Publications available from The Gandhi Foundation

Posted on February 21, 2013 by gandhifriends

Books:

‘The Happiness Manual’ Gandhian Ways of Living
by Prof. Narinder Kapur, £5 + £1 p+p

click on the link for further information about this publication:
http://gandhifoundation.org/2012/08/15/new-happiness-manual-by-professor-narinder-kapur/

Simply Gandhi by Mark Hoda, 17pp £1.50

Muriel Lester, Gandhi and Kingsley Hall by David Maxwell, 16pp £3.50

Frontier Gandhi: Abdul Ghaffar Khan by Shireen Shah, 28pp £3

The Life of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 49pp £2

The Conquest of Violence by Bart de Ligt, £5

All Men Are Brothers by M K Gandhi, 251pp £4

The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi ed. by Prabhu & Rao, 589 pp HB £7

Quotes of Gandhi ed. by S Bhalla, 224pp HB £7

My Religion by M K Gandhi, 166pp £3

Truth is God by M K Gandhi, 159pp £3

My Nonviolence by M K Gandhi, 373pp £5

Gandhi in Anecdotes by Ravindra Varma, 188pp HB £5

Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography by B R Nanda, 542pp £12

Gandhi the Man by Eknath Easwaran (illustrated), 184pp £10

Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power by Gene Sharp, 316pp £5

Sonja Schlesin: Gandhi’s South African Secretary by G Paxton, 101pp £7.50

Meditations on Gandhi: A Ravindra Varma Festschrift, 227pp HB £15

The United Nations and its Future edited by Vijay Mehta, 274pp £10

Gandhi’s Outstanding Leadership by P A Nazareth £12

Gandhi and the Contemporary World (Collection of essays), 421pp PB £5, HB £7 – special offer

Please add 25% for postage within UK.

For postage overseas, please contact George Paxton at the e-mail address below.

If you would like to order any of the above, please contact:

George Paxton at (books@gandhifoundation.org)

87 Barrington Drive, Glasgow G4 9ES, Scotland

Cheques should be made payable to The Gandhi Foundation or payment can be made through paypal via the Donate button.

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Documentary Films – ‘Globalized Soul’ and ‘The Hero’s Journey of Mahatma Gandhi’

Posted on September 20, 2012 by gandhifriends

Globalized Soul

Mahatma Gandhi

The one hour documentary, “Globalized Soul,” chronicles the world-wide phenomenon of “interreligious or interfaith dialogue,” the distinctive spiritual journey of the 21st century. More and more, spiritual leaders and activists are coming together in search of unity and harmony in addressing the crises facing humanity and the earth. Dozens of nations now host international interfaith conferences, and they are held in virtually every state and major city in the US.

Filmed in Australia, India, Israel, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and the US, “Globalized Soul” explores the oneness at the center of the colorful diversity of the world’s religions. The cornerstone of the film is its coverage of one of the largest interfaith gatherings in history: “The Parliament of the World’s Religions” held in Melbourne, Australia in December, 2009.

Onscreen commentators include The Dalai Lama, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Roshi Joan Halifax, Rev. James Trapp, Sister Joan Chittister, humanitarian Asha Mehta, and Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, co-founder of The Jerusalem Peacemakers. Music is provided by Enya, Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar and Harold Moses.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY OF MAHATMA GANDHI is an historic documentary. Chronologically, the film will follow the last ten years of his life, when his devotion to truth and the nonviolent means to live truth were assailed from all directions. At no other time was Gandhi’s gift to the world greater. We hope our global audience will be inspired and strengthened to cling to love and compassion during these current days of planetary challenges.

To help tell the whole of Gandhi’s story the documentary will go back in time to his moments of testing and greatness from South Africa to the Salt March. Perhaps most importantly, we will move forward in time to show the ways Gandhian principles are answering the critical needs of today and the future

For further information:  http://www.heavenearth.net/gandhi.html

A link to mid production video :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umw_MD_VlVU&feature=plcp

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Gloomy Thoughts on India Today By Antony Copley

Posted on July 14, 2012 by gandhifriends

Gloomy Thoughts on India Today by Antony Copley

These reflections are prompted by attending the Gandhi Foundation Award ceremony in the House of Lords of the Gandhi International Peace Award for 2011 to Binayak Sen and Bulu Iman and a seminar given by two very bright graduate students of the University of Kent on the writings and film making of Arundhati Roy. Biographical details on the two recipients can be seen in the Gandhi Foundation Peace Award article on this website and their two acceptance speeches will also be published shortly, so this is no attempt to summarise what they had to say. But it filled me with a real sense of gloom about where India today is heading.

It was very moving to find oneself in the same room as Binayak Sen. It was something of a miracle that he was present at all to receive his prize, only by being let out of prison on bail and having his passport returned at a very late stage. Binayak Sen is a doctor and specialist paediatrician and he began by telling us that surveys on malnutrition, based on body mass indices, show that India is in fact in the grip of famine. Sen’s struggle for civil rights is well known. He ended his talk by telling us the Indian government is currently drawing up legislation in which almost all forms of dissent will now be branded as sedition. Such was the charge brought against him for his own active engagement in the struggle for adivasi rights and one that led to a sentence of life imprisonment.

Bulu Iman delivered a searing indictment against the current economic development of India with its rampant capitalism riding rough shod over the economic and cultural life of the tribal population. He opened up an apocalyptic vision of India’s own economic self destruction. All this ties into the consequences of climate change. None has done more than Bulu Iman to memorialise the remarkable culture of the forest people. We were recently provided with a brilliant photographic record of this culture at an exhibition of photographs by Robert Wallis in the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, conveying a horrifying sense of the threat from the coal-mining and mining of other minerals to the very survival of this culture. Talking to Bulu Iman afterwards he left me with a disturbing sense that, in fact, the battle for survival has been lost. He sees the materials in his Sanskriti Museum, Hazaribagh as time capsules. How can any culture of this fragile kind survive the destruction of its village life, with huge roads ploughing through the forest destroying all in their way? At least a third of the tribal population in the forest areas of eastern and central India have already been dispossessed and driven into urban slums.

Felix Padel, historian of the tribal struggle and vital intermediary between The Gandhi Foundation and the two recipients, endorsed their findings. If anything, he sees the situation as even more dire.

No-one has more vividly described this human catastrophe overwhelming the forest population than Arundhati Roy. I learnt that her imagery always refers back to the holocaust of the partition. Initially, I could see how this imagery would work for the disaster that has struck Kashmir and the horrors of communal violence in Gujerat in 2003 but I was less certain of its relevance to the tribal tragedy. But then it was explained to me that their forced dispossession precisely echoes those images of long lines of migrants on the move during the massive migrations of the partition years.

Has the India of its founding fathers really come to this? Was there some fatal flaw in Nehru’s vision for change, a paternalist concern towards the vulnerable in Indian society that could turn dictatorial? Did that visionary sense of rapid development with its power stations and dams in fact presage the rampant capitalism on view today? It was Nehru himself who laid the foundation stone 5 April 1961 of the Sardar Sarovar, the scheme for some 3000 dams on the River Narmada. The forest people were drawn into a Nehruvian development project. Of course it is tempting to place the blame for the exploitation of the forests on the Raj and its Forest laws of 1878 and it is true that much of its timber was set aside for exploitation- think of the amount of wood needed fort the Indian railways. But the colonial regime did set aside protected areas and sought to shore up the way of life of the forest people. It is also worth recalling that originally these were plains people but driven into the forest by aggressive agrarian castes. But independence seemed to release even great depredation of the tribal economies. In the eight provinces of Bihar that were in 2000 to become the state of  Jharkand, far more mineral wealth was being extracted and exported than development aid was being invested. Did it only need Narisimha Rao’s Congress government’s liberalisation of state controls over the economy in 1993 to release globalisation in all its exploitative greed? For decades India was the world’s most exciting prospect of a developing economy and yet did we foresee Shining India as its outcome? Bulu Imam for one was sceptical if there be any life left in any earlier visionary outlook.

Of course it is distastefully possible to be dismissive of the chances for survival in today’s economic imperatives of such vulnerable communities as the forest peoples. If you adopt a historically determinist approach, then so called primitive or backward communities simply have to give way to `progress’. At best, you offer the communities some share in the profits of the mining revolution. It was argued in that seminar on Arundhati Roy that the newly enriched Indian middle class have no sense that the forest people are worth protecting-they simply stand in the way of the making of wealth. It helps to understand such indifference if we realise the staggering profits that will be made from the mining of minerals in the forests. Maybe the forest people are themselves –or so it is sometimes argued- morally obliged to accept that they have no option but to share this wealth.

But of course there are very strong counter arguments. In the tribal way of life we are given an example of a sustainable economy, one that respects nature, and is just the example of sustainability we need if we are to stave off the disastrous consequences of climate change. Bianca Jagger, inter alia Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador and Trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust, in her intervention at the Award ceremony pleaded for new paradigm on development. There has to be a development plan that accommodates the needs of such vulnerable societies. Not everyone knows that Parliament now has an All Party Parliamentary Group for Tribal Peoples. The LibDem MP, Martin Forwood, its founder and Chairman, attended the ceremony. He reminded us of the threat from the Maoists. And clearly there are alternatives models for development than industrial capitalism. More radically, we need to abandon the concept of growth for one of sustainability.

So is there any prospect of checking this invasion of the tribal lands in its track? We have to live in hope. Ilina Sen agreed with me as we said farewell in the corridors of the House of Lords. Without hope we are lost. I do not myself give up hope that the progressive ideals incarnated in the Indian Constitution, the democratic political vision of Nehru, the role of a free press in independent India, have wholly disappeared. At least one Minister of Forests tried to rein in the corporation, Vedanta and delay the mining of bauxite in Chhattisgarh. If the political class are too hand in glove with the capitalists then we have to fall back on dissent from India’s intelligentsia. Aruna Roy, distinguished journalist of the Times of India, put faith in such dissent. Admittedly, if Binayak Sen’s fears over changing the laws on sedition are accurate, then there is a momentous struggle to be waged. Will university students, amongst others, stand up for Civil Rights?

Where does this leave the Gandhians? In an earlier struggle, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), under the inspired leadership of Medha Petkar, a Gandhian movement went some way to check the flooding of the river by the dams and the destruction of its riverside tribal culture. And it may well be asked, why did this cultural vandalism not cause as much shock as that of the vandalism of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992? In 1993 the World Bank withdrew funding, embarrassed by the wonderfully named Monsoon satyagrahas, with Gandhian activists ready to expose themselves to the rising waters, in the practice of jal samparan, sacrifice in water. The whole issue was referred to the Supreme Court. But it has to be acknowledged that in the end it came out on the side of the dam. In its judgement, `it became necessary to harvest the river for the larger good.’ There was to be rather more good fortune in a Gandhian protest against the Maheshwar Hydroelectric Scheme in Madya Pradesh, a protest linked to the NAPM, the National Advancement of People’s Movement, set up in 1996.Yet we were told at the award ceremony when the women of Tamil Nadu protested against a nuclear power station all 5000 were arrested. Has the iron entered the soul in current Indian policy making?

So can a Gandhian protest influence the outcome in the current struggle in eastern and central India? Few people are aware of the scale of the conflict today. Has the freedom of the press been stifled? Are people just indifferent? To deal with the conflict both the police and increasingly the Indian army are heavily engaged. Quite who carries out reprisals against the tribal villages is unclear to me though I was told in the seminar that Hindu communal nationalists are heavily involved. They hold the tribal peoples, who of course lie outside the caste system, in contempt. Many tribals have joined the Maoist led revolt, driven out of their villages, outraged at the violation of their women. But what do the Maoists,or Naxalites as they are alternatively known, want? Have they a vision which in the long run saves the economies of the forest peoples? It does not fit with Marxist notions of economic development. Admittedly Marx, at the end of his life, came to see in such simple communities the very ideal of the communist society he was envisioning. Might today’s Indian Maoists do the same? It seems far more probable that the Maoists see themselves as engaged in a power struggle with the Indian state and have but opportunistically seized on this social unrest. The majority of the forest people find themselves in the crossfire of a civil war between the Indian army and the Maoists. Is there scope for non-violent satyagraha? So Bhikhu Parekh argued for at the end of the Award ceremony. Arundhati Roy feels that up against the violence of the State there is little prospect for a Gandhian solution and wonders if there is a non-violent alternative to the violence of the Maoists. Bulu Iman, a committed Gandhian, is equally pessimistic. In his view a satyagraha can only impact if your opponent has a moral susceptibility to injustice and he feels that such receptivity, one that existed with the likes of a Christian Lord Irwin of the British Raj or a Smuts in South Africa, does not exist in to today’s India. It makes one fear that a committed Gandhian like Binayak Sen may yet be disappointed in his life’s struggle. But again, one must not give up hope.

Eastern and Central India is not the only locale for struggles by tribal people. It also rages in North East India, Kerala, and on every other continent. These are not saintly movements. Up against the threat from globalisation several have retreated into exclusivist and xenophobic autonomous movements .Their political future would be better served were they to seek out more pluralist solutions. Such tribal people are at risk world wide. In the Award ceremony much was made of the role of international capital, the City of London, host to most of the Corporations financing the mining of tribal areas, a particular villain. The threat to the forest economies is clearly a part of globalisation. The tribal people stand in its way. Their communitarian values and ideals of a sustainable economy may yet be the inspiration to save us all from the consequences of unchecked growth. Their struggle is one that concerns us all.

 Antony Copley
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Kent and Trustee of The Gandhi Foundation

Books consulted, Alf Gunvald Nilsen Dispossession and Resistance in India : The river and the rage Routledge 2010, Ed Daniel J Rycoft and Sangeeta Dasgupta The Politics of Belonging in India: Becoming Adivasi Routledge 2011,Arundhati Roy Broken Republic Hamish Hamilton 2011

Filed under: Adivasi Campaign, Living & Environment, Politics & Democracy, South Asia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Gandhi Foundation AGM Lecture 2012

Posted on June 30, 2012 by gandhifriends

The AGM Lecture 2012 by Brijesh Patel

Photographer Brijesh Patel giving the 2012 AGM Lecture

Photographer Brijesh Patel delivered a post AGM presentation on his “Salt: Land & People” project inspired by Gandhi’s 1930 Satyagraha campaign.

Brijesh opened his presentation by talking about his background, and what first drew him to photography. His parents had to flee Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972. Brijesh was born in India and moved to England when he was six years old. This family history, its connection and relationship to India, is what inspired him to explore it with a camera.

Before talking more about his work, Brijesh discussed the arrival of photography in India and showed some photos of landscapes and architecture of North and West India in the 1860s.

Brijesh then discussed his work in the UK and India; “Photography is not an objective medium and my view is a subjective and personal view point of a country that is constantly in flux and which is open to analysis with multiple standards of what is right and what is wrong…”

He first presented portraits of former athletes who competed in the 1948 London Olympics and armed forces musicians; “I often carry out projects in the UK which allow me to explore techniques, equipments, ideas and compositional narratives on projects before going to India to shoot”.

Brijesh’s photography in India reflects his view of the country as “A democratic, capitalist, society where feudalism casts it shadow over the ever widening disparity between those in the center and those on the edges of the new social order framed by the desires and attitudes of the middle class”.

Brijesh said he has become increasingly aware of the distance that lies between the ‘idea of India’ and being Indian today in the post colonial landscape and resulting intertwining stories of the ordinary Indians is what interests him at the core of this. His photography aims to “raise questions about the transformation of the society, its people and the landscape”.

Brijesh presented photos of his landscape and portrait projects on Gujarati middle class families, tribal areas and untouchables before turning to his Salt project. Its aim is to retrace the journey of Gandhi and seek out modern elements of his philosophy. By exploring the land and the people along the route, Brijesh was seeking modern elements and inheritors of his philosophy. He wanted to isolate themes and ideas from Gandhi’s work and seek images that place them in the 21st Century context.

“This series of Land and People images of the “Salt” project are an emblematic as well as a factual representation of what today’s India stands for me. In India, and along my route, modernity and tradition battle for prominence, creating multiple narratives, which highlight the contradictions. There are two parallel lives being lived by India, and the two have not successfully crossed over. The economic gains are concentrated within the middle classes and the negative spill-over of uncontrolled developments and financial corruption is deeply felt by the lower classes”.

Brijesh will be exhibiting Salt: Land & People at the Gandhi Foundation’s Kingsley Hall East London HQ during the Olympic and Paralympic games. There are also plans to publish a book of photographs from the project.

For further information contact Brijesh Patel at: www.brijesh-patel.com
Salt: Land & People and his other fine art photography go to: www.parchai.com

To view the Gandhi Foundation Annual Report click on the link below:
The Gandhi Foundation Annual Report 2011 – 2012

Mark Hoda – Trustee and Chair of The Gandhi Foundation

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Gandhi and War by George Paxton

Posted on May 14, 2012 by gandhifriends

Gandhi and War

Gandhi in the Boer War

By George Paxton

Professor Anthony Parel in his Gandhi Foundation Annual Lecture 2011, Pax Gandhiana (which can be read by clicking the link at the end of this article), asks to what extent Gandhi’s nonviolence is compatible with the coercion which any state inevitably exercises. He claims that “coercion based on consent is compatible with Gandhian nonviolence”. But when coercion takes the form of physical violence, especially the extreme violence employed by armies, is that really compatible with Gandhian ethics?

Gandhi spoke and wrote a great deal as the approximately 100 volumes of his Collected Works illustrates. But he was no political philosopher, rather a man of action so his recorded words are strongly linked to the specific circumstances of the time and place they were uttered. It is relatively easy to find quotations which express contradictory positions.

Restricting ourselves to the issue of war, there were three occasions up to 1914 when Gandhi participated in war in some manner. The first was the Boer War (in 1899 and 1900), the second was a Zulu rebellion (1906), and the third was when he was in London in 1914. However in all three instances his participation amounted to raising ambulance units of Indians which I would see as very different from actual combat, although Gandhi did not personally make that distinction. The sole occasion when he did contribute to the armed forces was when in 1918 he tried to recruit Indians to fight on the British side. Without going into the reasons he gave for this, many of his friends and colleagues severely criticised him for this action which ran counter to his long standing advocacy of nonviolent action. Whatever the reasons in this instance (he gave several), the following decades saw him take an increasingly strong stance against war.

As Parel points out Gandhi spoke in favour of armed defence on occasion. But I believe that this can be explained by his recognition that most Indians (or people in general) were and are not pacifists like himself and therefore they have a right, or even sometimes a duty, to serve in the armed forces if their country is attacked or threatened. In his speech to the Second Round Table Conference in 1931, which Parel quotes from, he was representing Congress which in general held a much more conventional position than Gandhi himself. Military defence was however considered by Gandhi to be very much an inferior ethical position. He did not change his position of opposition to violence and war after the Second World War, he had for long held this position. Admittedly, confusion could arise because he held these two positions which many people would see as contradictory, i.e. absolute opposition to war as the ideal which he always advocated, and support for the right to have military defence for those less advanced in their understanding.

To illustrate Gandhi’s long held position on armed force here are some quotations:

Under Swaraj of my dream there is no necessity for arms at all.
Young India 17/11/1921

I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest causes.
Young India 11/12/1924

I do justify entire nonviolence, and consider it possible in relation between man and man and nations and nations; but it is not “a resignation from all real fighting against wickedness”. On the contrary, the nonviolence of my conception is a more active and more real fighting against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness.
Young India 8/10/1925

Referring to ambulance work in South Africa:

My repugnance to war was as strong then as it is today; and I could not then have, and would not have, shouldered a rifle.
Young India 5/11/1925

But the light within me is steady and clear. There is no escape for any of us save through Truth and nonviolence. I know that war is wrong, is an unmitigated evil. I know too that it has to go. I firmly believe that freedom won through bloodshed or fraud is no freedom. Would that all the acts alleged against me were found to be wholly indefensible rather than that by any act nonviolence was held to be compromised or that I was ever thought to be in favour of violence or untruth in any shape or form.
Young India 13/9/1928

I would not yield to anyone in my detestation of war.
Young India 7/2/1929

In Switzerland after the Round Table Conference:

Q. How could a disarmed neutral country allow other nations to be destroyed? But for our army which was waiting ready at our frontier during the last war we should have been ruined. A. At the risk of being considered a visionary or a fool I must answer this question in the only manner I know. It would be cowardly of a neutral country to allow an army to devastate a neighbouring country. But there are two ways in common between soldiers of war and soldiers of nonviolence, and if I had been a citizen of Switzerland and a President of the Federal State, what I would have done would be to refuse passage to the invading army by refusing all supplies. Secondly, by enacting a Thermopylae in Switzerland, you would have presented a living wall of men and women and children, and inviting the invaders to walk over your corpses.
Young India 31/12/1931

In the 1930s Gandhi advised several governments and their citizens to resist aggression by nonviolent means. This included Abyssinians, Czechoslovaks, Chinese, Jews in Germany, Poles, Norwegians, French, Britons, as well as Indians.

The following is typical:

I shall take up the Abyssinian question first. I can answer it only in terms of active, resistant nonviolence. Now nonviolence is the activist force on earth, and it is my conviction that it never fails. But if the Abyssinians had adopted the attitude of nonviolence of the strong, i.e. the nonviolence which breaks to pieces but never bends, Mussolini would have had no interest in Abyssinia. Thus if they had simply said: ‘You are welcome to reduce us to dust or ashes, but you will not find one Abyssinian ready to cooperate with you’, what could Mussolini have done? He did not want a desert. Mussolini wanted submission and not defiance, and if he had met with the quiet, dignified and nonviolent defiance that I have described, he would certainly have been obliged to retire. Of course it is open to anyone to say that human nature has not been known to rise to such heights. But if we have made unexpected progress in physical sciences, why may we do less in the science of the soul?

Harijan 14/5/1938

A different situation faced the Jews as they were not a country but a minority in Germany. Their plight produced one of Gandhi’s most powerful statements:

But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For, he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If ever there could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton destruction of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war.

… Can the Jews resist this organised and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless or forlorn? I submit that there is.

… If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can.
 Harijan 26/11/1938

In 1940 Gandhi addressed the British:

I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption. Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans. The only difference is that perhaps yours are not as thorough as the Germans. If that be so, yours will soon acquire the same thoroughness as theirs, if not much greater. On no other condition can you win the war. In other words, you will have to be more ruthless than the Nazis. No cause, however just, can warrant the indiscriminate slaughter that is going on minute by minute. I suggest that a cause that demands the inhumanities that are being perpetrated today cannot be called just.
Harijan 6/7/1940

This was written as the Battle of Britain was about to commence yet how accurate the prediction of the war’s development proved to be. Of course what Gandhi advocated for other countries he advocated for the Indians although they had no government of their own:

I have written these lines for the European powers. But they are meant for ourselves. If my argument has gone home, is it not time for us to declare our changeless faith in nonviolence of the strong and say we do not seek to defend our liberty with the force of arms but we will defend it with the force of nonviolence?
Harijan 22/6/1940

The previous year after the war in Europe had begun he had written:

So far as I can read the [Congress] Working Committee’s mind after a fairly full discussion, the members think that Congressmen are unprepared for nonviolent defence against armed invasion. This is tragic. Surely the means adopted for driving an enemy from one’s house must, more or less, coincide with those to be adopted for keeping him out of the house. If anything, the latter process must be easier. The fact, however, is that our fight has not been one of nonviolent resistance of the strong. It has been one of passive resistance of the weak. … My position is, therefore, confined to myself alone. I have to find out whether I have any fellow-traveller along the lonely path. If I am in the minority of one, I must try to make converts. Whether one or many, I must declare my faith that it is better for India to discard violence altogether even for defending her borders. For India to enter into the race for armaments is to court suicide. With the loss of India to nonviolence the last hope of the world will be gone. I must live up to the creed I have professed for the last half a century, and hope to the last breath that India will make nonviolence her creed …
Harijan 14/10/1939

Nearly a year after WWII began Gandhi wrote:

The present war is the saturation point in violence. It spells to my mind also its doom. Daily I have testimony of the fact that Ahimsa was never before appreciated by mankind as it is today. All the testimony from the West that I continue to receive points in the same direction. The Congress has pledged itself to Ahimsa however limited. I invite the correspondent and doubters like him to shed their doubts and plunge confidently into the sacred sacrificial fire of Ahimsa.
Harijan 11/8/1940

A week later:

I believe all war to be wholly wrong.
Harijan 18/8/1940

He continued in this vein until he was arrested in August 1942 after the launch of the Quit India campaign and remained incarcerated until May 1944. After the war ended he wrote:

If the Government had not arrested me in 1942 I would have shown how to fight Japan by nonviolence.
Harijan 9/6/1946

A few months before his assassination this report appeared:

A friend had asked if the division of the army and the retention of British officers had Gandhiji’s approval. The friend should first ask whether Gandhiji approved of the army at all. As it was, the military expenditure in free India would probably be more, not less, than before. Gandhiji could never be a party to it. He viewed the military with apprehension. Could it be that India would also have to pass through the stage of military rule? For years they had said that they did not want any army. He stood by that statement even today, but the others did not.
Harijan 3/8/1947

At an interview at Scottish Church College:

One of the scientist members of the staff then asked Gandhiji what scientific men should do if they were now asked by the free Indian Government to engage in researches in furtherance of war and the atom bomb? Gandhiji promptly replied, “Scientists to be worth the name should resist such a State unto death”.
Harijan 24/8/1947

I suggest that we hear the true Gandhi in these quotations; certainly the Gandhi that I admire. How far India has travelled away from the path of Gandhi! Of course his message is for everyone irrespective of nationality.

Postscript

These quotations are taken from the two volume Nonviolence in Peace and War published by Navajivan Publishing House in Ahmedabad, the first volume published in 1942 and the second in 1949. Navajivan (‘new life’) Trust was founded by Gandhi in 1929 to spread his ideas. It is a pity that this particular title has long been out of print.

Pax Gandhiana: Is Gandhian Nonviolence Compatible with the Coercive State? By Professor Anthony Parel

George Paxton is a Trustee of The Gandhi Foundation, an author and Editor of the Gandhi Way

Filed under: Africa, Gandhi, Nonviolence, Politics & Democracy, South Asia, UK & Europe | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Great Soul – further views about Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi

Posted on October 20, 2011 by gandhifriends

Gandhi and South Africa

A recent book by Joseph Lelyveld Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India was seen by some tabloid newspapers as suggesting Gandhi had latent sexual feelings towards his close friend Hermann Kallenbach. The controversy was used by the BJP Gujarat chief minster, Narendra Modi, to try to ban the book nationally. The article, in The Nation, explores the motives behind Modi’s attempts and also critiques the book itself. Read the full article by Martha C. Nussbaum:

Gandhi and South Africa by Martha C. Nussbaum, published in The Nation

Joseph Lelyveld book caused a stir even in the popular press in the UK when it was published and was banned in the state of Gujarat in India. Among the reviews, one by well-known historian Professor Andrew Roberts expressed a very negative view of Gandhi. Antony Copley of the Gandhi Foundation, and a historian himself, responded:

Antony Copley’s response to Professor Andrew Robert’s review

Filed under: 1. News & Events, Africa, Gandhi, Reviews & Arts, South Asia, UK & Europe | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Gandhi Foundation Annual Gathering 2011

Posted on July 11, 2011 by gandhifriends

The AGM Annual Gathering Event
- Gandhi in Noakhali

21st May 2011 at Kingsley Hall, Powis Road, London

Shaheen Westcombe MBE

Film screening: rare footage of Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to Noakhali during the 1946 riots

Testimonials from Gandhi’s visit; Shaheen Westcombe MBE talks about her father’s archive

Poetry reading and speeches

Tour of Gandhi’s room at Kingsley Hall

Mid-season exhibition: resident artist Saif Osmani examines the spaces inhabited by Gandhi

The Spaces Inhabited by Gandhi

by Saif Osmani, Visual Artist and Spatial Designer

Kingsley Hall is the place Mahatma Gandhi chose to stay in during his visit to London in 1931 for the second Round Table conference.

I began researching the footprint of the Kingsley Hall building from the local archives at Bancrost Library. In media coverage of Gandhi’s visit of 1931, the newspapers attempted to present a romanticised and disaffected view of the East End. Photographs were taken over a broad skyline, away from the factories which lined the major roads and arteries of the locality.

The style of painting I have chosen borrows from far eastern practices, from Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese rural paintings on cloth. I initially started with broad, loose brush strokes, layering the details and features of the buildings in an attempt to re-create a sense of time and place, whilst playing with perspective. Each piece was further abstracted by imbuing meanings extracted from testimonies in Noakhali and London, such as in the piece ‘Top of Gandhi’s head’ and ‘Beyond Landscapes’. Through abstraction I am exploring Gandhi’s influence over physical occurrences as well as tracking his thought process and philosophy.

The Spaces Inhabited by Gandhi by Saif Osmani

The iconography and aesthetic of Gandhi’s public image was difficult to steer away from. I find that traditional canvas often prompts the viewer to search for a reality, as if looking through a portal into an imaginary world. By painting on cloth I am attempting to break away from this and allow the viewer to search for his or her own meaning.

The focus on the spaces Gandhi occupied come from my own practice which often follows narratives in space, by recording the displacement of people and changes in spatial configurations, as a means of understanding socio-political aspects of human behaviour.

These paintings will form part of a larger exhibition, intended to be shown as part of September’s Open House weekend.

To view images from the AGM and Saif Osmani’s exhibition click here

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A Reply to Andrew Roberts’ Review of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

Posted on April 18, 2011 by gandhifriends

A new book on Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld has caused a stir even in the popular press in the UK and has been banned in the state of Gujarat in India. Among the reviews, one by well-known historian Professor Andrew Roberts expresses a very negative view of Gandhi. Antony Copley of the Gandhi Foundation, and a historian himself, responds.

A Reply to Andrew Roberts’ Review of Joseph Lelyveld’s
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

Dear Andrew,

I can see why you felt driven to write so distasteful a review of Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi. As a historian, indeed it could be said as a hagiographer, of Churchill, you must always have been on the lookout for some way of getting back at Gandhi. For all his achievements as a liberal reformer in the pre-1914 government and as a war leader Churchill died a disappointed man. His life’s ambition had been to save the Empire and he had failed and none bore so great a responsibility for his failure as Gandhi. And of course his contempt for Gandhi as the Inner Temple lawyer, posing in his eyes as a half-naked fakir, betrays his grim awareness of where his imperial ambitions had met their nemesis. Whereas as General Smuts had the insight to recognise a person of high moral stature, Churchill was hopelessly blinkered. His was an odd dichotomy for we can see in his passionate opposition to appeasement the need to stand up to Hitler but he was quite unable to grasp, as a defendant of appeasement like Halifax had, that through Gandhi was the one possibility Britain had for that gradual change from Empire to Commonwealth, one of the more admirable transpositions of British policy in the 20th century.

Jawarharlal Nehru famously told Richard Attenborough when he gave the go-ahead for his film on Gandhi, don’t turn him into a saint and I agree with you that we do Gandhi no favours by writing hagiography. Gandhi was such an exemplary leader just because of his all too human frailties. Yours is an attempt to belittle Gandhi’s achievement in the public sphere and to diminish the man in the private. You readily take up any half-truth going and turn it into calumny. It is a careless and slapdash attempt at character assassination. Wavell would be very surprised to find himself Vice-Roy in 1942: it was the unimaginative Linlithgow who locked up Gandhi and the Congress High Command after the Quit India satyagraha of August 1942. Wavell was only his successor in 1943.

So firstly, your sour commentary on Gandhi the private man.

Interpretation of Gandhi’s deeply troubled struggle to harness his sexual energies has already become a well rehearsed attempt at salacious denigration. We now understand how Gandhi sought in all those experiments with the truth, as he saw them in his Autobiography, a way of overcoming weakness and gaining strength for the awesome challenge he was undertaking against imperialism. Here is one explanation for his admittedly somewhat obsessive concern with diet. And diet was also one way at controlling sexual desire. Who are we to judge Gandhi if he convinced himself that sublimation of sexual desire was one vital resource in his awesome political struggles? Of course it put almost intolerable constraints on his followers and asceticism has always been psychologically costly. It was when Gandhi faced the simply horrendous possibilities of communal madness leading to partition, fearing that his sexual self-control was slipping and that he would then lack the force to face the impending holocaust, that he embarked on that embarrassing experiment with his grandniece Manu. Indeed, he did find the energy to bring communal harmony to Noakhali. But many have doubts about the wisdom of that experiment. But you show no interest as to what lay behind it.

And now comes another kind of controversy over his personal life. Was he the lover of the German Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach? There is nothing new here at exploring the possibilities at such relationships in the lives of famous Indians: Nehru has been seen as having such a relationship with his tutor and indeed possibly with Mountbatten. It is all grist to the biographical mill. Personally I would not want to reject such a proposal on grounds of the nature of its sexuality: we have had to struggle far too hard in our lifetime to see the acceptability of homosexuality as a part of the spectrum of human sexuality only to fall into the trap of prejudice and here use this possibility as a means of expressing contempt for Gandhi, something you seem all too ready to do. It is also worth pointing out that in Africa, a continent with such an appalling track record of intolerance, South Africa is a rare  exception, a country with an extremely enlightened legislation and indeed a recognition of civil partnership. Would that India was anywhere near being so tolerant and enlightened.

Margaret Chatterjee is the best person to comment on Gandhi’s friendship with Kallenbach. She has written so sympathetically of Gandhi’s friendships with both Kallenbach and Henry Polak in Gandhi’s Jewish Friends. Quite clearly this was the friendship that changed Kallenbach’s life, a rich Johannesburg architect, who became one of Gandhi’s earliest European followers, drastically reduced his material way of life to embrace Gandhi’s ideal of ashram poverty, deeply engaged with Gandhi over all matters dietary, and came to the rescue of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns when he bought Tolstoy farm outside Johannesburg to meet the crucial needs of Gandhi’s struggle against the pass law and internal restrictions on migration. There is a wonderful story of their journey to England together in 1914 when Gandhi criticised him for his expensive pair of binoculars and Kallenbach ended (or was it Gandhi?) by joyfully throwing them into the sea.

But a sexual relationship? Obviously one will have to look at the evidence Lelyveld has discovered but on face value it seems  improbable. The earliest use of the fast by Gandhi was when a case of sodomy came to light between two boys at the Phoenix Farm ashram. Gandhi was apparently in great distress and Kallenbach tried to dissuade him from so extreme a response but eventually concurred, and indeed there were to be two fasts, presumably because the boys after the ending of the first had renewed their affair. By any modern standards Gandhi had pretty regressive attitudes to human sexuality and just possibly behind brahmacharya, his vow of celibacy, lay some repressed element in his makeup. But we know that Charles Andrews felt strongly attracted to Gandhi but Gandhi increasingly kept him at an emotional distance, and the same was true of Madeleine Slade. Are we seriously to believe Gandhi made this extraordinary exception of Kallenbach?

It might be best to respond to your other slurs on Gandhi’s role in the public sphere on narrative order.

You point to some radical inconsistency in Gandhi the opponent of Empire working as an ambulance driver in the wars against the Boers and the Zulus. Firstly Gandhi will make no sense unless you accept his commitment to oaths of loyalty, his belief that Victoria had pledged Britain to care for its Empire and it was not to be till the outrageous massacre at Amritsar in 1919 that Gandhi brought himself to break that oath of loyalty and engage in non-violent resistance. But secondly you need to know that the  ambulance brigades were made up of all the different Indian communities in South Africa and was an experiment in nation-building and that Gandhi was deeply moved by the courage of the Boers and here was one inspiration for his freedom struggle, though in his case a non-violent one. And yes it is true Gandhi was too much a man of his times to reach out to the black majority in South Africa; that was an expansion of the imagination that his son Manilal was to undergo.

Then you find fault with Gandhi’s attitudes to one of the leaders of India’s Muslim community, Jinnah, and the leader of the untouchables, Ambedkar. Here Gandhi’s battle was as an integral nationalist. Jinnah had emerged at the Lucknow Congress of 1916 as the promising new leader of Congress but it had come at the price of accepting separate  electorates for Indian Muslims. Gandhi did not contest Jinnah’s leadership on grounds of his being a Muslim but his being possibly the classic Anglicised Indian. As Gandhi sought to make sense of where the nationalist movement had reached on his return from South Africa he was keenly aware that it had to change from one led by a westernised elite and pursuing a narrow constitutional path to one reaching out to the Indian population at large, above all to its peasantry, and becoming an authentic mass movement. He tried to undo the damage as he saw it of a separate electorate, which threatened a divide between Hindus and Muslims, by  seeking an alliance with the Khilafat movement. But indeed when this petered out the damage to communal relationships became all too apparent.

It was for this reason that Gandhi was so passionately opposed to Ambedkar’s campaign for separate electorates for Indian untouchables. Ambedkar, a brilliant constitutional lawyer and chief architect of the Indian Constitution, was a formidable opponent. Gandhi’s attack on untouchability was all of a piece. He sought the entrance of untouchables to caste Hindu temples as way of their integration into the caste system. He embarked on a fast unto death in Poona in 1932 at Ambedkar’s demand for separate electorate as a means of staving off any further division of the Indian body politic. And who would in comparable circumstance accept separate electorates for Afro-Americans or Hispanics in America or ethnic minorities in the UK?

But his stand had of course consequences. Jinnah, who might have ended his days as a barrister in London, returned to play the communal card, with disastrous consequences. However, at the end, knowing he was dying, he tried to steer the new state of Pakistan towards religious tolerance and to extend friendship to the Hindu minority.

You also ridicule Gandhi’s practice of satyagraha. Yes, it is true that violence in 1919 just possibly might have led to independence in the same way as in Ireland. John Grigg made this case a long time ago. But equally probably the colonial state would have had the power to fight back. It was this awareness that led Aurobindo Ghose, Gandhi’s most outstanding precursor as a national leader, to recognise that a tactic of violence would not work. And yes, satyagraha began to look fragile as a strategy as the world closed in on World War II. At least over Czechoslovakia Gandhi was no appeaser and indeed the Czechs did possess the powers to resist Germany by conventional means, had they not been betrayed at Munich. And yes Gandhi had no answer to the plight of the European Jews though possibly had a case against immigration into Palestine. Was he so misguided in 1942? The evidence suggests that he had every expectation that the British would stay on anyway to protect India for their own imperial interests against Japan and you overlook the obvious fact that the Japanese were allied to the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose and, had they won in 1944 – in fact all the evidence suggests they were at the end of their advance – Bose would have mitigated any Japanese brutality. The whole point of satyagraha is an argument about consequences, that a violent struggle can but lead to a violent society. Hence his calling off the campaign in 1922 following the violence at Chauri Chaura. Here is a wisdom that was widely recognised in Eastern Europe in 1989 and possibly today in the Arab Spring.

I wonder if you can bring yourself to see Churchill’s bête-noire in a more charitable light?

Antony Copley
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Kent


View Andrew Roberts’ review

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Book Review – Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India

Posted on January 23, 2010 by gandhifriends

Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India
Lida Trivedi
Indiana University Press 2007 pp205
$29.95

Lida Trivedi teaches at Hamilton College in USA. On a study tour of India she travelled with, among others, an uncle who was a former freedom fighter and labour leader. Travelling for four months across northern and western India she had the opportunity to meet many who had taken part in the struggle. In addition the oldest sister of her father taught her to spin on the charka. So she learned about khadi and swadeshi as the material facts of India’s national politics.

Her study is about khadi – the self-made cotton for daily use and the role it played in the national struggle for independence. For many people outside India – and I was certainly one of them – the making and selling of khadi is an economic process. Khadi had to replace the imported cloth from Britain to re-establish the former Indian textile industry.

The movement which supported the idea was named swadeshi, the approach to economic self-reliance. One of the eleven Gandhian virtues, swadeshi meant belonging to or being made in one’s own country. This policy of self-reliance meant in practice using only Indian-made cloth. In a wider sense it meant establishing India’s economic autonomy as the basis for future self-government.

Thus khadi meant three different but related things: as a material artifact of the nation; part of a national economic policy; a visual symbol of the Indian people. In doing so it challenged the political boundaries of both traditional Indian society and the British colonial regime. The swadeshi movement found popular support and after some time the Indian National Congress through the Congress Working Committee created the All India Khaddar Board, comprising technical instruction, production and sales. It established in 1922 a new school to train swadeshi workers – the Akila Khadi Vidyalaya, which was in many ways the heart of Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement.

Within the Congress however there was controversy. One of the issues was with regard to members of Congress wearing khadi at Party functions. In keeping with the principles of mass participation the Congress Working Committee decided in 1924 that a revised franchise required that Congress membership had to be earned, not just paid. Hand-spun thread had to be donated to Congress’s Khadi Board and this had to become part of Congress membership. This decision however was not popular with many and within nine months the spinning franchise was repealed. There remained a diluted commitment to swadeshi politics and khadi.

This meant a defeat for Gandhi’s form of swadeshi but khadi was brought to the general public with great success. Gandhi formed the All-India Spinners Association in 1925 which oversaw the development of the swadeshi movement from Satyagraha Ashram. The assets of the defunct Khadi Board were transfered to this new organisation and there was support from some industrialists. Swadeshi now included other hand-produced goods.

India had known a century-long tradition of weaving and textile production including colourful clothing which was an obstacle to undyed khadi becoming popular. To counter this, promoters used exhibitions, showing of lantern-slides, the use of the Gandhi-cap, and the charka flag.

The swadeshi movement achieved three things:

  • khadi became more than a boycott of foreign goods – it became a moral system of labour and consumption for the nation. It emphasised the distinction between indigenous and foreign production.
  • it provided a heterogeneous population with a sense of a united India, relocating rural and urban India within a market-place shaped by common taste and defined by common values.
  • the habitual khadi-wearer celebrated the principle of universal labour and self-sufficiency as the basis of political community and made him or her visible as an individual.

The Gandhi cap or topi emerged as a symbol of political dissent and as a signal of one’s obligations, thus khadi became more than an economic issue. One more product of the khadi movement is worth mentioning, that is the flag of India. It no longer bears the symbol of the charka, the swadeshi movement emblem, but the Ashoka chakra wheel or dharma wheel, but it still represents the hopes and aspirations of the people of India. The flag still has to be made of hand-spun and hand-woven wool, cotton or silk.

Lisa Trivedi has written a penetrating and comprehensive study of khadi in a lively style and is a pleasure to read.

Piet Dijkstra

Filed under: Reviews & Arts, South Asia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Gandhi Inspires Obama

Posted on September 8, 2009 by gandhifriends

8th September 2009
Wakefield High School, Arlington, Virginia

President Obama went to Wakefield High School in Arlington to give a national speech welcoming students back to school. He called for students to take responsibility and to learn from their failures so that they succeed in the end.

A student asked President Obama:

Hi. I’m Lilly. And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?

President Obama replied:

Dinner with anyone dead or alive? Well, you know, dead or alive, that’s a pretty big list. (laughter) You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine. Now, it would probably be a really small meal because — (laughter) — he didn’t eat a lot. But he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King, so if it hadn’t been for the non-violent movement in India, you might not have seen the same non-violent movement for civil rights here in the United States. He inspired César Chávez, and what was interesting was that he ended up doing so much and changing the world just by the power of his ethics, by his ability to change how people saw each other and saw themselves — and help people who thought they had no power realize that they had power, and then help people who had a lot of power realize that if all they’re doing is oppressing people, then that’s not a really good exercise of power.

So I’m always interested in people who are able to bring about change, not through violence, not through money, but through the force of their personality and their ethical and moral stances. And that’s somebody that I’d love to sit down and talk to.

Source: The White House Press Office

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