Elusive Non-Violence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa

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In his powerful new analysis of violence and non-violence as seen through the Gandhian prism, Jyotirmaya Sharma argues that Gandhi acknowledged the absence of any serious tradition of non-violence in India. His uncompromising insistence on ahimsa, then, was a way of introducing non-violence as an Indian value by fabricating a tradition around it. Gandhi offered a unique interpretation of Hindu texts and philosophical practice while engaging with certain strands of European and American intellectual traditions.

Sharma maintains that past attempts to understand Gandhian non-violence remain inadequate because of the tendency to measure it on the yardstick of efficacy, in specific situations, in Gandhi's own lifetime. More significantly, and perhaps controversially, he suggests that Gandhi's formulation of ahimsa fails both as concept and practice, largely because of its location within the religious realm. An unintended consequence of this is that it has left the liberal-constitutional space in India bereft of the legitimate use of a powerful and desirable language of dissent in the shape of non-violence.

From the author of a strikingly original and nuanced body of writing on the politics of religion and nationalism, Elusive Non-violence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi's Religion of Ahimsa is a work that could change the way we assess Gandhi's contribution to the evolution of modern Indian thought.

JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA is professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. His publications include Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism, M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India, A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism (all published by Context), and The Ocean of Mirth (Routledge).

In a podcast about his autobiography on 16 December 2020, Barack Obama mentions the people who influenced him.' As a college student, he was looking for exemplars among those who led mass social movements, entered politics and still managed to keep their soul intact. He mentions Václav Havel, Martin Luther King Jr, Lech Walesa and Gandhi among his formative influences. In the 9 September 2020 edition of The Daily Social Distancing Show hosted by Trevor Noah, author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell mentions Gandhi, among others, as an example for learning organised, disciplined, non-violent protest. These are only two stray examples of the power of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's image to this day. The vision of an ascetic man non- violently taking on the powerful British Empire was cemented in his lifetime. Churchill, the arch-imperialist, consolidated it by dismissively calling him a malignant, subversive fanatic, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, and most famously, a half-naked fakir."

Even apocryphal quotations from him continue to flourish." One that still makes the rounds is his answer to the question, 'What do you think of the Western Civilization?', to which he is supposed to have replied, 'I think it would be a good idea." But not everything he said is hearsay. He went to drink tea with King George V, at Buckingham Palace, wearing a dhoti and a shawl made from cloth he had himself spun. When asked what the King thought of his dress, he remarked that the King was wearing enough for them both.

To the British and indeed, to most Europeans, he must have seemed utterly incomprehensible. A small clip of footage from his trip to London in 1931 is instructive. It calls him 'the mystery man of India', makes several references to his loincloth, mentions his pots, pans and spinning wheel, along with his diet of goat's milk. His being scantily clad, such that you could see his knees, is part of the commentary. It adds a snide remark about the publicity he got during his trip, as against his self-professed reticence for publicity. It patronisingly calls him a bizarre little man.

Richard Attenborough's 1882 biopic, Gandhi, catapulted the Gandhi image into the realm of mythology. Short on historical details and nuance, the film is part hagiography, part an extravagant costume drama.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages