October 4, 2013 by Vinay Lal
Review of Faisal Devji,
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[First published in The Book Review, Delhi, Vol 37 no. 10 (October 2013).]
It was not so long ago that Mohandas Gandhi was, at least to the
academic world, a largely forgotten figure. In the 1980s and 1990s, as
postcolonial thought in its various inflections became quite the rage in
significant sectors of the Anglo-American (and Indian) academy, and the
‘master narratives’ of the Enlightenment, as they were called, came
under sustained interrogation and assault, attention would come to be
lavished upon those figures who were viewed as the torchbearers of
resistance, critical of deeply embedded frameworks of interpretation
that had given succor to elites, and harbingers of a politics of
emancipation for those, especially, relegated to the margins.
Curiously, though Gandhi is a critical figure in the histories of
struggles against colonialism, racism, and the oppression of women and
minorities, he remained singularly unattractive to the most prominent
postcolonial theorists and intellectuals of other stripes. He was seen
as a distinctly unsexy figure, dismissed as a ‘doer’ rather than
‘thinker’, scarcely worthy of the company of Aime Cesaire, C.L.R. James,
or the much lionized Fanon. The stately Edward Said was habituated to
giving lists of the great figures of anti-colonial resistance, but in
the thousands of pages of his writings there is barely any mention of
Gandhi’s name. When at all attention was bestowed on Gandhi by a famous
intellectual, it was more for effect than out of any serious
consideration of his thought, perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s extraordinary and one should say careless
attempt, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), to suggest that sati could be associated with “Mahatma Gandhi’s reinscription of the notion of satyagraha,
or hunger strike, as resistance.” As she adds, “I would merely invite
the reader to compare the auras of widow sacrifice and Gandhian
resistance. The root in the first part of satyagraha and sati
are the same” (p. 298). Since when did satyagraha and “hunger strike”
become synonymous? Fasting is no doubt part of the grammar of
satyagraha, but does anyone suppose that satyagraha can be reduced to
hunger strike? And is there no distinction to be made between fasting
and hunger strike? One would have expected a great deal more from
someone who has been a relentless advocate of careful and hermeneutic
readings of texts.
Much, however, has changed in the course of the last decade. Gandhi
has found favour in the most unusual circles, though for reasons that
are far from apparent, and scholarship on him is flourishing. It surely
cannot be that the world is in the throes of violence—indeed it is, but
not demonstrably more so than in previous decades—and that Gandhi now
appears not only eminently sane and reasonable but prophetic in his
insistence on nonviolent social and political transformation. It may be
that many of the most widely admired figures of our times, among them
Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi, have openly
declared themselves as beholden to Gandhi in helping shape their
worldview. Even the Commander in Chief of the greatest military force
in the world, Barack Obama, has described Gandhi as his spiritual and
political mentor, and he once went so far as to tell American
schoolchildren that if there is one figure from the past with whom he
could have dinner, it would have to be Gandhi. (We need not pause here
to reflect on how the evening might have shaped up, since Gandhi ate
very little and well before sundown—yet Obama’s observation seems to
have been offered without any pinch of salt.) It is certainly possible
to entertain the idea that, at least from the scholarly standpoint,
other ideologies—liberalism, conservatism, Marxism,
constitutionalism—are seen as having run their full course, and that
some indulgence towards Gandhi’s ideas is seen as permissible. All too
often, of course, nonviolence has been the last rather than the first
option for those who style themselves revolutionaries.
Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian is easily both one of the
most stimulating and disturbing books in the Gandhian cornucopia.
Devji proposes to set forth ‘a new case’ for Gandhi ‘to be considered
one of the greatest political thinkers of our times’ (vii), just as the
analytical philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, another relatively recent convert
to Gandhi’s ideas, has argued that Gandhi was ‘the greatest
anti-imperialist theorist who ever wrote’.[1]
Much has been written on the subject of nationality, but Devji’s
reading is altogether fresh: considering the role of Indians within the
empire, he argues that ‘it was neither India nor South Africa that
provided Indians with a nationality, but satyagraha, considered as a
practice without origin or destination of any territorial sort’ (49).
Gandhi in this fashion also controverted the usual assumptions about
‘minorities’ and ‘majorities’, a language born of modern political
arithmetic, and a letter to Jinnah in 1944 reinforces the notion of
nationality wrought in the crucible of struggle: ‘The only real though
awful test of our nationhood arises out of our common subjection. If
you and I throw off this subjection by our combined effort, we shall be
born a politically free nation out of our travail’ (cited at 64). Devji
writes with considerable elegance and even panache, to be sure, but
also with the aim of unsettling conventional readings and what we deem
to be ‘common sense’. One of the more fruitful results of this
intellectual exercise is the chapter tellingly entitled, ‘In Praise of
Prejudice’—shades here, as throughout this book, though hardly
acknowledged, of the impress on Devji of the seminal readings of Gandhi,
and more broadly of Indian political culture, advanced by Ashis Nandy.
Gandhi worked to develop ‘the prejudice that remained between Indians
there into a basis of friendship’ (70): neither friendship nor prejudice
are amenable to a calculus of interests. Though both friendship and
brotherhood furnish models of egalitarian relations, Devji argues
convincingly that Gandhi was ‘an advocate of the former against the
latter’ (71). Unlike brotherhood, which may be ‘flouted a hundred times
without ceasing to remain brotherhood’, friendship rests on a much more
fragile foundation, having ‘to remain disinterested to be itself’
(69). Devji weaves into this discussion a consideration of Gandhi’s
stance on the Khilafat Movement and pan-Islamic politics, a subject on
which even Gandhi’s most ardent admirers have often found themselves
parting company from the Mahatma. Devji’s complex interpretive moves
cannot be rehearsed here, but suffice to say that he does not agree that
the ‘Khilafat episode’ must be reckoned as one of Gandhi’s greatest
failures. Quite to the contrary, it is here that Gandhi demonstrated
the true meaning of friendship, and it is only a cheap calculus of
interests which makes us suppose, quite erroneously, that Gandhi sought
reciprocity from Muslims—for example, a promise to refrain from cow
slaughter—in exchange for his support of the Khilafat cause.
The six chapters that have been patched together to comprise this
book thus bristle, to varying degrees, with arresting insights—even if,
as is sometimes the case, our understanding of Gandhi is not visibly
advanced. A case in point is the chapter entitled ‘Bastard History’,
where Devji tackles the question of Gandhi’s ‘intellectual and political
antecedents.’ Brushing aside those conventional histories which invoke
the names of Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau, or Raychandbhai and Gokhale,
Devji avers that, with the possible exception of the Swadeshi Movement,
‘it is impossible to point to any historical example that might provide
a precedent for Gandhi’s use’ of nonviolent practices and his
deployment of the ideas of ahimsa, satya, and so on. If Devji is
unfamiliar with the work of, say, Howard Spodek on the antecedents of
Gandhian satyagraha in Gujarati political culture, or of Dharampal’s
treatise on the history of civil disobedience in Benares, it would be a
severe shortcoming; but if he has deliberately chosen to ignore these
histories, and many more come to mind, the reader would certainly profit
from understanding why they are of no consequence. But this is
scarcely the worst of the matter: Devji then makes bold to suggest that
‘Gandhi’s ideas and practices emerged instead from a past of conflict
and violence’(11), and he suggests that the ‘Indian Mutiny of 1857 . . .
provides the only historical precedent for several of the practices by
which Gandhi’s politics was known, including non-cooperation,
encouraging native manufactures and the working out of new moral
relationship between Hindus and Muslims’ (11). The Rebellion of 1857-58
gave rise to Hindu-Muslim fraternal relations, much to the
consternation of colonial authorities; Gandhi similarly championed
Hindu-Muslim unity. Muslim soldiers in 1857 were keenly aware of Hindu
concerns about ritual pollution without believing in them; and, in a
similar vein, Hindus supported the cause of the Caliphate under Gandhi’s
leadership (29). But, apropos Gandhi, the argument borders on the
bizarre. Devji has established absolutely nothing: he admits that
‘Gandhi’s own references to the Mutiny were invariably negative’ (11),
though, in truth, Gandhi scarcely mentioned the Rebellion. It is not
accidental that though elsewhere in the book Devji routinely cites
Gandhi, as he must, this chapter does not have a single reference to
Gandhi’s writings or pronouncements. What Devji has to say of the
Rebellion is interesting enough, but as an exercise in the genealogy of
ideas that informed the worldview of Gandhi, the chapter is utterly
unconvincing.
Devji’s book bears the subtitle, ‘Gandhi and the Temptation of
Violence’, and it to this that we may finally turn for the centerpiece
of Devji’s argument. There is no gainsaying the fact that the question
of violence is central to any assessment of Gandhi’s moral, spiritual,
and intellectual outlook, even if the instinct of most people has
naturally led them to ahimsa in thinking of Gandhi. There are
some commonplace arguments that are now firmly established in the
scholarship, among them Gandhi’s distinction between nonviolence of the
strong and the nonviolence of the weak, his avowed preference for
violence over cowardice (134), and his frequently voiced claim,
especially towards the last several years of his life, that he preferred
that India be left to anarchy rather than continue to have the country
subjected to British rule. The notion that the British were there to
mediate between the Hindus and Muslims is one for which Gandhi
rightfully had absolutely no respect. Gandhi entertained a suspicion of
the ‘third party’ (169), whether the colonial state, the national
state, or any other body—an idea first seeded in Hind Swaraj
(1909): the doctor, for example, comes between the patient and her own
body. Here, however, Devji becomes too entranced by his own argument,
and cleverness lords it over judiciousness and wisdom. Thus, we are
assured, Gandhi had ‘a desire for civil war’ (161), he was despondent
over the refusal of the Congress, the League, and the British ‘to heed
his advice about the desirability of internecine warfare’ (164), and
that he remained ‘cheerful’ as the violence raged all around him (168).
Indeed, there may have always been the ‘temptation of violence’ for
Gandhi, but we might just as well accept Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, ‘I can
resist everything except temptation.’
Why, then, the ‘impossible’ Indian? Each reader will make her own
interpretive moves, and some will no doubt gravitate towards the view,
held among others by Ambedkar, that Gandhi was one ‘impossible’ person,
cunning, disingenuous, and a master of manipulation. Others will surely
embrace the view that stands at the other extreme, and is best typified
by Einstein’s admission that it was nearly impossible to believe that
someone such as Gandhi ‘ever in flesh and blood had walked upon this
earth’. The Gandhians are likely to suggest that the Mahatma made no
impossible demands upon others that he did not first impose upon
himself. Yet what Devji has in mind in describing Gandhi as ‘the
impossible Indian’ seems to be far removed from all of this, and may
even extend well beyond the reading that he himself explicitly puts
forth, namely that an impossible tension exists between Gandhi’s stern
advocacy of nonviolence and his keen sense that the most genuine embrace
of nonviolence resided in the confrontation with, rather than mere
repudiation of, violence. In invoking Gandhi as ‘the impossible
Indian’, Devji appears to be gesturing at the kind of possibilities
suggested by Derrida in his essay, ‘Avowing—the Impossible: “Returns”,
Repentance, and Reconciliation’. The impossible enhances the potential
of what exists; or, put differently, the possible only revels in its
full potential in the face of the impossible. There is no wise and
ethical politics without the impossible. Whatever its other
limitations, Devji’s The Impossible Indian suggests as much about
Gandhi and in this respect has opened up new avenues of exploration
into the rich politics and inner life of a person whose contribution to
contemporary political and ethical life by any measure was sui generis.
[1] Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi’s religion and its relation to his politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, eds. Judith M. Brown & Anthony Parel (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 107.
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