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Unconditional Equality: Gandhi's Religion of Resistance PDF

408 Pages·2016·3.027 MB·English
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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 system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8166-9865-3 (hc) ISBN 978-0-8166-9866-0 (pb) Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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 This page intentionally left blank 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

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