Peace in his time

Mithi Mukerjee Oxford University Press Dh145/i> Mohandas Gandhi remains one of the great enigmas of the 20th century. Was he a politician or a saint, a leader or an ascetic? He mobilised millions but never held political office; his style of non-violent politics flourished in an era of violence dominated by men like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao. His popular title - "Mahatma" or "Great Soul", given currency by India's national poet, Rabindranath Tagore - suggests a capacity to rise above the ethical compromises necessitated by power, while preserving the aspiration to create a perfect moral commonwealth.

Indians consider him the father of their nation, even as he set in motion a wave of freedom throughout the colonised world and among oppressed people everywhere, including segregation-era America. If not for Gandhi, the concept of ahimsa, or non-violence, first articulated in the Jaina and Buddhist texts of India 2,500 years ago, would have no place in the repertoire of modernity's murderous politics.

Gandhi's ahimsa, literally "absence of the desire to harm", was about a difficult, complex and deeply personal effort to achieve freedom from fear, and cultivate a stance towards others not premised on the mutual capacity for harm. To be non-violent is to change the basis of the social contract, from harm held in check and traded for interests to a shared vulnerability that allows fearlessness for all. In a world whose parameters were described by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, where politics is war by other means, it is nearly impossible to find a conceptual or practical space for ahimsa.

Gandhi, who was born in 1869, lived through the might of the British Raj, the World Wars, Europe's totalitarian catastrophe, and the first atomic bombs dropped in Asia; he understood perfectly the disconnect between his non-violence and the brute force driving human affairs all around him. That's why he advocated ahimsa first and foremost as a practice of the self, an individual journey that would change the world only by changing every person in it, self by self.

Consider the escalating violence between the Indian state and the Maoist rebels known as Naxalites in parts of central India rich in forest and mineral resources, inhabited mostly by tribal populations. Shouting to be heard above the crossfire between the government and the insurgents, the writer and activist Arundhati Roy has questioned whether Gandhian non-violence can still be a viable mode of resistance against the military might of an overwhelmingly powerful state or its trigger-happy enemies. Outraged Indian commentators have reacted by accusing Roy of defending the way of the gun for the Naxalites and the tribal communities they come from; the Indian government, meanwhile, has issued oblique threats to "intellectuals" who support the Maoists. Roy, for her part, insists that Gandhian protest requires an audience, which people don't have in the jungle, and that "you can't ask the hungry to go on a hunger strike".

Roy sounds persuasive, at least about the inefficacy of Gandhian tactics if not about the efficacy of Naxalite armed struggle. But if Gandhi's non-violence is to be challenged, history has repeatedly taken Roy's side: Gandhi himself was assassinated (in 1948), as was Martin Luther King, who was inspired by him. India's independence in 1947 came at the cost of Partition, mass violence affecting an estimated 20 million people across the subcontinent. Gandhi-style leaders like Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama must battle terrible odds, and non-violence seems as precarious in its Indian home as it does abroad.

This judgement of failure, of course, arises from the expectation that non-violence ought to deliver an outcome, that it can in principle be used as a weapon of the weak to defeat unjust and violent regimes. To expect such results and be disappointed at their lack, to my mind, reflects a profound misunderstanding of Gandhian thought. The question should not be "Who will prevail?" - the Indian state, the Naxalites or the mining companies. The achievement of a truly non-violent solution would be to help all these actors find freedom from mutual harm and consider their options for peaceful coexistence. In an India that has long forgotten its founding father, no one remembers this language - not even the talented Ms Roy.

Mithi Mukherjee's India in the Shadows of Empire takes the long-awaited step, in Indian historiography, of exploring how Gandhi married the Western idea of political freedom, liberty, with the Indic idea of renunciatory freedom (moksha), thereby coining a new type of political action to which the Empire had no counter. Prominent historians in have traced Gandhi's debts to British liberalism, American transcendentalism and Russian anarchism, and to world religions like Christianity and Islam. But until now there has been very little by way of what Mukherjee calls the "genealogy of democracy" in India, to explain how Gandhi introduced or invented Indic categories like non-violence (ahimsa), truth (satya), soul force (satyagraha) and self-rule (swaraj) for a new and effective lexicon of anti-colonial resistance.

Important Indian belief systems like Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism share a sort of liberation theology, the idea that man's ultimate quest ought to be for freedom from the ego, from identity and its constraints, from worldly desires, from suffering and ultimately from mortality as such. These Indic understandings of freedom, expressed through terms like moksha and nirvana, had a long history but evidently no political traction - until Gandhi. The Mahatma, Mukherjee argues, transformed India's search for equity within the British Empire into a search for freedom from colonial rule, by creatively fusing the metaphysical and political meanings of freedom. Indians identified with Gandhi's interpretation of freedom, in part because he referred not just to imported concepts but to ideas familiar from India's own spiritual traditions.

In Mukherjee's reconstruction, the key moments in the Indo-British face-off in colonial India, at least prior to Gandhi, had a legalistic framework: the creation of the Supreme Court of India (1774), the trial of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, who was accused of corruption in England (1788), the end of the Mutiny of 1857 and the establishment of Crown Rule (1858), and the founding the Indian National Congress (1885). For 150 years, the stage of history resembled a courtroom, with the Indian public as the plaintiff, the colonial government as the defendant, and the British Parliament as the judge. At stake was the ideal of a "just" empire. Generations of lawyers, including Gandhi himself, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, pleading and petitioning on behalf of India, formed the entirety of the nationalist leadership. Try as they might, they could not square the ideal of imperial justice with the reality of a rapacious colonial state.

The critical break from this moribund pattern came around 1920, when Gandhi urged the Congress to abandon its attachment to legal negotiation with the British, and exhorted his colleagues to stop practicing the law. The protagonist of nationalism was no longer to be the lawyer (vakil), but the renunciant (samnyasin), a transformation exemplified by and embodied in Gandhi. India, lost for a century and a half in what Mukherjee calls "the labyrinth of imperial justice", was at last launched into its final lap towards democratic self-rule.

Ironically, once independence was achieved and Gandhi was dead, India adopted, in 1950, a Constitution that Mukherjee calls "imperialist", owing to its emphasis on equity as the embodiment of justice and its drafting under the leadership of lawyers like BR Ambedkar. The window of Gandhian self-rule (swaraj), thrown open by the imaginative grafting of liberty and moksha - transcendental freedom -closed once again, and it has yet to be reopened in post-colonial India. Perhaps those vainly expecting justice from the Indian state today, whether through violence, like the Naxalites, or through passivity, like the tribals, ought to consider afresh the lesson in Gandhi's historic breakthrough, and look for the possibility of a different politics in the ahimsa he advocated. After all, the pursuit of liberty as liberation is an old story in India, and Gandhi is but the latest in a long line of great souls who have reminded us that there is, in non-violence, freedom from fear.

Ananya Vajpeyi's first book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.