{"id":608,"date":"2014-04-28T22:00:37","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=608"},"modified":"2014-04-28T22:00:37","modified_gmt":"2014-04-29T05:00:37","slug":"monday-messiah-gandhi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/04\/28\/monday-messiah-gandhi\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Messiah: Gandhi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mkGand3\"<\/a>Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi, meaning \u201cGreat Soul,\u201d is widely considered a saint and a martyr, the father of his nation, the prophet of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience; a man who set an example of ascetic self-sufficiency, including spinning his own yarn for weaving his own loincloths; a revolutionary who faced down the mighty British Raj and pressed for the rights of the poor, even the despised untouchables, whom he called the \u201cchildren of God\u201d.\u00a0 A mystic, peacemaker, prophet of minimalism, messiah of liberation\u2014surely the antithesis of compatriots like the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, with his fleet of Rolls Royces, or dark messiahs like Jim Jones, with his doctrine of revolutionary suicide, or Adolf Hitler, with his unifying myth of Aryan nationhood.\u00a0 In fact, questioning Gandhi\u2019s saintliness feels a bit churlish, as heretical and apt to offend some people as questioning the divinity of Jesus would offend others.\u00a0 Yet, there are grounds to see Gandhi as fitting in with the same general messianic model as the antiheroes mentioned above.<\/p>\n

A merchant-caste Gujerati born in 1869, Mohandas Gandhi made an arranged marriage at the age of 13, and at the age of 19\u2014already a father of two\u2014travelled to England to study law.\u00a0 There, he came under the influence of the Theosophists, who turned him on to the ancient Sanskrit epics, especially the Bhagavad Gita<\/i> and the Ramayana<\/i>, which informed his later aspirations for India. He was even introduced to Madame Blavatsky and her eventual successor Annie Besant, in 1889. \u00a0It is a little ironic that this major figure in Eastern thought came to his own culture\u2019s scriptures secondhand through a European conwoman\u2019s cult.<\/p>\n

According to legend\u2014and the Oscar-winning 1982 movie\u2014Gandhi was sensitized to racism when he went to South Africa for his \"gandhi1SAfricaj\"<\/a>Indian law firm, and got kicked out of a first-class train carriage because of his colour.\u00a0 This sparked off nearly twenty years of campaigning for the civil rights of Indians in South Africa, during which he developed and honed his techniques of passive resistance and nonviolent protest, plus his dedication to communal living, at his Ruskin-inspired ashram outside Durban.\u00a0 Contrary to legend, he did not campaign against segregation, nor for the rights of black South Africans\u2014in fact, he was all for segregation, provided Indians were on the nicer side of the dividing line.\u00a0 He was just not very keen on the \u201ckaffirs\u201d:<\/p>\n

[1896]\u00a0 Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness. (Collected Works, Vol. 1: 410)<\/p>\n

[1903] We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do\u2026 We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race. (Collected Works, Vol. 3:256)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, he already had a reputation built on his activities in South Africa\u2014not just as a potential politician, but as a holy man, a guru. Charismatic and ambitious, he rapidly became a major political figure, particularly as the messiah of the peasantry; and in 1921, he acquired executive authority in the National Congress.\u00a0 For the next twenty-seven years, he dominated the messy and volatile Indian political scene, in and out of Congress and jail, sometimes as the immoveable object, sometimes the irresistible force.\u00a0 In solidarity with poor Indians, and in accord with his principle of simple living, he adopted indigenous dress in 1915, and simplified it to the familiar loincloth and shawl in 1921.<\/p>\n

\"untitledj\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In character, he was definitely charismatic, and apparently witty, clever, and lovable, though not always so to his wife and sons<\/a>.\u00a0 Gaining a huge following, he swept along scores of millions with him in his crusade for swaraj<\/i>, or self-rule, freedom from both the Brits and from the negative circumstances of one\u2019s own life.\u00a0 In due course, he was worshipped\u2014like a god, or maybe a rock star\u2014and was even said to have performed miracles.\u00a0 To his credit, he debunked these supposed miracles whenever he could, claiming to be irritated by his personality cult, though he did admit to enjoying the adulation of the crowds.\u00a0 He was just a simple man, he said, living humbly in an ashram, on fruit and goat\u2019s milk; but this humble man could sway millions, could turn violent mobs on or off as if with a light switch, and more than once bent both the Brits and his fellow Indian politicians to his will simply by threatening to fast until he died.\u00a0 [Note: Nathuram Godse, Gandhi\u2019s assassin, suggested wryly that Gandhi never tried this technique with the Muslims because they might well have called his bluff.]<\/p>\n

\"Gandhi_studio_1931\"<\/a>So: a man with remarkable charisma and political will, and one who has been informally canonized in the west, as the saint of nonviolent protest and the father of modern India.\u00a0 That is the narrative line taken by Attenborough\u2019s Oscar-winning movie, but of course the story is not that simple.\u00a0 For one thing, Gandhi was happy to tolerate violence when it suited his political agenda, and kept having to call off nonviolent protest campaigns because the violence got out of hand.\u00a0 And while India did become independent on his watch, serious historians (both Indian and European) point out that he was virtually irrelevant at the end, and had held back<\/i> the process of independence for years through his intransigence over the question of power-sharing with the Muslims.\u00a0 Britain had been wanting to \u201cquit India\u201d for some time, and at any rate could not have held onto the subcontinent after the weakening effects of the Second World War.\u00a0 One of the factors holding them in India before<\/i> the war was a perfectly justified fear of civil war breaking out as soon as they left, because the interested parties (including Gandhi) could not compromise on the terms of independence.\u00a0 But Gandhi\u2019s own vision for India needs a closer look.<\/p>\n

Independence from Britain was only part of the package.\u00a0 Gandhi had a solid millenarian agenda: the return of a long-past, pre-colonial Golden Age\u2014and incidentally, a mythical one.\u00a0 The Brits would be gone. Past glories would be revived, in their pure, original form.\u00a0 This was, in fact, a classic revitalization scenario, along the same lines as the Ghost Dance or the Xhosa cattle killings.<\/p>\n

In this revitalized context, the future that Gandhi envisioned for India was one of countless little self-sufficient village economies dotting the countryside, mini-republics peopled with enlightened farmers who would presumably weave their own loincloths.\u00a0 They would eschew Western medicine, science and education.\u00a0 There would be no foreign trade, since the villages would sustain themselves; no need for government, since the villages would rule themselves.\u00a0 There would be no exploitation or exclusion of untouchables or people of other faiths, since all were the creatures of God.\u00a0 And so forth.<\/p>\n

This vision was called \u201cRama Rajya\u201d \u2013 or the rule of Rama\u2014a symbolic return to that mythical golden age of plenty and prosperity\"rama-coronation\"<\/a> when the God-King Rama presided over the happy primeval Hindus, whole eons before the Muslims and the Brits arrived to mess things up.\u00a0 Indeed, Gandhi thought of Muslim and Christian Indians as being lapsed Hindus, ancestrally converted by their various conquerors, but Hindu at the core.\u00a0 India would thus be both freed and unified by the great national narratives of Sanskrit literature, and by a single great national symbol, Rama himself.<\/p>\n

And they would achieve all this nonviolently, because purity of heart and commitment to the principles of satyagraha<\/i> (truth-force<\/a>) and ahimsa<\/i> (nonviolence), aka turning the other cheek, were the greatest weapons of all under God: in fact, a magical way of gaining power over one\u2019s enemies.\u00a0 Those who see Gandhi\u2019s principle of nonviolent protest simply as a moral statement are overlooking that magical, mystical aspect.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Rama Rajya sounds rather charming, but\u2014could it have worked?\u00a0 Not likely.\u00a0 Even leaving aside myriad competing ethnic\/religious interests, a return to a simple agrarian economy is not feasible once a society reaches a certain level of complexity, at least not without a horrific downsizing.\u00a0 The only serious attempt to move a whole society back to instant agrarian simplicity was the hideous experiment in social engineering carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 1970s, and we all know how well that<\/i> went.<\/p>\n

But even without the practical problems involved in Rama Rajya, there were fatal flaws in Gandhi\u2019s dreamworld.\u00a0 Revitalization, though seductively appealing to many Hindus, did not<\/i> appeal to a good many others\u2014for example, the politicians doing their best to work out reasonable compromises in a messy multiethnic situation, and to frame them in a secular postcolonial system.\u00a0 Even to those who loved Gandhi, like Nehru, Gandhi was a loose cannon.\u00a0 His insistence on a certain northern-based version of Hinduism alienated sections of South India, for whom Rama was anything but a symbol of liberation.\u00a0 Gandhi\u2019s mystical vision of the future, they recognized as nonviable.<\/p>\n

\"Gandhi<\/a>
Gandhi fasting.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Worse was his way of dealing with the Muslims\u2014a sizeable minority in the subcontinent overall, and a majority in many areas.\u00a0 The Muslims, worried about what would happen when the Brits left, had long campaigned for concessions, safeguards, and guaranteed seats in the government of a free and unified India.\u00a0 They were especially upset by Gandhi\u2019s Hinducentric mystical revitalization, however much Gandhi dressed it up as \u201cuniversalism\u201d. \u00a0Partition into separate Muslim and Hindu nations was talked of as early as the 1920s, but Gandhi rejected it utterly; the Muslims, he said, must remain \u201cthe prisoners of our love.\u201d\u00a0 At the same time, many Hindus were outraged by what they saw as Gandhi\u2019s appeasement of the Muslims at the expense of Hindu interests, which is what eventually got him killed.\u00a0 Gandhi\u2019s policy of trying to woo the Muslims into a union that was based on Hindu mysticism was virtually guaranteed to split Indian communities along the religious faultlines.<\/p>\n

Another group that was not enchanted with Gandhi\u2019s vision was, oddly enough, the very \u201cuntouchables\u201d for whose improved conditions he worked so tirelessly.\u00a0 The untouchables, or dalits<\/i>, comprised about 15% of the population, and their traditional position was ghastly.\u00a0 The Hindu system was and is caste-based, a hereditary hierarchy entrenched in the very scriptures that Gandhi was promoting.\u00a0 According to Hindu beliefs, dalits were born as dalits because of atrocious sins committed in previous lives.\u00a0 Therefore, they were atrociously discriminated against, condemned to the lowest occupations\u2014latrine cleaning, for example\u2014barred from entering temples, and liable to violent retribution if they got too uppity\u2014say, by putting on shoes.\u00a0 Even the touch of a dalit\u2019s shadow was considered polluting to a caste Hindu.<\/p>\n

Gandhi, who had done wonders pushing for dalit rights to education and self-improvement, wanted to abolish that caste-consciousness, and bring the dalits into the Hindu mainstream\u2014as if he could make it so<\/i>, simply by willing it.\u00a0 But caste consciousness is integral to the Hindu religious worldview\u2014some even see Hinduism as a routinized religious system set up solely to protect the privileges of the higher castes.\u00a0 There was much negative reaction from caste Hindus\u2014but even more from the dalits themselves.\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n

\"Ambedkar<\/a>
Ambedkar converting to Buddhism.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The dalits wanted self-determination, and an end to centuries of being treated as subhumans.\u00a0 Under such home-grown leaders as Bhimrao Ambedkar, they were working to be treated as a separate ethnic\/religious group, looking for the same kind of deal as the Muslims, with power to elect a guaranteed number of dalit representatives.\u00a0 Many did not want to be Hindu at all, since Hinduism institutionalized their oppression, and they converted to Islam, Christianity or Buddhism.\u00a0 They did not trust the caste Hindus to treat them decently, just because Gandhi said it should happen.\u00a0 And their mistrust was justified\u2014even now, especially in rural India, the dalits are still subject to violent discrimination.<\/p>\n

Gandhi brushed them off.\u00a0 His vision was Indian unity, with a Hindu subtext; and his was the only right<\/i> vision.\u00a0 The dalits, like the Muslims, should do what he told them to; and if they were beaten or oppressed or saw their families killed or their homes burned, they should accept it all in the spirit of ahimsa<\/i>\u2014exactly the advice he gave to the Jews in Hitler\u2019s Reich.\u00a0 Such claims of absolute truth and absolute uncompromising rightness\u2014my way or the highway\u2014are characteristic of cult messiahs. \u00a0\u00a0At any rate, Gandhi was anything but a hero to the untouchables.<\/p>\n

As for other characteristics of messiahs, one thing you cannot say is that Gandhi raked in the dough and lived the high life.\u00a0 He practiced what he preached: let himself be beaten without fighting back, spent years in jail, cleaned toilets in solidarity with the dalits, and genuinely lived an ascetic life\u2014and yet, mean-spirited as I feel in saying this, there was something ostentatious about his asceticism.\u00a0 As his close friend the poet Sarojini Naidu slyly pointed out, it cost a fortune to keep Gandhi in poverty.<\/p>\n

On the sexual side, his idiosyncrasies are well-known, and caused considerable embarrassment to his allies and family.\u00a0 At the age of 37, he informed his long-suffering wife that he (and she) had just sworn off sex forever, as he had taken a vow of <\/span>brahmacharya<\/i>, or celibacy-with-benefits, the benefits including an increase in yogic powers, purity, and dominion over self.\u00a0 Like other cult messiahs, he sought to control his followers\u2019 sexuality, demanding celibacy even between married couples on the ashram.\u00a0 Later in life, to test his self-control, he performed what he called \u201cexperiments\u201d in chastity, as part of his own spiritual journey and to recharge his <\/span>satyagraha<\/i>: sleeping naked with one or two similarly naked women in his bed, including teenaged relatives.\u00a0 Though cuddling the guru was clearly regarded as an honour, the practice was also a bizarre form of <\/span>sexual exploitation<\/a>, with <\/span>damaging long-term effects<\/a> on the women involved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"MorningWalk1946\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fast forward to the consequences of his vision.\u00a0 Most of all, Gandhi opposed partition\u2014yet his determination to realize Ram Rajya virtually guaranteed that partition would happen.\u00a0 The ugly events that followed partition\u2014mass refugee migrations, ethnic cleansing, up to a million deaths, the later tragedies in Bangladesh, the ongoing ugly situation\u2014may have played out very differently if Gandhi had not had the power to push things in the direction of his impossible dream.<\/p>\n

But put it all together, and Gandhi comes off as a charismatic autocrat with a standard millenarian, revitalizing vision to be achieved through magical means.\u00a0 Ahimsa was India\u2019s Ghost Dance, a magic to rid the land of the white man and bring on the new millennium.\u00a0 If one lived in the Truth, maintained purity of body and spirit, and embraced nonviolence, one would, by definition<\/i>, win any conflict, even if one ended up homeless, raped, battered, or dead.\u00a0 Consider his comments on various groups under threat:<\/p>\n

[1938: The Jews]<\/a> The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.<\/p>\n

[1940: An Appeal to Every Briton]<\/a> I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

[1947] “I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour…You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol.87:394-5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To me, these look more like calls to victimhood than to victory, granting a free pass to tyranny and injustice, and\u2014like any religious flummery\u2014making empty promises of spiritual or postmortem rewards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi, meaning \u201cGreat Soul,\u201d is widely considered a saint and a martyr, the father…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-featured","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}