Where is Gandhi when you need him?

In his own time Gandhi was held in contrast to the bloody-mindedness of Hitler and Stalin, and the era of world wars.  Who do we look to today to counter Putin’s brutal militarism?  Gandhi’s was a message of truth, of non-violence, of the power of self-sacrifice, and his influence can be found in the American civil rights movement, in anti-apartheid South Africa, and among the student protestors at Tiananmen Square.[1]

Gandhi can be described as a kind of Nietzschean superman, who transcended all values – including Nietzsche himself – to become a global icon.[2]  He found joy through an ascetic “secret of service” and is now regarded as “Father of the Nation”, so it should come as no surprise that his face adorns the Indian rupee.[3] It is also possible that his is the only bespectacled visage on the official currency of any country.

Perhaps the closest equivalent we have to Gandhi today are our nurses and doctors who have worked unenviable hours over days, weeks and months, for more than two years of the pandemic.  Gandhi himself had fallen seriously ill from the Spanish Influenza of 1918-19, but long before that he found that he had “an aptitude for nursing” which “gradually developed into a passion”.[4]

Here is an extended quotation from Gandhi’s Autobiography where he deals with an early plague, in India, of an unknown date, but likely around 1897, before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.[5]  Note his singular respect for the untouchables, and the varying reactions to his service of toilet cleaning by the different castes.

Plague broke out in Bombay about this time, and there was panic all around.  There was fear of an outbreak at Rajkot.  As I felt that I could be of some help in the sanitation department, I offered my services to the State. They were accepted, and I was put on the committee which was appointed to look into the question.  I laid especial emphasis on the cleanliness of latrines, and the committee decided to inspect these in every street.  The poor people had no objection to their latrines being inspected, and what is more, they carried out the improvements suggested to them.  But when we went to inspect the houses of the upper ten, some of them even refused us admission, not to talk of listening to or suggestions. It was our common experience that the latrines of the rich were more unclean.  They were dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms.  The improvements we suggested were quite simple, e.g., to have buckets for excrement instead of allowing it to drop on the ground; to see that urine also was collected in buckets, instead of allowing it to soak into the ground and to demolish the partitions between the outer walls and the latrines, so as to give the latrines more light and air and enable the scavenger to clean them properly.  The upper classes raised numerous objections to this last improvement, and in most cases it was not carried out.

The committee had to inspect the untouchables’ quarters also.  Only one member of the committee was ready to accompany me there.  To the rest it was something preposterous to visit these quarters, still more to inspect their latrines.  But for me those quarters were an agreeable surprise.  That was the first visit in my life to such a locality.  The men and women there were surprised to see us.  I asked them to let us inspect their latrines.

‘Latrines for us!’ they exclaimed in astonishment. ‘We go and perform our functions out in the open.  Latrines are for you big people.’

‘Well, then, you won’t mind if we inspect your houses?’ I asked.

‘You are perfectly welcome, sir.  You may see every nook and corer of our houses.  Ours are no houses, they are holes.’

I went in and was delighted to see that the insides were as clean as the outsides.  The entrances were well swept, the floors were beautifully smeared with cow-dung, and the few pots and pans were clean and shining.  There was no fear of an outbreak in these quarters.

In the upper class quarters we came across which I cannot help describing in some detail.  Every room had its gutter, which was used both for water and urine, which meant that the whole house would stink.  But one of the houses had a storeyed bedroom with a gutter which was being used both as a urinal and a latrine.  The gutter had a pipe descending to the ground floor.  It was not possible to stand the foul smell in this room.  How the occupants could sleep there I leave the readers to imagine.[6]

Gandhi, Autobiography, c. 1897.
 

 

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[1] Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p.  135.

[2] Ibid, p. 143.

[3] Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, tr. Mahadev Desai (New York: Dover, 1983), p. 196.

[4] Ibid., p. 153.  See also p. 213.

[5] Ibid., p. 151.

[6] Ibid., pp. 149,150. 

On the unpreparedness for war: expect the unexpected

During the Second World War Germans would scoff at the Russians, and one of the jokes was of a Russian POW who came across a German soldier’s watch.  But it didn’t work.  In a moment of insight the Russian realized the problem exclaiming: “Ah! The mechanic is dead!” 

Yet there were real-life equivalencies to the Russian war experience, which posed problems for Stalin.  As Soviet troops advanced on Berlin, they discovered that the Western capitalist swine (so-called), be they Fascist or not, also had the benefits of flush toilets, something unknown to most, if not all, of ‘mother Russia’.  As a result, the invading troops also had to be ‘de-contaminated’ upon the war’s end.

Today, as Russian troops attack Ukraine, there are other psychological problems faced by Putin’s forces who are fighting an undeclared war.  In Russia, it is illegal to talk about the activity in Ukraine as a “war”, or as anything other than a “special military exercise” where Russian-language minorities in Eastern Ukraine might welcome Putin’s ‘help’.  This puts Russian troops at a tremendous psychological disadvantage, because they are not – or were not – anticipating full-on war as their tanks rolled towards Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.  In effect, Russia’s effort amounts to a kind of “Mission Impossible” writ large. We know Putin succeeded in the KGB, but can he effectively mobilize a nation over an official secret?

Perhaps this is why Russian troops are committing war crimes (if reason can be attributable to such atrocities), news of which is now surfacing in widespread media reports.   Possibly still thinking of the enemy as “Nazis”, Russians are not only fighting Ukranian soldiers, but find themselves pitted against an entire citizenry, who are prepared to defend their country to the death.  So the Russian forces appear to be either seeking vengeance at their own unanticipated war shock or wanting to settle “historical” scores, which is less likely. When making war, one should always expect the unexpected: what can go wrong, will, and this was the greatest lesson of the First World War, “the war to end all wars”. In August 1914 the British had no military plans, and of the European powers they fared better than others, precisely because they had no plans.  In February 2022, the Russians began to stall, then flail, simply because their forces did not know of any plans, although there was one, yet troops had not been prepared mentally for the actual grim combat of war against Ukraine.

It is also worth noting that according to the Gini Index, which ranks the income disparities of each nation across much of the globe, Ukraine (along with Finland, interestingly) is placed among the top ten countries where income disparity is least.  In other words, the Ukranian sense of  ‘solidarity’, ‘nationhood’ and perhaps ‘selflessness’ are well developed, as there is less social ‘envy’ or ‘conflict’ - and success against the Russians is not just attributable to Volodymyr Zelensky’s thespian oratory.  Put another way: the country was long primed for shared action, culturally, politically - and economically. Today Ukranians are still determined to defend themselves, and when coupled with military weapons from the West, their spirit becomes a beacon of hope against the powers of a bloodthirsty autocrat. 

Looking Back - and maybe forward: The Declaration of the Independence of the Mind (1919)

Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly built than that which previously existed.

The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us for the future!

First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers, artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific, logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled, debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance) they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their access of mania—now, Thought, which has been entangled in their struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.

Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice; we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free, frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant—Mind, which is free, one and manifold, eternal.[1]

Romain Rolland in L’Humanité (26 June, 1919)

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[1] Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921 [Scholar Select reprint]), pp. 351-353.  Composed by Rolland, this manifesto was published on the same day the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed.  Individual signators to the Declaration from across the globe included: Rolland, Albert Einstein, Benedetto Croce, Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, and Bertrand Russell.

Putin is Making a New World

Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918

Ukraine, 2022

Tagore on Nationalism in India

Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history.

Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.

India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be, whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed for ever—they are fluid with life's flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.

Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured….

However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit India has not in this achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also concede, that the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never given her attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has tried to make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for depriving aliens of their right to earn their honest living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict. Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and hatred. 

You say this is human nature—and India also thought she knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its ragged appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our God. The degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest degrades our own humanity—and this is the punishment which is most terrible, because we do not detect it till it is too late.[1]

Tagore, Nationalism (1917)

 

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[1] Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: MacMillan, 1918), pp. 114-119. First published in 1917.  Available as a Project Gutenberg eBook from which the above text is excerpted.  Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.  He was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.