Gandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence, Volume 1: Scientific Roots and Development

350 Pages·2020·4.086 MB·English

by  V. K. Kool, Rita Agrawal

Gandhi and the
Psychology
of Nonviolence,
Volume 1
Scientific Roots and Development
V. K. Kool · Rita Agrawal
Gandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence,
Volume 1
“Vinod Kool has once again provided us with groundbreaking new understand-
ings of sides of nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition few have paid attention to.
These two volumes cover an impressive wide range of topics and each of them
combines thorough studies of the sources with recent scientific discoveries in psy-
chology and medicine.
Both volumes of Gandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence must be obligatory
reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Gandhian “experiments
with Truth” have developed into the most important force in societal conflicts
globally. All engaged citizens, activists, politicians, researchers, and students should
include these books in their curriculum.
Kool and Agrawal provide food for thought on most of the important questions
humanity is facing today, including the 2020 pandemic.
Reserve space in your book shelves for these books. When you have read them
you will achieve a more nuanced view on Gandhi and nonviolence than you can
imagine.”
—Jørgen Johansen, Deputy Editor, Journal of Resistance Studies, Sweden
“Those of us in peace psychology take pride in how our field covers almost all
approaches in psychology. In these two volumes, this is done with a focus on
Gandhian psychology. The wide range and depth of coverage offers a must read for
everyone who wants to be familiar with Gandhi or who wants to be well-versed in
peace psychology.”
—Rachel MacNair, Director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis
for Consistent Life, USA, President of the American Psychological
Association’s Division of Peace Psychology (2013), and author of Religions
and Nonviolence: The Rise of Effective Advocacy for Peace (2015)
V. K. Kool • Rita Agrawal
Gandhi and the
Psychology of
Nonviolence,
Volume 1
Scientific Roots and Development
V. K. Kool Rita Agrawal
SUNY Polytechnic Institute Harish Chandra Postgraduate College
Utica, NY, USA Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
ISBN 978-3-030-56864-1 ISBN 978-3-030-56865-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56865-8
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P
reface
While the life and work of Gandhi impressed people ranging from scholars
like Albert Einstein to common human beings around the globe, films
such as Attenborough’s Oscar Award winning film, Gandhi, or veteran
Bollywood film producer Shyam Benegal’s The Making of Mahatma, visu-
ally recreated history to show that Gandhi taught us that there are no
limits to our capacities. On November 28, 1982, the New York Times, in
its review of Attenborough’s film, reported that it had been successful,
helping us to realize what to make of ourselves and to make others feel as
being a “long-lost friend.” Gandhi’s life and work must be understood in
terms of an indivisible whole, as Eswaran puts it, because it is not easy to
understand this super human being if we, simply and unnecessarily, focus
on some isolated event of his life. Fortunately, through our meetings with
Gandhi’s grandchildren and activists in India, now in their 80s or even
above, we were fortunate enough to be party to some of the intimate
moments that he spent with his family members and direct narrations of
events which revealed Gandhi’s philosophy and way of life. Additionally, it
brought us closer to the scenes captured for posterity by the celluloid
world and to the time frame of the yesteryears, helping us to experience it
with unbelievable reality.
Our contentions are that great human beings do not become par excel-
lence overnight. They learn from experiences as they navigate through
their lives, experimenting with and learning from the new challenges
thrown up at them, leading to both upward and downward spirals of
development. Sooner or later, some might even reach sainthood, bestowed
on them formally or not, unlike the clergy who are mostly confined to the
v
vi PREFACE
technical interpretations, traditionally stipulated, and who are supposed to
lead a socially desirable and prescribed life. Saints, in contrast, have been
known for their heroic efforts for and becoming catalysts of change in the
community. From the perspective of psychology, it would not be wrong to
profess that Gandhi displayed several qualities worthy of a saint. In fact,
according to Harvard University scholar Kolhberg, Gandhi had attained
the highest stage of moral development, namely, that of post-conventional
growth. Additionally, the people of India address him as Mahatma (the
great soul) and have declared him the Father of the nation.
Overall, an effort has been made in this manuscript to describe and
analyze the extent to which Gandhi helped us to not only realize our
potential but also to delineate what he had to offer to modern psychol-
ogy—the science of human behavior. Even more specifically, an attempt
has been made to demonstrate the ways in which many concepts of psy-
chology could be better understood with exemplification from his life
and work.
At the outset, our interest in tracing the applications of psychology to
the life and work of Gandhi was rooted in the findings of experiments
conducted by Professor Stanley Milgram, reported in almost every text-
book of psychology. While Milgram analyzed the obedient behavior of his
participating subjects in continuing to deliver electric shocks to the erring
learner, he completely ignored those who simply walked away from his
experiments at its inception or quit soon after. Why were they disobeying
the instructions of the experimenter, delivered in the context of promot-
ing knowledge in the prestigious setting of a laboratory at Yale University?
While Milgram’s quest was genuinely scientific, we wondered what Gandhi
could offer regarding our understanding of these subjects who disobeyed
and defied Milgram (Kool 2008, 2013; Kool and Agrawal 2013), in the
light of the fact that Gandhi taught millions of people around the globe
how to draw a fine line in choosing between when to obey or when not to
obey. In fact, scholars like Gene Sharp at Harvard University, Kenneth
Boulding known as half Mahatma Gandhi and half Milton Friedman,
Galtung as peace maker and many more spent almost their entire career in
seeking and applying the lessons learned from Gandhi’s quest for obey-
ing—and yet not obeying—behavior during his sustained effort to bring
home the elusive freedom for India or to seek justice in South Africa. The
key element in understanding this ability to obey or not is rooted in our
capacity to apply self-control, known as Satyagraha at the mass level.
PREFACE vii
However, as far as modern psychology is concerned, it has remained a
relatively poorly studied concept.
Considerable has been written about the life and work of Gandhi,
encompassing as it does, almost 5000 books. Yet, after our survey of litera-
ture, we were disappointed to find that the psychological underpinnings of
his behavior have been viewed only scantily. No doubt that scholars such
as Gregg, Eswaran, Weber, Fischer and many others had analyzed Gandhi’s
life and work, but it was Erikson (1969), in his Pulitzer award winning
book Gandhi’s Truth, who first sought to aim directly at Gandhi’s identity
using a psychoanalytic framework. Ever since the publication of this book
about five decades ago, not much has been done to highlight the life and
behavior of Gandhi in developing the sub-field of psychology of nonvio-
lence, per se, or to augment our understanding of behaviors in the domains
of work, industry, education, human evolution and cognition, religion
and other areas using Gandhian ideas (Kool and Agrawal 2018).
Murray and coworkers (2014) were disappointed that while psychology
has paid considerable attention to the study of human aggression, little has
been done as far as exploring the psychology of nonviolence is concerned.
Both the American Psychological Association and the American
Psychological Society have been encouraging research in promoting this
positive feature of human behavior, but its history has been relatively very
short. When we looked at a recent book on 100 years of psychology in
India (Bhushan 2017), we noticed that even in the home country of
Gandhi, namely, India, research on Gandhi has been scant, both in quan-
tity and quality.
“While little has been written about Gandhi’s relevance to psychology
as an academic discipline,” wrote chancellor Rao of India’s GITAM
University, “there is an increasing awareness of the Gandhian model of
conflict resolution and its relevance. A recent issue of Gandhi Marg,
(2013) is devoted to highlight the psychological aspects of Gandhi’s
thought and practices” (p. 239). We are happy to inform the readers that
both of us contributed articles to this special issue of Gandhi Marg (Kool
and Agrawal 2013), and Kool was given the responsibility to be the Guest
Editor. Additionally, through her base in Varanasi, India, it was possible
for Rita Agrawal to keep contacting the members of Gandhi family and
fellow freedom fighters, with perseverance and diligence, to craft the psy-
chological inputs that were necessary in preparing the range and scope of
our project, consisting of two volumes. Together, we agreed and felt that
viii PREFACE
there was a need to prepare a book on the theoretical and applied aspects
of psychological significance with the life and work of Gandhi as the base.
Earlier, sensing such a lack of interest and research on Gandhi in par-
ticular and psychology of nonviolence in general, Kenneth Boulding, in
his keynote address at a conference on nonviolence at SUNY Institute of
Technology in 1992, had invited psychologists to do more and to engage
in publications. In addition to preparing this manuscript as a tribute to
Gandhi around his 150th birth anniversary, the present book also honors
Professor Boulding for his constant encouragement and extremely cogent
suggestions, helping us in reaching this stage of our work.
This book is developed on the central theme of Gandhi as a practical
psychologist, in spite of the fact that he was a barrister by profession and
had no credentials as a psychologist. The turning point in such an argu-
ment is based on a very succinct comment by Stricker (2000) that was
published in the American Psychologist, an official journal of the American
Psychological Association. Stricker wrote that Gandhi’s approach would
be helpful in understanding the controversial Boulder practitioner model
that required each clinical psychologist to be placed in a psychiatric center
for training to help him/her better understand the organic nature of dis-
eases. Further, when unarguably the most popular psychologist, Skinner,
mentioned Gandhi in the context of his reinforcement theory in his classic
article, “Whatever happened to the science of behavior,” published in the
American Psychologist in 1987, we felt that it had become imperative to
focus on the life and work of Gandhi and what it has to offer to modern
psychology.
Further and very importantly, we also believe that in line with our
understanding of two evolutions—biological and technological, Gandhi’s
life and work offers psychological underpinnings that fan across several
sciences in a most formidable manner.
For Gandhi, material worth was minimal, which, in turn, under cuts
both technological and biological evolutions. While Gandhi was not
against the development and use of technology, he cautioned against its
phenomenal growth and harmful impact. He also defied the basic tenets
of biological evolution rooted in the survival of the fittest and the selfish
nature of genes. With no bank balance for himself and his children and no
animosity even toward his adversary, he defied the tenets so typical of both
technological and biological forces that guide our behavior. Gandhi
offered a third evolution, namely, a cognitive evolution, which was not
solely rooted in the survival of mere organic material but which guides
PREFACE ix
human behavior, instinctively, or in its absence, in conjunction with an
external prosthesis composed of artificial intelligence, gifted to us through
technological sources. He sought to disentangle human cognition and to
understand its role in seeking one’s identity, first, in the context of our
coexistence with the conglomeration of machines around us, including
our own body (which according to him was also a machine), and, second,
with the all-encompassing elements of nature surrounding us. He never
denied the existence of the myriad inherent ways in which we automati-
cally learn to satiate our needs. Yet, at the same time, he was also aware of
the perils such behavior creates for the existence of others, and cautioned
us not to overstretch ourselves in our use of technology.
Standing at the cross road, between our god-gifted biological heritage
and the man-made artifacts, is the youth of our time who is searching for
his or her identity, often displaced by its own personal narcissism. We
believe that while expanding the range of human cognition and depressing
or mending biological and technological forces surrounding human
beings, Gandhi, definitely, championed the cognitive revolution which
was established by the likes of luminaries such as Bruner, Miller and others
in changing the course of modern psychology and navigating it away from
the classic behaviorism that dominated most parts of the twentieth cen-
tury. Gandhi was relevant, then, and, is more so now, as we continue to
face the impact of the technological evolution vis-a-vis the biological evo-
lution that would challenge, and possibly reshape, our cognition to create
new realities with the advent of robots and spiritual machines around us
(we ask the reader to also refer to our book, Psychology of Technology by
Kool and Agrawal 2016).
Through this book, we seek to present to you a road map of psychology
that is based on psychology of nonviolence, in general, and Gandhi, in
particular. For scholars such as UC Berkeley professor, Nagler (1990), the
science of nonviolence has laws tougher than those of physics. For Gandhi,
his experiments with life were exercises in searching for the truth, which is
also the creed of a science. While basic sciences and technology focus on
some objectively demonstrated existence of material, for Gandhi the
understanding of human cognition, or the lack of such understanding, is
the ultimate goal for defining our survival. It invites us to evaluate what we
have been doing so far and to envision the course of civilization that
would, in conjunction with advances in both biological and technological
domains, need an “applied psychologist” like Gandhi, to whom distin-
guished psychologists like Skinner or Bandura were looking for support,
x PREFACE
as an exemplar, in understanding and explaining human behavior as well
as its management.
Our contention has been further reinforced by recent research and
comments of two leading psychologists, Robert Sternberg (2019) and
Howard Gardner (2018), both of whom are well known for their land-
mark work on human intelligence. They are of the firm belief that the
concept of intelligence, though important, is not sufficient for providing
solutions to problems of the twenty-first century and that psychology
would do well to look beyond. One such concept is wisdom, about which,
Sternberg and Gardner are of the view that psychology could learn much
from the life and work of Gandhi.
This book is a humble tribute to one of the wisest human beings of the
twentieth century, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who helped us to
understand our psychological strength in the context of our positive com-
munal relationships, and we appreciate the support of his grandchildren
and fellow coworkers who provided us material for this manuscript and
virtually, more than a film, placed us in a slice of time, enabling us to expe-
rience Gandhi in a manner, so lively, as we had neither known nor
imagined.
We would like to thank Gandhi’s family, including his grandchildren
whose interviews are narrated in Chap. 3, Volume 1 of this book: Ms.
Sumitra Kulkarni at Bangalore; Ms. Usha Gokani at Mani Bhavan,
Mumbai; and Nilam Parikh at Navsari. We are grateful to everyone who
provided valuable information to us during our meetings and specially to
Gandhi’s close coworker Justice Chandrashekhar Dharmadhikari at
Mumbai; Ms. Niranjana Kalarthi at Bardoli; Mr. Bhawani Patnaik, MP,
recipient of Padma Shree national award and nonviolent freedom fighter
of Gandhi era, at Bhubaneswar; veteran Gandhi scholar Nagin Das
Sanghavi; Chancellor Ela Bhatt of Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad
(founded by Gandhi); and Ms. Radha Bhatt for providing information on
Sarala Behn (original name Catherine Mary Heilemann), daughter of a
British Army officer, and who worked closely with Gandhi and settled in
India after his death. We are grateful to Dr. Pragna of Bardoli and
Professors Lodhi and Herbert Blumberg for their support.
Professor Kool also acknowledges and thanks the Fulbright program
for awarding him Fulbright Specialist status (2011–2015) and grants to
visit India; the American Psychological Association for providing financial
support by selecting this book proposal in a global competition (2015);
and to Andrew Russell, Dean of School of Arts and Sciences, SUNY