Transcription
Hey, does anybody have any questions before I begin my lecture for today based on anything I've said thus far? Any questions about administrative matters, requirements, books, materials? No? All right. So let me tell you what we're going to attempt to do today. We have a very large canvas that we have to cover. I'm interested in three large sets of issues. I'm not going to necessarily apportion time equally between them; we'll just see how things move along. One is the political and intellectual history of India in the nineteenth century, very briefly, because you need to have some idea of the backdrop to the emergence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Let me remind you that Mahatma is not his name; it's a title conferred—or, in the word, means great soul—a title conferred on him much later on. And in fact, when one says Mahatma Gandhi, one has, in a sense, already acceded to a point of view, right? So I prefer to actually always use the word Mohandas when referring to Gandhi. So the first set of questions has to do with the political and intellectual history of India. The second, which is related but quite discreet, is the cultural and religious milieu in which he grew up. Right? What were the dominant religious trends at that time? It would also include such things as his family: what kind of family did he come from, and what bearing might that have on the manner in which he grew up and grew to adulthood and developed his thoughts? Right? And thirdly, his history—Gandhi's history—in political terms. So it's related to the second set of points: his history in political terms until his departure for South Africa in his early twenties. So you see what I mean when I said that we have a very large canvas that we have to think about. Let me begin with the first set of questions having to do with the political and intellectual history of India in the 19th century.
India had fallen under colonial rule, strictly speaking, in the middle part of the 18th century, and 1757 is a traditional date when what was called the Battle of Plassey was fought, and the British achieved military conquest over portions of eastern India. What you're going to find the British doing over the course of the next 50 to 100 years is expanding their rule, gradually acquiring more territories, and eventually putting into place a fairly complex administrative system for the governance of India. Now, even though India was a colony, I think it can safely be said that the administrative system for the governance of India in the late 1700s, early 1800s, was probably almost as complex as the administrative system anywhere in the world—certainly as complex, in some ways, as the administrative system in England itself. All right. But what is also important to note here is that Indians did not have a role in governing themselves. Now we should be amply clear about what that means: that as we move along in time, we are going to find that in the late 19th century, for example, the British had to rely upon a large number of Indians who would staff government positions, but they would staff them in the lower-level positions. The governors, the governor-general, the district heads—all of these officials were always British. And I want to underscore the word British, not English, and I hope you know the difference. The difference, of course, is that British includes the English, the Scots, and the Irish, and the Welsh. There were a large number of Scotsmen who were in India; in fact, a disproportionate number of the ruling elite was actually Scottish, you know, in proportion to their numbers. Those are complexities that we cannot enter into right now, because that is not the subject matter that we are primarily interested in, but I'm just trying to suggest to you that when Gandhi comes around, when he is born—at that point in time, 1869 is the year of his birth, October 2nd—that at that point in time there is a fairly vast machinery of administration by which the British are ruling India, but that Indians themselves do not have a part to play in that machinery except in clerical positions at the lowest level. Right.
Now the second pertinent fact is that when Gandhi is born in 1869, not all of India was directly under British rule, and I want to explain that very briefly. So if you—if you take—I do use PowerPoints; I'm not going to use one today, just letting you know, because I think it's important that students develop the ability to listen. And in this culture, students have become so attuned to the visual that the oral facility does not get developed. And remember, we are coming from a culture—in this case, in India—where the oral facility developed over a period of 2,000 years. Even when I was going—going to school in the early sixties in India, we had to memorize large numbers of poems. Right? And in ancient India, they memorized texts running into thousands, tens of thousands of lines of poetry, and they could recite it without a single flaw. All right. So this—so there's a politics to PowerPoint presentations, too, and why we should be a little wary of these things. Okay. Now, but I'm not averse to using them, and I will use them, but for today we don't need one. So here is a rough map of India. Okay, it's a peninsula. South India is a peninsula; this is over here. You've got the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea. Gandhi is born right here, the city of Porbandar. Okay, 1869. We'll go back to the importance of it being a coastal city in a moment. For the present, the more important thing is simply this: that two-thirds of the country was under British rule; the remaining one-third, roughly, is not directly under British rule. That one-third, roughly, is comprised of what are called the native states; sometimes they're called the princely states. You'll hear both of these expressions; you'll encounter both of them. Each of these states is autonomous, and yet it is not—what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that each of them is headed by a native ruler. The native ruler could be a Hindu or a Muslim; in some cases, a Sikh—largely Hindu or Muslim. If it's a Hindu, you designate that ruler as a Rajah or a Maharaja. Maha is the Sanskrit prefix, as in the word Mahatma. Right? So if you—if you want to appear to be—look really great—then you call yourself a Maharaja. Maha is great, right? And the word Raja means ruler. So the Hindu ruler would be the Raja, sometimes called the Maharaja, the great ruler. Okay, it might be a petty little man actually, but he might call himself a Maharaja, or others might call him that. If he was a Muslim ruler, he would be known by different names; he could be known as the Nizam, as in the case of Hyderabad, or could be known as the Nawab. The vocabulary—I'm just saying, if you encounter it, you think, whatever. These are titles; these are designations. Okay.
Now, why did the British not rule the native states directly? And what do I mean when I said they did not rule them directly? What I mean by that is they allowed the native ruler autonomy over his jurisdiction in certain spheres of life, such as education, sanitation. However, the native ruler could not enter into an alliance with a foreign power; he could not enter into an alliance with a foreign power because when you enter into an alliance with a foreign power, you are a nation-state at that point; you have autonomy. So over all the critical matters, the British exercised jurisdiction, but over all the non-critical matters, they left things to the native ruler. And there were advantages to doing that. The advantages obviously had to do with the fact that you could minimize your administration in these areas, and you appointed a person—the person was called a Resident—Resident, and that person would be the liaison officer between the British government of India and the native ruler. Gandhi is born in one such princely state; that princely state is called Kathiawar; it's the region, and this area—the city that he is born in—is called Porbandar. Porbandar; that whole area is called Kathiawar. Kathiawar is used in a couple of different ways, but that—of western India. Now, in the state of Gujarat. So in modern-day terms, Gandhi is a Gujarati, because if you look at a modern map of India—right—there was a reorganization of India after India achieved independence in 1947, and so the state that he was born into became known post-1947—it was a little bit after 1947, but after independence—became known as Gujarat. And so Gandhi is a native Gujarati, but he's also a native Kathiawari, because that was a region within Gujarat that he was born in, and the city is called Porbandar. Now that's important; it's important for a reason I hinted at, but I want to develop that reason. I hinted at in my previous lecture: it's a coastal city; it's a port. Now one can make all kinds of arguments about the place of ports in history. It has often been argued that ports are very often places that are more cosmopolitan; they're more cosmopolitan because they are—goods and people coming in; there are sailors; there are—also people were deeply suspicious of ports, for example, and the U.S.—I'm sure you all know that—that political analysts divide the U.S. into blue America and red America, right? So we know that each of them refers to portions of the U.S. which are, quote, either liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, right? And the—and you will find that Chicago, for example, even though it is—it's not on the ocean, but it's on the lake—it's on a lake; there's a body of water there, certainly—but Chicago, California, New York, these are all viewed as forming one kind of stream of opinion in America, and then you've got, you know, the rest, as it were. Okay, you know, give or take a few places here and there, you know, the general picture—I don't have to elaborate upon it. Now the important thing is that one can make one's own inferences about the significance of Gandhi being born in a city which was a coastal city, looking out—looking out into the Arabian Sea—the Arabian Sea, looking westward. To understand the deeper significance of that, we should attempt to understand the fact that the Gujaratis—and Gandhi is a Gujarati—the Gujaratis were an extraordinarily diasporic people, and had been for a very long period of time. People who used to do world history and who thought that world history meant European history—there's still many people who think that, frankly—okay—and who thought that the Mediterranean trade was the center of the world, for example. Okay, many of these people would have been taken by surprise to know that there was a massive trading system called the Indian Ocean trading system, which was the linchpin, in many ways, of the world economy for centuries. Because remember here—now—so this is India here, and then you get Southeast Asia here, moving—so in, you know, the Indonesian archipelago, Southeast Asia—of Vietnam—all of these places, and then of course you've got the Gulf region here—over here you're on the Middle East—moving into the Gulf region here, and then you've got, of course, Africa and the east coast of Africa—the east coast of Africa—the Gulf Peninsula, India—peninsular India—both the coasts—and all of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea over here—all of this is part of the Indian Ocean trading system. And we know that no matter where you went within this vast world, you would run into a Gujarati; you would always run into a Gujarati. You just pick up any texts, any document which talks about the year 1000, the year 1200, and you could go to any port—you could go to Aden, and you could go to Mombasa, you could go to Zanzibar—you would always run into the Gujaratis. Gujaratis were traveling all over, trading, okay, creating a—a fella—a kind of a seaborne cultural empire, if I may put it this way. Right? So that is the significance of Gandhi being born—that he is looking outwards. And I think my own view is that generally, yes, people who are born on a coast generally do have a tendency to look outwards; you know, they're less insular, but you don't have to accept that. But what you do have to accept is that the Gujaratis—and Gandhi was a Gujarati—were a people who had been traveling and trading for at least a millennium, if not much longer. Right? That's a key element here, because we have to think of this: that around the time that he was born, how many Indians were traveling? Remember, India as a country that is under the heel of colonial rule; it's subjugated; it's a subjugated place. How many Indians had experience of the world at that point in time? How many would have experience of the world twenty years later when Gandhi goes to London? He did go to London for his higher education. He finished his schooling in India; he's born in a place—a city—called Porbandar, and he goes to high school in the native town of Rajkot. I'll show you some slides maybe in the next lecture. Very briefly, I visited both Porbandar and Rajkot recently—you know, a few years ago—and he went to school at Rajkot Alfred High School. The place is remembered with plaques because it's associated with Gandhi, of course. And so he did his schooling there, and then he eventually moved on to London. How many people from Kathiawar were moving on to London? Right? So you see this backdrop is essential for you to start thinking about Gandhi becoming eventually a global figure—a global figure—and a globalized figure, because those are two different things. Gandhi becomes globalized, so that whenever you have a march, a demonstration, a protest somewhere in the world, particularly if it's a non-violent kind of protest or demonstration, whose name do they have on the banners? Whose photograph do they have on the banners? Mohandas Gandhi—not the only one, necessarily; sometimes they'll have Che Guevara and Gandhi together—and we can consider the politics of that later on. Right? But you get the sense. So this is one set of questions. Now let's go back to the political and intellectual history of India and the question of the religious milieu and all of that.
So in the second half of the 19th century, India, as I've already said, had been under colonial rule for well over a hundred years now, right? Administrative machinery is in place; they've been significant changes in 1857-58, just a little over a decade before Gandhi is born. Why? Because in 1857-58 you had a rebellion; it's called the Sepoy Mutiny, but just think of it as the Great Rebellion of 1857-58, which was by far the greatest threat that the British had ever had to their rule. So there was an uprising affecting substantial portions of North India—very little of South India—but certainly affecting substantial portions of North India, portions of eastern India as well. The British suppressed it; there was brutality on both sides. And the most significant change was that India—and I cannot enter into a discussion of this point really and its complexities, but you need to know that—that India had, up till that point in time, technically been ruled by a company; it was not technically ruled by Britain; it was ruled by the East India Company. So in 1857-58, when the rebellion is crushed, the East India Company is going to be abolished, and India becomes what is called a crown colony; in other words, it's now going to be directly ruled by Britain, by Parliament, and there is going to be a man in Britain who is going to be in charge of affairs for India, and he's a member of the British Cabinet; he is called the Secretary of State for India. They had a separate Secretary of State for the colonies—an interesting little point here—right? Because India is a colony, so why do they want a separate Secretary of State for India, a separate cabinet position? The reason for that, of course, was that India was not just another colony; it was, to use that clichéd phrase, the jewel in the crown; it was the largest colony; it is what made Britain an empire. You lose India, your empire crumbles. Right? So they had a separate designation, a separate member of the British Cabinet called the Secretary of State for India. Now let's entertain a few other questions in general about that political—right—so this is set up now. India is ruled by Britain; there's a Secretary of State; the man in India who rules is called the Viceroy—the Governor-General, also known as the Governor-General of India, also known as a Viceroy—two different designations. When he is sitting in Council, he's a Governor-General of India; when he's representing the British monarch, he is a Viceroy. Right? So he is the supreme ruler of India, and he is not accountable to Indians; that is what it means to be colonized. He is not accountable to Indians; he is only accountable to the British Parliament; that's who he's accountable to. And then, of course, you have another administrative setup; you have within India, you know, so you have governors of various areas and a whole hierarchy of rulers, right? And these people who are governing India are members of what is called the ICS—Indian Civil Service—it's the administrative service. However, think of it this way: all of this is germane to understanding the milieu he came out of. Think of it this way: the Indian Civil Service—were there Indians in the Indian Civil Service in the 1860s? The answer is no; there were no Indians; it was staffed only by the British. In fact, an Indian who wished to play a part in the governance of his own country—we need not add, from the point of view of political correctness, her country, because nobody was thinking about women at that point in time—right? An Indian who wished to play a role in the governance of his own country could not be a member of the Indian Civil Service. When this was permitted, however, there was another anomaly: that an Indian who wished to appear in the Indian Civil Service—become part of the administrative services—and this is what you have to do in the U.S., too—you have to sit for an administrative services exam; let's say you want to join the American Foreign Service, you have to sit for a state-administered exam—an Indian who wished to do that had to go to London to do that. How many Indians were in the position of being able to travel to London to join the ICS? You see, this is another meaning of being colonized, and that's the political milieu. Now let's shift the focus slightly to the religious and cultural milieu. One of the grounds on which the British ruled India—they advanced many arguments—but one of the grounds on which they ruled India was they argued that India was a country that was backward. This argument, by the way, is still constantly used; sometimes it's disguised as humanitarianism; sometimes there is polite language; it is exactly the same argument—well, there are variations, of course—but it's exactly the same argument used by the Americans today when they are waging war in places such as Iraq or Sudan or Afghanistan or Libya or wherever the next country might be that they're going to attack and invade. Right? It's—it's—it's a variation of that argument. So, for example, when you look at Afghanistan—let's take the example of Afghanistan—because Afghanistan was always cast, after 9/11, as the most backward country in the world—and frankly, American intervention in Afghanistan was nothing other than an attempt to say—if I may use my own language—that we are going to save brown women—i.e., the women of Afghanistan—we're going to save them from the wicked brown men—that is, their own men—who oppress them. The white man is going to come atop his horse—chivalry's right—and he's going to save brown women from brown men. This was the argument that was made in a disguised language; it was an argument that was made by the entire American foreign policy establishment and military establishment. Afghanistan—backward—they—they mistreat their women; they don't allow them to go to school; they mutilate them; they do this and that; in other words, they're backward. Now that was an argument that the British were going to make, of course, in India as well, albeit with nuances and complexities, because when you're dealing with India, the British also realized that, well, India did have a history that was considerably older than the history of England itself. So if Indians had been barbarians for 3,000 years, well, then it was going to be a bit of a stretch to explain how that civilization had survived for 3,000 years and produced, you know, enormous works in literature, philosophy, grammar, so forth and so on. And so, of course, they had to use a different language, but the idea was that they had a mandate; they had a mission. What was that mandate? That mandate was: they had to improve India; they had to save India from its worst sins and crimes; and therefore, fundamentally, it also meant that they had to save Indian women from the clutches of Indian men. And this is all contained within that argument.
Now, in response to the British, a number of social reform movements arose, going back to the first half of the 19th century. I just want to mention a few; I mention them not because I expect you to know a great deal about them, right? I mention them because I want to suggest that Gandhi is not working in a vacuum; in other words, there is ferment already; people are thinking about certain questions. One of the fundamental questions that Indians were thinking about was: why are we, as a people, colonized? So certainly some of them accepted the British diagnosis that there must be something wrong in us if we are being subjugated. Right? The equivalent would be African Americans thinking that, well, there must be—we must—there must be something wrong in us; we must be backwards; we must have been oppressing each other; this is what made it possible for the white elites to be able to put us in slavery, because, after all, the history of many countries is precisely one of hierarchies which are often brutally enforced, right? Hierarchies brutally enforced. So there were some Indians who certainly took the view that yes, there is something—either fundamentally wrong—but even if one doesn't accept the analysis—there's something fundamentally wrong with ourselves that we still need to improve ourselves. And of course, my response is: is there a group of people who don't need to improve themselves at any point in time? I mean, can white Americans, for example, say that, well, everything is hunky-dory; everybody else needs to improve themselves, but we are perfectly fine? You know, everybody needs to—there's always room for improvement in any kind of society, whatever the social structure of that society. But nonetheless, the most germane fact is simply this: that there were social reform movements. One of these social reform movements was called the Brahmo Samaj, set up in the 1820s, headed by a man called Ram Mohan Roy. And Ram Mohan Roy—what he was attempting to do was to suggest—so I—I should give you a little context before I tell you what he was attempting to do more broadly—and this particular illustration I am going to furnish to you speaks to everything I've said in the last 10-15 minutes. In India, around the time that Ram Mohan is living—for it—so the 1800s, early 1800s, moving into the 1810s, 1820s—you have a phenomenon called sati. Most Indians don't like to talk about it, but I think we should attempt to understand what is transpiring here, and I'm giving you an extremely condensed version. So sati—the word has two meanings: one meaning is a good wife; a good wife. The second is the act of self-immolation—that when a woman—a married woman—lost her husband, on whatever account—maybe the husband died of a snakebite in Bengal, in the jungles of Bengal, or maybe died of cholera or pneumonia—whatever the case may be—when a widowed woman lost her husband, in some communities—very limited communities—let us be very clear that we understand—we are not speaking about an India-wide phenomenon; we are not speaking about a phenomenon even in one area where all the communities—okay—carried out this practice; we are talking about a practice carried out in a very limited number of communities in a certain part of India—the—in that—in those communities, sati meant that when a married woman lost her husband, she would join her dead husband on the funeral pyre; she would commit self-immolation. And of course, the British said it's barbarous; it's horrendous; think of the outrage committed on these women, and think of the suffering of the woman. And of course, Indians such as Ram Mohan Roy—these liberal social reformers—agreed with that point of view, and in fact, Ram Mohan Roy is part of a group of people who is instrumental in persuading the British that they ought to abolish sati. So when you abolish sati,
Also, means that someone who practices sati in the territories of British India is culpable of a criminal offence. Its culpable of a criminal offence. So that is how Rahman Roy became known to a much wider audience in Britain. Yes, somebody like Rahman Roy and his and his friends and his supporters, they wanted to, but they were Indians who opposed the ban on sati. They were Indians who opposed the ban because they said this is an interference by the British in our customs. Yes, what the Sethi goes back to—I mean some people would say it goes back historically for centuries—but there's again a disputed body of scholarship. So what we do know without any doubt, what we do know is the incidence of sati went up dramatically after the British became rulers of India. And I can try to explain that to you on some other occasion, but we would have to have a long discussion then. What were the consequences of British rule? But the incidence of sati went up. Yes, they were appealing to the East India Company. No, no, they repeat, well, well, it both, they're appealing to the company, but Rahman Roy is also sending petitions to Parliament because the company—this is what I meant that I have to give you a very condensed version—because the company, even though India is ruled by the company, it still has some degree of accountability to Parliament, and this degree of accountability is growing gradually year by year. So in fact, by the 1820s, even though India was technically—that's where it used the word “technical” at that point 20 minutes ago—that India was technically under company rule, but Parliament was already exercising considerable sovereignty. Okay, right now.
So when I speak of Indian social reformers, I'm saying that somebody like Rahman Roy, alright, is part of a group of people who are saying that yes, we need to reform Indian society. There are some elements of Indian society that are quite backward and so on. However, I need to make this picture more complex, and I want you to keep it in mind when we begin to look at Gandhi’s conception of religion. All right, so you’ll see the link now. Rahman Roy and many others were asking the question: if sati is being performed in a certain part of India by certain communities, with what right are they doing so? Is this sanctioned by Indian scriptures? Right? Is this sanctioned by Indian scriptures? For example, the kind of discussion that takes place today sometimes about Islam, you know that there have been a few instances where a person committing adultery is stoned. So you know what the discussion is: does the cause look, what does the Quran actually say about it? What do the hadith, the Hadees are the tradition of the prophet, okay, what do they say about it? Or is this a misreading of the Koran, etc., etc.? Let, let’s not get into that. I mean, if the analogy is useful for you to understand, Rawad Roy is saying: is sati actually condoned in the Indian scriptures? And he comes to the view that there is no scriptural sanction for sati at all, certainly not in the greatest of the scriptures. That there are secondary scriptures written much later on when Indian society had become more patriarchal. Right, that’s the argument that he’s going to give. And so what he is going to also argue is that fundamentally the problem really is that many people in India do not understand the nature of their own religion. They think that if you ask the people who perpetrate sati—because the people who perpetrate sati, they are not just the women, they are the ones who are going into the funeral pyre—they are very often being forced to do so by members of the family, including the mother-in-law, for example, who’s saying: you must follow tradition. But what does it mean to follow tradition? Is this tradition simply an oral tradition, or is it sanctioned by the scriptures? That won’t do. Studies the scriptures, and he says it is not sanctioned by the scriptures. The problem is that over a period of two thousand years the true scriptures have been hidden from us because over the course of the last two thousand years enormous amounts of material have been added to the scriptures. We can no longer distinguish between what is the authentic and what is the inauthentic.
So what does he want to do? Let me use an analogy here from a tradition that you might be more familiar with, the Christian tradition. Very often it has been argued that Rahman Roy is to Hinduism what Luther was to the Christian tradition. Okay, in other words, he is launching a kind of a Protestant Reformation of Hinduism. Right, and indeed I agree with the assessment, and I think it had enormous consequences, enormous consequences. That what he was trying to do in a way was to Protestantize Hinduism. Okay, that he understands Hinduism within a Protestant framework. He also knows Christianity very well. One thing I have to tell you about many of these Indian figures—Rahman Roy, Gandhi, people like that—they did not know just their own tradition; they knew the Christian tradition very well. And there is no Christian who ever knew the Hindu tradition the way—think about that. Okay, think about that. Much in the way in which I would argue that if you’re a scholar of Indian history, you always know the history of the West, but when you’re a scholar of Western history, it doesn’t mean you know the history of India. All right, now. Therefore, what we have to understand is that what Rahman Roy was trying to do was to introduce a Protestant form of Hinduism in India. He did not have many takers at that point in time. It was mainly the anglicized elite of Calcutta. He came from eastern India. Okay, and Eastern India’s capital, and it was a capital of the British Empire in India, was Calcutta, now called Kolkata. All of the cities have been given, given, you know, had they reverted to the Indian name as it were. Okay, so he came from eastern India, and Calcutta was the base of his operations. And here the anglicized elite, some of them began to follow him, but did not have a following really in much of the rest of India at all. So that’s an illustration of one kind of social reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj. Right, the other illustration—there are many such reform movements, many such reform movements—I’m giving you only two illustrations because again, let me remind you, I’m giving them to you partly because I want to suggest to you that Gandhi is not operating in a vacuum; that there are already religious reformers, social reformers working within India, and many of them thinking about such things as: what can we do to improve the situation of Indians? Why are we as a, why are we a colonized people? Is there something deficient in our religion? Gandhi, for example, just to let you know beforehand, and then you can—he never accepted the view that there was anything deficient in Hinduism, you know, right? And that is also going to be the way in which he is going to think through the problem of conversion; that a person who wants to convert from one religion to another, Gandhi has no fundamental objection to that at all, because it is your freedom if you—but he always argued that a person converts from one religion to another has always an inadequate understanding of his or her own religion. Because Gandhi did not accept the fact that there is a hierarchy of religions, and that some religions have a better conception of the human being or a better conception of emancipation or liberation or redemption, whichever word you wish to use, than other religions. All right, so, so keep this in mind because all of this is related to the question of that when Gandhi becomes a mature person, what is his response going to be to these social reform movements? The Arya Samaj. If the Brahmo Samaj was area of activity, arena of activity was here, the Arya Samajis arena of activity was here in the Punjab, in north India. Okay, north of, north of Gujarat and east Punjab, that was arena of activity. The Arya Samaj—area can remind you of anything—our DNA, the word Aryan, right? Because of course you know the India, I, by the way, according to the, the Nazi ideologues, the supreme ideologues of, not Nazism, such as Alfred Rosenberg—there’s a big article on him in the New York Times either today or yesterday, I forget—about the diaries. So Alfred Rosenberg was Hitler’s chief theorist of Nazi ideology, and people like him were firmly convinced that India was the center of the Aryan universe. But that posed a big problem because Indians were also colonized. Aryans are supposed to colonize everybody else, not be colonized. Right, so there is a big problem, but we won’t get into that right now.
So now the interesting thing is the Arya Samaj. What is this? The word Samaj means society. Right, same here. Its founder, a man by the name of Dayanand Saraswati, what he argued—that India had been contaminated by waves of foreign rulers, and that the way to redemption was for Hindus, who constituted the preponderant portion of India, that Hindus had to return to the Vedic civilization, that was the fount, the origins of Indian civilization. That was his view. Okay, they had to return to the Vedic civilization, and Vedic is related to the word Vedas, which are the texts. Okay, in oral composition for centuries before they were written down. The Vedas, the way those were, are the, the scriptures of Revelation, if I may—you have to use a Christian language here. The word Scripture, revelation, these are all Christian words. Right, and we have to be wary because when we use these words we are automatically, in a way, transplanting certain ideas in order to understand another culture or another set of terms. Yes, yes. So to return to the Vedic civilization means to return to the teachings of the Vedas. Okay, to return to the teachings of the Vedas, that everything else that has occurred after that has, is it’s like the growth of the jungle, you know, it’s a growth of the jungle, and so we have to, we have to now cut this apart and we turn back to the roots. That’s what he was advocating. And so they, so in this case, let me give you an illustration that will be the simplest way for you to understand. One illustration only, for example, in common everyday Hinduism, in everyday Hinduism, common everyday Hinduism, the worship of images is widespread. I am NOT saying that to be a Hindu you have to engage in the worship of images. I’m not saying that at all, but I’m saying the reverse is that it is common. There are many Hindus who will worship the divine through an image. The image could be of a God, it could be Vishnu, it could be Shiva, it could be a goddess Kali, whatever the case might be. They are none. Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, argued that image worship was not to be found in the Vedas, and therefore he argued that this was a form of idolatry which was foreign to Hinduism. Right, so this is what it means to return to the Vedas. I’ll give you only one illustration; it could give many others, but it’s a social reform movement because he’s saying we have to change the modes of worship. Yes, like what is definition of like something that’s like political to India because Hinduism, like even in the word in—yeah. Oh, look, we, I could, I could give you an answer that will be five hours long. Seriously, it will detain us considerably if we try to now understand, okay, to what extent his arguments are plausible or not. So the comment here, for example, word hint as in Hindu, right? I’ll hint—it’s an Arabic related, the word from the world for the river Sindhu. I, that you see, but if we get into that, you, we will get into all kinds of complexities. For example, let’s take the word religion. So we call Hinduism a religion, right? But what is the Sanskrit word for religion? Is there a Sanskrit word for religion? So the word that is used is very often Dharma. Okay, Dharma in English, DHA RMA. Now what I want you to do is I want you to go to a dictionary and look up the word Dharma, a Sanskrit-English dictionary, and what do you find? There are 500 meanings. In Dharma means law, morality, conduct, religion. It means all these things. There was no separate word for religion at all. So each thing that he says we could begin to, okay, what was his understanding of religion? Was he also operating within a Protestant—because I want to say, in a way, I’m glad the question’s been asked because I want to say something to you right now which you do not have to accept, but you think about it, right? And it’s an argument which goes well beyond the per matters of this course. I want to suggest to you that every religion today in the world is in fact a Protestant form of that religion, including Judaism, including Judaism. Hinduism, the religion that most Hindus think is a religion that their ancestors were following is not—this is not a religion; it is a Protestant form of that religion because essentially Protestant Christianity became the template for what is a proper religion. Okay, it’s a fundamental problem in the history of religions, but it’s a very massive problem. We are not going to attempt to tackle that today. All right, the main thing is I want to suggest to you that Gandhi is actually quite alert to that, even though he’s no scholar; he had an intuitive grasp of what some other fundamental problems are going to be. However, we—this is simply to describe to you the Balu, the larger balloon. Now let me go to some other aspects of that velu. All right, the two religions, religions. Now again, I don’t have to do what they always do, you know, in quotation marks. It’s understood; it’s always in quotation marks. Well, you know, religion, when we say religion, well, we’re really talking about the influence that Protestant Christianity came to exercise and the manner in which Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, all of these religions became transformed. All right, Jainism, I had mentioned to you in passing. So the religion, this religion is one of the four religions that arises from the soil of Indian and western India where Gandhi grew up. Jainism was widely prevalent. There are two things about Jainism—many things that are of real importance, but two that are indispensable very briefly for an understanding of Gandhi. One is the idea of ahimsa. You must know this word; you cannot take this class of Gandhi and not know this word. Okay, ahimsa is usually translated into English as non-violence. So this, there is a Sanskrit word called himsa which means violence, and ahimsa is non-violence. Right, and I will discuss the implications of violence and non-violence and the problems with the language in my next lecture. For the present it suffices to say that the Jains were committed to a rigorous interpretation of the idea of ahimsa. There was a difference between the laity and the clergy, right? But even among the laity. So, for example, the Jains are strict vegetarians, strict vegetarians. And vegetarians means in India, by the way, this category vagin is really something you get from the US because in India all the vegetarians, almost all, will in fact actually take milk, dairy products; they all do. But a straight vegetarian—my mother is a strict vegetarian; she is in her 80s; she has never tasted an egg, forget about meat or seafood—unthinkable, unthinkable. The, you know, I sometimes I hear from Americans, “Oh, I’m a fish vegetarian.” Like, what, what is that? You know, yeah, I’m a vegetarian but I eat fish. No, if you eat any living thing, you’re not a vegetarian, as simple as that, you know. So the, the Jains were and are strict vegetarians, but vegetarianism is a very complex theory because there’s also a theory of flavors. They do not, for example, eat—most of them—much like the version of—we’ll get to that in a moment—onion and garlic. Why do they not eat onions and garlic? Because onions and garlic have a very strong smell, and you cannot taste, you cannot smell other food properly because their smell overpowers. A lot of the vegetarians in India, if your Aegina version of a—, you also abstain from onion and garlic. In the US, if you want to encounter a variation of this, go to the Hare Krishnas, as they’re called. Okay, they are strict vegetarians too. So, and as I said, there were different rules for the click, for different levels of observance. So you found that Jains did not go into agriculture historically speaking. The founder of this religion is born 2500 years ago. They did not go into agriculture. The reason they did not go into agriculture is because when you go into agriculture you have to plow the land; when you plow the land you will end up killing living things in the soil, snails, ants, whatever the case might be. They did not go into agriculture, the Jains, and that’s what I mean by a strict observance of the idea of ahimsa, non-violence. It’s not simply a matter of abstaining from, you know, seafood or meat; it’s much wider theory than that. Right, the other influence that was predominant in his family—there are complexities which I cannot get into. There, for example, there’s a sect called the Pronami sect, and here they were, it was quite influential there, but, but for our purposes, since we’re not doing an extraordinarily advanced seminar on the whole religiosity of that period and how it bore upon Gandhi’s life, but some elements are important. The second main thing is Vaishnavism, which is one of the predominant forms of Hinduism. The Vaishnavites are those who follow the god Vishnu. Okay, they follow the god Vishnu, and rationalism—many strands of it are also strands which are vegetarian, not necessarily all of them, but some are. The more important thing is that Vaishnavism is also associated with devotion, bhakti, the word in used in Indian languages, some Indian languages, is bhakti. So this idea of devotion is important, invasion of the zone. Okay, that one of the ways in which you approach God is through your acts of devotion to God. Right, now to understand, let’s take one illustration, and this also is the segue into Gandhi’s own life now, right, to the early biography of Gandhi. To understand what bearing this might have had upon his life, if you read his autobiography, I hope that you have started reading it, you will recall an incident where his mother had gone on a fast, and in order for her to break the fast she could only do so when she saw the moon. Right, so there is a fast, by the way, that is undertaken in North India especially by married women for the longevity of their husbands. It’s called the Karva Chauth. Now since we are living in an age of political correctness and men are supposed to be nurturing and all of that as well, right, there are men who will join their wives in the Karva Chauth. So they undertake a fast for the longevity of their wives, but this is—there is no tradition for that. All right, so I know quite a few people, you know, who their husbands will join there was. So the, a married woman, it’s, you know, it’s not obligatory, right, although there’s a social custom. I mean, the some of the neighborhoods of Delhi that I grew up in, every married woman would undertake their fast. What, what is that fast? So in the morning, from the morning you cease to have any food or even water, if you strictly observe it. Nowadays it’s very difficult for people to, you know, observe these things. We’re not living in an age of rigorous asceticism, if I may put it this way, right? So they’ll allow themselves, you know, some water and so on, but if you were to observe it rigorously, no water or food at all, then you have to wait until the moon appears at night before you can break the fast, and you have to see the moon yourself if you’re the woman who’s undertaking the fast. So when I was growing up as a child, so in India, you know, you’ve got flat rooftops, so my mother would say, “Beta, upar jaa ke dekh, go up to the rooftop and see if the moon has come out,” you know, okay, because you know otherwise you keep on track because it’s easier to see it from, from a higher point, right? And, and if the moon came out then I would quickly go running down, you know, “It’s come out!” You come, and then she would come and she’d take a look. Okay, now Gandhi says in his autobiography that his mother observed this fast, and there were occasions when the moon doesn’t come out—it’s cloudy or it’s raining, you can’t see it. What do you do? And so, you know, and he would realize that his mother is so devout and she’s gone without food or water for 18 hours. Right, strenuous for a person. Right? So he temp was tempted to say, “Yeah, I saw it, I saw it,” you know, “good enough,” and then you tell your mama, “Look, I saw it,” and but you know then the clouds came and it’s hidden again, and then puta li, by his mother would say, “No, no, my son, I have to see it myself, I have to see it myself.” And so he says that he understood a great many things from his mother—what it means to be devout. See, it’s—you, I want to just stress something, you know, these are—in any age and time it would be different to comprehend fully someone who’s that devout. In our agent times today, it is very exceedingly difficult to do so because even some things as the sacred, what does it mean anymore? Everything’s up for sale in the global marketplace today, you know, and California is the best example of, you know, the mall of spirituality—Ground 1 Yoga, Ground 1, Ground 2 Ayurveda, Ground 3, you know, Tai Chi, Grant Ground 4 Transcendental Meditation, you know, which floor do you want to go to? It’s some—all of spirituality here, everything has been marketed, packaged, sold. You see, so what is a sacred mean? You have to bear that in mind when you’re reading Gandhi—that we don’t have always that language available to us today. That is my submission to you, and it’s the same thing—we devote, who is devout? I mean, if somebody told me Ted Cruz is devout, I’d laugh, you know, at laughs—he’s not devout, his ideological, you know, this is a different meaning of being devout. And so Gandhi understood that from his mother—what it means to be devout, what it means to be disciplined, what it means to stand by another person. You see, and again, if you’re a feminist you’d say, “Well, you know, it’s his mother,” yes, but you can abstract the general principle. The abstract, the general principle means to understand what it means to stand by a person, what it means to say that I am ruthlessly committed to the principle of honesty—that unless and until I see the moon myself I cannot break my fast because I do disservice to myself and to my god. You see, this is the ambience, the climate in which Mohandas Gandhi grew up. He also learned from his mother something else, something he is going to deploy later on on a grand scale; he is going to be the master of it in world history, the master of the fast, or what people call hunger strike. Now what is the context? I could give you examples from Indian texts that go back a long ways, but I want to take the example from Gandhi’s own life and from his mother—that he saw disputes in the household between his mother and father. There are always disputes in the home between spouses, disagreements. So how are these disagreements resolved, and what did Gandhi understand when he saw these disagreements? And here again I want to use my own example for a second because I experienced this in my own household, and then I understood what Gandhi was really talking about. See, for example, in most Indian households—and I think that was true in the US until quite recently, it’s probably still true in many—but in most Indian households certainly when I grew up, the share of power between my father and my mother was by no means equal; it was highly disproportionate, highly disproportionate. And needless to say, it was my father who exercised by far the greater power in the house. And so if my mother, let’s say that she wants, she has a disagreement with my father about something and she cannot get her way at all, so what could she do? She could say, “I’m not going to eat; I’m going to go on a fast.” And then my father might say, “Well, that’s up to you; you don’t want to eat, be my guest; maybe it’s good for you, maybe you’ll slim down.” He didn’t say that, he didn’t say that to her, but, but I can imagine a scenario where somebody might say, “Well, you know, you need to lose any a little bit weight anyhow, my dear wife,” so not a bad idea, you know. But in other words, my father might say, “Okay, you know, she is using this coercion because, you know, after all, it’s…”
Like a mother wants to see her children eat right, as a father, if I see my son's not eating for a whole day, I get, "Why are you not eating, my son? What's the problem? You know you want to, right? It's natural." So this idea was that, all right, she has a disagreement; she cannot get her point of view across. She says to my father, "I am NOT going to eat." However, this strategy did not always work. Piece, as I've suggested, might say, "Well, that's up to you." Now, if there are children in the home, as it were, in our home, and I see my mother not eating, then I think to myself, "I wonder why she is not eating." We eat all together at the dinner table, but she's not eating. Why is she not eating, you know? And if, okay, one meal, maybe, or maybe she's got a bad tummy, but let's say, you know, three meals a day she's not eating, she begins to see, and then, you know, she tells me, "Well, you know, they have a disagreement with my father," and then if I, if I say, "I'm not going to eat either," then my father will swing into action immediately. Whatever she wants. "None of my, my son is not eating," you know. And so my mother would say, "Well, yeah, but you know, there's a reason, but let's resolve this right now." This is what Gandhi saw in his home. He saw that Putali, by his mother, was resorting to fasting, resorting to fasting. This equilibrium of power between the mother and the father in the home, right, and he is able to exercise an influence much later on in adult life. He's going to begin to think about the manner in which one deploys fasting politically and the public sphere on a much grander scale.
And I want to make a point right now; I want you to reflect on it, and that is that Gandhi always adhered to the view that the idea of nonviolent resistance was not simply something that you carried out against the state, for example, the colonial state, or against an oppressive elite; that you could also carry it out in the setting of the home. So that you go from the micro level to the macro level, the gamut, and there is a relationship between what happens in the public sphere outside and what happens in the home, right? He came to an awareness of these kinds of things, but the genesis of this all goes back to his home. That doesn't mean the genesis of everything goes back—I'm talking about the, for example, the fast, the mother being a model for him in many ways. She was devout, she was disciplined, she was religious, she was honest, right, the notion of perseverance, so forth and so on. Now that's the milieu. Now let's move on to the last phase of this story.
So Gandhi, I've already mentioned, born in 1869, schooling in Kathiawad, in Porbandar, and Rajkot. Who was his father? His father was a man who was working as the Diwan, the prime minister, to one of the native rulers. Now that sounds like a very lofty position; it wasn't really, frankly, because this native state was a very small state. The Raja was no big shakes, frankly, all right. You know, he's a kind of a petty ruler, a small petty ruler. And some of these princely states, incidentally, were very small. I mean, the smallest of them would have been a thousand acres, two thousand acres, the size of UC Santa Cruz campus. The largest of them would have been the equivalent of a big state in the U.S., you know, Hyderabad, Kashmir, and these were, you know, millions of, okay, inhabitants living there, millions, tens of millions. So his father was, however, a man who was versed in politics to some degree because he was the Prime Minister, the advisor, the principal advisor to the ruler. And when appropriate, I will discuss other episodes from his autobiography, but the gist of the matter is this, without getting into the details there, which, which, as I said, we'll, we'll cover at some other point, that Gandhi finishes his schooling in India and then he decides that he wants to go to London.
Now, in the 1880s, when he went to London in the 1880s, by this point in time, a number of Indians—a very small number, we're talking about a few dozens, moving into a couple of hundreds at most—some Indians were beginning to travel to Britain. None to the U.S. No one came to the U.S. for higher education at that point in time. Of course, you went to Britain, and to go to Britain usually meant you went to Oxford or to Cambridge or to London, to one of the Inns of law. Most of the Indians went to study law. And I need to introduce one little detail here before we revert back to the life of Gandhi, and that is in 1885, there is an organization that is going to be founded in India, 1885. It is called the I.N.C., the Indian National Congress. It's founded in 1885. What was the intention? The intention was elites came together initially. We are talking about 60, 70, 80 men who come together, and they come together because they are somewhat disturbed by the fact that Indians have no self-representation, right? They have no self-representation, that Indians have no voice in the governing of their own country; they are not politically represented. Of course, they don't have the vote, right? And they want to increase Indian participation in political life. In the early years, what did the Congress elites do? They were all elites; they all came from well-to-do backgrounds, and make-so people, it must be said, Hindus, Christians, different caste backgrounds—I won't get into caste right now, all right—different caste backgrounds, even some Christians. In fact, is a man called Allan Octavian Hume, who is one of the founders of the INC, he is a Britisher, because there were a few Britishers living in India at that time who also thought that, well, it's about time that Indians started to actually take part in public life, right, become responsible for the governance of their own country. So in the early years, what did the members of the Congress do? They would go with a petition to the Governor-General or the governor and say, "Sir, would you do this or that for us as a community?" That's what they did. They picked a, like, the petition. The organization is going to come along slowly, you know, a few hundred people are going to join over the course of a few years. It's important because this was the first concerted attempt by Indians—albeit by the elites—by Indians to have some kind of political activity and some claim for self-representation. We are going to see that Gandhi, when he comes into Indian politics in the second decade of the 20th century, you know, he is going to radically try to reform this organization, which is not to say that it was that, over 30 years from 1885 until 1915 when Gandhi returns to India from South Africa, that the organization had not already changed; it had, but still it was not a mass organization, which is what it would become.
And I also want to add before we, before I close my lecture for today, I want to add, because this is a way of again thinking about how the Indian, the movement in India became, in fact, critically important, not just in India, but became critically important for all colonized peoples over the world, that the Indian National Congress was the first such organization put together by colonized people anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world, arguing for self-representation. It would become the model organization. Think about the A.N.C., A.N.C., does it register? African National Congress, right, associated at its height, of course, with the late Nelson Mandela, with Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, the great organization, right, which spearheaded the struggle in South Africa against apartheid rule. The ANC was modeled after the Indian National Congress. The Kenyan National Congress, you name it, a great many organizations of anti-colonial resistance in Africa looked to what was happening in India—not this Congress as such in 1885, but as I've already argued, the organization, this organization evolved, all right. So we will stop here, and I will pick up this narrative in my following lecture.