Tag: Jyotirmaya Sharma

On January 30, 1948, a Brahmin armed with a pistol and wrapped in a fantasy of ascetic self-sacrifice, shot Gandhi dead in New Delhi. Forty-one years later, on January 30, 1989, Rohith Vemula was born, a star-gazing dreamer who died trying to break the indifferent chains of India’s discriminatory universe. Rohith died so that thought, which, he knew, often springs from the most spartan, neglected, and deprived grounds in the land of his birth, could soar high into the galaxies with freedom again. Two visions of human freedom and sacrifice collide today, then, as they do every year: one vision tainted by majoritarian resentment, its assassins seeking for themselves a moral presence, even authority, on India’s democratic scene that their politics never had; the other vision seared with the dignity that comes only from the act of leaving the world quietly, sacrificing everything on one’s own terms, without hostility towards even one’s enemies (as Rohith writes in his final letter), heartbroken but undefeated, in singular solitude (as Gandhi once described Ambedkar’s freedom).

How a subcontinent of over a billion people remembers this day from here on might depend not only on the kind of sacrifice India decides to pose its political faith in but also on the kind of nonviolence it has the heart to truthfully fight for. After all, those who forced Rohith to take his life through their active, strategic neglect were, on the surface, nonviolent. And therein lies the entire history of India’s nonviolence, failing to cut itself loose from the aporia of its epic cruelty. In Elusive Nonviolence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa, the final and arguably the most ambitious and timely instalment of his quartet on political Hinduism, Jyotirmaya Sharma uses Gandhi’s love of religion as his philosophical lens to shine light on the moral heart of this searing impasse.

What if, rather than our compulsion to violence, it is our relationship with nonviolence that has failed us? Does our proclaimed, fabled inheritance of nonviolence as a realistic liberal democratic strategy—whose repertoire has come to be mired in beliefs shaped by an unforgiving majoritarian will that masquerades as normative choice—lie at the heart of our democratic degeneration? But more importantly, Sharma forces us to ask, can we ever truly restore our political faith in nonviolence unless we are prepared to breach its consecrated surface—the resplendent legacy of the anticolonial struggle—that has distracted us from examining something more pernicious, more obdurate, more punitive within it? “Like weed on the surface on a pond,” Ambedkar writes in 1916 essay “Castes in India,” this thing just hangs there, like a ghost without gravity or force. To save nonviolence from its disgrace, and thus, to save it from its own ghost: that would require a new critique of violence beyond its surface. What is this thing with only a surface and an empty centre?

Unbearable inequality

On the surface, Rohith’s death by suicide (days shy of his 27^th birthday) in January 2016, seems starkly different from the assassination that extinguished Gandhi’s life in January 1948. On the surface, Rohith’s death was an effect of social discrimination endemic to caste society, a philosophically provincial event, while Gandhi’s end was a symptom of political derangement typical of ultranationalist pathologies, with a tragic universalism written all over it. On the surface, Rohith’s suicide had nothing to do with India’s enduring trouble with human freedom and the question of rights—and rightlessness—at large, in the same way Godse’s vile act had nothing to do with India’s peculiarly sacrificial universe, which is scaffolded by the lethal singularity that is caste. On the surface, caste has nothing to do with the moral logic than enables Indian rhetorics and practices of sacrifice (and the monastic ethics of self-sacrifice). Just as on the surface, the entire Indian universe of duties and conduct—dharma—has never needed the presence of a punishing, segregated world just outside the cities, with a system of organised inequality clamped on it.

But on the surface only. For only on the surface does the distinction between social barbarity and political violence, braced to India’s tacit and unforgiving caste contract, hold. Only on the surface does the monastic disinterest of self-sacrifice—of which Gandhi himself was a scrupulous practitioner—look starkly different from the disdainful, institutionalised neglect of a solitary dreamer that reduces it to “a thing” and ends in his suicide. Only on the surface does Hindutva have nothing to do with the simmering caste prejudices of urban India that has for decades fed into its calculus of hatred towards the minority, the poor, and the outcaste (and which now yields it handsome electoral dividends in the subcontinent’s megacities). Only on the surface does India’s passion for purity and segregation, which underwrites its majoritarian savagery through a maze of classical statutes and penal reasons, continue to remain a social question (as opposed to being held accountable as a political crime), so that even those liberals who claim they love nonviolence as much as they detest Hindutva can still, without irony, deny that India lives—and will die living—by its brutal and quiet caste contract. Some might even claim a civilisational monopoly over the nonviolence built upon it; others—if Gandhi was right about moderates in Hind Swaraj—might sign a petition or two in its name.

In what is clearly a difficult meditation on Gandhi’s religiosity (and its silences), Sharma sets out to explore the consequences of this profound denialism that thrives in the name of—and as—nonviolence in Indian political culture and its moral universe. Difficult not for the reader, whom Sharma draws in immediately with his unfailingly lucid prose and analytical clarity, setting the stage up with one of the finest chapters ever written on Gandhi’s attempts to come to terms with Abdul Rashid’s murder of Swami Shraddhanand in December 1926.

As always, Gandhi opens a labyrinth of dialogue with those who write to him about the murder. Sharma pursues every single passage of this labyrinthine imaginary, from which begins to emerge the contours of a nonviolent Hinduism that is far more enigmatic, far more insecure, than it looks on the surface: a religion less concerned with faith than it is with obligation; less concerned with unbearable inequality than it is with the moral law of office; less vexed by violence than it is by the nonviolent resistances of those unequals who are simply not born—and thus, not trained—to sacrifice (and therefore they must not).

“For he says,” Gandhi writes, ventriloquizing Ambedkar’s revolutionary vision, “‘the dark forces of nature shall no longer hold me in their snare. I shall rise to the same height that the Brahmin occupies, even though I may have to demolish both him and myself in the attempt.’” Nothing so violent—or half as hostile—of the sort Gandhi conjures here ever happened. Neither Ambedkar nor Rohith brought harm to a Brahmin, let alone demolish him, even as they soared on an arc higher than Gandhi’s fears and more resilient than the armed grievance of his Brahmin assassins. A desire called Brahminism—a love of height that mistakes distance for dignity—lurks in India’s political imaginary, often in plain sight. The tragedy of political nonviolence is that it was its most committed practitioner who failed to twist free of that desire, only to be slain by the murderous delirium of a Brahminic clique affronted by his refusal to be Hindu enough. And all this, as Sharma writes in a pivotal moment in the book, when it is precisely Gandhi’s “religious mission that circumscribes everything else and bestows a significance to his nationalism” (p.135-36).

It is difficult, especially in these times, to get to this insoluble truth about Gandhi’s heroism. But Sharma accomplishes it with rare finesse and even handedness. If he had given readers a glimpse of what deft microhistory can achieve for political thought in his 2013 book on Vivekananda (Cosmic Love and Human Apathy), here he brings the method of a sensitive classicist, chipping away at layers of textual material to reveal at once the infinite power of Gandhi’s moral imagination and his baffling obliviousness to structures of political power and penal reason that underwrote it.

It is not that Gandhi was ever less than truthful about his revulsion to untouchability. It is more that satyagraha, as a conception of truthful life, was itself underwritten by that exemplary structure of power that is the caste contract. One does not have to sign it, one is born into it: this moral contract of extra-judicial impunity accorded to routine, small-time barbarities, with the coercive apparatus of police power and judicial delay behind it. What is caste, after all, if not a systemic theft of time? An elliptical universe where it is “difficult to love without getting hurt,” as Rohith writes in his final letter. A world of numbers where the law is enforced not always by abandoning the unequal to power but by making inequality hurt in a million slow cuts of organized neglect, and where force comes not always from the ability to spill blood but from a swerve between savagery and solace. It is the cruelty of this swerve that Rohith forcefully rejects in the final, intensely sacrificial expression of his will. But let us note: a sacrifice without opulence, a force without violence.

Modifying Hinduism’s heart

Whatever else it was, Gandhi’s religion did not have at its heart a theory of political freedom. Had it had such a political theory (as opposed to its theological counterpart, moksha, to which, as Sharma shows, he gave immense weight), it might have led satyagraha to the revolutionary heights where Gandhi rightly thought it belonged: a strategy not purely of negative egalitarianism—Gandhi was opposed to inequality only insofar as it led to an unrestrained, unchecked abuse of power—but of a militant, anarchic equality of the right to exercise and resist power, and thus, the freedom to act and appear as equals in the world. This might just be small freedoms: like the freedom to renounce the religion one was born into without a fear of sanction, or the freedom to marry anyone without the fear of ostracism, even death, or above all, the equal right to vote. Without a fundamental commitment to this equality of shared freedoms, all critiques of power are bound to remain superficial; all concerns about its unrestrained, untrained use bound to remain a ruse; all appeals to duty before rights a master’s excuse.

With immense tact and without easy exits, Sharma probes these extremities of Gandhi’s audacious project to inscribe nonviolence at the heart of modern Hinduism. The arc he traces is long, spanning four monographs, and there is something to be said simply for this sustained archaeology of India’s experiment with the modern nation-form beyond the cliché of the Idea. What is fascinating is that, cutting through current common sense, Sharma chooses Gandhi to end this project on the implosions of national identity. “A politics without nationalism,” he reminds us, Gandhi concedes, “I do not understand.” This wasn’t a frivolous claim of satyagraha’s interest in national sovereignty. It was a sign of a man ploughing strenuously and tirelessly through two moral universes, spanning two defining centuries, across which his project acquired the form of a vacillating realism couched in a spiritual grammar all his own. “It is the equality of spirit,” Gandhi could unironically write in Harijan, “without which no equality is possible.”

Religious antagonisms and riots wrapped in the language of spiritual reparation were endemic to the period of transition to colonial mass politics, right at the time Gandhi came of political age. The largest wave of cow-protection riots, instigated by the militant Hindu Gaurakshini Sabhas, had engulfed northern India in 1893, the same year that Gandhi landed in Durban to work for a Muslim trading company. To the west, in Bombay Presidency, it was colonial legislation around plague in the late 1890s that decisively and irreversibly brought religious conservatism into the political crucible of the incipient mass struggle against the empire, stamping Brahminic orthodoxy indelibly on all future conceptions of the “people”, and, on the identity of those who would forever be relegated to its outside. Ambedkar would call that radical outside “a part apart.”

On the one hand, thus, there were temptations of the counterrevolutionary tradition of statecraft hinged upon majoritarian—rather than general—will, whose penal modernity Gandhi deplored but whose nineteenth-century jargon of authenticity and asceticism, even war, he could not resist. On the other hand, there was the revolutionary constitutional tradition that posited its faith in equality—or pace Ambedkar, its “right to justice”—in direct confrontation with the archaic grammar of Indian custom. This was the abolitionist tradition whose politics Gandhi could not wholly endorse either and whose militant love of truth, first conceptualised in the nineteenth century by Phule in the figure of the satyashodhak, he puzzlingly failed—or refused—to reconcile with his own. In that sense, it is through the American Civil Rights tradition that political nonviolence becomes wholly revolutionary, first by decisively rejecting the Gandhian ambivalence towards rights, and then by attaching its sacrificial commitment to voting rights in America with its radical critique of capitalist (and eventually, neoliberal) assault on human freedom. On both, Gandhi demurred, although it is on abolitionism that his ambivalence today looks least inert.

Which brings us to the heart of Sharma’s matter: the rigorous politics of vacillation out of which Gandhi honed his sacrificial power like few others have in the annals of modern politics. Vacillation not because Gandhi did not always have faith in his abilities, nor because he was in any way whatsoever a philosophical anarchist disdainful of measure; quite to the contrary, he could fast until death over vote percentages. Rather, vacillation because, on the surface, that is what a nontheological dogma at its extreme, violent limit looks like: a rigorous swerve of injunctive force. But on the surface only. In fact, maryadadharma, which Gandhi begins using in the early 1920s for this regime of limits, is anything but classical liberal indecision. Its truths are not simply moral—that is, pertaining to normative conduct—but rather juridico-political (Gandhi himself translates maryada as “discipline”): that is, they pertain to punitive specificities of office and sovereignty. This notion of truth mobilises a particular relationship between measure and mastery, one whose sacrificial impulses remain, as Gandhi often says, mysterious even to him.

Paradoxical as it may sound, it is the will to self-sacrifice that embroils nonviolence in a troubling kinship with sovereignty. For there is a strain of asceticism in satyagraha until the very end—especially in the end—that requires both self-mastery and self-closure. And at their centre is always ritualistic theatre, even opulence by other means, which is not only seeped in religiosity; it also entrenches the worst of the religious. Indeed, if all sacrifice is already marked by a strain of mastery, even exclusion, what might save it from lapsing into (or resembling) the more opulent liturgies of sovereign power? After all, across theological and juridical traditions, rulers live in ritualised austerity too. Rather than making political heroism of the satyagrahi transcendent, such monasticism simply threatens to mire satyagrahic action in the liturgical history—and disciplinary power—of the law.

As Sharma carefully highlights, Gandhi’s exit from this imbroglio is to evade the problem. And it is here, in the final chapter of the book, that Elusive Nonviolence threads its thinnest needle, offering some of sharpest, most deliberate readings of Gandhi’s Anasaktiyoga, his fascinating commentary on the Gita. Readers familiar with Sharma’s earlier work—the Hindutva trilogy for example—will see some of his most courageous arguments given amplitude in this part of Elusive Nonviolence, as he subtly connects the dots of the long nationalist conflict over interpretations. So that the heightened urgency here comes from an even greater austerity of his procedures, not from heroic generalizations that abound around Gandhi.

Religion against pluralism

If Elusive Nonviolence is difficult, it is so for liberals and liberalism of the kind Sharma quietly yearns to see returning to Indian political culture – their indecision around Gandhi and secularism hopefully replaced by a commitment to radical plurality in which political faith is sourced not from the final, arrogant word of the masters but from the ordinary virtues of those whose sacrifices are cast to the winds in silence, as if they were nothing. A liberalism, in other words, that remains pluralist enough to concede two things: (1) that caste is indeed India’s original crime, which thwarts its dreams and perverts its social contract from the very point of its inception, and (2) that liberal snobbery is urban India’s most primitive, punitive form of ongoing cruelty, without whose absolute destruction—Gandhi’s apologetics for varnadharma notwithstanding—there is simply no freedom. And yet, this must be a liberalism not so excessively pluralist either that it confuses the theatre of political liturgy with genuine political faith, embracing its homicidal dramatists as redeemable, corrigible democrats who might someday learn to govern justly simply because they have, on the surface, a democratic mandate.

To lapse into that confusion about what democratic life truly requires, to land yet again into that liberal soft spot for political (or governmental) Hinduism just because someone, at some point, reinvented it as a religion of nonviolence – Sharma implicitly cautions his fellow liberals – would amount to repeating the greatest, most tragic error that clouded Gandhi’s affinity for Bhakti: imagining that a political majority is as epic in its grace as the hymns it chants, as restrained in its use of power as Lakshmana is in Tulsidas’s Ramacharitmanas (where, we are told, the warrior refuses to use his sword on a harijan). That correlation between the exemplary conduct of a mythic exemplar and the merciless cruelties of a majoritarian misanthrope simply does not hold. It certainly does not explain why an entire swathe of democratic society falls into an abyss of hatred for the poor and the minority at the very moment of its unstoppable climb to the subcontinent’s politico-religious peak, where, wracked by grievance and the guilt of perpetual defeat, it has aspired to be since at least the 19th century.

Sharma uncompromisingly parses out these threads that mired Gandhi, despite his painstaking classicism, in that 19th-century project, locked him in with the 19th-century figures, and eventually left him stranded there, unable, until the end, to comprehend the extreme resolutions that his politics of sacrifice would yield in a society as unequal—and sometimes as unforgiving in its love of purity—as India.  Indeed, the will to punish goes to the very heart of classical Indian theories of government: a science and principle of punishment (danda niti) that takes its most coercive form especially when it is turned inward (say during a fast) and might be most vicious especially when it speaks in the language of silence. This mastery as silence explains Gandhi’s dogmatic refusal to even once speak of the nonviolent craft that Bhagat Singh and other socialist revolutionaries had mastered, if precisely by means other than satyagraha: the hunger strike.

Rarely wrong about the moral efficacy of nonviolence as a healing device, Gandhi could be equally perceptive about the timing of its deployment for political effect. It was just that the real structure of the modern political majority in India upon which he pegged his hope remained simply inscrutable to him. At other times, he remained willingly oblivious to its mutations, tied to his own sense of measure when it came to destroying the searing inequalities of Indian political life.

Hindutva’s systemic power today comes from politicising this inequality to its extremities, parasitically tapping even into the anti-Brahminic heritage of Indian political history. As Sharma lays out in the second half of Elusive Nonviolence, this deviance is not just a momentary eruption on the surface of Hinduism’s moral psychology. Systemic Hindutva—a technocratic brutalism freed from electoral calculus—has come to acquire the form it has today not because a narrow clique has usurped Hinduism’s nonviolent perch, as it were, but because, if Sharma’s deep genealogy is right, there is a resentful, reserve army that has always populated its ramparts. Only now, backed by nearly absolute power it never had, it can brazenly take its constitutional liberties for extra-judicial license.

If Elusive Nonviolence is timely, it is so also because, amid the loud politics of contemporary rage and easy denunciations of dissenters as enemies, the book bears the hallmarks of philosophical persuasion in the best tradition of Indian liberal thought. One thinks here of the resilient works of C. A. Bayly, Rajeev Bhargava, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, but of also the sustained investigations into classical categories and their modern afterlife morphed by nationalism, in such quietly fierce works as Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony and Tanika Sarkar’s Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation. Because for all the fluency of its prose, Elusive Nonviolence also carries out its archaeological task with unstinting critical precision, patiently cutting through the surface both of liberal obliviousness and partisan hyperbole that surround Gandhi’s experiments, his grammar, and the place of religiosity in his politics.

Nothing less might do justice to nonviolence. Because it was and remains an impossibly demanding experiment, one made even more treacherous by the fact that in the process of carrying it out, Gandhi tried to run away with Hinduism and nonviolence at one and the same time, momentarily stamping this otherwise unseemly couple with an obvious realism in a society that was clearly unprepared for it and a majority that was quietly hostile to it. It is the sort of heist in modern thought and political history few have ever planned, and fewer have executed. With dissenters as raw as Tilak and Savarkar on the one hand—Gandhi found Tilak “frightening”—and as supple as Tagore, Andrews, and Buber on the other, it is a testament to Gandhi’s audacity—if not the majesty of his thought—that he almost got away with it.

That his assassins wore on their skin masculine delusions of self-sacrifice has never been Gandhi’s fault. He did not bring, either in intimacy or enmity, the scourge of Hindutva upon India. The sheer idea that he had a pact with his assassins is a false provocation that obfuscates the hardest truth about nonviolence: its unaddressed relationship to a singularly Indian form of inequality. The troubling dignity Gandhi brought to sacrificial religiosity, steeped in visions of purity—urging women during the partition riots to take poison before they were violated—had an almost incurable inequality written all over it, to which he had little other than solace to offer. The problem with solace is that, like healing, it comes only after the sacrificial homicide or rape. And when it does, it leaves untouched the disdain, snobbery, and brute power that might have pushed the unequal’s world into the inconsolable, possibly forever.

Resurrecting authentic non-violence

Seventy-four years after they assassinated Gandhi, the original crime of Hindutva’s suicidal war on India is beginning to yield fruit. The assassination was meant to leave unapologetic marks of majoritarian rage on the soil where Gandhi’s blood fell. Insofar as it was bound to have the effect of getting the RSS outlawed (a consequence Gandhi’s assassins were perhaps willing to live with), one might even say the murder was marked by an almost deranged lack of interest: the sort of disinterest that grows inside the perverse underbelly of classical ascetic traditions, their viciousness neatly concealed behind a maze of seemingly nonpolitical, monastic rituals, before one day, their devouring mouths start assaulting the body politic itself. The assassin’s brother Gopal Godse would later reminisce that Nathuram believed it was an act “purely political, and political alone.”

This is a conception of the political hinged on purity that appears on our horizon every time the fragile line between self-mastery and one’s mastery over the world, between self-interest and one’s utter disinterest towards the world, between monastic silence and one’s cultivated disdain toward those who are barred from speaking to the world, has been blurred beyond recognition. We do not know at what point the relentless perfectionism and polemic of discipline that accompanies visions of self-sacrifice tips over into a justification of societal harm. But what we do know is that the more one revels in the little glories of self-mastery over one’s own passions, the less one comprehends the sacrifice of those who disappear in silence, their martyrdom reduced, as Buber tells Gandhi, to “testimony without acknowledgement, ineffective, unobserved.” It takes very little for ascetic disinterest to lapse into calculated disdain. Perhaps one is simply impossible without the other.  Perhaps what we call “caste” is exactly a pretence of this line between the two, a landscape of India’s civic arrogance that gives its systemic violence a nonviolent face.

The choice for liberal India (which is a much wider, more complicated swathe of India’s megacities than Indians who identify themselves as philosophically liberal), is not between violence and nonviolence, then. Such a choice, as Sharma masterfully shows in the stunning opening passages of Elusive Nonviolence, is not only an easy one to make—what sort of a liberal after all does not prefer nonviolence over violence unless he has run out of choices? —it is also a false one, one that has for far too long let India get away with its indifference to those forms of strife that it wilfully refuses to see as violating the moral compact of democratic life. The true choice instead is between two visions of nonviolence itself: one steeped in a hubristic universe of 19th-century Hinduism that was from its inception a majoritarian political project tied to visions of national sovereignty (and which created a repertoire of sacrificial practices in which duty rather than freedom became the primary impulse); the other anchored in a critique of that history of sovereign nonviolence, a critique committed to excavating – and casting aside – the most obstinately congealed practices of moral and political cruelty from inside that religious history.

The fact that Jyotirmaya Sharma has turned to Gandhi in the final instalment of his formidable genealogy of the making and unmaking of the Indian majority says something clarifying about the republic we do not often want to hear. That its greatest violence might lie concealed in the most urbane, civilisational claims about its nonviolence, that the most deafening assaults on its democracy might do their work wrapped in studied, calculated silence. Democracies tend to perish not only under the assault of those who overtly hate it, after all; they are as likely to be pushed into tyranny by the ordinary vices and failings of its defenders. “In the end,” as Martin Luther King Jr. writes in that timeless formulation that is also a warning, we “remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” What else is moral cruelty if not that which makes such tyranny bearable, such silence excusable?

Aishwary Kumar is the author of Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford: 2105; Delhi: 2019) and The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence(forthcoming). He is currently finishing a book on political faith after Babri, titled Neodemocracy. He can be reached at aishwary@stanford.edu.