Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance

408 Pages·2016·3.027 MB·English

by  Ajay Skaria

UNCONDITIONAL EQUALITY
A CULTURAL CRITIQUE BOOK
Cesare Casarino, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney, Editors
Unconditional Equality
• • • •
Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance
Ajay Skaria
A Cultural Critique Book
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of the Introduction were previously published as “Gandhi’s Radical Conserva-
tism,” in “Thinking of Gandhi,” special issue of Seminar India (October 2014), edited by
Tridip Suhrud. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published as “Living by Dying,” in
Genealogies of Virtue: Ethical Practice in South Asia, edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Surrender without Subordination 1
Part I. Before Satyagraha
1. Stumbling on Theological Secularism 31
2. Between Two and Three 65
3. The Warrior’s Sovereign Gift 91
Part II. The Aneconomies of Satyagraha
4. The Impossible Gift of Fearlessness, for Example 121
5. The Destruction of Conservatism 147
6. Daya Otherwise 171
7. The Sacrifice of the Gita 191
8. Ciphering the Satyagrahi 223
9. The Extreme Limit of Forgiveness 259
Afterword. The Miracle of the Gift 287
Acknowledgments 299
Notes 303
Index 363
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Preface
A Religion of the Question
Somewhere in the early 2000s, while preparing to teach Mohandas Karam-
chand Gandhi’s English translation of Hind Swaraj to my undergraduate
class, a passage about history in the text intrigued me. Since I happened
to have the Gujarati version of that text at hand, I consulted it. The diver-
gence is striking. The Gujarati text criticizes “history” (the English word
occurs in the Gujarati text) and contrasts it to itihaas [usually translated as
“history”]. The English text criticizes “history,” but in it there is no equiv-
alent for itihaas; the contrast between history and itihaas is thus obscured.
The gap between the Gujarati and English texts, I have since come to
realize, is symptomatic of Gandhi’s struggles to think his politics. What
this politics involves is by no means clear to him; perhaps he writes so pro-
lifically and indefatigably (his collected works run to ninety- eight volumes
in English) precisely in order to try and understand his own politics. This
politics becomes even more intriguing when we attend not only to Gandhi
as an author or “intending subject,” but to his writing.1 By dwelling in and
on the gaps (between Gujarati and English and also within each of these
languages) in his writing, this book tries to draw out his politics.
For me, writing this book has been difficult also because of another
gap— that between Gandhi’s insistence that there can be “no politics with-
out religion” and the secular inheritance that I have, as far as I know, no
desire to abandon. Gandhi repeatedly describes satyagraha (his most famous
neologism, which he coins initially as a translation of “passive resistance”)
as his “dharma” or “religion,” even as the religion that stays in all religions.2
Symptomatic of my difficulty with this religious politics was my inability
for long to even recognize it. When Vinay Lal first asked me in 2007 to
write an essay on Gandhi’s religion for a volume he was planning on polit-
ical Hinduism, I protested that I was not interested in this aspect of Gandhi.
But with his characteristic persistence, Vinay did not accept my protests,
and I ended up writing that essay, which became a precursor of this book.
• vii •
viii PREFACE
In the process, my own understanding of dharma and religion as “concepts”
has been transformed.3
What is Gandhi’s religion? Which, given his remarks, is also to ask:
What is the religiosity of his politics? What is the politics of his religion?
And what is its universality?
This book is an attempt to address these concerns. In preparation for
later chapters, here I would like briefly to attend to an issue that, though
not explicitly thematized in the book, is yet perhaps the specter animat-
ing it— the relation between Gandhi’s religion and secularism, or (to briefly
signal the argument about this relation) how Gandhi’s satyagraha is a reli-
gion of the question.
•
Hegel notes already in 1802 “the feeling that ‘God himself is dead’ upon
which the religion of more recent times rests.”4 Hegel can assert this par-
tially because, by the time he writes, God- centered ethics are on the decline
among philosophers, and many philosophers think morality and ethics in
secular terms, without reference to God.
The apprehension of the death of God is not only a characteristic of
“more recent times.” It is already borne (if only as nonpresence) by the
various negative theologies that one finds “in” each of the various “reli-
gions,” including the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, and Judaic.
But it surely does gather an increasingly inescapable force in “more recent
times.” Justifiably or not, all modern religions and ideologies share the
apprehension about the death of God. This apprehension is the mark
of their modernity. It forms these religions and ideologies regardless of
whether they accept or deny the death of God, whether they denounce or
accept secularism.5
Gandhi’s writing occurs under the shadow of this apprehension of the
death of God. He comes to his religion after crossing the “sahara of athe-
ism.” And while he considers “modern civilization” “godless,” and thinks of
his politics as striving for a godliness, his religion and godliness are them-
selves marked by reason. Thus, condemning the practice of untouchability,
he argues: “Hinduism like every other religion, apart from the sanction of
Shastras, has got to submit itself to the test of universal reason. In this age
of reason, in this age of universal knowledge, in this age of education and
comparative theology, any religion which entrenches itself behind Shastric
injunctions and authority is, in my own humble opinion, bound to fail.”6
Moreover, he often stresses his affinities with atheists such as “Bradlaw”
PREFACE ix
(Charles Bradlaugh, whom he admires greatly, and whose funeral he attends
while a student in London), whose “atheism was only so- called. He had
faith in the moral government of the world.”7
Most strikingly perhaps, Gandhi cannot conceive God as a sovereign or
kingly being; God becomes a shorthand for sat or satya— words that can
be glossed, respectively, as being and truth in the sense of the realization or
accomplishment of being. While he is willing to accept a “personal God
for those who need his personal presence,” he also insists that it is inade-
quate to think God in human terms, and treats the very word “God” as an
example of such humanization; for him, therefore, “satya is God.”8 Such
formulations are symptomatic of how satyagraha is concerned not with
the transcendent world, but rather with the immanent one. Even his appar-
ent invocations of a transcendent or sovereign God— as, for example,
his claim that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was “a divine chastisement sent
by God” for the sin of untouchability, or his claim that he seeks moksha
(“salvation”)— turn out on closer scrutiny to be concerned with the imma-
nent world.9
This immanent religion organized around satya is all the more intrigu-
ing given how his neologism satyagraha conjoins two terms: satya and
agraha— force, firmness, insistence, or even seizing. It is not as though the
satyagrahi, the practitioner of satyagraha, already knows or possesses satya
and seeks only to enforce or spread it; rather, the satyagrahi is engaged in a
“quest for satya.” And this quest is also a questioning because satyagrahis
do not know what satya is— they are only constantly aware of being part of
and yet abysally separated from satya, of striving to be seized by satya.
All of this is symptomatic, I would like to argue, of how in Gandhi’s
writing at its most intriguing, the apprehension of the death of God is
accompanied by satyagraha as a religion of the question.10
•
But what is this— a religion of the question? We could perhaps begin with
that last sentence of Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Tech-
nology,” which reads: “For the question is the piety of thought.”11 That sen-
tence condenses within it an immense paradox whose implications were
already being thought before Heidegger’s forceful formulation. The para-
dox lies in the conjoining of questioning and piety.
Had Heidegger said that the question, and questioning, is the essence
of thought, he would only have succinctly restated a powerful and long-
standing tradition. For the privileging of the question is shared across