Aparna Kapadia on Mahatma Gandhi

An essay by Aparna Kapadia, a History Professor of some type, published in scroll.in, raises an important question. Is it possible for a person of Indian origin to write a single line about Mahatma Gandhi which is neither false nor fatuous?

Consider her opening line-

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, about 900 men of the Mahiya pastoralist-warrior community came together, sitting-in for months on public grounds in Junagadh in Kathiawad without much to eat or drink.

No such thing happened. Anyway, Mahiyas weren't 'warriors' coz they didn't have guns. Indians may have been as stupid as shit but they weren't so stupid as to think that 'warriors' could get by without guns. Why? Coz guys with guns would shoot them if they tried to pretend they were warriors able to throw a scare into people. The Mahiyas discovered this the hard way during their brief 'rebellion' against the Nawab of Junagadh in 1882.

The Mahiyas had served the kings of Junagadh for generations, and in return for their military services to the state, they had been granted tax-free lands.

How had they 'served'? Even if their service could be described as 'military', once they ceased to perform it, they weren't entitled to any tax rebate.

Now, their royal patrons, with whom they shared deep historical ties had decided to impose an unfair tax burden on their pastures, the source of their livelihood.

What 'deep historical ties' could they possibly have? The Babi dynasty had only arrived from Afghanistan in the seventeenth century. The Mahiyas were indigenous. They had played no particular part in the Babi rivalry with the Marathas. No doubt, during disturbed times, their propensity for violence meant they could grab a couple of dozen villages for themselves. But, the times were no longer disturbed. Their 'threat point' had vanished. In 1882, they rebelled against a new tax and were massacred on Kannada Hill. After that, they quietened down. Still, the Muslim convert 'Babrias' may have claimed some special relationship with the Nawab. But that was based on confessional identity rather than some historic link. In any case, what is salient here is that the triumph of the British had unloosed any other bond there might have been much earlier in the century.

All this can be verified in two minutes of a Google search. Yet Kapadia paints a picture of a warrior clan, betrayed by its laird, forced to pay taxes to reside in what was its own sovereign territory.

But the Mahiyas’ sense of loyalty was strong

Their loyalty was a pretense. Back then, everybody claimed to be terribly, terribly, loyal to the dynasty, or the usurper, or any random dacoit who happened to turn up.

and instead of taking on arms to protest the injustice,

in which case they would have been massacred and consigned to 'criminal tribe' status

they resorted to another method of resistance – risaamanu, the temporary severing of relations between friends or family members, or as in this case, between patrons and clients.

How was this a method of resistance? It was stupidity simply. I suppose its purpose was to foster in-group solidarity through collective suffering. No doubt, the women were doing the work while the men-folk competed with each other in seeing who could carry on with this imbecility longest for the purpose of thymotic signalling.

'Risaamanu'- or boycott- only works if the tie that is being suspended was useful to the other party. In this case, it wasn't. Consider what happened when the good people of Chirala-Pirala decided that it was obnoxious to pay municipal taxes. Having consulted Gandhi, they decided to perform 'desh-tyag'- i.e. left their homes to go stay in the jungle where they became very ill. They then had to return home and pay the tax. This was deeply unfair because, as their leader- a guy with an M.A from Edinburgh pointed out- they didn't need drains and dispensaries and schools and police stations and other such godless innovations. Even if the satanic Sarkar forced them to put up with such things, they'd be damned if they would pay for them through municipal cesses and participation in local government. Sadly, the mosquitoes in the Jungle kept biting these wonderful freedom fighters and so their 'desh tyaag' was to no avail.

Despite hardships, the Mahiyas did not budge, did not attack the villages nearby for food, and most importantly, did not take to violence against the rulers who had subjected them to new taxes.

Because if they had done so there would have been a much bigger massacre than the one in 1882. Furthermore, they would be classed as a criminal tribe and thus have to support themselves by petty theft and prostitution.

The Junagadh king remained unmoved, however, and ultimately, the Mahiyas were defeated at the points of guns, even as they stuck to their commitment of not using violence against their former patrons.

Why does Kapadia tell us this story? Some stupid guys with bows and arrows think gathering en masse will intimidate the powers that be. Then a few chaps with guns show up and they disperse quietly. Their only commitment was to not getting massacred again. They had no means 'to inflict violence on their former patrons' and get away with it. Why? Coz the Brits were everywhere. There was nowhere they could run away to.

Why is Kapadia pretending that this story is about Non-Violence as opposed to the overwhelming superiority of Western weapons and military tactics? `

Kathiawad, the peninsular portion of present-day Gujarat, is also where Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was from. He was born in the sea-side town of Porbandar, a prominent princely state, and grew up in Rajkot, less than 200 km away from his birth-place.

Porbandar was a 13 gun state- scarcely prominent at all save in comparison to Rajkot, which was 9 gun. Still the British political agent resided there, because of its central location, so it was considered more secure. Gandhi completed high school in Ahmedabad, not in Kathiawad. It should be noted that Porbandar was relegated from first class to third class status, because of mismanagement, while Gandhi's dad was Divan.

Until he left for London to train as a lawyer at the age of 18 in 1888, Gandhi had mainly lived in this part of western India and had received his primary and secondary education there.

Gandhi had only lived in western India till he left for London.

Later, Gandhi would go on to work for the firm of a fellow Kathiawadi in South Africa, where he established himself as a political activist of repute.

This is misleading. Gandhi did not establish himself as a political activist while working for Dada Abdulla. He completed that case and was preparing to return home when a political change in Durban caused the Indian community to ask him to stay and take up political work, in which case they would guarantee his income. Gandhi thought this political work could be completed in a short time and did in fact make a trip back home a little later with the intention of settling permanently in India. Once again, political changes within South Africa called him back- this time with valuable support from the Indian National Congress and the Tatas. In other words, Gandhi was no stranger to India but rather drew strength, for the South African struggle, from his extensive Indian contacts and supporters.

And after decades of being away, when he returned to India in 1915, surrounded by much anticipation and fanfare,he would choose to evoke this heritage by donning the traditional Kathiawadi dress – plain cotton cloak, turban, and dhoti – in contrast to the suits preferred by the other Indian leaders at a reception held in his honour at a fashionable Bombay venue.

Arguably, this was traditional peasant costume rather than an elaborate regional variation of it. Gandhi was not trying to emphasize his regional peculiarity but rather appealing to something universal- viz. the desire to appear a yokel rather than a shyster so as to better swindle the yokels.

Traditionally, the people of Kathiawad had not just used dharnas, or sit-ins but had also developed many other ways to gain political leverage. From today’s vantage point, some of these, like risaamanu and fasting seem to share common elements with Gandhi’s ideas. In contrast,others like self-punishment, self-immolation, as well as well as forms of guerilla warfare are distinctively “un-Gandhian”.

Kapadia seems to be insisting on Kathiawad's difference from the rest of India. Yet no such difference obtained. Ambedkar has pointed out that the same tactics she refers to were used by high caste people in Maharashtra- generally to the detriment of the Dalits. There were also bardic communities, like the Charans, whose specialty was committing suicide so as to inflict a curse upon the wrong doer- but such mischegos can be found elsewhere in India. Hunger strikes and self-immolation, like guerilla tactics, too abounded in an area much of which had been recently under the Marathas.

How much was Gandhi directly influenced by this tradition in framing his political methodology? Historian Howard Spodek answers that as the son of a high official in the Porbandar and Rajkot states, at the very least Gandhi would have been familiar with these ways of negotiating power and settling disputes.

He would have been familiar with their singular inefficacy- that's why his family spent a lot of money sending him to London. British politics was a story about violent protest being quickly and brutally crushed whereas 'bourgeois' radicalism could bring about quite substantial reform precisely because the working class was increasingly conservative and thus there was no contagion risk. Indian Nationalists could not follow the Irish path because land reform- which is what the masses really wanted- would have hurt their own families most of whom were dependent, in one way or another, on rents extracted from an emaciated peasantry.

At the same time, Middle class India faced an existential threat- viz. a Youth revolt whose radicalism could turn insurrectionary at the slightest prompting. The Brits could shoot your kids, but to appease the masses, they would also do land reform. So, not only do you lose your sons, you also lose your financial security. The question for middle aged leaders was how to appeal to the young without alienating the British and putting a target on their own back. In this context, Gandhi could scarcely have been oblivious of the hunger-strikes of the Suffragettes and the tactics used by the Swadeshi movement. The British establishment had decided that they could live with such manifestations of rebelliousness in essentially silly creatures whom it was wiser to pamper than to persecute.

Gandhi needed to adopt similar self-harming strategies so as to put clear blue water between himself and the radicals who were prepared to carry out assassinations. In any case, he had been obliged to embrace fasting as a means of purging oneself of sin while in South Africa coz his son had been getting amorous, under his roof, with the married daughter of his biggest supporter. A lesser man would have topped himself.

This specific version of the Mahiya protest against the Junagadh kingdom is a partially fictionalised account of real incidents, told by Jhaverchand Meghani (1896-1947), the well-known, writer and folklorist from Kathiawad, who Gandhi once referred to as rashtriya shayar, or national poet.

 So, it was a pack of lies.

What is known though is that the mode of protest the Mahiyas chose was certainly traditional to Kathiawad which was home to hundreds of small kingdoms which had been around for centuries; even at Independence over 200 of the 550 Princely States of India were located in this region of present-day Gujarat.

It was not a traditional form of protest for the simple reason that it did not work at all. On the other hand, actual tribal levies, or other types of militia soldiers, do from time to time signal their displeasure at an outcome by firstly showing solidarity and secondly discontinuing some normal practice. The 'Curragh Mutiny'- during which British officers signaled their willingness to resign rather than have to bear arms against the Ulster Unionists- is an example.  This is purely a bargaining game, not some 'embedded' tradition. Gujeratis aren't stupid. They are perfectly rational.

Disputes between different kingdoms often required means to garner political leverage, making Kathiawad a hotbed of political ferment and resistance.

It was a hotbed of internecine silliness of an aristocratic sort but no resistance whatsoever. Compared to the Hurs of Sindh, or the Faqir of Ipi, Gujarat was peaceful and its people were rising rapidly in education and civic sense.

In Kathiawad, Gandhi had also grown up in an eclectic socio-religious milieu.He mentions his encounters with Vaishanavism, Jainism, and Islam in his autobiography but he would have also known followers of Zoroastrianism and other Hindu devotional sects.

So would anyone from almost everywhere else in India. In the bigger cities, one would also find Iraqi Jews and Armenian Christians and Chinese dentists and so forth.

Kathiawad was a region where different religions had co-existed for centuries thanks to its links with the Indian Ocean trading world.

The same was true of Kerala and the Konkan coast and Calcutta and so forth. Why keep harping on things which Kathiawad has in common with other littoral parts of India?

While it was a predominantly Hindu region in the nineteenth century, for ages, the Hindu and Muslim communities in Kathiawad had lived side by in relative amity.

As they had done in Sindh and East Bengal. Gee, I wonder why that didn't work out? Could it be because Islam was the majority there?

On occasion, as in other parts of India, the two faiths also mingled. For instance, Gandhi’s mother, to whom he was deeply attached, belonged to the small Pranami sect. Krishna-worship was central to the Pranamis but the sect’s eighteenth-century founder also drew from Islamic practices and beliefs. While the Pranami faith spread to a few other parts of the subcontinent, it is in Kathiawad that this syncretic religious order had originated.

So what? Dayanand Saraswati was from Gujarat. His Arya Samaj, like the Brahmo Samaj, has an Islamic rejection of 'idols'. But, by the time Gandhi was in school, this current of thought was flourishing throughout India. Gandhi's mummy's fasting may have been important. Her being a 'Pranami' wasn't important. Daddy's being a member of the Pushtimarga was very important. This was because the syphilitic hereditary head of that sect was fucking his disciple's wives. The Maharaj libel case exposed this scandal a few years before Gandhi was born. That's why he was furious with his Daddy for re-marrying three times. 

It is not a stretch to imagine then that at 18, when Gandhi made his way to London, he was not a young man from a remote village who had set out across the sea to a large international city, but instead, someone who had already encountered and lived a complex cosmopolitanism.

It is a stretch to imagine this because, by Gandhi's own account, he was a callow youth unused to big city ways. Later, he found it difficult to settle down in Bombay- precisely because it was 'bustling' and 'cosmopolitan'. Even Ahmedabad was too big. He was happiest in Wardha which was wholly rural.

Indeed, Rajkot was no bustling metropolis like Bombay, but his specific setting had perhaps fitted him with the tools needed to embark on a new journey of experiments in England.

It was not his 'specific setting' but his family connections which gave him the tools he needed. Those tools were (1) sufficient hard currency and (2) basic English literacy and numeracy. Neither had any specific connection with Kathiawad. The Rupee was freely convertible and Government inspected schools taught to an acceptable standard because the Brits were running things.

 Kapadia is pretending that any street urchin in Rajkot could have jumped on a steamer and gone to London and returned, three years later, as a Barrister.

To be clear, it was later in London, South Africa, and eventually back in India, that Gandhi developed satyagraha as a unique mix of elements, specific to his early twentieth century context and experiences.

This is as clear as mud. I know of nothing that happened while Gandhi was here in London which had any relation at all to satyagraha. In South Africa, he got money and political backing from Indian politicians and businessmen which enabled him to pursue what was essentially a Trade Union type action. Smuts could get rid of the Chinese, who weren't British subjects, but if he pressed the Indian 'coolie' too hard the fellow would have to be sent back to India at British expense.

Indians in South Africa were a vulnerable minority. It would be very foolish to use the same tactics there as in India where non-Indians were a much smaller, even more vulnerable, minority.

In addition to indigenous influences, his ideas were shaped by the works of many international thinkers including the Russian Leo Tolstoy, the Englishman John Ruskin, and the American Henry David Thoreau.

Meanwhile, Dadabhai Naoroji was rubbing shoulders with Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov! Born 40 years before Gandhi, Naoroji was 40 years ahead of him all the time!

But Naoroji was a Bombay man, through and through, and had been an M.P in London. These were truly international topoi.  Gokhale and the moderates needed someone who could represent the small towns and pocket Princedoms whose vision could at best be National. Tolstoy was intensely national- Russia as the Christ bearing nation etc- and more than a little insane- as was Ruskin but both represented great Imperial countries and were great men in their own right. India's place would be more humble and its new Rishis needed to reflect this humility. Thoreau, who mingled' pure Walden water... with the sacred water of the Ganges' was a better fit. Clearly, Indians would have little role in the wider world, save as cogs in machines whose purpose they could little understand and approve, yet, Indians needed a class of seers amongst themselves whose conscience had to be free enough to undertake needful reform- more especially regarding the Hindu religion.
Thoreau wrote- 'The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.'

This passage encapsulates the dilemma of the Indian patriot. In so far as one contributed to global security or prosperity, one did it mechanically, at the command of others; in so far as one managed or decided matters with one's own brain- those matters were essentially contingent, not essential, and thus a matter of expediency not principle. Yet some sort of Thoreauian mishegoss was necessary for a notion of Nationality to survive- and such a notion was necessary if Reform were to be a Moral, not a Mercenary, project because otherwise none would bell the cat and risk being seen, however transitorily, as an Ibsenite 'Enemy of the People'. 

My point is that there is no 'international' program here. The Christian or the Khilafatite, or the votary of Spencer or of Marx, might have such a program but such programs were wholly disconnected with the problem of the small town Reformer battling Casteism and Misogyny and Child Marriage and so forth.

Gandhi, being outside India, came somewhat late to the game. This was fortunate because his own crossing of the black water would have counted against him in places like Bihar just a few short years previously when the young Rajendra Prasad was battling to reverse the out-casteing of a Kayastha barrister who had just returned from London.

Gandhi, in South Africa, like Shyamji Krisha Varma in London, did have links with non-India oriented movements. But Gandhi, as he tells us in his 'Experiments', insisted that the Indians keep their struggle separate from other struggles (even though they were working closing with the Chinese) whereas the Indian Revolutionaries in the UK (and in America, a little later) took the opposite route. Thus, according to his own testimony, Gandhi was a national, not international, figure.

By contrast, consider the trajectory of M.N Roy- a Jugantar revolutionary in Bengal who goes to the US in furtherance of a plot to get arms from the Kaiser. In Mexico, he helps found the Mexican Communist Party. In Moscow he rubs shoulders with Lenin and Trotsky. The Comintern sends him to China to foment a peasant revolution there. He fails and understanding that Stalin would give him short shrift, returns to India where he resumes his political career. Roy was truly international. Gandhi was solely concerned with India and the Indian diaspora.

And his earliest experiments in non-violent resistance were carried out, not in India but in South Africa.

What would have happened if he had tried violent resistance? Smuts knew the answer to that even better than Gandhi.

The true story of Gandhi's first 'experiment' is as follows. He says all Indians should go to jail for defying the Pass Law and not come out under any pretext. He names and shames those who quit after a few months of porridge. Then he himself goes to jail and discovers within a few weeks that Smuts was right all along. Indians should carry a Pass. Once they understand it is a good thing, they will do it voluntarily. What was humiliating was Smuts presumption that they would only comply out of fear of punishment.

Anyway Gandhi came out of jail preaching this new Gospel. Some Indians violently resisted Gandhi by beating the shit out of him. They suspected he had been bribed. Thus, Gandhi learned a valuable lesson. It is better to be in prison, where your own people can't beat you, than to do a deal with Whitey so as to get out early.

The reason Gandhi wasn't a complete failure in South Africa is because Smuts could deport the Chinese but not the Indians because the latter were British subjects and would have to be resettled by the Imperial Government. Thus, it was the Brits who provided Gandhi his 'threat point'.

As his most recent biographer, Ramachandra Guha points out, “Gandhi was, and remains, a genuinely trans-national figure. He was trans-national in the range of his influences and in the reach of his thought.”

Gandhi was and is a genuinely failed trans-national figure just like Hitler or Stalin or Mao. There are small groups of nutjobs in every country who are inspired by such imbeciles. But then there are also votaries of David Icke or Lyndon LaRouche or other such paranoid thinkers.

Significantly, Gandhi also went far beyond the scale and scope of what anyone had ever attempted with non-violent protest.

The British reversal of the partition of Bengal occurred before Gandhi's return to India. Khilafat and the anti-Rowlatt agitation would have gone ahead if Gandhi had never existed. No doubt, Gandhi took leadership of this movement promising to deliver Swaraj within 18 months if a certain amount of money was collected, however, he called it off and thus ensured its failure. Thus, his contribution is equivocal. Arguably, he retarded, not catalyzed, progress and thus India got less than Egypt or Iraq or even Ceylon or Burma.

Unlike his Kathiawadi precursors, he took on not a local ruler but the entire British empire: his satyagraha, or truth force, succeeded in creating a political movement that eventually broke down colonial rule.

But Colonial rule broke down everywhere in any case no matter what the complexion of the local resistance to it.

Today, non-violent resistance has gained traction all over the world.

Opposition to silly or unjust laws may or may not be non-violent. Such opposition succeeds or fails not because of the tactics used but on the basis of a calculus of costs and benefits. Osama bin Laden succeeded in getting American troops out of Saudi Arabia- the stated aim of the 9/11 attack- but, just now, after the attack on Saudi refineries, it looks as though this victory was Pyrhhic. On the other hand, many reforms arise spontaneously without any 'resistance' whatsoever on the basis of a moral consensus based on better information. By contrast, much 'resistance' is counter-productive because it is stupid or paranoid. Gandhian 'resistance' generally falls under this category.

Yet in India, while Gandhi is officially celebrated as the “father of the Indian nation”, his ideas of peaceful protest are newly controversial.

His ideas were always recognized to be merely magical and involving a puerile type of play-acting. Still, one particular political party, and one particular political dynasty, had a mythology based on some magical power Gandhi is supposed to have possessed such that a hereditary apostolic succession had continuing sanctity. According to this view, the BJP killed Gandhi and thus must be ostracized in perpetuity allowing Congress to continue to steal and screw up everything in sight. However, there are plenty of such mythologies in every region of the country. In general, cousins belong to different political parties and vilify each other for betraying their common ancestor's legacy.

Often the common line of attack is that that Gandhi’s pacifism is either too weak a remedy for our times, too outdated, or simply an aberration that only an uncommon person, a “mahatma” (great soul), or saint like him, could sustain in the real world of politics and power.

This is also the line of defense against religious nutjobs who say 'God is all powerful. Instead of buying medicines or guns to fight disease or the invader, let's just pray.' The truth is God either does not exist or desperately wants to see the back of us. Yet, it may not be politic, to admit this.
My own way of dealing with Gandhians is to demand the fast to death on the 'free Deidre Rachid issue'. But they tend to give me a wide berth.

While his symbolic legacy remains unquestioned by almost every political creed, on the left and right, the central Gandhian notion – the right to protest peacefully – is disputed.

His 'symbolic legacy' is that of endless moralizing and utter impotence- a type of political action which challenges nothing. Still, sometimes it pays to pretend that Santa Claus is the one who brings your kiddies their presents. Similarly, it can be convenient to appear to be yielding to a Saintly nutter, rather than backing down.

The Kathiawadi traditions of resistance remind us that Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance was not quite the aberration it is imagined to be.

It wasn't 'an aberration'. It was a type of stupidity everybody everywhere is subject to. Sooner or later we all futilely protest something or other.

It had deep roots in India itself, including in his own home region. Wednesday marks the 150th anniversary of his birth. On this occasion, as Gandhi’s ideas face a new test in India, it is perhaps worth recalling these small and little-known histories: the Mahiyas of Kathiawad, and other non-violent protestors of the region, whether Gandhi knew them or not, were his ancestors in more ways than one.

It is not worth recalling things which never happened. Gandhi was a Modh Bania. He did not have any Mahiya ancestry. Unlike the Mahiyas, he did well out of his stupidity because he got Birlas and Bajajs and so forth to pay for his money pit Ashrams. This is the great lesson here. Get your funding right and then indulge in imbecility.  Don't put the cart before the horse.