10 August 2019
Continued from https://indiarubbermancom.home.blog/2019/08/09/unsettling-world/
I am not a Gandhian nor an avid scholar to claim the views I nibble on now are authentic or original. Between the fleeting readings of here and there, I know that Gandhi tried to see Western Civilisation for the good it brought or was capable of, and the evil it signalled long before the World War horrors, and much before the White Conservatism could be envisaged as a compact shifting national loyalties and still capable of exhibiting that tenacity and twisted sense of morality in pursuit of its vision and dominance.
Why Gandhian view? Because, unlike today, he was India’s paramount leader, and most unlike today, he was a first amongst towering personalities, each of whom if they had spaced themselves more staggering manner would have been staggering leadership by themselves! It was very rare to find how few people in his camp actually agreed with his views, some held as archaic, others as iconoclast and a category of those that were deemed impractical and eminently avoidable, yet overwhelmingly they were drawn to the composite of Gandhi, to the persona that was able to show to them parts they identified with, and created that bonding. Whether it was Netaji, or Jinnah, or Sardar Patel or C Rajagopalachari or Maulana Azad, or Jawaharlal Nehru, and there were countless other leaders and exemplary men and women in those times, Gandhi was seen as one whose convictions, whose courage, whose charisma and character could inspire their following.
Gandhi from his postures and actions, not exactly from his utterances or expressed words in journals, took three significant steps, which reveal his world view. His view of Japan was as an Asian Power, when it was at odds with Russia, his view of the Ottomans was not just as a Muslim overlord and Caliph, but as a Anti Western Power, his view of China when faced with Japanese aggression was that of fellow nation struggling against Imperialism of the Western variety, and his resistance to Partition was how it would reduce India’s global leadership counterbalancing Western Conservatism.
So Gandhi espoused the cause of Asia, he cultivated a narrative that reinforced the Buddha as a pan Asian symbol that originated from India, he closed ranks with Asian countries going as far as Turkey, acknowledging the Islamic brotherhood as a bulwark against European Imperialism, because Gandhi has seen in South Africa, the front lines of racial segregation born from the foundational idea of White Supremacy. Unlike other Indian leaders of his time, Gandhi had a view not just from the Inner Temple and the law in UK, but also from South Africa where he was an activist as well as humanism experimentalist. His first Ashram was Phoenix inspired by Tolstoy.
So if you see Khilafat movement, if you see how the INC sponsored Dr Kotnis to China, if you see the interactions of the Congress with Sun Yat Sen’s Party in China, if you see how India while being a colonial estate of the British managed to espouse a world view and participated in deliberations for the UN, you will see that all this conformed to a larger Gandhian instinctive understanding of White Conservative movement.
When Gandhi warned that if Indians started to consume like Americans the world would be stripped of her resources in no time, it simply failed to register. Today when we find in mid July we have exhausted the Earth’s capacity this year to replenish herself, we can connect to Gandhian thinking on this. In an uncanny way, Gandhi mooting a concept of self reliance, community living in small sustainable villages which he chose to call ‘Ram Rajya’, would appear as a viable model for our Earth now seeking urgent solutions to tackle climate change.The Quaker community in USA is one example of Gandhian thought of sustainable community living, though Gandhi may have disagreed with their extreme rejection of modernity, and their being frozen in a particular era. But the idea of conservation of earth’s resources, limiting their exploitation, frugal and judicious lifestyles by elimination amenities all together need wider global understanding, as first measures to be adopted to halt the progress of Global Warming which is reaching tipping point. Consumerism needs to be tamed and arrested forcibly if our next generation is to get a shy at avoiding permanent Climatic changes as a consequence of human activities.
The biggest danger Gandhi saw was of communalism, not for its religious intoxication, but because he saw it for what it was- an expression of identity politics. His rejection of the ‘Hindu’ tag for India, was not because he had no pride in his ancient culture, or was personally not invested in it. Far from it, Gandhi was deeply imbued in his sect of Dharmic lineage, all his Western camp followers recorded faithfully that never did all the influence of the West from Christ to Rolland and Tolstoy move Gandhi’s moral compass from his Swami Narayan moorings. His religious identity forged his political thought of mass congregation, prayer meetings, of ahimsa and empathy for all. Gandhi viewed White Conservatism of playing a sinister plot of identity politics, which would cleave communities that coexisted in Asia and Africa for millennia, unleashing a cycle of relentless violence. Today, in not just Asia, but in conflict zones of Africa too, you will discover a colonial seed that gave root cause to the ethnic or religious confrontations that revel in bigotry and violence. In an indirect affirmation, both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr were inspired by Gandhian world view and values, and they fought and papered over racial segregation, choosing to celebrate common human values over racial differences, King’s ‘I have a Dream’ and Madiba’s Rainbow Coalition, actually seek to have black and white, together at a common table of humanity!
If White Conservatism had not run the thread that wedged Indian subcontinent in the early part of the previous century leading to its dismemberment, India today could have been an amorphous but amalgamated and adoptive notion of modern nationhood encompassing the arena that Aurobindo dreamt as ‘Akhand Bharat’ spanning from the fringes of Persia to the waters of the Andaman seas and Cape of Good Hope. It would have been home to a 3rd of humanity, home to all religions and ethnicities, and an vivid alternative model to that founded on Western Conservatism!
Today, White Conservatism has marched on because of the retreat of Gandhian values on consumption and integration of humanity. It is strange that today in the land of his birth and of much of his life struggles, Gandhi is viewed either with indifference or downright condemnation. His ghosted and contorted versions that inform today’s India is not the problem as much as the allure of White Conservatism and the compact it entices Indians with, by touting Indian exclusivism. The Western psychological war, presents India with an idea of greatness of ancient and current, by selectively celebrating the Vedic thought, and IITians, as if India was simply based on just these segments. For decades after Independence, the RSS and the Western Conservatives have nurtured in Indians a sense of selective superiority by prescribing Delhi Sultanate, Deccan Sultanates and Mughal rule as a kind of Islamic invasion of India, when in reality they were migration of Turks and Central Asian tribes seeking better futures and consolidating their gains in India. So we had many Western Scholars telling us how Arabic numerals were Indian numbers stolen from us, forgetting in the same breadth to say that this was their own categorisation. Titles like Indian Origin of Things was written by Western authorship. Ancient theorems of Archimedes, Pythagoras and more were now discovered to have existed in Indian scripture and predating them, but these discoveries were used not to say how unfair the West has been to India, but to suggest how unfair Islamic rulers had been to hapless Indians, and how the White Man had effected a rescue of India’s lost heritage and how India must unabashedly stand for her self sourcing herself as a Vedic- Indo-Aryan Nationhood unified by adopting one language, one culture, one God ( God Complex) and one conjured sense of polity!
(More potently now White Conservatives have crafted a carefully orchestrated embrace of Indian antiquity while fostering a template of nationalism that is quite antithetical to Gandhian view of India. We will continue to explore this subsequently…)
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