27 thoughts on “Be careful whom you canonize”

1. He did make some unfortunate remarks about the caste system, but his views were actually considered to be liberal during his time.

   Gandhi should be commendd for leading the Indian independence movement, fighting for justice through non-violent methods, and helping Indians to have pride in their country. His strong leadership, conviction, sacrifice, and patriotism are worthy of celebration.

2. We need to separate Gandhi the symbol from Gandhi the person.

   Gandhi the symbol was always a given, and de-canonizing him now is a bit late. He and Nehru were the two leading figure in Indian independence, and nations need their founding myths and heroes to put on their banknotes and trot out in political speeches. As PMC notes, he was quite socially liberal for his times with his slogan Hindu Muslim bhai bhai. After all, he lost his life to over his willingness to talk with Muslim leaders.

   Gandhi the person was much more complex. Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, both unrepentant slaveowners, Gandhi had his oddities: the caste remarks you mention above, a belief in the purifying powers of drinking urine, disinterest in his illiterate wife, a belief in testing his abstinence via bathing by female followers. Yet his reflective, meditative side was deep and transcendental, and his personal story from South Africa onward is damn inspirational, to say the least.

   When I note his birthday (yesterday, Oct. 2), I bow to the shared symbol, not every wrinkle of the person. It’s being a Gandhi admirer in the cultural sense.

3. PMC — I disagree that Gandhi’s views were liberal for the time. He only comes around to an anti-caste system position in 1945, through the 1930s he is trying to defend a distinction between varnas and castes, proposing heriditary jobs that would be separate but equal.

   For a long time, his approach to caste was one of nobless oblige, not radical egalitarianism.

   If you compare Gandhi’s views to others in the Congress movement (like Ambedkar), or other social reformers in India, he actually lags behind enough of them that one wonders why.

   In both non-violence and swadeshi, Gandhi comes in after others as well. And his arguments about non-violence are less coherent than those of his chela, Martin Luther King.

   He certainly inspired many, but they were inspired more by the myth and less by the man himself. It’s hard to make the case for his originality. Easier to make the case for his myth making / marketing genius.

   As for South Africa, click on the word “troubling” in the post to see a dissenting view. I didn’t have time to blog it yet …

4. I’ve always thought the most unfortunate thing about Gandhi’s “non violent, civil disobedience” is that in India, too much of it continues to this day. 😉

5. Great men are not great in all things. They are, after all, men and not Gods. Gandhi also made quite unforgivable remarks about Jews persecuted in Germany during Hitler’s time.

   His fight for Indian independence is to be lauded. He served as the focal point of a movement which greatly needed it. We can judge each act (and statement) individually. He was right about Indian independence and wrong about caste. Churchill was right about facing and fighting Germany and wrong in his treatment of the Indians who served that very cause. It does not diminish Churhill’s greatness in the fight against fascism. It only underscores that it is not to the men we should be faithful, but the principles for which they claim to stand.

6. 1) are we defining morality by whether Gandhi “goes as far” as Ambedkar?

   Caste-blindness is fine – and I support it – but there was nary a pit-stop at caste-blindness before the implementation of full on anti-upper-caste reservations…

   And we all know the consequence of these reservations: they drove India’s best and brightest abroad, including driving many of our parents to the US. While I don’t subscribe to the idea that “brain drain” is a cause of a bad economy, it is certainly a symptom of a bad economy as otherwise the IIT grads would be staying home.

   The current Indian economic boom is almost entirely due to a) the partial repeal of socialism and b) the fact that caste-quotas have not yet been introduced into the private sector. If and when that happens, you will see the Indian economy stopped dead in its tracks as private organizations are forced to hire incompetents.

   2) That said, I’m no fan of Gandhi. He had some truly idiotic remarks on the Palestinian/Israeli situation that were representative of his worldview, e.g. here:

   If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province. But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with Germany…. …If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. 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. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

   So, one might say – well, he’s taking an insane (albeit axiomatic) stance towards nonviolence, but he’s consistent in a bizarre way that just happens to sanction mass-murder on the grounds that it is spiritually joyous for the murdered. But no…

   They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favour in their religious aspiration. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-shares with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

   So, he can’t blame the Palis for killing the Jews (because the Palis are oppressed)…yet he can’t endorse violent resistance against Nazism by the Jews. Sounds like a double standard to me…indeed, sounds much like the typical Berkeley progressive.

   Sounds like an actively EVIL IDIOT, in other words, the type of guy who wouldn’t raise a finger to help a woman being raped because he was against “violence”. And of course there were his thoughts on blacks, which you have probably seen.

   3) Finally, Gandhi‘s ideology had disastrous consequences:

   Everyone knows the story of how India gained its independence: Gandhi nonviolently protested colonization, and the British eventually felt guilty enough that they left India (which was promptly rent by Partition). I’ve always thought that this was a singularly poor way for a country to gain independence. Freedom gained through charity is very different from freedom that one must fight and die for – it is the difference between a Gandhi culture and a George Washington culture. The Gandhi culture in post-independence India led to several decades of delusionary soft-socialism. From the disastrous belief that the Chinese were “brothers” against colonialism (which led directly to India’s defeat in the 1962 border war) to the useful-foolishness of the “non-aligned” movement to the utopian belief in a license raj “aided” nation of autarkic villages…post-independence Gandhism served India very poorly. It ensured that India had powerful enemies (China and Pakistan), false friends (the USSR and leftist academics in the west), ghastly poverty, a pathetic military, and unnecessarily cold relations with the USA. Here’s the question: did it have to be that way? Did India have to embrace Gandhism? I’m not sure. I think a good argument can be made that India would have become communist had it opted to use violent resistance – and that the result would have been a Ho Chi Minh culture. Obviously, that would have been even worse – for all its faults, soft Gandhism was preferable to hard communism. I don’t know whether Indian communism was as avowedly secular as the Russian and Chinese varieties, but as a purely academic question it would have been “interesting” to see whether religion could have been wiped out as a cultural force as it was in Russia and China. Now, the question of whether India would have been better off had it violently resisted is different from whether India *could* have successfully violently resisted. But I think it’s pretty clear that Britain would have had a tough time of it had the Indians resorted to violence. After all, the UK had just been devastated by World War 2. Had the weakened and politically fractured UK tried to fight for India, it would have lost just as the French lost in Vietnam[1] – and with similar consequences. After all, the Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing, and India has always had plenty of Muslims inclined to “direct action”…(not to mention Sikhs and RSS-type Hindus). Along the same lines, this interesting piece from 1857 makes the point that colonial India could only be ruled by the British insofar as it was divided:

   Fifty years sooner or forty years later, the English could have made no impression on India as conquerors. Seventy years before the conquest of Bengal the English traders had been plundered by a viceroy who anticipated the tyranny of Surajah Doulah. They determined not to submit to such exactions. They resolved upon war. But the great Aurungzebe was then on the throne of Delhi; and though the Moghul empire had declined somewhat from the standard set up by Akbar and maintained by Shah Jehan, the fighting merchants were soon taught that they were but as children in the hands of its chief. They were driven out of Bengal, and Aurungzebe thought of expelling them from his whole empire. The punishment of death was visited upon some of the East India Company’s officers and servants by the Moghul. This severe lesson made a deep impression on the English. They resumed their humble position as traders on sufferance. They never thought of conquest again. It was not until every man who had been concerned in that business had long been in his grave, that the English dared so much as to think of making another war. Nowadays the Gandhi/Washington/Ho-Chi-Minh question is moot. George Washington’s culture is on the rise in South Asia with the ascendance of the BJP. Right-wing economic and military policies are necessary for a country’s prosperity and survival, and the 1991 economic liberalization[2] plus the 1998 BJP-ordered nuclear missile tests were the one-two punch that KO’d the dead ideology of Gandhism. There are problems with the BJP’s chauvinistic interpretation of Hinduism – including textbook rewriting and Hindu-Muslim communal tensions – but I do think that BJP-style Hinduism is the only way to glue the country together and paper over the traditional divisions of caste, language, and so on.

   Indeed, it is because of the BJP that India has become the one nonwhite country eligible for the hate of the academic left. There is no surer sign that India is on the right track than to be grouped with the USA (and, often, Israel) in the anti-pantheon of the left. After all, you will never see Saudi Arabia or Zimbabwe dressed down for the manifold faults of their regimes in a university setting, but contemporary India gets the full two-minutes-hate from the ZMag crowd. And of course leftists feel safe making racial generalizations about “jobs going to curry eaters in India” that they’d never make about other groups, paradoxically indicating that Indians are slowly starting to be regarded on the same level as whites. Remember, PC ideology protects ONLY those perceived as *underdogs*…and if India is no longer an underdog but a peer competitor, all is fair game. In the final analysis, the academic left can’t stand the fact that India is no longer a sympathy object. When Businessweek and Wired have India on the cover while naked fakirs increasingly retreat from the pages of National Geographic, the left has lost another welfare-recipient and perpetual victim…and it stings.

   The “naked fakir”, “spinning wheel in every hut”, wimpy Gandhi mentality was only finally shrugged off after the collapse of the USSR. In the 90’s India actually gained some measure of self-respect thanks to right-wing policies: economic liberalization + nuclear weapons + partial repudiation of socialism.

   Of course, the Communists currently in power are set on dragging India back into the pit – this time for good – with their private sector quotas, so this moment probably won’t last for long.

7. Sorry, long reply…

   It’s amusing to read Ennis’ entry. There’s an undertone to it of ‘epater les [Hindoo] bourgeoise’, but who is this going to shock ?

   Old news about MKG, really. The various commenters are correct, of course, that one can still admire Gandhi given his role in Independence, etc.

   Just to make things more interesting, I’d argue that Gandhi’s attempt to apply Hinduism to the public arena is quite important as well. Not so much for his postion on particular issues, but for the methodological lesson he inadvertently teaches.

   His ‘experiments with truth’ ultimately stem from the rejection of the traditional method of interpreting ‘Sabda’ in Hinduism–one that was both experiential and intensely intellectual, involving argument and counter-argument. This rejection, traceable ultimately to the Brahmo Samaj, has been disastrous for Hinduism, and it shows in Gandhi’s ‘experiments with truth’.

   BTW, Gandhi actually fits in nicely as a ‘traditional Hindu rishi’, the latest in a long line of cantankerous, far-from-perfect men (& women). We traditionalist Hindus honor them for having seen and uttered a piece of the ‘Sabda’, not for their moral perfection. Moral instruction is left to the tradition as a whole.

   Kumar P.S., ‘caveat emptor’ also applies to the Dalit link. Let’s just say that Runoko Rashidi has some,..umm…, odd views as well.

8. By the way, I should note that Gandhi’s “nonviolent resistance” strategy is fairly limited in effect:

   1) it is only applicable to moral powers capable of feeling guilt like the US and Britain, and not to the USSR/Nazi Germany.

   2) it is only applicable in a situation where the media is on the side of the “nonviolent resisters”, as the evocation of guilt in the target ruling population depends upon presenting the right, selected images.

   Put it another way: had the media chosen to cover the Black Panthers rather than the KKK, or the Wichita Massacre rather than the dragging death, there wouldn’t be guilt on the part of the masses but quite a different emotion.

   Against a power that doesn’t really feel guilt – an eliminationist power – offering “satyagraha” just facilitates your elimination. And if there are no cameras to capture it – and there wouldn’t be in a non-guilty state – then your “moral victory” is essentially nonexistent, b/c the guilt-free immoral power will tell the world that you violently resisted anyway!

   This is why the “nonviolence” ideology is so unfortunate. It is of a piece with typical delusionary leftism and socialism, and only works against Britain…and not against REAL evil doers like Pakistan and China. The naive “Hindi Chini bhai bhai” ideology earned India an ass-kicking and international humiliation and nothing more.

9. Ahem….

   Following the great GC, I take back the following sentence “Sorry, long reply…,” j/k, GC 🙂

   Kumar

10. heh, well, much of it is quotation…but i included a long quote so that people wouldn’t say I quoted him out of context.

    Seriously, Gandhi was one confused individual. I think his effect on India was – overall – terrifically injurious. From the disastrous belief that the Chinese were “brothers” against colonialism (which led directly to India’s defeat in the 1962 border war) to the useful-foolishness of the “non-aligned” movement to the utopian belief in a license raj “aided” nation of autarkic villages…post-independence Gandhism served India very poorly. It ensured that India had powerful enemies (China and Pakistan), false friends (the USSR and leftist academics in the west), ghastly poverty, a pathetic military, and unnecessarily cold relations with the USA.

    Bottom line: Gandhism was basically soft-communism, an ideology which lead to slow self-strangulation and poverty – excused as “satyagraha” – rather than violent expansionism.

    Perhaps the most galling aspect of Gandhism was its self-righteousness, as if the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance was a universally applicable resort to conflict resolution rather than a highly specialized tactic…one which would only be effective against a guilty occupier with a leftist media.

11. gc, i think you are attributing too many things to gandhi. india’s socialist economic policies were implemented my nehru, who rejected the village based economics of gandhi, and looked toward ‘scientific socialism,’ though perhaps more via the fabians than marxist-leninists.

12. GC, You stated ” that they’d never make about other groups, paradoxically indicating that Indians are slowly starting to be regarded on the same level as whites ” Ahhhhh, did you sleep more peacefully at night considering the fact that atleast the Leftists now consider India a ‘white country’. This must have had a very soothing effect on your burned psyche of spending years and years self loathing over your ‘brown skin’ and ‘non-whiteness’.

13. Gandhi was a complex person and his philosophy was always evolving, something you see when you read his autobio. Perhaps his support of the caste system seems at odds with his humanism, but when you see it in the context of his entire philosophy, some of the sting goes away.

    For instance, Gandhi believed that no labour was low or high. He would for instance clean toilets and forced his wife to do the same. This most menial of tasks had been until then reserved for outcastes. If a person does not attach a value, high or low, to a task, and believes in equal dignity to all occupations, a belief in the caste system is not inconsistent.

    To us, it seems absurd and unhelpful, because dignity of labour or not, people should be free to do what they want.

    Gandhi’s philosophy was constantly evolving and he was constantly struggling with himself to find harmony. It is true that he sought to reform Hindu society from within, rather than reject it outright. Of his greatness of his soul and the integrity of his intellectual inquiry, I have no doubt whatsoever.

14. Mr Vij, ‘owning slaves’ is not an ‘oddity’. Mr Gandhi had his eccentricities, but nothing as repugant as owning slaves.

15. Nano Iyer:

    And you think that a repudiation of the caste system would have involved rejecting Hindu society outright?

    I see humanism in people’s actions. When he is continuing to defend a system of separation based on hierarchy, even if he says that everybody should be treated and paid equally, I have trouble seeing the humanism in it. I presume he thought that Dalits should not be doctors, they should simply be respected while they carted “night soil” (shit) around.

    There were two major social issues within Indian society: castes and sex. He doesn’t come across as a reformer on either, based on what I’ve seen.

16. People have different notions on what constitutes Hindu society. Gandhi was grappling with ideas he thought formed the framework of Hindu society – the caste system, Brahmacharya and so on.

    Gandhi carted night soil around himself. What greater repudiation of tradition can you have? He was a bania. He became a fakir. Like I said, people are complex and their intellectual positions evolve. For a man like Gandhi who took up the pursuit of Truth, the problem becomes harder because he has to reconcile several philosophies together – political, economic, social, religious, secular, national, international.

    : There were two major social issues within Indian

    society: castes and sex. He doesn’t come across as

    a reformer on either, based on what I’ve seen.

    That’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it.

17. “Gandhi carted night soil around himself. What greater repudiation of tradition can you have? “

    That was nobless oblige, the condescending act of a man of high status lowering himself, “humbling” himself to the status of somebody lower.

    True repudiation of tradition would have been something similar to the position he came to at the end of his life (but stronger and unambigious), the position that he had been urged to take by Ambedkar and others for decades, the position that he had been resisting, namely:

    • All men are created equal
    • No matter what your father did, you can do whatever you want

    It would be saying, I’ll carry shit on my head, and you should become my doctor, my lawyer, my teacher.

    Then I would have been impressed.

    But reluctant agreement from a reactionary is not impressive. To condemn untouchability, but try to preserve the caste system is like trying to condemn Jim Crow but preserve segregation.

18. ‘owning slaves’ is not an ‘oddity’.

    But two hundred and twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t cause for remark except among the rare abolitionist. As abhorrent as it obviously was, in its time slavery was viewed by whites as quite normal. Even Abraham Lincoln sold his own slaves into another’s servitude rather than freeing them.

19. And Washington did free them, which makes the comparison interesting.

20. Jefferson on slavery – he was quite conflicted, to say the least….

21. About Gandhi being cutting edge — Vivekananda makes a similar argument, but decades earlier, trying to condemn untouchability and castes while still preserving varnas. But even then, Vivekananda says that varnas should not be heriditary, and argues that the way out for Dalits is for them to learn Sankrit, in essence, to become pandits.

    So decades before Gandhi, Vivekananda is making a far more aggressive argument in a similar vein.

    This shows Gandhi to be reactionary in comparison.

    Look, if you want to say that Gandhi was an important political leader, like Nehru or Sardar Patel, sure, I agree.

    But I see little to venerate about the guy. If you were to examine his writings without knowing he was Gandhi, even if you had the writings of his contemporaries in front of you (to control for the way people thought back then), I really wonder what Gandhi’s defenders would think.

    Without the label, would he pass the taste test?

22. I’m not a ‘Gandhi defender’. I don’t subscribe to your brand of rhetorical argument in which you state positions in short terse statements. I don’t regard ‘Gandhi defender’ as a meaningful label.

    ‘Noblesse Oblige’ and other things you state are just psycho-babble crap that passes for conventional wisdom these days.

    To clean your toilet is not a gesture of solidarity towards untouchables. That would be the kind of thing that is fashionable these days among leftists. For Gandhi, it was also a first step towards self-reliance. It all ties in, you see, pseronally, socially, politically.

    Of course Gandhi was also a political leader. But he was no ordinary political leader. He figured out how a country of impoverished people with a broken spirit could slowly go about building itself.

    I suggest you read up on Gandhi. I also suggest you live and travel a bit in India.

23. Very Interesting discussion on Gandhi and Gandhian values. I didnot read a lot on Gandhi, so I might be wrong at some places.. There are many who consider Gandhi as the father of indian independence movement who was able to pool the then confused indians together and help india win independence with his famous non voilent movement/satyagraha.. There are a lot of indian historians who still doubt about Gandhi and his role in indian freedom movement. There are a lot of people who argue about his famous non voilent movement and if it delayed india’s freedom struggle by twenty years and also his choice of making Nehru as a prime minister instead of sardar vallabhai patel who was equally dynamic as Nehru. What is great probably about Gandhi is his simplicity,though he led indian national movement he never claimed the throne nor try to get his kids or family members be prime minister or occupy any important post in post independent india. He lead a very simple life, fasted, walked miles on bare feet and went through a lot during india’s struggle for independence which is commendable. As far as his role in indian indendendent struggle goes, without doubt he carried a lot on his shoulders and did a great job. As Manish points out Gandhi as an individual had his own eccentricities and was basically a simple man with his own obsessions walking bare naked on streets, has his own opinions on caste system,brahmacharya etc., but he was someone poor people in india could relate too very easily and rose to great heights during indian independence struggle. He was at the right place at the right time in india and became a great leader. From my understanding , Gandhi evolved as a leader constantly changing philosophies and opinions on various issues of the world. As VSNaipaul, nobel laurette argues in his book ” India a wounded civilisation”, did Gandhi come up with unique ideas or were his obsessions that made him a mahatma is questionable. Did he happen to be born at the right place and did he return to india at the right time to rise to great heights? Ennis is right swami vivekananda and even before him his teacher swami ramakrishna paramahamsa condemned untouchability and ramakrishna paramahamsa even was ahead of even vivekananda, he spent time at mosques, temples, churches and cleaned roads where the untouchables lived in those days and he was the one who came up with the ideas of chastity/brahmacharya that Gandhi talked about later. And there were a lot of religious leaders like dayananda saraswati, social leaders like raja ram mohan roy who fought against some of the social evils like caste system, widow remarriages etc., way before gandhi started preaching his ideologies. from chapter NOT IDEAS BUT OBSESSIONS BY VS NAIPAUL from “india a wounded civilization” Gandhi was not a mahatma from the beginning , it was circumstances which made him a mahatma. He left india to study law and even after finishing law despite being vocal about hating western customs, comes back to india for a year and decided to go leave india and go to africa and lived there for twenty years. It was the racial descrimination in south Africa that made him a mahatma. That is where he became broad minded and matured in alien societies and returned back to india to be adored as mahatma the great soul. And on caste system from my understanding Gandhi supported caste system/varnashrama hoping that all the four caste would do their duties respecting each others professions and no caste would dominate another ( he was the one who stood by the idea that cleaning toilets was as respectable a profession as anything else).more on this here http://www.mkgandhi.org/sfgbook/index.htm But in todays india Gandhian values of non voilence, only using swadeshi goods and make salt or weave clothes manually, caste system, brahmacharya would not work. But during indian independence struggle it worked well and lot of people could relate to that but not many people can relate to all that today.

24. Nano Iyer –

    Personally, I love it when people present their arguments in ‘short, terse sentences’. Saves the eyesight a bit….

    Nice of Gandhi to ‘force his wife’ to clean toilets too 🙂

    Like I stated before (see, short and terse), he was right about some things and wrong about others. Important in the Indian independence movement, but not so good with the social stuff. He could advocate poverty, er the simple life, all he wanted, but that doesn’t mean everyone should have to live that way, so it’s a good thing he didn’t become finance minister or anything.

    And by the way, I admire the man. He was important and his contributions to the world were ultimately positive. It is not too small a thing to say he ‘freed a people’, or at least was a very important part of that struggle. I just don’t want to turn him into a secular god.

25. MD, I find your line of reasoning very peculiar and immature – the use of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in short terse sentences, for example. From what I understand of your reasoning, you know what is right and wrong.

    Perhaps it is not Gandhi who should be canonized, but you, who can tell what is right and what is wrong.

26. And yesterday, my wife forced me to clean the toilet bowl and do the dishes. I didn’t want to, but she forced me.

27. Someone claimed the incompetence of dalits for the past slow growth of India. And similarly claimed the lack of reservation in the private-sector jobs for the current boom. Dalits have been deprived of equal opportunities for ages. I will suggest this moron to compare the school kids of a well-to-do Dalit with an comparable Higher Caste kids. If the people are running out of country beacuse of shortage of opportunities inflicted by dalits. No matter what state is the economy in, many more people will be running out in the future. Its only the second generation of Dalits which has got some dignity and level playing field (owing to the affirmative action in the public-sector jobs after independence). These families are educating and developing fast. As they become equally competent they are going to grab the opportunities (affirmation or no affirmation). They cannot be oppressed for a long time. You better vacate your space for them willingly in a peaceful manner. Or there is going to be a big clash in very near-future.