Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation does overlook many of its strengths; its

scientific and critical spirit of inquiry; its human control over the natural world; its
organisational capacity. Such achievement would imply a certain ‘spiritual dimension’
that Gandhi seems to have missed . However, the focus of his criticism is modern
civilisation of a specific period; his condemnation of colonialism focuses on its
imperialistic inspiration; his rejection of industrialism derives mostly from its
capitalist context; his apprehensions about rationality regard its truncation by
materialism.

However, once the real limitations of Gandhi’s critique are acknowledged, then we
can better contextualise and interpret his relevance for us today, whether this be
with regard to politics in our neo-colonial world, or technologies in our post-industrial
times, or culture in our post-modern age. These will now be some of the issues on
which we must allow Gandhi to interrogate us. For "the kinds of questions Gandhi
asked nearly eight decades ago are the ones which now face both the underdeveloped
and the post-industrial societies caught up in a deep upsurge of confusion and
disillusionment" .

Neo-colonialism: Gandhi’s rejection of the supposedly civilising mission of colonialism

brings into question the whole legitimacy of colonial rule, at a fundamental ethical
level. He would have India unlearn much that she has from the modern west. For if
Indians "would but revert to their own glorious civilisation, either the English would
adopt the latter and become Indianised or find their occupation in India gone" (HS,
Preface to English edition).

Thus, he opens up a host of ethical issues between the coloniser and the colonised,
the dominant and the dominated, the oppressor and oppressed. The post-colonial era
brought such issues into sharper focus across the world. Now with globalisation
leading to a unipolar world, such concerns with empowerment and disempowerment,
dependency and interdependency, have gained, not lost their urgency. Moreover,
closer home this widening divide bears down on us more decisively than ever before.

Our new economic policy increasingly represents a whole new vision of society, that
takes for granted the internal colonialism we are experiencing today, as for instance
between Bharat and India, the bahujan and the twice-born jatis, the avarna and the
savarna castes, the toiling masses and the privileged classes, the oppressed people
and the oppressor groups, the minority traditions and the majority one.

Thus, our post-colonial world can only be described as a neo-colonial one,

internationally divided into developed and developing nations, as also intra-nationally
between privileged and underprivileged citizens. Moreover, these divisions are
mutually reinforced, not just economically and politically but culturally and socially
as well.

Moreover, the west is still the centre of our world for we have not the self-respect,
the self-reliance, the self-sufficiency to centre ourselves and so we condemn
ourselves to remain on the periphery of someone else’s centre. For the colonial
masters had stripped our collective identity of any intrinsic dignity by denigrating us
as a cowardly and passive people. Gandhi sought to reverse the damage to our
collective psyche by his "redefinition of courage and effective resistance in terms of,
or through non-violence" .

The issue then of our identity as a nation and a people still remains to be resolved.
Such identities are only viable in a genuinely multicultural world. Gandhi’s urging in
this regard is certainly relevant today in our own society where the propagation of a
cultural nationalism is growing every day. Yet "nothing could be more anti-Indian than
attempts to make an ideology of Indianness and to fight, instead of incorporating or
bypassing non-Indianness".

Post-industrialism: With the new technologies there was much hope for a new
freedom from degrading and monotonous work. However, what seems to have come
in to replace this degrading monotony is not a new dignity of labour but rather a
compulsive consumerist society, which is but dehumanising in newer ways. This should
hardly surprise us since the ethic underlying post-industrialism is the same as that
which underpinned industrial capitalism, namely, the profit motive and the market
mechanism.

Gandhi’s critique was precisely a condemnation of these. If we find his ideas of

trusteeship a little naive and impractical, we still have no alternative answer to
humanising a system that seems to have betrayed what possibilities it might have had
of bringing freedom and dignity to the toiling masses. Moreover, technology has its
own intrinsic dynamism, that instrumentalises our world and inevitably leads to a
disenchantment that bring us to the ‘iron cage’, as Weber warned long ago.

Our environmental crises are surely a manifestation of this loss of innocence, even to
the point when we want newer technologies to repair the damage already done by the
older ones. Gandhi was precisely rejecting such a naive "nineteenth century optimism
which sought for the positive sciences the liberation of humanity". But such anti-
modernism then was ahead of its time!

Post-modernism: The excessive and aggressive rationalism of the age of reason, now
seems to have turned on itself with the post-modem revolt. But this has thrown up its
own irrationalities. It seems to have lost the liberating project that was implicit in
modernity. For the kind of relativising and subjectivising of ethics that post-
modernism has led to, undermines the claims of any justice. For there can hardly be
any mutually accepted legitimacy to arbitrate conflicting claims, when consensus
irrevocably breaks down. So, might becomes right, and the power its own
legitimation.

Gandhi’s trenchant critique of modernity was focused on modernist rationalism, but it

was equally opposed to a post-modern rejection of rationality. What Gandhi was
pleading for is a richer concept of rationality and a meta-theory of rationalism . He
wanted to contain excessive rationality within reasonable bounds without an
irrational revolt against reason itself, but he would emphatically reject any forced
choice between totalising rationalism and relativising subjectivism.

Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj presents us with an idealised version of Indian culture that is
completely counterpunctal to the ‘modern west’. Here we pick out three seminal
themes: swaraj, swadeshi and satya.

Swaraj: Gandhi radically re-interprets ‘swaraj’ and gives it a dual meaning. The
original Gujarati text uses ‘swaraj’ in both senses. Gandhi’s English translation makes
the duality explicit: swaraj as ‘self-rule’ and as ‘self-government’. The first as self-
control, rule over oneself, was the foundation for the second, self-government. In this
second sense, local self~government was what Gandhi really had in mind. Gandhi very
decidedly gives priority to self-rule over self-government, and to both over political
independence, swatantrata.

Essential to both meanings swaraj, was a sense of self-respect that is precisely

Gandhi’s answer to colonial rule. For Gandhi freedom in its most fundamental sense
had to mean freedom for self-realisation. But it had to be a freedom for all, for the
toiling masses, and the privileged classes, and most importantly for the least and last
Indian. In this sense, sarvodaya was precisely the patriotism that Gandhi espoused. It
focused on people’s welfare not on national pride: "By patriotism I mean the welfare
of the whole people, and, if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow
down my head to them" . So he could write: "my patriotism is for me a stage on my
journey to the land of freedom and peace" (Young India, April 13, 1924, p 112). And
yet swaraj was not something given by the leaders, Indian or British, it was something
that had to be taken by the people for themselves.

Clearly, the foundation of swaraj in both its senses had to be threefold: self-respect,
self-realisation and self-reliance. This is what Gandhi tried to symbolise with the
chakra and khadi, both much misunderstood symbols today. For Gandhi khadi "is the
symbol of the unity of Indian humanity, of its economic freedom and equality and
therefore ultimately in the poetic expression of Jawaharlal Nehru, the livery of India’s
freedom". Today the chakra and khadi have not retained this powerful multivalent
symbolism.

Yet the ethic that Gandhi was trying to introduce and inscribe into Indian political life
was that "real swaraj will not be the acquisition of authority by a few but the
acquisition of the capacity of all to resist authority when it is abused" . For Gandhi
"Civilisation is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path duty" . The
basis then of his swaraj could not be just rights, it had to be duties as well. For
Gandhi real rights are legitimated by duties they flow from, for both are founded on
satya and dharma. The modern theory of rights reverses this priority and founds rights
on the dignity and freedom of the individual. But comprehensive morality can never
be adequately articulated or correctly grasped in terms of rights alone.
Swadeshi: Swadeshi is the means for Gandhi’s quest for swaraj. Fundamentally it
meant ‘localism’. This was not an isolated localism of the "deserted village", that
Goldsmith romanticed, or the degradation of caste oppression that Ambedkar revolted
against, but rather the local neighbourhood community, the village as the node in a
network of oceanic circles that over-lapped and spread out in its ever widening
embrace. It is this commitment of the individual to his ‘desh’ that was Gandhi’s
Indian alternative to western nationalism .

Gandhi perceived that power in India was inevitably monopolised by the urban elite,
at the expense of village folk, and was trying to reverse this dependency to make the
state serve the weaker sections. His was an egalitarian, not just a romantic,
inspiration. Mao attempted as much in China. But the village Gandhi idealised was not
just a geographic place, or a statistic, or a social class. It was an event, a dream, a
happening, a culture. As he used "the term ‘village’ implied not an entity, but a set of
values" . It brought together his three basic themes of swaraj: self-respect, self-
realisation and self-reliance.

In privileging the rural over the urban, Gandhi was arguing for a minimal state, since
he saw the state essentially as an instrument of violence. It was only in the communal
cauldron at the time of partition, that he began to see the need of state power to
contain and end the violence. And yet our experience of the post-colonial state in this
hod of dialogue that would bring two disagreeing parties not just into mutual
agreement, but into the realisation of a deeper truth together. The dichotomy
between the oppressor and the oppressed is transcended in this ‘heightened
mutuality’, but even beyond this "satyagraha ruptures the tricotomy among the
oppressor, oppressed and emancipator" , for it seeks to involve all three in this quest f
greater self-realisation of the truth. From the satyagrahi as the initiator, this required
a demanding discipline.

But satyagraha was also a politic strategy. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi defines ‘passive
resistance’ as he called it then as "a method of securing rights by person suffering.
Clearly, "Gandhi’s satyagraha then was an ingenious combination of reason, morality
and politics; it appealed to the opponent’s head, heart and interests" .

This was a "vernacular model of action that the people understood. But it was Gandhi
who first used it so effectively to moblise them and to appeal to their oppressors. In
fact he was the first leader to bring non-violence to centre stage in the struggle for
freedom with the British. He was well aware that adopting "methods of violence to
drive out the English" would be a "suicidal policy". And his HindSwarg was precisely
intended to stymie such a soul-destroying venture.

Gandhi’s re-interpretation: Gandhi locates himself as an insider to mainstream

Hinduism, the ‘sanathan dharma’. Hence, the radicality of his re-interpretation goes
unnoticed. Gandhi does not reject, he simply affirms what he considers to be
authentic, and allows the inauthentic to be sloughed off. For "Gandhi’s Hinduism was
ultimately reduced to a few fundamental beliefs: the supreme reality of God, the
ultimate unity of all life and the value of love (ahimsa) as a means of realising God" .
His profound redefinition of Hinduism gave it a radically novel orientation. In sum,
"Gandhi’s Hinduism had a secularised content but a spiritual form and was at once
both secular and non-secular" .

Thus one of the most remarkable and yet unremarked re-interpretations of Hinduism
that Gandhi effected was that of the Gita, a text intended to persuade a reluctant
warrior on the legitimacy and even the necessity of joining the battle. Gandhi reworks
its ‘nishkamakarma’ to become the basis of his ahimsa and satyagraha!

We have only to contrast Gandhi’s Hinduism with V D Savarkar’s hindutva to see how
starkly contrapunctal they are! Hence, in spite of its pretensions to be nationalist and
modern, its militant chauvinism and authoritarian fundamentalism make hindutva the
very antithesis of Gandhi’s Hinduism. Hindutva is in fact but a contemporary synthesis
of brahmanism! This is why in the end the Mahatma is vehemently opposed by the
traditional Hindu elite, who felt threatened by the challenge he posed.

But precisely because he presents himself as a Hindu in his interpretation of Indian

culture, he was seen as too inclusive by traditional Hindus, and at the same time as
not ecumenical enough by contemporary non-Hindus. Hence his appeals for Hindu-
Muslim unity were rejected, by the Muslims as being too Hindu, and questioned by the
Hindus for not being Hindu enough.

Gandhi’s failure to bridge the religious divide between Hindu and Muslim, was
matched in many ways by his failure to bridge the caste divide between dalits and
others. He never quite understood Jinnah, or his appeal to Muslim nationalism. One
could say the same in regard to Ambedkar and dalits, who have never forgotten or
forgiven Gandhi for the imposition of the Pune Pact. We can only wonder now
whether separate electorates for dalits then would have made reservations for them
unnecessary now. What we do know is that the caste divide has only deepened with
increasing conflict and indeed the same can be said about the religious divide and
religious conflict in this country.

Yet for Gandhi the unity of humankind was premised on the oneness of the cosmos,
which was a philosophical principle that was ontologically prior to diversity. Once the
legitimacy of religious diversity is rooted in the fundamental Jaina principle of
‘anekantavada’, the many sidedness of truth, then religious tolerance is a necessary
consequence — not a negative tolerance of distance and coexistence, but rather one
of communication and enrichment .

In cultural matters, Gandhi wanted all cultures to be enriched by each other without
losing their identity. But such cultural assimilation, was opposed by political
revivalists and religious nationalists. Yet for Gandhi open and understanding dialogue
must precede, not follow, a free and adaptive assimilation. Thus, an enriched
diversity would then contribute to a more invigourated pluralism and an enhanced
unity. This was precisely Gandhi’s understanding of Indian culture and civilisation,
and he had, indeed, grasped its fundamental strength and the secret of its survival.

We must now situate ourselves with regard to the critical issues of our world today to
enter into dialogue with him. Here we have chosen three such issues as being the
most fruitful for this encounter: the collapse of socialism and the crisis of capitalism,
gobalisation in an interdependent world, and the unresolved violence of our atomic
age.

Post-socialism: In our present world, the socialist ideal is being discredited as a god
that failed, when it is rather the once socialist states that have collapsed. Moreover,
today the crisis of capitalism is everyday more apparent, with the collapse of the
much acclaimed Asian tigers as the new model for the cornucopia of development and
progress; and the growing unemployment in the west cannot but presage further
crises there as well. With liberalisation and privatisation as accepted policy in our
country today, the Bharat verses India divide, that Gandhi had intuited long ago, is, if
anything, rapidly and disastrously growing. Only now the elite of Bharat seems to have
been co-opted by the privileged of India, even as the refugees of India have been
forced into an urbanised Bharat.

Much has been made about the disagreements between Gandhi and Nehru. But in the
exchange of letters in 1945 , it is quite clear that the axis of their reconciliation was
precisely around this quest for equality. Their paths may have been different but
Nehru’s socialism and Gandhi’s swaraj were both oriented to this quest for equity and
equality across all the divides, of caste, class, region, etc.

Gandhi was quite radical in urging equality, even more so than the communists. He
would have equal wages and bread labour for all. In his ‘Constructive Programme’ ,
Gandhi’s concept of equality is not grounded in impersonal and competitive
individualism, as it seems to be in the west, but in cooperative and compassionate
non-violence, on ‘fraternity’ not just ‘liberty’. In the beginning, he saw no
contradiction between such fraternal equality and the idealised hierarchy of varna.
But in his later years he reversed himself to urge that "classless society is the ideal,
not merely to be at aimed at but to be worked for" (Harijan. By now he was
promoting inter-caste marriages and hoping "there would be only one caste known by
the beautiful name Bhangi, that is to say the reformer or remover of all dirt" .

But if Gandhi’s quest for equality is something that our complex world cannot
accommodate, we seem to have given up not just this ideal of equality, but even the
quest for equity in the distribution of the rewards and burdens of our society. And yet
today Gandhi’s proletarian ‘levelling down’ certainly seems to be much more viable
that Tagore’s elitist ‘levelling up’. In such a scenario the relevance of Gandhi’s idea
of sarvodaya as the goal of swaraj is something we need to re-examine. Certainly, a
decentralised participative democratic and humane society, is a more attractive, and
one may dare say, a more vialable ideal today, than the kind of consumerism and
inequitous divisions that the new economic policy in our country seems to welcome.
Indeed, the principle of subsidiarity seems to be the only viable solution to national
governments that are too large to address local problems, while being too small to
cope with global ones. Today the 73rd and 74th amendment to the Constitution once
again affirm panchayati raj and tribal self-rule. We are coming back to a devolution of
powers that Gandhi had urged in his ideal of swaraj and had tried to have written in
to our Constitution. Hopefully this will be a presage of more to come.

Globalisation: Globalisation and the alienating homogeneity that it must inevitably

promote, is the very opposite of the localism and the celebration of diversity that
Gandhi’s swadeshi was meant to encourage. However, Gandhi’s principle of swadeshi,
"simply means that the most effective organisation of social, economic and political
functions must follow the natural contours of the neighbourhood," thus affirming "the
primacy of the immediate community" . Gandhi’s "goodness politics" as it has been
called , could only really operate on such a scale. For "Gandhi decentralisation means
the creation of parallel politics in which the people’s power is institutionalised to
counter the centralising and alienating forces of the modern state... Thus the
Gandhian decentralised polity has a built-in process of the withering away of the
state" .

But before this is dismissed as too naive or impractical for our sophisticated and
complicated world, we might pause to think of the kind of politics our centralised
states have in fact spawned. The very hegemonic homogeneity it promotes succeeds
less at obliterating difference than at alienating minorities and enkindling their
resentment. On the contrary, to take a lesson from ecology, micro-variability is
needed for macro-stability in political and economic systems as well.

Gandhi’s swadeshi could never mean ethnocentrism. Unlike some Hindu and Muslim
‘nationalists’ Gandhi never used ‘nationalism’ for narrow sectarian purposes. He
mobilised his people as ‘Indians’ not as Hindus or Muslims. His nationalism was anti-
imperialistic not chauvinistic, a struggle for political justice and cultural dignity . He
was a patriot who wanted "Indian nationalism to be non-violent, anti-militaristic and
therefore a variant of universalism". He was only too aware of the number of
‘nationalities’ that could be moblised in India, once the genie was out of the bottle!

An ecological understanding is now propelling us to a new and deep realisation of our

interdependence. We have only one earth, we must learn to share and care. We are
but a contingent part of the cosmos, debtors born, whose proper response to life must
be the ‘yagna’, service-offering of our lives for others [Parekh 1995:88]. Thus, with
regard to the economy and polity, Gandhi would have the village as his world; but
with regard to culture and religion, it was the world that was his village! Surely, here
we have a viable example of thinking globally and acting locally. Indeed, our global
ecological crisis has begun to press on us anew the relevance of Gandhi’s paradoxical
ideas. For the institutional individualism that seemed to be the very foundation of the
democratic quest in the west seems quite inadequate to the ecological crises of
today. For it privileges individual rights over the common good. But even enlightened
self-interest has no answer to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ accept an external
coercion.

However, for Gandhi, "individuality" must be "oriented to self-realisation through self-

knowledge... in a network of interdependence and harmony informed by ahimsa" . Nor
was this to be an interdependence of dominant-subservient relationships so prevalent
in our local communities and global societies. His swadeshi envisaged a more
personalised and communitarian society on a human scale, yet extending to include
both the biotic and even the cosmic community. This was the logical extension of the
Jaina doctrine of ‘syadvada’, that everything is related to everything in the universe
in ‘a great chain of being’.

However, the Gandhian ideal was a community modelled on the joint family and on
varna as a non-competitive division of labour. Later in his life his own promotion of
inter-caste marriages testifies to a change in his views. Yet even as we critique such
Gandhian ideas, we must discover in dialogue what value and relevance they have for
us today. For ultimately Gandhi insists on both: that the community is not a mere
means for the self-interest of the individual and that the individual in not a mere
resource for the concerns of the community. And this would go for the community of
communities, that our global community must be.

Violence: There can be no negating the liberation that modernity has brought in our
post-modern world to vast masses of people. But for all its much vaulted ‘rationality’
some would rather say because of it, modernity has failed to cope with this endemic
irrationality of violence. If Gandhi’s ahimsa seems impractical, what are the
alternative we have trapped ourselves in? If Gandhi was right that "to arm India on a
large scale is to Europeanise it," then what would nuclear arms do? Americanise us?
And this is an initiative being pushed by our cultural nationalists! But then in a
globalised world it is surely only the elite that will get to strut and fret upon this
global stage, while the masses of our people are a passive and manipulated audience
to this theatre of the macabre.

The whole effort of the modern world in dealing with violence has r with the ‘Sermon
on the Mount’ and reads one into the other. In fact, if he has Christianised Hinduism
he has certainly also presented us with a Hinduised Christian spirituality.

Precisely as a re-interpretation from within, Gandhi can so much to more effectively

and authentically integrate into his synthesis elements from without. Thus he
reconciles meaningful faith and reasonable modernity. In the best traditions of this
land he combined both faith and reason, for each is implicated in each other. Gandhi
would constantly critique faith to ascertain whether it was meaningful and reasonable
in terms of basic human value commitments. And so too he would demand of reason
the same fidelity to these values as well.

However, the ascetic dimension of Gandhi’s integration at times loses the aesthetic
one. A criticism of Gandhi’s ashrams was that it grew only vegetables not flowers .
Growing vegetables represented more than the Gandhian pre-occupation with
vegetarianism and bread-labour. But in rightly emphasising the need for renunciation,
certainly a message that our consumerist and self-indulgent world needs more than
ever today, the Gandhian ashram seemed to miss out on the need for celebration,
which our tired and alienated, dis-spirited and pessimistic world needs almost as
much.

A re-interpretation of Gandhi would precisely allow such a celebration. While

Gandhi’s understanding of ‘moksha’ as service is a seminal breakthrough, even this
can be enriched by affirming, not negating the other dimensions of life. It is only thus
that we will be able to bring some wholeness to, in Iris Murdoch’s unforgettable
phrase, the "broken totality," of our modern world.

Gandhi’s life was a continuing series of controversies and contestations with those in
power on behalf of the powerless. He never lacked opponents, among the British and
even the Indian elites, and often found himself isolated and alone particularly at the
end of his life, which was far from being one long triumphant procession. Yet one of
the great contributions of Gandhi was precisely his centring of the periphery: in
politics with ‘anthyodaya’; in religion by de-brahamising Hinduism, de-
institutionalising practice and personalising belief; in education by his proposal for
‘nai talim’ or basic education as it came to be called; in the economy by symbolically
urging khadhi. Not all of these efforts were successful or perhaps even practical, but
they did make a contribution which is still valid today. And all Gandhi’s original ideas
can be found seeded already in his Hind Swaraj.

Today we need a new developmental model, and increasingly people are beginning to
see that. it has to begin by "Putting the Last First" , to come back to the last Indian
that Gandhi would have as the talisman of our social planning. No one can claim that
Gandhi’s reformist appeal has fulfilled the ‘revolution of raising expectations’ of our
masses. This only underscores the need for a more fine-tuned analysis and a wider
dialogue in our society for constructive change given the limits of reformism and the
constraints on revolution. If we are looking for a new synthesis for a counter-culture,
we must take Gandhi as a dialogue partner in this project but first we must redefine
and re-interpret him. Such an encounter will help us to re-examine and reconstruct
ourselves as well.

Gandhi has been severely criticised as impractical, as someone who took out an
impossible overdraft on human moral resources. But this is to claim that human beings
are not capable of a metanoia, a radical change of heart, that can open up new
perspectives, not just for individuals and groups, but for entire societies and whole
cultures as well. We need organic intellectuals and transformative activists who can
articulate and precipitate such a social movement. The cascading crises that our
society and our world is experiencing, only underlines more emphatically the need to
find new ways of redefining ourselves and understanding our problems, before we can
begin to respond to the situation.