Moral & Political Thought of Gandhi [Lec 01]

All right, um, I'd like to, uh, welcome all of you to this, uh, class on, uh, Gandhi and the making of Modern India. My name is Venal, and, uh, I want to, uh, take a few minutes first to just, uh, very, very briefly, uh, describe to you what the subject matter of the course is. We're obviously going to discuss that at greater length, uh, as we move along today. Um, and then I'm going to go through some administrative, uh, matters having to do with how this course is going to be run, uh, what kind of requirements there are, uh, and so on. So, uh, uh, this is a course that I have taught in a previous incarnation; uh, it used to be called the moral and, uh, political thought of Mahatma Gandhi, designed as a lecture course. Uh, there's also a seminar version, uh, which is somewhat different, uh, with somewhat more complex readings than what you have at the moment, which is not to say that the readings for this course are not complex, but, uh, their degrees of complexity are different now.

Uh, the, uh, the course, uh, is largely focused on Gandhi, and, uh, when I say the making of modern India, we're basically going to stop, uh, with the assassination of Gandhi, which was on 30th January 1948. Uh, and in order for you to understand, uh, Gandhi, I'm going to have to take some time to set up the material, uh, the context, 19th-century India. India was under colonial rule; it had been under colonial rule for a considerable period of time, uh, since the mid-18th century. Sometimes you hear about 300 years of colonial rule, but that's 300 years of the British presence in India, which is not the same as 300 years of colonial rule. Uh, the British really established themselves as the rulers of India in the mid-18th century, so they ruled for roughly around 200 years, right? But I think we're going to have to understand some, uh, things such as, uh, what India was like under colonial rule, uh, what was the nature of life in Western India, the place that Gandhi came from, uh, what made Gandhi possible, right?

Um, and, uh, along the way we will obviously consider such things as Gandhi's place, um, in world history, because the fact of the matter is that he's a world historical figure. And when I say a world historical figure, uh, we can even think of him frankly, uh, as someone akin in many ways to, let's say, Christ, to the Buddha, perhaps to Muhammad, although he's not the founder of a religion, right? There's no religion that is associated with the name of Gandhi. You often hear the word Gandhism, uh, and people who are described as his followers are referred to as Gandhian. One thing that you do not want to be, as you're going to find out, uh, because it comes at great peril, being a Gandhian, because sometimes it just means mimicry, right? Adopting some of the mannerisms of Gandhi but not really understanding what Gandhi actually stood for.

On the other hand, uh, he's a figure who is very often viewed along with politicians because he was a man who, uh, was very much involved in the slum of politics. Notice the phrase the slum of politics, because what is really unusual about Mahatma Gandhi, and I think actually makes him sui generis—that is, a figure unlike any we've ever seen in history, I would say—is the fact that this man who certainly had some spiritual inclinations and was very often viewed as a saint, uh, rightly or wrongly, and we are going to look at criticisms of Gandhi, uh, it's actually become a bit of a passion now to criticize Gandhi in India. Uh, if you Google Gandhi and criticisms of Gandhi, they're a dime a dozen, dime a dozen literally, right? Every constituency in India has some problems with the father of the nation, as he's called. But the fact of the matter is again that, uh, Gandhi was someone who waded into politics, which is something that was not expected of people with the kind of spiritual disposition that he had, right? So in, so in the 20th century, you find if you look at colonial, uh, documents and you look at the reporting on Gandhi in American, English, French, German newspapers, you find that there was often this: Is he a saint or is he a politician? But why doesn't he make up his mind, right? That would be the tone very often of many of these articles. And if he's a saint, why is he meddling in politics? And if he's really someone who's meddling in politics because he is, after all, the chief architect of the Indian independence movement, right? If he is really meddling in politics, much more than meddling in politics, then why does he claim to be someone who's spiritually inclined, right? So this was always a conundrum for the commentators: You know, how does, how does one really classify somebody like him, right?

So there are a large number of considerations that we have to think about when we think about Gandhi, but this is not a course that is dedicated entirely to his thought. Um, we're going to actually read his autobiography, uh, among some other texts, uh, and I am interested, uh, obviously in his, uh, thinking on such subjects as war, violence, non-violence, truth, um, even sexuality. And I mean there are some subjects on which he didn't have really much of a thought, like cinema, for example, uh, but nearly everything else—in, uh, nutrition, hygiene, sanitation—Gandhi wrote rather voluminously. So there's a, there's a set of his writings; it's called the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi; it's in 100 volumes exactly. And I can assure you that there are documents which are not in the Collected Works, because I am in possession of documents written by him which are not in the Collected Works, and I know there are many others who have documents that are not in the Collected Works, right? So, uh, he clearly wrote voluminously. Let's supposing he had not been the architect of the Indian independence movement; let's supposing that we were doing a course on the history of journalism. You know, Gandhi founded four newspapers in his lifetime—four newspapers, right? So let's, if, if he had been forgotten, you know, completely as someone who had a place in the Indian independence movement, he would still be remembered as a journalist, for example, and so forth and so on. So you know we're speaking about someone who, uh, is obviously, to use a clichéd expression, multi-dimensional, right?

Um, but again, we're going to have to be very careful how we look at that because, uh, if you use such, such a phrase as multi-dimensional, then you know people immediately start assuming that he was multitasking, to use a very modern phrase. And these are things that we take for granted, but then we have to see, well, what was Gandhi's conception of labor? What was his conception of time, right? Because I think very often when people multitask, what that means is they compromise quite often the quality of the work that they do. And we're going to find that Gandhi was extraordinarily attentive to minutest details, so even while he was at the helm of the Freedom Movement, he was very, very attentive to small details, right? So that's, if I may put it this way, a very broad overview of the kinds of questions that we're going to be interested in. Now we're going to, of course, do it systematically, such as what, what are his views on colonialism? What did Gandhi really mean by nonviolence? Is nonviolence simply the extension from violence, which is the common understanding and, in my view, a completely erroneous understanding? Because if it was simply the extension from violence, then well, most of us are nonviolent 99.9% of the time frankly, right? Because after all, we're not shouting other people down; violence doesn't simply mean beating somebody with a stick; or a considerable role to play, right? Uh, but we're also going to look at criticisms of Gandhi from the Marxist perspective, from the feminist perspective, from the perspective of working-class people in India, because we're not interested in looking at him as a figure of reverence; uh, we're not writing a hagiography here, right? You know, hagiographies are lives of saints, and usually there's a halo around the saint, right? We're not interested in that, uh, now. But to say that doesn't mean that I don't have a perspective or that I don't think very highly of him; I do, uh, and as I've already indicated to you, I think in fact he is sui generis in history. This is not to establish a hierarchy of figures, but simply to say that I don't think that we necessarily have the available language in which we can actually understand Gandhi for the reasons that I've already hinted at, right? Such as the fact that he posed a conundrum, uh, for those who thought, well, he's really a saint, or those who thought he's a politician, uh, and the British frankly didn't really understand what nonviolent resistance was about. I think if Gandhi had actually launched a violent movement, they would have known exactly how to deal with him, but they didn't really understand how you would retaliate against someone who is the author of the idea of Satyagraha—non-violent resistance. Now we'll obviously look at that in greater detail as we move along. However, let me, before I look at the syllabus in greater detail, let me go through some, uh, administrative matters related to this course. All right.

The first of which is that I would really appreciate if you were to ensure that your cell phone is turned off, all right, uh, because it really is disruptive for the class if we have, uh, any cell phone activity going on. Um, the readings for this class are of two sorts; uh, one, there are readings that are online, right? So when I say of two sorts, I don't mean substantively, I mean in terms of availability to you. Uh, so a good number of the readings are available online, uh, but there are also five books that have been ordered for you, uh, at the bookstore. The bulk of those books are Gandhi's own writings, including his autobiography, uh, and I want to stress that we are not going to be going through the life of Gandhi systematically as a biographer might; we don't have the luxury of doing that. You know, what was he doing when he was 5 years old, when he was 10 years old, when he was 12 years old? What school did he go to? You know, this is all something that you really need to just read on your own, uh, and the number of biographies of Gandhi is legion. I mean, there are a thousand biographies in English alone; I'm not even talking about Indian languages or French or German or European languages or Chinese, Japanese, whatever the case may be, right? There are over a thousand biographies in English. Uh, you know, the life was an epic life; some of these biographies are epic in scope. I mean, we're talking about a 10-volume biography such as the one by Pyarelal and an eight-volume biography by a man called Tendulkar. And if you've gone through this syllabus carefully, you would have noticed I have simply given you a list of some of the books, uh, that you can access if you should ever feel inclined. Now, if you don't really have the interest or the time to read a biography, then, uh, sorry to say, but you can go to Wikipedia, just look up the rudimentary details, all right? Just look up the rudimentary details so that you have some idea of, all right, so you know where did he, where did he do his schooling, for example, uh, and you can go to my own website, uh, which is a pedagogic website that was set up, uh, about 20 years ago; it's called Manus. So if you just Google Manus and put in my name, it will come up, or you can go to sset.ucla.edu, um, and SL, South Asia. So that's the website, and then you click on the link, uh, for, for Gandhi, uh, and you will find about 50, 60 articles, including a short biography of Gandhi that I had written for this website. Nearly everything on this website is by myself; there are about 400 articles having to do with all aspects of Indian history, culture, you know, even architecture, cinema, and so on, right? So just acquire at least some of the rudimentary details, um, of Gandhi's life on your own. So one set of readings, as I said to you, are readings that are available online, and then there's a set of readings which you will find in the books that have been ordered for you. Uh, most of the books are quite inexpensive, uh, and I think you really should, uh, buy all of those books; whether you buy them from the bookstore or anywhere else is up to you, of course, uh, but, uh, I think you will find the books, uh, quite useful. Now, uh, let me tell you what the requirements for the course are. All right.

The requirements are quite straightforward. I have an unusual requirement, uh, which will not be graded; I want to emphasize that at the outset. Now, if you read Gandhi's autobiography, um, so I'll get to the first requirement. If you read Gandhi's autobiography, you know he tells you that when he was a young man, uh, he visited a prostitute, and, uh, what is our source other than Gandhi's autobiography for this incident? We don't have any other source at all. So had Gandhi not elected to tell us that, we would almost certainly not have known that he visited a prostitute. And he explains the circumstances under which he visited a prostitute; he also says that when he got there, he kind of got alarmed and frightened and ran away, you know, right? So, uh, the reason I mentioned this is that one of the things that Gandhi is going to be quite insistent upon is that when we keep things to ourselves, very often that is a form of violence. Now you might say that that sounds extremely far-fetched, and I'm not going to attempt to persuade you that that argument has merit at this point. I think that as we move along, you will see why it is possible to at least argue that much, right? The secrecy is something that we should be wary of, you know. So when my son, who's supposed to be doing his homework, is watching video games, and the minute he hears my footfall he quickly changes the screen, right? He's trying to keep it secret from me; I'm, in other words, he's, he's engaging in an act of deception because he's pretending that he's doing his homework while he's actually watching one of these video games, right? And I suspect that the vast majority of people do something of that kind at some point or the other, right? Now, so Gandhi tells us this incident, and, uh, you know, when Gandhi was shot dead, shortly after that, one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century wrote an extraordinarily interesting article on Gandhi, and that author is George Orwell. I'm certain that some of you are familiar with his works, such as, um, *Animal Farm*, *1984*. He was a major writer and socialist of the 20th century, and he wrote an essay called "Reflections on Gandhi," and he says that, you know, whatever your view about Gandhi, whether you liked him or disliked him, whether you thought that nonviolence was idealism, uh, and of course he's writing in the aftermath of World War II, which is a holocaust of enormous proportions, right? Uh, so he's very much aware of the place of violence in the 20th century, uh, and of course a question that was foremost in the minds of many people was, well, how would one deploy nonviolence against someone like, let's say, Hitler, right? So and so on. But Orwell says that, you know, at the end of the day, one of the interesting things about Gandhi is that he left behind a rather clean smell—that's an interesting way of putting it—and, and then he says that, you know, that Gandhi magnified his sins. So, oh yeah, he visited a prostitute, and then he writes about it as though, you know, he had gone to hell, right? And he says that if Gandhi had actually not really magnified his own sins, it would be hard to find anything really wrong. I mean, that yes, one might agree with some of his, disagree with some of his political decisions, for example, right? I mean, there's always going to be a difference of opinion, um, in politics; I think we, we understand that. But he says that, you know, you, you cannot accuse Gandhi in the ordinary sense of doing things that one might accuse many others of doing, such as lying outright. There is more than one presidential candidate today who, who is a master at that, right? If you know what I mean—Donald Trump, but I can reel off a few other names too, right? So now the question here is that, uh, this first assignment, what is that first assignment going to be? Now, if you read those early pages of the autobiography, Gandhi insists on the importance of abstaining from things—things that, right?—not just sexual abstinence, which he was certainly not engaging in at that point in time in his early teens, because he was a father of four boys, right? Before he had reached his mid-20s, and it's only much later on that Gandhi actually embraced the idea of celibacy, which was in his mid-30s, right? But when we're talking about abstinence, we are talking about abstinence from any number of things—various forms of addiction, right? So what's your first assignment? The first assignment is, and it's not going to be graded, but I think that in order to enter into the spirit of this course and the spirit of the life of Gandhi, I think that one must learn what it means to give up something, even for a short period of time. So what I want you to do is I want each one of you—and I can't enforce it; I mean, you could not do it and send me a little paper and lie about it outright frankly, right?—but there's, there's no enforcement here, but, and as I said, it's not being graded. I want you to give up something that is dear to you for 24 hours. For many of you, it will be this gadget. If I know my daughter, who's about to enter college, she thinks it's actually a part of her body. I mean, you know, I see students walking around on campus like this, and the phone is constantly in their hands, and the minute they leave this room they're going to be texting, right? It's like some shattering news has come in the last hour, for example, you know, and every 15 minutes people have to log in, right? Or text or find out, you know, whether they got a message. It could be this: Let's say you drink coffee every day, and you think you can't survive without it, right? Right? Coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, sex, for that matter, right? I mean, if you simply are addicted to something, whatever it may be, give it up for 24 hours, and then write about what went through your mind; how did it feel to you? Do you think you had to really make a huge sacrifice, right? I mean, after all, Gandhi did take a vow of celibacy at the age of 37. Now, agreed that he had already had a sexually productive life, but at the same time, I think you would agree that one sexually productive life does not end at the age of 37, right? For the vast majority of people, right? So he did, he never had any sexual relations after he took the vow of celibacy, and it was difficult, but he did take that vow, and we are absolutely certain—none of his critics, the most ferocious critic of Gandhi has never doubted that Gandhi observed that vow—okay, until the last day of his life, which was 40 years later. And there are people who give up things. So what I want you to do is just give up something—a mere 24 hours, that's all. If you can do it for 48 hours, all the better, but, and as I said, I think for many of you, I'm giving you a little cue: Try this little gadget, okay? Try this little gadget and see if you can give it up for 24 hours completely—no phone calls, no texts—and then write, uh, on to what extent you were traumatized, right? By this act of renunciation, right? And whether you felt, on the other hand, liberated because you suddenly found that you thought you were entirely dependent on this, that, but frankly it didn't change an iota in your life; in fact, you might have thought that, well, maybe I should do this more often, right? So you make your choice, and I want you to read a little bit more of Gandhi to understand the spirit of that. And so this assignment is not due until, uh, the Tuesday of week four—3 weeks from today—okay? And one or two pages, um, and as I said, it's not going to be graded, but I just want you to do it because I want, I want to also understand, you know, what you think about, uh, abstinence and what you think about Gandhi's views on that, and if you think that he's got ideas that are really quite, um, unacceptable or are, are you know, very close to lunacy, well, say so, right? Say so, because you, because you're not really taking a risk in any case in, in doing something of that kind. So that's a first assignment—one to two pages, right?

Secondly, uh, we will have an in-class midterm exam. Uh, the date of that exam is specified on the syllabus. Uh, the in-class midterm exam is going to be very simple; you're going to get five short IDs—very short IDs. So, uh, you know, I, I could say something like Jallianwala Bagh. You don't know what it is at the moment, but you'll, you'll find out later on. So it's a place where there was a shooting, um, in 1919, and about 400 Indians were massacred by the British, uh, and, and Gandhi was outraged, right? So, and I'll give you a sample ID; I'll send you a sample ID so you know how to answer it. You just basically three sentences, and it's simply a way of, for me to ensure that you're keeping up with some of the reading and so on, right? So five IDs; I'll probably give you seven and say answer five, uh, and I'll give you three essay questions, uh, and you'll answer two of those essay questions in the, uh, in-class midterm, all right? So you're going to have about 70, 75 minutes to write the exam. I would roughly proportion, uh, 15 minutes for the IDs and half an hour for each of the two, two essays. Uh, and then there's a take-home final, and when I say take-home final, I mean that you have access to all the books. This class, as you can see, is being video streamed, so you'll have access to, uh, all the, uh, lectures; you can go back to them as often as you want. Uh, it's, it's an open-book take-home final; you, uh, you know, are expected actually to cite some of the readings, uh, and the format of that will be that you will get, you will have at least five days—at least 5 days; I don't remember the exact date I specified on the syllabus, but you'll have at least 5 days to write the exam—um, and, uh, the format of the exam is very simple; it's only essay questions. So you will get six essay questions, divided into three groups of two questions each. So Group A, two questions; Group B, two; Group C, two questions. Group A, you have to answer both the questions; Group B, you get two questions, you answer one of those two; and Group C, similarly, you get two questions, you answer one of those two. So you answer four out of six questions on the take-home final; you write approximately two and a half, three pages for, you know, two to three pages for each, uh, question. So we're talking about roughly 10 pages, right? And those are, and the, and the only thing you'll be graded on will be the, uh, in-class midterm exam and the take-home final. Uh, the in-class midterm exam will account for 35% of the course grade; the final exam will account for 55%; the remaining 10% is basically class attendance and participation, all right? So, and you know this class is small enough, uh, that I know who's coming and who isn't. Yeah, I, I don't take attendance; I think those things ought to be done only in high school. I, for the life of me, I can't imagine why anybody does that sort of thing in a college, uh, but, uh, you know, I expect you to come, uh, because I think you will see that even though the lectures are being video streamed, the dynamics of the classroom are quite different, uh, and nobody has ever accused me of being a boring lecturer. Likely, you may not agree with my views, uh, but you're not quite likely to fall asleep in this class, all right? So, uh, you should come to class, and I'm…

Saying, reiterating once again, that the fact that these lectures are being video-streamed is not an excuse for not coming, uh, because those, uh, lectures, uh, that are available, uh, later on to you, uh, are really available to you so that you can go back to them and review them, uh, in the event that you need to do so. All right, so those are the requirements for the course, and, uh, I have already specified to you, uh, the readings and where they'll be available, uh, the office hours, which are not mentioned in the syllabus because the syllabus was put together, of course, sometime before office hours, um, were decided upon. But the office hours will be Tuesdays—that's today—1 to 3:30, uh, barring today. I sent out an email to the entire class explaining that that I would not be able to hold office hours today, uh, and I want to take this opportunity to actually mention to you, uh, in the event that there are some of you who didn't get the email, uh, that, uh, this afternoon at 2:00, uh, and that's my reason for not being able to hold office hours. I'm—I have a speaking engagement at Cal State Northridge with the Reverend James M. Lawson Jr. If you don't know him, this is an extraordinary opportunity to know him because he is the greatest living architect of the American Civil Rights movement in the United States today. He's 87, and he and I have been engaged in working on a book of conversations, uh, which already extends to 25 hours. So we're going to be having a conversation today, this afternoon at 2:00, uh, at Cal State Northridge, uh, and the subject of that is, "Does violence have a future?" Um, so you—you might want to think about, uh, something of that kind, but of course it's no obligation whatsoever, uh, to go to that lecture. I will make an attempt to get him to our classroom, uh, as well, uh, during this term if it's possible, but I'm not quite certain of that at this point in time.

So now, uh, before I launch further into the course, are there any questions about requirements, readings? Has anyone here been to the bookstore yet? You have? Did you see the books there? No, I—it was for another class. Oh, you went to another class. Has anyone seen the books? No? Yeah, I saw they're all there. Uh, I think I have not ordered from the story, but—but—but most of them are there. Most of them are there. Okay. All right, so, uh, if you run into any difficulties with the books or with the readings, send me an email. All right, I'm—I'm, uh, you know, I don't check it every hour, but—but, uh, uh, I will—I will reply to your email unfailingly. Yeah, yes. Are the books on reserve? Are the books on reserve? Uh, I'm not certain. I can't recall now if I put them on reserve. Uh, let me put it to you this way: all of Gandhi's writings are on the internet. That 100-volume set that I mentioned to you called the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi is on the internet to be downloaded free in PDF format, so it corresponds exactly to the published version. Okay, so let's say something like the autobiography. Okay, so one of the books I had ordered for you was the autobiography—that's this book over here. There's no copyright on it right now, so all of Gandhi's writings are out of copyright at this juncture, uh, because you know there's a—a 70-year period in India which has passed now—60-year period. So, uh, all of these writings are available on the internet now. This autobiography is available separately, but it's also a part of the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, if you understand what I mean, right? So if you go to the collected works, this book—not exactly in this format—but the entirety of the book, every single word will be in the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi. And what I urge you to do is to look at the syllabus carefully because all this information is actually conveyed in the syllabus, right? And similarly, you know, let's say you—you get interested in something and you say, "Well, I wonder if there's a book written on such and such subject," right? Well, you're free to send me an email, but before you do that, go to the syllabus, because what I've done in the syllabus is I've given optional and recommended readings for most weeks, and optional recommended means exactly that: you're not required to do them. Of course, you're not required to do it, because if you read all of them, you'd be doing nothing else this quarter, you know, right? But the readings are there so that if you have some questions, you know, you get interested in the Salt March of 1930 and you want to know a little bit more about that, well, go to the syllabus and see what are the recommendations over there. All right, so I can look into the question, but you don't really have to worry about going to the reserves because the easier way, if you do not wish to buy the book, although frankly, at priced at something like, you know, $10 or $15, whatever this is, uh, that's what it is—it's actually worth your time and money to buy this rather than to download a work and try to read it on the internet. And there is a difference between reading a book on the computer and reading it when you have something in your hands. Uh, I can't get into that at any great length today, uh, because it has to do with the practices of reading and what is the interaction between the eye and the screen as opposed to the eye and print. There's a—there's a considerable difference, right? Um, so, uh, to the extent possible, you should have these readings with you in print form. That's really the best way to access them. There was a question somewhere over there. You mentioned that the—would be on Tuesday, but on my UCLA, it says it's—what—what's—what's on the—the officers—final—the finals? No, no, the—you see the final is a—the final is a take-home final. Um, so we won't have until the—the—the final mentioned in the registrar's website is of no consequence because that's on the assumption that it's an in-class final. I want to—I want to go through the syllabus, um, you know, it—it is brief, but nonetheless systematically, uh, to understand why we're tackling certain subjects, um, and what kind of readings we have for those subjects. And I want to reiterate once again that if at all possible you should really pick up a biography of Gandhi and read that alongside, but if you don't have the—of doing that—you don't have the time and the inclination of doing it, then at least make sure that you go through Gandhi's autobiography. Now, his autobiography will only take you to the 1920s because that's when he wrote it, right? And you know he was assassinated, as I said, in January 1948—that's more than 20 years after he wrote his autobiography. So to understand the last 20 years of his life, you really do have to go to some other source, right? And—and generally for that, that would mean that you have to go to one of the biographies. And if you look at the syllabus, I recommend several biographies. One of them has been ordered for you because we also are going to be reading some chapters from that, uh, but this is a very recent biography I'm talking about—the one by Joseph Lelyveld called *Great Soul*. So that's one of the five books that was ordered for you—the book. So you should buy it. In India, there was an attempt to ban the book, right—to ban the book. Uh, one of the reasons for that was that the Indian government thought that the author had insinuated that Gandhi had homosexual relations with someone in South Africa. So the Indian government was very upset, um, and you might say, "Well, what does the Indian government have to do with it?" Well, because Gandhi is officially the father of the nation. All right, I mean, there are three mandated holidays in India—three—and one of those three is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. All right, so you can understand that the government of India thinks that it has a prerogative to intervene in all matters having to do with, you know, Gandhi's life, right? Although—although abusing Gandhi is not an offense in India, right? It's not an offense. It's not the comparable thing and in—in Germany would be that if you were to, uh, you know, uh, start singing the praises of the Nazi party, well, officially in some places you can get into trouble in Germany, right? So in India, it's—it's—there's no such law which says that the abuse of the father of the nation is going to send you, you know, into jail, uh, and in fact, abusing Gandhi has become a pastime for some people in India today, but that's a long and complicated story which you're not in a position to understand now. You'll understand it later on as we move through Gandhi's life and some of his ideas and so on and so forth. But this book was sought to be banned, and it is not an ordinary biography, uh, in the sense that, you know, a biography would usually be a straightforward kind of chronological account, and of course, depending on the complexity of the biographer, you—you might get a much more complex picture; you might get some psychological traits; you might get a psychoanalytical interpretation, for example, depending on the predilection of the biographer. But nonetheless, biographies have—it's a—the biography is a certain genre of literature, right? It's a certain genre, and Joseph Lelyveld's *Great Soul* is in that respect, um, uh, deviates somewhat from the genre—somewhat from the genre. I think it's a very good book, which is a reason why I included it, right? But I'm suggesting to you at the same time that if you wanted a kind of a short, straightforward narrative of his life, that's not the book you want to turn to, and you can turn to one of many biographies that have been written which are very condensed expositions of the life of Gandhi. So there's a series, for example, published by Oxford University Press; it's called *Very Short Lives*, uh, so you know, the book on Gandhi is a mere 125 pages—something of that kind—something like that would be sufficient. But if you look through the syllabus again, you will find that I have mentioned all of this, right? Along with Hinduism and Buddhism. Sikhism—Sikhism is one of the four religions; its founder, Mahavira, uh, was born roughly around 2,500 years ago now. The Jains, uh, adhere to ideas of strict nonviolence; they—because they're strict vegetarians, for example. And the most orthodox of the Jains, uh, the Jain monks in particular, will very often walk with a little net over their mouth so that they do not mistakenly swallow a living organism, like a—let's say, a little bug, mosquito. They will sweep the floor before they walk on it to ensure that they do not step on an ant, right? That's the Jains. Now, that doesn't mean that all the Jains do that, of course not, but I'm saying that there—there are some in the religion who adhere to a very rigorous conception of nonviolence. Now, this is the milieu in which Mohandas Gandhi was born, because after all, you have to think of yourself—I mean, from where did he arise? What made it possible for someone like Gandhi, right, to engage the British in the fashion in which he engaged them, which was very unusual? And I'm not suggesting—I'm just giving you a simple—I'm simply laying out some ideas here that this is a sort of thing that we're going to have to at least briefly explore in my lecture on Thursday: the political context—India under British rule; the nature of life in Western India. Gandhi is born in a place called Porbandar; it's on the coast—that's not unimportant—because the Gujaratis—he was a Gujarati—the Gujaratis are a very diasporic people, and they have been a diasporic people for a thousand years at least, if not longer. And you know, those who are born on the coast in general are very often different than those who are born inland. When you're facing the sea or the ocean, it's a different experience. So we can—we can entertain all kinds of considerations of this kind. I'm going to lay out for you a few ideas systematically that I think will be helpful to you to understand the political, cultural, social, intellectual, and religious milieu out of which Gandhi arose in the mid-19th century. You know, was he somebody who stepped into a political vacuum? Uh, lots of people are unaware of the fact that he lived in South Africa for 20 years before he returned to India, right? And that South Africa claims him as a native son, too. South Africa claims him as a native son. Look at—read some of Nelson Mandela's pronouncements before he passed away a few years ago. Okay.

Um, so that's what we're going to do in the following lecture, and we're going to start to put into place some large questions. Then, weeks two and three, we're going to look at Gandhi's idea of nonviolence, but when I say we're going to look at Gandhi's ideas of nonviolence, what we're going to do is we're going to look at systematically a number of complimentary ideas. What was Gandhi's grammar, if I may put it this way, right? What were the terms that he worked with, right? So, for example, he coins this term, *satyagraha*, *satyagraha*. As I—as I, uh, will explain at much greater length later on, so this word *satya* means truth, and the word *agraha* means force, right? So he—he—he describes the nonviolence that you offer and his whole philosophy as the force of truth. So what's the relationship between truth and nonviolence? And when I say what are the elements of a Gandhian grammar, we're going to have to look at a number of other terms. So if you look at the syllabus, by the way, there's a little glossary at the—at the end of the syllabus, too, for some of the key terms that you will encounter in the readings. And rather than going to the internet to try to Google what that term means, the easiest thing for you to do is to actually just go to the syllabus because you have a little glossary there. Okay, and that glossary will give you the simplest definitions of some key words such as *satya*, *agraha*, *brahmacharya*, *brahmacharya*—celibacy—*sadhana*, which is discipline, right? That these are the elements of a Gandhian grammar. And then we're going to see, once we—once we've gone beyond that step, we're going to see, well, how and in what circumstances did he author the idea of nonviolent resistance? In what respects is it different from Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an essay which I suspect some of you might have read in high school? I know that American high schools used to have Thoreau's essay on the syllabus; I don't know if they still do—on the *Duty of Civil Disobedience*, right? And the relationship, for example, of Gandhi's ideas of nonviolence to such texts as *The Sermon on the Mount*, right—*The Sermon on the Mount*. So we're going to look very briefly at some of these things—briefly, but systematically, as I said. And then we're going to look at some of the campaigns of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi launched in India. How does one launch a nonviolent movement? What are the steps you have to take, right? So one of the—the things that, for example, is very often argued against Gandhi is that, well, you know, Mohandas Gandhi succeeded in—in India because his opponents were the British, and the British, after all, are a fairly civilized bunch of people, right? That's the argument—in other words, that look, if Gandhi's opponent had been Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein, he would have been crushed like a mosquito. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered that argument—thousands of times. Well, I think frankly that one has to think through these things systematically because you do not launch a movement in 1938. When did World War II begin, right? 1939. When—when—when did the anti-Semitic laws in Germany come into place? Long before that—by the early 1930s, many of those laws were already in place, right? Now, you don't begin midstream and hope that you're going to salvage the situation. And of course, even those who offered violent resistance could not salvage the situation for the Jews in Germany. Let me remind you of that—those who are constantly critiquing the advocates of nonviolence and saying, "Well, that's idealistic," but I want to know how many people—how many Jews were successful in forging resistance against fascism? I want to know that. I've read the literature systematically, and I have yet to see anyone give me an answer to that question. So, in other words, when you launch a nonviolent movement, you do so systematically, and it's a process—it's a process over a period of years. I think if Gandhi had been in Germany, he would have launched this movement in the 20s—in the 20s—because discrimination against Jews was already becoming a fundamental problem at that point in time. And I'm not even looking at the long history of anti-Semitism because that's—then we're talking about a very long history there—especially in Europe—especially in Europe. Anti-Semitism was not necessarily a problem in every part of the world. We have to be very clear about that because India is one country where—and I'm not saying this as, you know, uh, a partisan—I mean, I would recommend that you read the works of Jewish scholars, for example, Nathan Katz—a Jewish scholar who has worked on the history of Jews of India. He has a book published by the University of California Press called *Who Are the Jews of India*, and the first thing he tells you in that book is that India is one country where there has not been a single instance of anti-Semitism in its recorded history. Okay, and India did have a Jewish population—albeit not a huge population—but it did have a Jewish population; it had several diverse Jewish populations. And similarly, you do not find instances of anti-Semitism in the history of China, although there are Jewish communities in China and have been for some period of time. All right, so there is a problem in—in Europe that we have to—but we're not doing a class here on Jewish history or—or the history of anti-Semitism. I'm simply saying to you that there's this assumption that, you know, Gandhi was naive and that, "Oh, well, he would have been simply crushed." Well, I can tell you English colonial rule was not a Sunday picnic. It's not like the English were just sitting around there and, you know, blindly governing India. When—when they had to commit atrocities to perpetuate the rule, they did so, right? And I think we should be very careful that we do not get into this game whereby—whereby we start distinguishing between good colonialists and bad colonialists. So the bad colonialists are the Germans, for example, in this game, right? And then the—and then the good ones are the English because, after all, the English are gentlemen, you know, right? We have to be extremely wary of such an approach. So what we're going to do here is we're going to—to look at how did Gandhi actually launch a nonviolent movement? What are the steps that you take, right? What is a place of negotiation? What is a place of compromise? What is a place—what does it mean to offer truth to your opponent? So we're going to look at a couple of these systematically so that you have an idea of what was entailed. So that's weeks two and three. Weeks four and five, if we go down the list, um, week four: Gandhi's critique of modernity—an exceedingly important subject because one of the things that distinguishes Gandhi again from many others who shared his interest in nonviolent resistance, and I want to be clear that you understand I am not establishing a hierarchy; I'm not saying that this makes Gandhi greater or lesser—but Gandhi had a systematic critique of modern civilizations—a critique that was not shared, for example, by many of the people who were instrumental in leading the American Civil Rights Movement, right? So we want to understand the nature of that critique, and we have to understand, of course, that Gandhi was a representative of a colonized people. Now, similarly, I would argue that African-Americans were a colonized people even in the 1960s. Yes, I mean, they had—officially they had the rights of a citizen. It's not clear to me, by the way, that they still have rights of citizens—most of them, if you ask me, you know. So there's a difference between formal citizenship—what a constitution formally proclaims—and what actually happens on the ground—what actually happens on the ground. If one out of every seven black men is going to go through the prison system in his lifetime in the United States, we've got a fundamental problem that we need to think about. And we have to understand why is it that more than half of the American states have passed laws which make it impossible for people—people who've been convicted of a felony—to ever vote again? I hope you know that. I mean, it's really extraordinary because if you think about it, you've got a group of people who had to struggle for generations to get the right to vote, and then a good number of them are going to be stripped of that right—why? Because they've been convicted of a felony. I mean, there's hardly any democracy in the world which has legislation of this kind, but that is the fact of the matter in the United States—that if you've been convicted of a felony, you cannot vote in most states of the US, you know, right? So now the question for us is going to be that when we look at Gandhi, we say that he has a systematic critique of modern industrial civilization. What were the contours of that critique? Why did he have such a critique? And then there are those who say, "Well, you know, he had a critique, but he compromised"—why? Because, for example, he used the telephone, right? Gandhi used a telephone; he used the railways. So one of the books you're going to read is his little tract, um, published in 1909, called *Hind Swaraj*, um, for some people this tract is for the 20th century what the *Communist Manifesto*—Marx and Engel's *Communist Manifesto*—was for the 19th century, right? An extraordinary little booklet—pamphlet, really—extended pamphlet which lays out a whole worldview, and in that you will find that Gandhi had a blistering attack on railways, and yet I can tell you no one used the Indian railway system as extensively as Mohandas Gandhi, right? So we're going to have to understand what the—what's the nature of his critique and what's the nature of his life, right? And that is what we're going to attempt to do in week four. Then we move from there to week five, which is Gandhi's critique of colonialism. Now, you have already heard from me a number of times that India was, of course, under colonial rule. All of you know that, uh, and Gandhi is going to, uh, have numerous occasions when he is going to, uh, negotiate with the British, when he's going to contest British rule, right? I mean, he is very often viewed as the principal architect of the Freedom Movement in India, but he had—he had again a sustained critique of colonialism. It was not a haphazard kind of critique. He understood that colonization is not simply a matter of military conquest or economic conquest—that there is a colonization of the mind, and that is a much more enduring and much more insidious kind of colonization, you know? And when I say colonization of the mind, it's not simply a matter of people who were formerly victimized or formerly colonized having an inferiority complex. I'm not referring to—I'm not using pop psychology here. I'm referring to what happens when all the categories through which you think about the world are the categories of your master—you know, the people who colonized you—that the English left the soil of India in 1947, and yet many of the—many Indians, especially middle-class, educated Indians—the categories through which they think about the world are categories that were bequeathed by colonialism, right? What they understand by history, what they understand by growth, what they understand by democracy even, right? So when we look at Gandhi's critique of colonialism, we're not only looking at what were the ramifications of British rule on the political economy of India, and Gandhi's critique of that—yes, we are interested in that—the fact that the British drained the wealth of India, as some nationalists argued, and that Gandhi had a perspective on that as well—but we are also interested in the question of the colonization of the mind, because that's the fundamental critique that Gandhi is going to engage in in order to understand how Indians can be emancipated. Week six: Gandhi's femininity, his relations to women, and feminist perspectives, right? That Gandhi, throughout his life—his adult life—uh, consorted with women.

That's one thing that Saints are not supposed to do, by the way, right? Right. So, the traditional definition of a saint is, uh, you know, a man who's so wedded to the Divine, constantly concerned about spiritual emancipation, uh, and that matters of the flesh have to be kept at a distance, you know, right? Uh, well, Gandhi was constantly surrounded by women. And not only that, but to take it to a much more complex level, Gandhi had, I would say, a complicated reading of gender, right? Because he was trying to understand the femininity in each man and the masculinity in each woman as well, trying to understand how a woman could be a woman and yet also perhaps exhibit some masculine traits, whatever those may be, and how a man could be a man and yet then leverage some feminine traits to change the political scenario.

To give you a little hint of what I mean, I will elaborate upon this when we come to that portion of the course. To give you a little hint of what I mean, so Gandhi's assassin was a man by the name of Nathuram Godse. Okay, Nathuram Godse. He came from the state of, uh, Maharashtra, which borders India—I mean, which borders the state of Gujarat, which where Gandhi came from, right? So this is a rough map of India. So this is Gujarat over here, let's say this is where Gandhi comes from, and this is the state of Maharashtra. This is just a rough, rough map, of course, right? And his assassin, Nathuram Godse, uh, gave a speech in his own defense when he was put on trial. And one of the things that Nathuram Godse said in his speech was that he had to shoot Gandhi dead because the country could not afford to be led by a man who was really a woman. Well, what on Earth does he mean by that? And he says, yet, you know, Gandhi liked to go on a fast; he liked to spin; he liked to weave. He says these are things women do, not men—not at least real men, right? And what we're going to have to attempt to understand is what are the ways in which Gandhi leveraged various ideas of gender, right? What is his critique of masculinity? And he has a critique of masculinity, and in fact, his assassin was an embodiment of hyper-masculinity. You so you'll begin to understand the politics of the assassination in a very different way. So this is a sort of terrain that we're going to cover in this particular week when we look at his relationships to women, some of the experiments he carried out, uh, you know, what was the nature of his femininity, and so on, right?

Then we move from there to week 7, uh, week 7 and 8, where we're going to look both at Gandhi's friends—those who advocated his point of view, those who wrote warmly about him—but what we're really interested in here is how is it that he was able to attract to himself such a diverse group of followers? I mean, it is extraordinarily diverse, the kind of people that Gandhi was actually able to attract to himself, you know, all the way from some of the richest people in India to the daughter of an English Admiral, you know, who gave up everything and said, "I'll fall at your feet," you know, right? So we want to try to understand because that will be one way in which we begin to, you see, understand that when we say the word "Gandhi" today, now we are no longer really saying, speaking only of a man called Mohandas Gandhi; we're actually talking about a whole assemblage of ideas and phenomena, right? So that when we say Gandhi, it means not just Mohandas Gandhi and his ideas but the thousands and millions of his followers and detractors are part of that assemblage that we call Gandhi today. And we're also going to look at his adversaries in greater detail. I wrote a piece 78 years ago, published, which, which is on the syllabus, which you're going to read. It's called "The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate," okay? Not "The Gandhi Everyone Hates," which is a little different—"The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate." All the constituent major constituencies in India—he's the boy that they like to whip, you know. The feminists have a problem with him; the Marxists have a problem with him; the modernists have a problem with him; the Liberals have a problem with him. Every group has a problem with him, and yet, ironically enough, when the problems of the country become acute, these same people come running to his door, you know, and find that, well, maybe he was a little bit more reasonable than we thought he was. So we're going to try to understand this dynamic, you know, who his friends were, who his adversaries were. And I will also use one of those lectures to actually give you an illustrated slide lecture on representations of Gandhi from around the world. This is a book that I've been working on for, uh, over 10 years. I have a digital archive of 15,000 images of Gandhi—distinct images, statues, posters, prints, cartoons—cartoons from German, French, Spanish magazines from the 1920s, for example. Um, we're not going to look at 15,000 images, needless to say, but we're going to look at a good 60-70, so you get some idea, uh, of what I mean when I speak about a world historical figure. And I want to try to actually show you a few here right now because what I want to impress upon you is the fact that Gandhi was, was, as I said, a world historical figure, right? So there's no one, frankly, to my mind, um, uh, about whom we have such an extraordinary set of representations.

Let me just very quickly, in a couple of minutes, just run through a few of them, just to give you an idea. I'm not going to discuss these images. Take this one here, right? I mean, you know, you could spend a whole lecture on this one single cartoon, and imagine you had 15,000 images. Okay? So this is a cartoon from a magazine called "Clatter"—long out of print—this goes back to 1930, published in Germany, right? Uh, and here you see Gandhi, you know, uh, uh, wearing, uh, boxer's gloves, um, almost like the image of the Goddess, right? Multi-pronged, multi-armed very often, and then this boxer who's in frustration cannot defeat the nonviolent warrior. So what does he do? He tries to bite his feet to defeat him, you know, right? Violating the rules of the game. Uh, look at this one here from another magazine, again 1930 roughly. And as I said, we could do a, we could do a fairly detailed analysis of all of these images, uh, and some of them are really images that have never even remotely been investigated; in fact, very few people have even known of the existence of these kinds of cartoons. And then when I talk about images of Gandhi, the world historical figure, I mean this is one of the most beautiful statues of Gandhi, uh, in London, the seat of the Empire that Gandhi brought down. So there's a special significance of a statue of Gandhi in central London, right? And this is a really quite a magnificent, uh, statue if you look at the quality of the work here in Tavistock Square. Um, I used to walk by it almost every day because I lived in London for over a year, 20 years ago. This is a very different statue of Gandhi, much more vernacular, right? Much more folksy, if I may put it this way, from Western India, uh, so forth and so on. We could look at these—the point is that there is a, there is, that there are images of Gandhi, uh, which show very clearly they come from different parts of the world, such as the cartoons that I showed you, the statue that I showed you, and of course images from all other places, and including these prints, uh, which show unequivocally that Gandhi was, as I said, a world historical figure, uh, and in that sense, uh, uh, which of course there are other world historical figures, but he's a world historical figure who in some ways is, as I've indicated, sui generis, right?

So let me just quickly wrap up in a few more minutes, uh, my exposition of this, uh, syllabus, right? So, uh, as I said, weeks seven and eight we're going to be talking about, we're going to be talking about, uh, the, uh, friends and adversaries of Gandhi, and then we're going to move from there to, um, uh, one second, what happened to the, uh, sorry, just lost that for a second, uh, okay, so we're going to move from there to, uh, the conclusion of the course. And what I'm going to do in, in, in, uh, those subsequent weeks, so week nine is where we're going to look at Gandhi's assassination, okay? What is his critique of the nation-state system, uh, and that's rather important because there is at the heart a contradiction or a conundrum that we have to think about, namely the Gandhi is the person who, whatever your view of him in, and in India, as I've already suggested, there are competing views of Gandhi, and there are those who say that Gandhi has been given too much credit, that there were many others who were involved in the struggle for Independence, and some of them were advocates of armed violence, right? So there's a party of people who say that in fact the use of violence was actually important in delivering India from colonial rule. Now this is contested terrain, but what is very clear is that Gandhi certainly had a huge role to play. You might think that he was the principal architect, as I do, but even if you don't think that, you would still have to acknowledge that Gandhi certainly was a figure who was at the forefront of the anti-colonial movement. So what is the conundrum at the center? The conundrum is that this man who is eventually responsible for liberating India from British rule and thereby giving rise to a new nation is the same person who was a relentless critic of the idea of the nation-state, right? In fact, I think it is safe to say that Gandhi saw the nation-state, which is the building block of modern politics, he saw the nation-state as an entity that was fundamentally anti-democratic in some ways. So we're going to try to understand that, all right? That is what we're going to do in week nine when we look at the assassination of Gandhi. We're going to look at the politics of the assassination. I give you a little hint about that when I talked about Nathuram Godse, right? So the whole politics of gender, what is it that motivated the assassin? What were the implications of the assassination? But we're going to, we're going to, we're going to place it in the wider context of the nation-state and what I'm calling the world system. And then in week 10, we're going to move to the conclusion of this course, where I'm going to try to look at what is not really simply the legacy of Gandhi's ideas, right? Rather, what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to see what would a Gandhian perspective on modern India look like, right? If, if, let's say Gandhi were around today, you know, what would he think about the nature of the political institutions in India? What would he think about the kind of disputes we have over such things as reservations? Reservations are, if you had to think of the American terminology here, it would be affirmative action, right? Except that reservations in India are on a massive scale—massive scale compared to what affirmative action does for some minorities in the United States, right? So we would try to understand what a Gandhian perspective on India would be like, and with that we're going to come to the conclusion of the course. So what I'm going to suggest that you do is, as I mentioned in the email, is I suggest that you start reading, uh, the autobiography, uh, if you get a chance, and if you're motivated, pick up one of the short biographies, read that alongside—you could just read Joseph Lelyveld; that will, that will really be sufficient, although as I've already cautioned you, it is not an ordinary biography in the, in the ordinary sense of the term—um, but I think that if you do at least, if you read at least the autobiography, I think you'll be in fairly good shape to move along with the rest of the course. All right? So see you all on Thursday.