutch or the Belgians; every place is under European domination; it's the rule of one group of people over another. So, of course, a tendency of nationalism is going to say, "Well, there's something intrinsically wrong with Western civilization," but then that becomes your other. So, what is Gandhi doing? He's saying there are different Western civilizations. What I'm going to do is I am going to build an intellectual, moral, and cultural alliance with the other West, because this way it is possible to then think of the project of freedom as indivisible, which in turn means what? That politically and intellectually, his ambition is not simply to free India from colonial rule; it is to actually free the British from their own worst tendencies; it is to free the British from their own worst tendencies because what he is going to fundamentally argue—and I'm not saying that he is consciously arguing this right now at this stage of his life, in his 20s, 30s, and early 40s—I'm not—I'm not making that argument that he had systematically thought through—what he had certainly done was he had understood that if there was not going to be an opposition between India and the West—if the West had to be brought in into this project of freedom because my freedom is only possible when you are free, to write—that if that was going to be the project, then he had to find a way to find a West which he could work with—that he could—he cannot work obviously with those who are his oppressors, but he is saying that these people—and these are not the only people; I'm giving you four illustrations—that these are all Western intellectuals who themselves have become marginal to the Western intellectual tradition, and in a way they have become colonized, right? So, this is the intellectual project that he is going to be engaged with.
Now, let's turn to a different aspect of that intellectual project. If you read his autobiography or some portions of it up till now, you would have noticed that Gandhi, after he completes his schooling in Rajkot in Porbandar and then in Rajkot, what does he do? He goes to England. Now, here's a question for you: ordinarily, given that India is a British colony, what do you suppose ordinarily a young man at this point would—we're only speaking of young men; there are no young women going—alright? So, ordinarily, what would a young man like him be going to England for? Yes, yes, but to law—to study law. But let's try to answer it in a different language, right? That is—it's unquestionably the case—he goes here to become credentialed in law, and it is no accident, as I mentioned to you, that if you look at the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, which I'd mentioned in my first lecture to you—the Indian National Congress—the early membership is virtually all lawyers—all lawyers. And incidentally, by the way, nobody went to England from India to study medicine or engineering, because there were no medical schools at that time—virtually no medical schools at that time—and engineering was not really a field of study as such. Again, the—the—the engineering is very much a modern subject of study, all right? So, you went to study law, but surely you must know by now that I cannot be thinking only of that, right? When I say if a young man went to England, what would you go for? Does anybody want to hazard a speculation? What is the real meaning of going to England? Yes? Can you repeat that again? To get a Western education. But that's a variation, right? That's a variation of—he went to study law, alright? Maybe—maybe he did a few other things, you know, in his course of study, but that's a variation, right? Something else—to climb the social ladder, alright? It's fair enough, but you know, let's put it this way—that it's a long trek to take from India to England by sea at that point; you're going—it's a sea passage, right? To climb the social ladder—it's not clear that people who returned to India from England with a law degree necessarily would climb up the social ladder much faster than if you were to join your father's business in India. Let's see, okay? Your answer is correct, but I'm fishing for something else, and let me tell you what I'm fishing for here, okay? See, look at it this way: India is colonized; therefore, the assumption on the part of all Indians was: "We are a backward people; there is something wrong in us; there are some deficiencies within our national characters, and that is why we have been colonized as a people." You went to the West, right? And this is where the answers are all correct, but partially right—that you went to the West because the West was the mark of being modern. If you want to become modern, you went to the West, and nowhere better to go than London or possibly Paris, of course, the French would dispute London. So let's add—we can add a few other places to that; we don't have to be partial; it could be London; it could be Paris; perhaps Berlin, right? But you get the idea, right? That you went to the West because the West was the sign of being modern, and if you read his autobiography, what does Gandhi do when he gets to England? He apes the Englishman; he apes the Englishman; he buys, you know, a Western suit—coattails, a top hat; he takes lessons in playing the violin, right? He takes lessons in learning elocution; he wants to look like a dandy; that's what he goes to the West for. Law was just something you did by the side, if I may put it this way—that the real purpose of going to the West was to say, "I am Indian; I want to become modern; I'm going to go to the place which is the mark of being modern." And then this is the irony, and this takes us to the other West. If you continue reading the autobiography, just another 10 or 15 pages more after this—after his description of him arriving in England—what does he do? He starts consorting with people who were considered to be nuts; they were crazy; that's what they're—that's the—in the people he mixed around with were people who were considered to be a little off, if I may put it this way colloquially, right? Who are these people? Vegetarians, number one; it's almost—you know, when you read that, you should be laughing aloud, why? Because here is Gandhi—Mohandas Gandhi—coming from a strict vegetarian family, right? And he had, by the way, tasted meat once—you remember that episode in the autobiography—because his Muslim friend told him—Mehta told him—"Hey, why is it that we Indians are always being ruled by these Englishmen? That's because, you know, we're eating dull—that's lentils, right?—and vegetables—you know, salads—and if you want to become strong and, you know, you want to be able to show your muscles—flex your muscles—you've got to start eating meat; you've got to start eating meat." So what does he do? He has some goat, and then he says that all night long he sort of heard this goat bleating, you know, and—and—and henceforth decided that he could never touch meat again. But—but—but that incident is important also because there were other violations; for example, the implicit trust his mother had in him that he would not touch meat; he did it in secrecy; he didn't go and tell his mother, "Hey, Mom, I'm gonna have meat this evening with my Muslim friend; what do you think of that?" No, he did it in secrecy, and that's why Gandhi is always going to be—gonna think about that—that's another key word—secrecy—that there is always—almost always—an intention to deceive—to stray away from the truth when you do things secretly. You know, it's like my son playing video games but pretending to do homework on the computer—constant tussle; I can see that, right? And the minute he hears my footfall, quickly he'll say, "Change the screen," you know, hoping that I won't know—he's doing it in secret; the intention is to deceive. And yes, of course, I mean, I'm not using him as a—you know, I'm not saying that children may not do it; we can—we can have a long discussion of that, but you understand what I'm talking about—that he had tried meat and then decided that yes, he would never touch meat again. Now, he goes to England; he doesn't—he goes to England, but being a vegetarian and starting to mix around with vegetarians is not a sign of being modern—not in England in the 1880s at all; it meant that you were absolutely a crackpot—because nobody understood what vegetarianism meant in England; to be a vegetarian was to be a political rebel, actually; it meant to be a political rebel in many ways. Now, that doesn't mean that Gandhi is thinking of, "Okay, being a political rebel" when he decides that he's going to start mixing with the vegetarians; his reasons are very practical at that point in time, but I'm saying tacitly he has something else in mind; tacitly he knows—he has not articulated it yet—and the practical reasons, of course, was that he was looking for something that would enable him to survive in England, because if you have ever read—Schwimmer said—you know, the English novelist—he said, "The only way to eat well in England is to have an English breakfast three times a day," you know, right? Because at least you get tomatoes—baked tomatoes—and, you know, baked beans, right? But otherwise, you'll be—you'll be eating steamed carrots and peas for the rest of your life. I mean, English food is rotten to the core, you know, right? And that's one reason why England had to colonize India so they could at least eat decently, you know? Now, what happens? Gandhi goes there, and he starts mixing around with the vegetarians, and then he starts mixing around with the Theosophists; he talks about them—who are the Theosophists? Now, the Theosophists—too long to get into the intricacies—the Theosophists; they're—the great figure in that history is Madame Blavatsky, okay? Madame Blavatsky; there's also an Irish woman—but she was living in India later on; she becomes an—an Irish woman who's going to live in India for decades and is going to identify with the Indian cause, but she was associated with the—the Theosophy movement as well; her name is Annie Besant. So, I'm just—that's simply an illustration—the one we're—
Interested in is Madame Blavatsky, and more particularly, we are interested in what theosophy means. Theosophy is, if I’m able to put this way, a religious or spiritual doctrine, right, which argues that there is a way for human beings to communicate with the divine directly. Okay, with the divine.
The reason why theosophy is important is twofold. One: England, in the second half of the 19th century, has become the epitome, along with an emerging United States, the epitome of an industrial material society; an industrial material society where there is very little room any longer in people’s lives for something that we might call the spiritual. Okay, that’s one consideration.
The second principal consideration is that, even if you were a Protestant, right, you were still essentially following an institutionalized form of religion. It is, but your—your access to Christianity is mediated through the church, through the local minister, the parish minister, right. Now, if you’re Catholic, of course, yes, you know, then you—and if you’re an observant Catholic, you know, you’re—you do confession and all of that, which if you’re a Protestant you’re not doing that, but you’re—but your access to the divine is still mediated through the church. So theosophy was a—if I may put it this way—it kind of a revolt, and it believed in such things as a notion of the oracular, the Oracle; that Madame Blavatsky is a kind of person who’s saying—who’s sitting there and saying, “I see a divine vision.” And so many people thought, “Well, this is just—she’s a fraud; she’s an absolute fraud.” That was the dominant view of Madame Blavatsky and the whole movement of theosophy.
If I had to put it in yet a different language, one of the ways in which you could—you could start thinking about theosophy is a slightly different kind of self-reliance. When you say that yes, you know, Christianity has or Buddhism, whatever the case might be, has something to say—something to tell us about the nature of truth, something about the nature of conduct, morality, but ultimately one derives these notions from one’s own introspection about these matters, and one can use certain kinds of aids; one can use certain kinds of aids such as crystal balls. So, for example, you’ll find that some of the Theosophists are very often associated—I’m not saying that that’s central to it—but some of them are associated with these kinds of things.
The picture that you need to think about is that theosophy is going to be seen within the dominant Western/Christian intellectual traditions as something that is really a kind of a fraud, right. And Gandhi is going to become friendly with the Theosophists; is going to seek them out. So now you understand what’s going on here. They are representing the other West, once again—these vegetarians, these Theosophists who are, in a way, seekers after something. They say, “We’re not—we’re not satisfied with—we’re not happy with the institutional forms of knowledge that have become incorporated in the Western intellectual tradition. We’re not—we’re not satisfied by institutional forms of religion.” And they’re seeking—may not be precise; in other words, it’s not clear that they always knew what they were seeking. Because if you were a vegetarian, you are not just seeking a vegetarian diet; it meant that you had become, in many ways, marginal to British social life. You couldn’t mix around in the circles in which people mixed around with if you were a vegetarian, you see. You were someone who had set out on a different path. And so this is the irony now. The irony is that Mohandas Gandhi goes from Gujarat to England officially to become credentialed in law, which he does, right. So he’s going to come back to India with a law certificate, and he’s now able to practice at the bar, as they say. But this is what he does officially, and officially what he does is he opens himself up to a very different kind of intellectual and cultural tradition in the Western world, and that too in the heart of the British Empire; in the heart of the British Empire.
Let me translate it into yet another language: He did not go there to become a scientist or to learn the techniques of business management, which is the—which is what students come to the U.S. for today from abroad, right? They come here so they can get, you know, their—their degrees in engineering, because business management, business economics, science—why? Because it is believed uniformly that the—that the West—and in particular American universities—are the citadel of this kind of work. This is where you learn these things; you don’t learn them at some university in Sudan, right, if I’m gonna put it at this flying weight, right. And this is the irony: Gandhi comes to the West not to become more modern in his—does not—to become more scientific-minded in his thinking; not to say, “I’m going to learn the principles of business management, because after all I am a Gujarati; I’m from a family of grocers or merchants,” if I may put it this way, right. No, I’m not coming to the West to do that. I’m going to come to the West so I can parlay and party with vegetarians and Theosophists. Think about that. I mean, this is the oddest thing when you start to look at the life—folklore that’s Gandhi, all right. And this is what I mean when I say that his—we’re going to have to understand the relationship between this and what he’s going to do subsequently, what the nature of his struggle will be.
Question: Did he have any encounter with the Theosophists? In fact, I don’t think he had ever heard the word theosophy before he went to England. Now, vegetarianism he knew, because—because I’ve already gone over that, right? He came from a vegetarian family. But there is a difference. I’m glad you asked the question. There is a difference. The difference was that in India Gandhi was a vegetarian by default; that was the default mode. You were a vegetarian if you came from his kind of background, right? His mother is a strict vegetarian. The Jains and Vaishnavas who I spoke about belong to predominantly vegetarian traditions. It was something you just did, okay. When he comes to England and eventually seeks out these vegetarians, partially from despair because he’s looking for good vegetarian food, right—and you read the Autobiography, he tells you that—however, in England he embraces vegetarianism as a matter of choice; political choice, eventually it’s going to be a political choice. It was not simply that you just did instinctively, you know, right? That’s the difference. But he certainly had not encountered theosophy in India before he went.
Now we’re putting into place all the elements that will make it feasible for us to begin to understand his practice of non-violence, but before we do that we need to start looking at what I’m calling the elements of a Gandhian grammar. We will not get through this today, but that’s alright. I want to start on it in the remaining 5–10 minutes that I have, and I want to say also that when I give you the elements of a Gandhian grammar, these are not the only elements, right? There are others as well, and I’m giving you what I think are some of the key terms that you need to be thinking about. And the first of these is Satya. There. So you have for your reading for this week a piece by T.K. Mahadevan, “An Approach to the Study of Gandhi.” That piece is almost 50 years old now, but it says it’s still an important piece in the Gandhi scholarship. And one of the things that he points out quite rightly is that Gandhi has been minimized in India and especially in the West by being viewed simply as the apostle of non-violence. And what Mahadevan suggests—and I agree with him—there is that in fact the word Satya takes precedence over the word Ahimsa. So you should know the word Ahimsa, which is the Sanskrit word—the word would have also been common in Gujarati and in Hindi and a number of other Indian languages, North Indian languages especially, right? This word Ahimsa means non-violence, and the word Himsa means violence. And I want to pause there for a second before I go back to Satya. Okay, violence and non-violence. I want to suggest to you also there—there is a difficulty in translating this word, right? Difficulty in translating this work into—no, I am sorry—into non-violence. And in order for you to understand that, let us first, independently of this, look at the word non-violence. What kind of word is it in the English language? Very simply, this is not a trick question. What—non-violence? It’s a negation, right? It is a negation. You have the word violence; non-violence is the absence of violence, the contradiction of violence, right? But the word is violence, and then you negate it; you say non-violence, and you know that in English negations are always a problem. And that is why, in colloquial speech—by the way, in colloquial speech—think of it this way: In colloquial speech, you know, you—you’re talking with a friend about a third person; you say, “I don’t like this person.” Needs to negative, right? There is a problem in the English language with the idea of negation. Now the question will be whether there is a similar problem in the Sanskrit Ahimsa, because notice that, as in English, so you have at least overtly it looks like the same structure. So you have violence, and then you have the negation of violence; that’s called non-violence. You have Himsa, and then you have the negation. So in Sanskrit, the—right, Ahimsa—the a is the prefix, which is the negation, okay. However, in Sanskrit it does not have the same connotations of the negative, you see, as non does in non-violence in the English language, right? Let’s think about it in a slightly different way; give you a different analogy. Because what I want you to understand here is how is it that one word takes precedence over another, all right? So when I say takes precedence over another, I’ll give you an illustration. I would say that historically speaking, and almost every civilization, man has taken precedence over woman, and that, of course, is one of the grounds of a modern feminist movement is to try to arrest that, okay? So that’s what it means to take precedence. So let’s take as an example something quite different, but so that you understand fully well what are the implications or what we are attempting to do. So what is the definition of evil according to Augustine, the great Christian theologian who writes the City of God, right? What is the definition of evil? Does anybody know? Or even if you haven’t read Augustine, want to make a speculation? If you had to define evil, let’s say you looked it up in a dictionary, you know, you go to the Oxford English Dictionary. What is evil? Anybody, just speculate?
Sorry, not good. Did you say not good? Okay, I agree. So what is good now? Let’s—what is a definition of good, not evil? Ah, that—you—I’m so glad you mentioned it, because it allows us to go straight into the question. See, logically speaking, if evil is the absence of good, logically speaking, then, as she has suggested, good should be the absence of evil. However, Augustine does not agree. Why? Why does he not agree? And how does he define—so yes, evil is the absence of good; he agrees with that part. He—he does not believe that good is the absence of evil. So you might say he’s not thinking logically; no, he’s doing something else. The reason for that is good is good in itself; it does not need evil to be defined, you see. If you say good is the absence of evil, then you need evil in order to define good, and he’s saying that good is ontologically sufficient unto itself; it is sufficient unto itself. Evil is the privation, the absence, the lack of good; it doesn’t have a leg to stand on; it is dependent on something called good, and there not being good, but good does not need evil to stand on, right? It is sufficient unto itself. Now that’s a very interesting move politically and intellectually and theologically, and the implications for us are going to be that Gandhi is going to say that Satya does not need—truth does not need falsehood to stand on. The opposition of the opposite of falsehood is always truth, but the opposite of truth is not always falsehood, okay? And similarly, we’re going to have to understand what is the ontological relationship, okay, between violence and non-violence. In fact, he’s going to say non-violence is ontologically prior to violence. I’m going to stop with that thought, and we will continue with this in my following lecture.