Making of a Gandhian mind

Editor’s note: Bhikhu Parekh’s astute and illuminating study of Mahatma Gandhi as a political force—within the context of colonialism—situates the great figure at the crossroads between tradition and change. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform examines the political thoughts and ideas that Gandhi formulated, drawing from India’s traditions and religious plurality, as a form of resistance. A revised and updated edition of the book is now available. 

Here, Parekh reckons with Gandhi’s framing of ahimsā, which he defined as a positive and active concept of love. This excerpt from Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.

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For Gandhi then, ahimsā meant both passive and active love, refraining from causing harm and destruction to living beings as well as positively promoting their well-being. Himsā was the opposite of ahimsā. Since ancient Indian thinkers took himsā to be a positive concept, they defined ahimsā in terms of it. Gandhi equated ahimsā with the positive and self-contained concept of love and adopted the opposite approach of defining himsā in terms of it.

In Gandhi’s view, love implied identification with and service of all living beings. Its opposites were malevolence and selfishness. Malevolence implied ill will or hatred towards others, a wish to harm them even when they posed no threat to one’s interests and simply because one enjoyed seeing them suffer. Contrary to what some of his commentators have said, Gandhi distinguished between self-interest and selfishness. Self-interest consisted in securing those conditions without which no man could live a fully human life. Since the earth provided ‘enough for everybody’s needs but not enough for anybody’s greed’, Gandhi thought that there was no conflict between the self-interests of all men. By contrast, selfishness meant putting oneself above others and pursing one’s interests at their expense. It was inherently aggressive and limitless, and necessarily led to conflict. While the pursuit of self-interest was morally legitimate, selfishness was not.

For Gandhi, then, himsā meant inflicting harm or destruction upon another living being out of selfishness or ill will. As he put it, it consisted in causing ‘suffering to others out of selfishness or just for the sake of doing so’. A surgeon’s use of a knife was ahimsā; a thief’s and a sadist’s use of it were respectively motivated by selfishness and malevolence and constituted himsā. In the Indian traditions harm was defined widely to include not only physical but also psychological, moral and other forms of pīda or klesa (pain). Gandhi accepted this broad definition. In his view, physical harm or destruction was the most familiar form of violence and could be caused in different ways. One might harm or kill a man by shooting him or by denying him the basic necessities of life. Whether one killed him ‘at a stroke’ or ‘by inches’, the result was the same and the individuals involved were guilty of violence. 

Insulting, demeaning or humiliating others, diminishing their self-respect, speaking harsh words, passing harsh judgements, anger and mental cruelty were also forms of harm. They might, and generally did, result in physical harm, but it was not necessary that they should in order to be considered acts of violence. A lack of punctuality was also an act of harm as it caused anxiety to those involved and deprived them of their time. Not answering letters was also a form of mental cruelty and even torture, and thus an act of violence. For Gandhi, violence was a property not only of conduct but also of thought. The thought of harming another was a form of violence for, had not the social conventions, absence of opportunities and considerations of long-term interest stood in his way, the agent would have acted on it. Thoughts, further, were the building blocks of character, and a man tended to become what he thought. If he got into the habit of ‘living with’ certain types of thought, over time they tended to appear natural and self-evident to him, blunted his sensibilities and both disposed him to act in a relevant manner and legitimised his action in his eyes. Thoughts of violence paved the way for acts of violence, and were just as bad. Like most Indian thinkers, Gandhi refused to draw a qualitative distinction between thought and action. Thought was potential action or, rather, action in its early and embryonic stage, and action was operative or active thought. The two were integral parts of the same process and constituted a continuum. A thought was, therefore, never a ‘mere’ thought. 

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This excerpt from Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.