Gandhi and History

8/12/2019 Gandhi and History

1/13

Wesleyan University

Gandhi and HistoryAuthor(s): Balkrishna Govind GokhaleReviewed work(s):Source: History and Theory, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1972), pp. 214-225Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504587 .

Accessed: 03/05/2012 06:53

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to History and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=blackhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=wesleyanhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2504587?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2504587?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=wesleyanhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black


2/13

GANDHI AND HISTORY

BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE

Perhaps more than any other leader of his time Gandhi had, deeply rooted

in him, a sense of history, though he often spoke disparagingly of the valucof conventional histories. Furthermore, in many of his historical general-izations on Western or Indian civilization he betrayed an unhistorical trait,for in his condemnation of the one or admiration of the other he was bothsweeping and simplistic. Despite such an anti-historical bias in Gandhi'sthinking, several attempts have been made to construct Gandhi's philosophyof history.' The purpose of the present paper is not to make another attemptin a similar vein, but to frame certain questions which may help our under-

standing of the nature and role of the historical dimension in Gandhi's thought.Specifically, what did Gandhi mean by history, and did his sense of the his-torical, as he understood it, bear any perceptible relationship to the traditionalHindu understanding of the sense and meaning of history?

At the outset, however, we must identify the nature and scope of Gandhi'sintellectual and spiritual horizons before the foregoing questions can be an-swered. Gandhi was not, and never did claim to be, an academic thinker.His formal education simply did not prepare him for that. The broad details

of his eventful life are fairly well known. He was born on October 2, 1869,in an orthodox Hindu family in Porbunder in the present Gujerat State. Hisfather was a leading court official in a small princely state, and his motherwas very devout and pious in her religious inclinations and practices. Gandhihad his school education in Porbunder, Rajkot, and Ahmedabad before heleft for England in 1888 to qualify as a Barrister-at-Law. He was taught theusual subjects, such as history, mathematics, and Sanskrit, in his schools inGujerat but he was not an outstanding student. His education in England

was strictly professional and did not have any significant humanistic con-tent in its curriculum. He returned to India in 1891 and a year later wentto South Africa to argue a legal case for an Indian client. He remained in

1. See for instance Raghavan N. Iyer, Gandhi's Interpretation of History in GandhiMarg 6, No. 4 (1962), 319-327; Madan G. Gandhi, Gandhi and Marx (Chandigarh,1969), 61-66; 0. P. Goyal, Gandhi; an Interpretation (Delhi, 1964), 80ff; V. P. Varma,The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and Sarvodaya (Agra, 1959), 62ff.


3/13

GANDHI AND HISTORY 215

South Africa until 1914. From 1914 to 1920 Gandhi served a kind of ap-prenticeship in his Indian political career. From 1920 to 1942 he was theundisputed leader of the Indian nationalist movement. He served his last

jail term from 1942 until May 1944. The events of 1946-47 proved an anti-climax to Gandhi's long and distinguished career. During his last years, whichended on January 30, 1948, when he was assassinated in Delhi by a Hindufanatic, Gandhi was saddened to see his dreams and principles reduced toashes in the frenzy of religious killings in India and Pakistan.2

Gandhi's life of seventy-eight years falls into three broad well-markedphases, each dominated by a set of easily identifiable attitudes and operationalprinciples. The first was that of his childhood and adolescence wherein themost profound influences came from two rather disparate religious traditions.From his family he inherited his lasting adherence to the tenets and practicesof Vaishnavism, with its emotional comprehension of the Deity and its doc-trine of Love as a means not only of spiritual development but also as thebasis of social relationships. Philosophically Gandhi was not certain whetherhe preferred the absolutistic monism (Advaita) of Shankara (A.D. 788?-821?) or the qualified monism (Vishistadvaita) of Ramanuja (A.D. 1017?-1137?), for he often spoke of God as an impersonal principle (Truth-Love)as well as a person. But the other great religious influence on Gandhi's earlylife came from Jainism, founded by Mahavira (6th century B.C.), which wasa strong and influential religious persuasion in the part of India where Gandhiwas born and brought up. Jainism is an austere and demanding religion andstresses, among others, the twin principles of non-violence (ahimnsa) andnon-acquisition (aparigraha), both of which played an important part inGandhi's personal philosophy. Jainism also advocated the doctrine of Pluralis-tic Realism (Syadvada or Anekantavada), arguing that all human knowledgeis only probable and that absolute affirmation or denial of any position orphenomenal object is impossible.3 Gandhi combined in his philosophy theabsolute faith in God as demanded by his Vaishnavism with the Jain methodof regarding every statement or position relating to reality as only relative.This was the dominant element in his philosophy of Satyagraha and also in-fluenced his view of history.4

2. Gandhi wrote an account of his life until 1921 in An Autobiography or the Story

of My Experiments with Truth. (First published in Ahmedabad in 1927; the editionused for this paper is that of May 1956.) See the first ten chapters for his early life;D. G. Tendulkar in his Mahatma has written a comprehensive account of Gandhi's lifein eight volumes (published in Delhi between 1960-1963). There are numerous otherbiographies of Gandhi of varying merit.

3. For details of the Jaina philosophy see S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (Lon-don, 1948), I, 302-304.

4. For the influence of Jainism on Gandhi's life and thought see Pyrelal, MahatmaGandhi; the Early Phase (Ahmedabad, 1965), I, 276-279.


4/13

216 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHIALE

In London Gandhi acquired two other sources of his philosophy. Thesewere his reading of the Bhagavadgita (or Gita, The Song of the Lord) whichhe regarded as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth. It hasoffered me invaluable help in my moments of gloom. Gandhi offered hisown interpretation of the Gita, which he regarded as the gospel preachingselfless non-violent action.5 It was also in London that Gandhi was introducedto the Bible. Of this experience he says that he could not possibly readthrough the Old Testament. I read the Book of Genesis, and the chaptersthat followed invariably sent me to sleep. . . But the New Testament pro-duced a different impression, especially the 'Sermon on the Mount' whichwent straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses, 'But Isay unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thyright cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coatlet him have thy cloak too' delighted me beyond measure. 6 Gandhi seemsto have been particularly influenced by the two great doctrines that he learnedfrom these two sources; one was that God was always present in history andthat unqualified non-violence was the only means of coming to terms withHis historical destiny for man.

The last two sources of his philosophy Gandhi encountered in the earlypart of his South African career. These were Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom ofGod Is Within You and John Ruskin's Unto This Last. From these workshe came to the conclusion that the modern period of human history, especiallyWestern history, was one of dangerous deterioration in human values, sothat unless modern industrial civilization accepted non-violence as preachedby the Sermon on the Mount and curbed its acquisitive spirit, humanity wouldsurely meet its doom.

The seminal ideas in Gandhi's philosophy, then, were a sense of guilt orsin, the need to return to God, the pre-eminence of non-violence as an instru-ment of human progress, and the value of bread-labor as the basis of peace insociety. The sense of guilt or sin was created by certain events in Gandhi'searly life. He speaks of these as his carnal dalliance with his young bridejust when his father lay dying, his attempt at theft, his eating meat, whichwas a taboo according to the Vaishnava faith, and his frustrated visit to a

den of vice. 7 This sense of sin created in him a belief in the dialecticalinterplay of virtue and sin in human affairs and history. His interpretation ofthe doctrine of non-violence led him to distrust conventional history as merelya record of violence; and the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin gave him the notionthat human progress must not be interpreted, as was usual in conventional

5. See Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita According to Gandhi(Ahmedabad, 1956).

6. Autobiography, 68.7. Ibid., 8ff.


5/13


histories, in terms of the extension of power over territory or men or naturethrough the use of machines. The degeneration of Western values was demon-strated to him through his experience of European racism in South Africaand British imperialism in India. These beliefs formed the ground on whichGandhi attempted to build the structure of his own interpretation of history.

II

Conventional history to Gandhi was worse than useless, for it was merely achronicle of the doings of kings and emperors, a record of the wars of

the world, a record of every interruption of the working of the force oflove or of the soul. 8 In this chronicle of conventional history the spirit ofman lay buried under such events as wars and revolutions, empires and domi-nation of one race by another. The real history of mankind, according tohim, should concern the changes in man and his nature, society and its func-tions, the meaning of civilization, and the progress of man along the steepand narrow spiritual path through the practice of truth and non-violence.This history is contained in the myths and legends of the great religions of

the world, in the life-stories of the great spirits - he calls them avatars - andthe ascent of man from animalism to the spirit. Almost with tongue in cheekhe says: It is my pet theory that our Hindu ancestors solved the questionfor us by ignoring history as it is understood today and by building on slightevents their philosophical structure. Such is the Mahabharata. And I look toGibbon and Morley as inferior editions of the Mahabharata. . . . The sub-stance of all these stories [in the Mahabharata] is 'name and forms' matterlittle, they come and go. That which is permanent eludes the historian of

events. Truth transcends history. 9 But events for Gandhi are not mere illu-sion or maya, for they are very much there. An intense and ceaseless move-ment is going on all around in the world for nothing in this world is static,everything is kinetic. If there is no progression, then there is inevitableretrogression. He further says: I do dimly perceive that whilst everythingaround me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all a living powerthat is changeless, that holds together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.For Gandhi Man is a special creation of God precisely to the extent that he

is distinct from the rest of His creation and the individual is the one supremeconsideration. 10 Man is endowed with a twofold freedom, inner and outer,and the two are interrelated both in their nature and extent. The inner freedomis part of the spirit dwelling within him; the outer freedom flows from his

8. Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad, 1958), 77-79; Tendulkar, Mahatma, IT, 111; IV, 165.9. Mahatma, II, 111.10. Harijan, August 11, 1940, 245; Young India, October 11, 1928, 378.


6/13

218 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE

freedom of will which enables him to make a choice between virtue and evil.The outer freedom may be influenced by a variety of factors related to thestage of evolution of the society in which man lives.

Gandhi has faith that human nature is perfectible, and that it is working,consciously or unconsciously, toward the essential unity of mankind.11 Man'slife is an integrated whole in which all activities, social, economic, political,should not be compartmentalized, but rather informed by the same ethicalvalues which form part of his spiritual outlook and actions. He declares:

That economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values andTrue economics never militates against the highest ethical standard, just as

all true ethics to be worth its name must at the same time be also good eco-

nomics. An economics which inculcates Mammon worship, and enables thestrong to amass wealth at the expense of the weak, is a false and dismal sci-ence. '12 The role of reason in human affairs is that of a corrective to whateveris potentially or actually immoral. The man of reason, therefore, is essentiallyan ethical man and functions in human history as such. But conventional his-tory is often the record of man's unreason as made manifest in wars and violentrevolutions, economic tyranny, and social injustice.13

Despite the fact that man is endowed with inner freedom and outer choice,

he is prone to be oblivious of the free spirit within him and the use of reasonin outer freedom which should enable him to make the right choice. Gandhiviews the functioning of human society in a series of dialectical situationswhich stem from the simultaneous presence of two opposing tendencies withinman and society. There is always a conflict going on between man's spiritand the Devil in his body, and between truth and non-violence on the onehand and violence and greed on the other in society. While man as flesh maysuccumb to the forces of evil from time to time, Gandhi is convinced that

the Good are never destroyed, for right which is truth cannot perish; thewicked are destroyed because wrong has no independent existence. Manqua man will ever remain imperfect, but again, as man, will always strivetoward perfection. Man's destined purpose, says Gandhi, is to conquerold habits, to overcome the evil in him and to restore the good to its rightfulplace. Man cannot be at peace with himself till he has become like untoGod. 14

The true history of man, therefore, is to be seen in his ceaseless strivingto be at peace with himself and with the society in which he lives. This history

11. Young India, September 25, 1924, 313; Selections from Gandhi, ed. N. K. Bose(Ahmedabad, 1948), 27.

12. Young India, December 26, 1924, 421; Harijan, October 9, 1937, 292.13. Harijan, December 12, 1938, 346.14. Desai, Gospel of Selfless Action, 127, 196, 348; Bose, Selections, 9; Young India,

December 20, 1928, 420; Desai, Gospel of Selfless Action, 129,


7/13


is revealed less in the conventional chronicles which pass muster for historythan in the inner history which is told in allegories and parables, myths andlegends whose chronology is stated not in terms of centuries, decades, years,and dates but in periods and cycles of ages which are parts of cosmic pro-cesses. In this historic rise of man toward God, of time becoming eternity,God is always with man. In order that the universe may function at all Godmust ever act. God is ever watchful of the man engaged in the task of beinggood, for He is benevolent, Love, the Supreme Good, the Law-maker andthe Executor, the indefinable mystic power that pervades everything, the Kingof Kings. But He can also be wrathful, for Gandhi explains certain naturalcatastrophes such as drought and famine, floods and earthquakes as God'sdispleasure with man's moral lapses.'5

The second factor in the unfolding of history, according to Gandhi, is so-ciety. Essentially society is a ceaseless growth, an unfoldment in terms ofspirituality. But like man, society is riven with a twofold conflict, an innerand outer. The inner conflict occurs within a given social group when theacquisitive urge comes into conflict with justice, when one man or a groupof men acquire more property than is his or their due, when exploitationbecomes rampant, and means and ends become confused. Gandhi does notaccept the doctrine of class-war, which he declares to be foreign to the es-sential genius of India. He accepts that class divisions there will be, butthey will then be horizontal, not vertical. He insists that the real way ofprogress is class-cooperation and not class-conflict, which is really a conflict

between intelligence and unintelligence. He does not want to liquidate thecapitalist but to convert him and make him behave as a trustee in behalf ofthe workers for the property he claims to own.16

The ethos of a society is reflected in its civilization, which Gandhi definesas that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Perfor-mance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observemorality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing weknow ourselves. He further states that civilization, in the real sense of theterm, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntaryrestriction of wants. As in society so in civilization there is going on a cease-less change, resulting in progress or retrogression, reform and reaction. Prog-ress is gained through making mistakes and securing their rectification, for''no good comes fully fashioned out of God's hands but has to be carved outthrough repeated experiments and repeated failures by ourselves. ''7

15. Desai, Gospel, 184; Young India, November 10, 1928, 340; Harijan, February 24,1946, 24; September 7, 1935, 233; February 16, 1934, 4.

16. Bose, Selections, 89, 94-97; Young India, May 1, 1921, 4; September 16, 1926,324; December 26, 1924, 424.

17. Hind Swara], 61, 93; Bose, Selections, 37, 39.


8/13


For Gandhi there exist two Golden Ages : one was in the dim and distantpast when man was uncorrupted by acquisitiveness, greed, and violence; whilethe other is his own dream of a utopia when means and ends become con-vertible terms, and when man will stand face to face with God in a just andnon-violent social order all over the world. In the long interval between thesetwo there has been some progress but much degeneration. The worst degenera-tion of man has taken place, according to Gandhi, under the influence of themodern industrial civilization. The major guilt of modern Western societylies in its making merely bodily welfare its sole object in life. Its excessivemechanization dehumanizes man, and, most of all, the worker is trapped inthe coils of the machine and the greed of the capitalist which leads to theexploitation of workers. This civilization takes note neither of morality norof religion and is headed toward self-destruction. It is tired of its body andis weary of its soul. It has seized India too. In the past India was uniquebecause it evolved a civilization not to be beaten in the world. But Indianslost their heritage through greed, disunity, and fratricidal hate and were con-quered by the British. Under British rule modern civilization has been imposedon India, and Indians have also become slaves to the machine. Creativity ofwork is entirely lost, and society is riven by conflicts between capital andlabor and conflicts between nations, which tend to assume cataclysmic pro-portions.18

This degeneration also affects the nature and functions of the state. Gandhiis suspicious of the power of the state. He says: I look upon an increase ofthe power of the State with the greatest fear, although while apparently doinggood by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind bydestroying individuality which lies at the root of all progress. Personallyhe would prefer to be an enlightened anarchist ; but since this is next toimpossible for society as a whole, he would limit the power of the state tothe minimum.19

Gandhi's Golden Age to come envisions a peasant-centered society ofnumerous village republics in which the conflict between work and creativitywould be reduced to the minimum. Gandhi idealizes the peasant, who be-comes the hero in his historical thinking. He says: Peasants have neverbeen subdued by the sword, and never will be. The peasant's work is es-sentially life-creating rather than life-destroying, which is the characteristicof the machine-age civilization.20 Most of these ideas are obviously derivedfrom Gandhi's reading of Tolstoy and Ruskin. Gandhi was influenced byTolstoy's belief that the essential Christian doctrine of non-violence and re-

18. Hind Swaraj, 34-38, 94; Bose, Selections, 88ff, 93, 142; Hind Swaraj, 38-43, 60.19. Bose, Selections, 27.20. Hind Swaraj, 83; Young India, October 10, 1926, 348.


9/13


sistance to war as a means of resolving conflicts had been denied by the mod-ern West. Ruskin gave him an insight into the concept of creative labor andthe just distribution of its rewards. Both Tolstoy and Ruskin were critical

of the manner in which the modern Western civilization was developing, andGandhi based his critique of the modern West on their premises.21 Of Ruskin'sbook Gandhi says: The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begunit. It gripped me [that] I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflectedin this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made metransform my life. Tolstoy's work, Gandhi says, overwhelmed me. It leftan abiding impression on me. 22 His South African activities involved prac-ticing the principles advocated in the two works, while the Indian period ofhis leadership attempted to apply these principles to a problem and situationof larger dimensions and an entirely different nature.

Gandhi's particular contribution to thought lies in his doctrine of Satya-graha. Gandhi did not discover it, for it had been practiced in traditionalIndia for centuries. In numerous villages there was the practice of dharna,wherein an aggrieved person resorted to fasting and non-violent protest againsthis opponent in order to create moral pressure against him and arouse theconscious disapproval of the community by inflicting suffering upon himself.Gandhi took up this idea, but vastly refined it and applied it to situationswhere he sought to remedy social, economic, and political injustice and ex-ploitation on a mass scale by involving large numbers of disciplined passiveresisters. This was the Gandhian dialectic. In a dialectical process there is aprimal conflict between two opposing forces. Hegel and Marx have pro-pounded the concept of a dialectical progression, but, as Joan Bondurantpoints out, the Gandhian dialectic is significantly different in conception, prac-tice, and results from the Hegelian and the Marxist. She says:

Hegelian dialectics is a system of logic describing inherent, natural processes;Marxian dialectic is a method embracing not only man's original nature, but hisclass relationships, an historical method by which both the direction and structureof conflict are pre-determined. Gandhian dialectic, as distinct from Hegelian logicon the one hand and the Marxist adaptation on the other, describes a processresulting from the application of a technique of action to any situation of humanconflict a process essentially creative and inherently constructive.23

Gandhian dialectic is not simply an instrument, creative and constructive,

of conflict-resolution between one group of men and another but has impli-cations for Gandhi's thinking on history. This dialectic begins with the arising

21. See R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin (New York, 1967), 14, 16, 60, 73, 221-223;Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, ed. Leo Warner (Boston, 1951), 118,127, 135.

22. Autobiography, 137-138, 298-299.23. Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence (Berkeley, 1965), 192.


10/13


of a conflict between what Gandhi would call forces of injustice, exploitation,and wickedness on the one hand and those of truth (which is justice), equity,and virtue on the other. The two forces may represent deas and/or classes.but above all, for Gandhi, they involve human beings. In this dialectical n-terplay moral suasion and conversion of the opponent are the only meansused, and these are entirely of a non-violent nature. In this dialectic thereis no destruction of the one or the other but a unity of the two on a higherplane of truthful understanding nd moral harmony. This is possible becausethe means used are pure in moral terms, and for Gandhi means and ends areconvertible erms. Man's inner history as well as the true history of mankindshould reveal this interplay of forces in the Gandhian manner. This has beengoing on, says Gandhi; otherwise mankind would have been long destroyedby the innumerable wars conventional history has recorded. Conventionalhistory does not reveal all of man's potentialities, and to believe that whathas not occurred n history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in thedignity of man. Furthermore, if we are to make progress we must notrepeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance eft byour ancestors. Gandhi has no doubt about man's capacity for making suchnew history, for the ethical perceptions and values inherent n human natureare indestructible and invincible, though they may lie dormant or be over-whelmed from time to time. For they are the expression of soul-force thatmoves history, the force of love which s the same as the force of soul ortruth. 24

The makers of history, then, in the Gandhian view, are of two kinds. Oneis the peasant, about whom something has already been said above. The otheris a small body of determined pirits fired by an unquenchable aith in theirmission who can alter the course of history. The real history of mankind,Gandhi avers, is the history of men who had the courage to stand aloneagainst he world n vindication of their ethical and spiritual principles. Theyhave secured he advance of mankind rom one level to a higher hrough heirwisdom and suffering. These are the avatars, ncarnations f the Divine Spirit,who performed xtraordinary ervices o mankind and invested human historywith new meanings.25 To some, such a view may appear to be a kind oftheological determinism, but this is only partially correct.26 The Gandhianinstrument of historical progression-Satyagraha -is composed of eternal

verities such as truth, justice, and love. They reflect the operation of the Di-vine Spirit n history but operate in events through human beings who havethe freedom of making a choice. Historical progress, according to Gandhi,

24. Hind Swaraj, 65; Young India, May 6, 1926, 164; Harijan, August 22, 1936, 220.25. Young India, February 28, 1929, 71; October 10, 1929, 329-330; Desai, Gospel,

128.26. See V. P. Varma, The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, 62.


11/13


is due to the sum total of the energy of mankind, which is not to bringus down but to lift us up, and that is the result of the definite, if unconsciousworking of the law of love.

His units of historical progress are very much different from the stagesmarked in conventional histories. They pertain to progress in the inner beingof man rather than an extension of his power over nature or other humanbeings or territories. He says:

If we turn our eye to the time of which history has any record down to our time,we shall find that man has been steadily progressing owards ahimsa. Our remoteancestors were cannibals. Then came a time when they were fed up with can-nibalism and they began to live on chase. Next came a stage when man was

ashamed of leading the life of a wandering hunter. He therefore took to agricul-ture and depended principally on mother earth for his food. Thus from beinga nomad he settled down to a civilized stable life, founded villages and towns,and from member of a family he became member of a community and a nation.All these signs are signs of progressive ahimsa and diminishing himsa.27

It is interesting to note here that Gandhi is primarily concerned with man'sprogress from animal behavior to higher planes characterized by greater non-violence. Ultimately, Gandhi believed all of mankind would embrace thedoctrine of non-violence through the comprehension of love or soul-forceor truth, all of which are synonymous with God. At that point man will finallycome to terms with his own destiny when he stands face to face with his ownbeing which is a part of God. All conflicts will then be finally resolved, andhistory will transcend its own time-bound nature.

III

To a very great extent Gandhi personified, consciously or unconsciously, theimmemorial Indian peasant steeped in the Hindu tradition based on the twogreat epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Gita and the Puranas.To these he added selected parts from the Christian tradition such as theSermon on the Mount and the works of Tolstoy and Ruskin. But these Westernideas were used only to sharpen the basic concepts which he had inheritedfrom his Hindu-Jain tradition. The Hindu tradition gave him the central con-cepts of God and His role in history, of man as the battleground of forcesof virtue and sin, of the tremendous potentialities of love as an instrumentof human relations, and the acceptance of myths and legends as the core ofhuman history. The influence of Jainism is apparent in his interpretation ofthe doctrine of non-violence and its application to human situations and thetheory that Absolute Reality can only be relatively comprehended and stated

27. Bose, Selections, 22-23.


12/13

224 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHIALE

in human affairs (Syadvada). It was Franklin Edgerton, the great AmericanSanskritist, who pointed out the persistence in traditional India of two habitsof thought - which he called the ordinary and the extraordinary form-

ing two distinct norms of valuation and judgment. Conventional history isprimarily concerned with the ordinary norm or reckoning, wherein eventsinvolving kingdoms, empires, conquerors, and conquests mark the vicissitudesin forms of temporal power placed in the context of a more-or-less firm chron-ological framework. On the other hand, the extraordinary norm or level isrelated to the central affirmation of the Hindu metaphysics, the affirmation ofthe identity of man within his innermost being with the transcendental reality.The first habit of thought is concerned with discrete facts; the second with

truth, which, as Gandhi declared once, transcends history. The disconcertingfact, to the modern mind, is that the ordinary and the extraordinary evelsin traditional Indian thinking often interpenetrate. Mere man (Nara) strivesto become a cosmic archetype (Narottama) finally merging into the Deity(Narayana). History, in such a view, may not always be preoccupied with

here and now, for it takes for its theme the transformation of the natureof man from being a hero into immutable goodness and his final absorptioninto the Deity. History assumes ethical and cosmic overtones.28 The dimen-

sion of time in this view of history is altogether different. Time, as Zimmerpoints out, is a becoming and vanishing, the background of the element ofthe transient, the very frame and content of the floating processes of thepsyche and its changing, perishable objects of experience. 29 The order ofprogression and regression is related to the advance or deterioration in humanqualities, for events are constantly happening and as Gandhi says nothingremains static. The human nature is such that man must either soar or sink. 30The Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Puranas are testaments of such soaringor sinking of man and men. The units of time used here are quite differentfrom those of conventional history for they have a larger rhythm and a largerinterval; the word used is Yuga, an entire age or aeon. If chronology andarchaeology, the two essential indices of conventional history, he called thevertical coordinate, myths and mythologies form the horizontal one. Thehorizontal coordinates of myths and mythologies do possess a substratum ofhistory though it is largely social and cultural in its implications. The emphasisis on an historical apperception of culture systems, their growth and decaywithin which man soars or sinks.3'

History, then, must teach ethical lessons and reveal man's progress or de-

28. For a discussion of the subject see B. G. Gokhale, Indian Thought Through theAges; a Study of Some Dominant Concepts (New York, 1961), 12-15.

29. H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Cleveland, 1961), 450.30. Tendulkar, Mahatma, VII, 403.31. See D. P. Mukerji, On Indian History (Bombay, 1945), 61-65.


13/13

Gandhi and History

Documents

Transcript of Gandhi and History