Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Legacy of His Ideas

Rating:
Summary: Useful and informative
Review: For many years David Hardiman has been a leading scholar of the Indian peasantry. Now he has written his view of Gandhi and his politics. The Gandhi he presents is ultimately a man of high moral courage. But this is not to say that Hardiman has no disagreements with him. In his opinion Gandhi presented a "dialogic" vision, emphasizing tolerance and diversity of opinions. Hardiman then discusses such subjects as Gandhi's views on nationalism, the origins of his non-violent resistance, his criticisms of modernity, his views on sex and the family, his attitude towards the untouchables and the "tribal" minorities, his campaigns against religious hatred, the fate of Gandhian politics after his death, and the influence of Gandhi on the wider world.

What can we say about such a work? There are some flaws. The use of Bakhtin to support Gandhi's "dialogic" stance is a bit fasionable. The fact that Hindi Swarj is written in a dialogue does not necessarily mean much for its open-mindedness. After all, both Plato and Galileo used dialogues, but they both clearly meant to express one particular viewpoint. Hardiman says Gandhi supported Polish resistance in the second world war, but the reference is to a secondary source. Indeed, there is no systematic discussion of the Second World War, surely the acid test for any pacifist. The discussion of Gandhi's international influence is also weak, looking as it does at Petra Kelly, Martin Luther King, and others, including, somewhat oddly, Malcolm X. Hardiman's scholarship is rather thin here, relying on Stephen Oates' biography of King to discuss the American civil rights movement, and ignoring such key scholars as Dittmer, Garrow, Sugrue and many others. The concentration on individuals may lead many to ask whether non-violent resistance is better at saving the souls of its leaders than achieving its goals. The material preconditions for successful non-violent resistance are never really explored.

At the same time, however, Hardiman provides much useful information. Who would have known that Gandhi's assasin twice tried to kill him in 1944, and both times Gandhi allowed him to go free? Many people know that in South Africa Gandhi offered his services to the British during their wars. But Hardiman also points out how appalled Gandhi was when he learned that the British were callously torturing and killing Africans in the Zulu rebellion. Hardiman also uses his past experience in subaltern studies to provide useful historical background. We learn of the Indian origins of such non-violent practices as haunting the doorsteps of debtors and threatening suicide. We also learn of how Gandhi encouraged civil disobedience among women, and also the limited effect this had on Indian gender relations. Particularly helpful is his discussion of the struggles of the untouchables and the tribal communities, and Gandhi's varying, but increasingly supportive, reaction to them. We learn of how Gandhi supported tolerance and respect for other people's faiths, and we learn of a group of Muslims who adapted Gandhian methods to resist their exploitive communal leaders. We also learn about Gandhian politics after 1948. It is not an encouraging story. Gandhians tried to encourage landowners to donate land to the village as a whole. Many landowners made this promise (requiring a minimum of a fortieth of the village land) and TIME magazine praised it as an alternative to Communism, but few kept their promises. Gandhians also split over the 1975 State of Emergency. One leader supported Indira Gandhi's use of nuclear weapons, while the other leader, J.P. Narayan, formed a broad based movement against Gandhi's government, which unfortunately helped to indulge and legitimize the Hindu right.

Hardiman's portrait of Gandhi is a complex one. It is important to remember that Gandhi was more the Mendelssohn of Hinudism, rather than the Spinoza. Hardiman points out that while Gandhi was always hostile to untouchability he thought that caste could be worked with. Hardiman also points out that he became more liberal as time went on: where once he supported marriages only within castes, by the forties he encouraged Hindu girls to marry untouchables. Hardiman notes that Gandhi could be too indulgent towards Hinduism, but also points out that the Hindu right cannot (and often does not) claim him as a spokesman. Hardiman also discusses Gandhi's patriarchal attitude, and how his family suffered for his abstemious and dogmatic beliefs. He even went so far to suggest that fathers would be right to murder their raped "dishonored" daughters. But to view Gandhi as a life-denying asectic ignores his wit, his generosity, his open-mindedness and willingness to change his views. We can see this in his changing attitudes towards caste, ecumenism, and the tribal communities. Once mass rape erupted with partition, he pleaded with fathers to forgive their daughters. And, of course, there were his fasts in order to stop mass communal violence. For this and for other noble and heroic acts, he was foully murdered by a Hindu bigot.