MAHATMA GANDHI AND J. C.

KUMARAPPA AS FIGURES OF WORLD CULTURE Mark Lindley

My view of Indian culture is that of an American in his sixties who aspires to rationality and who has lived in Europe for a total of seven years, in China for four, and in India for the last five winters. My parents and elder brothers worked in advertising, journalism, politics and economics; I am an academic and have taught history of Western culture and music, but in India have mainly studied and written about Mahatma Gandhi. I would like here to describe how two great representatives of early-to-mid-20th-century Indian culture, Gandhi and his economist-disciple J. C. Kumarappa, synthesized Hindu and Western elements into an outlook which gives us all today, and not least in the U.S.A., an invaluable view of modern Western civilisation and capitalism.

GANDHI
Gandhi was the anti-imperialist who, in a special way, took away the biggest colony from the biggest empire. He had studied British law and religion and he had strong opinions about contemporary Western technology and socio-economic structure. His successful law practice in South Africa was largely due, I think, to the influence of his father which also made him, as a politician, sometimes rather cautious and conservative: "It is hard to find a father as loving as he was.... [Yet] he was a very strict disciplinarian. 'No; you will do this, not that.' 'This has got to be done.' 'What's this nonsense?' 'Who did it this way?' would come out from his lips with irresistible finality.... [And] even when the most confidential consultations [in his work as Diwan of Rajkot] were going on, or when the most celebrated state representative was visiting him, he would have me by his side." Because of his father's model of how one has to think and act in order to govern successfully, Gandhi the politician rejected the Western idea that reform is only a barrier to revolution; he would rather see, in each small voluntary change, a step toward a bigger voluntary one. And his concern for truth and personal integrity, which of course goes back also to his childhood enchantment with Harischandra and Rama, made him reject the Western concept of lawyers' work as described recently (1995) by an American law professor justifying his lucrative employment by criminals: "I'm just their representative, not their conscience. I would never do many of the things in my personal life that I have to do as a lawyer." Gandhi scorned that attitude. (He said "the profession teaches immorality" even though lawyers "are also men and there is something good in every man".) His peculiar successes as a lawyer, and later as a politician, were due to such a concern for pure means that he considered it undesirable to overstate an argument: "Gandhiji gave us [i.e. Pyarelal and some other disciples] a passage from Milton's Areopagetica and asked us to point out a flaw which he had found in the writer's argument. The writer in that passage had argued that the intellect is the mind's eye; to suppress a book is, therefore, worse than to kill the author; for death only puts out the light of the eye, but to suppress a book is to put out the light of the mind which is God's most precious gift to man. 'It is an overstatement of the case,' he [Gandhi] explained afterwards, 'and that is bad advocacy. Besides, the work suppressed may not be the writer's best or last. If he lives, he may produce another and perhaps a better work. I had expected a writer of Milton's calibre to be more careful in his thinking.'" Such an attitude, together with his diligence, won him the respect of the judges before whom he appeared in South Africa; they trusted him and he prospered. * An important aspect of imperialism was the work of Christian missionaries who felt that their inherited religious beliefs were uniquely true. Gandhi's reaction is epitomised in the following exchange in 1893 with a friendly missionary:

"He saw, round my neck, the Vaishnava necklace.... 'This superstition does not become you. Come, let me break the necklace.' "No, you will not. It is a... gift from my mother.'" The attempts to convert him made him reflect: "It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God.... If God could have sons, all of us were His sons.... [Jesus'] death on the cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious virtue in it my heart could not accept." "Gautama's compassion... was not confined to mankind, it was extended to all living beings.... One fails to notice this love for all living things in the life of Jesus." [Yet his admiration for the Buddha did not deter him from telling the Dalai Lama, "I advised the friends who saw me on your behalf to give up secretiveness and superstition if Buddhism... is to live."] "When [Christianity] had the backing of a Roman emperor it became an imperialist faith as it remains to this day." "Christendom has been responsible for wars which put to shame even those described in the Old Testament." "The gaities of the Christmas season... [seem to me] inconsistent with the life and teaching of Jesus. How I wish America could lead the way by devoting the season to a real moral stocktaking and emphasizing consecration to the service of mankind for which Jesus lived and died." Some of his remarks to Christians are deeply appealing: "You are interested in our movement, I understand, because it is claimed to be strictly non-violent.... You should study the movement through and through, criticize it... [and] be my fellow workers, testing everything I say on the anvil of cold reason." Others are entertaining, as when he told some disputatious clergymen, "There should be less of theology and more of truth in all that you say and do." Sometimes the entertainiment is provided by the Christian, as in the following exchange during World War II between an intrepid lady and Gandhi: "Don't you think Denmark has carried out your ideal of non-violence?" "Not a bit. It was surrender [to Germany], and what I have asked for is not surrender but nonviolent resistance...." "Well, well, what's the good of it?" "What was the good of Jesus Christ laying down his life?" "Oh, that was a different matter. He was the son of God." "And so are we!" "No. He was the only son of God... our salvation." "So those who accept the Christ are all saved. They need do nothing more?" "We are sinners all, and we have but to accept Him to be saved." "...You talk like some of the Plymouth Brothers I met long ago in South Africa." "Yes, I am afraid you were so unfortunate in the Christian contacts you formed in South Africa. You did not meet the right kind of people." "Surely you will not say that. I met a number of estimable people. They were all honest and sincere." "But they were not true Christians." "...Why all this quarrel about labels?" Hinduism claims no exclusive validity but assimilates quite freely; so it is characterstic that Gandhi would acknowledge freely the reinforcement he found, in the Sermon on the Mount, of Shamal Bhatt's teaching that one should return kindnesses very generously ("For a bowl of water, give a goodly meal"), display conspicuous courtesy ("For a kindly greeting, bow down") and repay evil with good. The analogous biblical teaching which Gandhi cherished is that one should not "strike back" at evil, but if stricken on the right cheek, show the left one; or if one's coat is demanded, yield one's cloak as well. Now

the right hand would normally do the striking, so the right cheek could normally receive only a condescending backhand blow in which case showing the left cheek invites the assailant to treat you as his equal by striking man-to-man; and, to sue a poor man for his coat was in Jesus's time characteristic of a cruel creditor who might be shamed by handing over your cloak as well and voluntarily walking naked from the court. Another such injunction attributed to Jesus is to "go an extra mile". Any Roman soldier in Galilee at that time had the right to make a local civilian to carry his gear for one mile (the roads had milestones) but no farther; offering additional service might give him pause to think. The Hindu teaching is of broader scope, but the political flavour of the Christian one is more evocative of satyagraha, though still far from hinting at organised campaigns to change the law. While Gandhi was not informed of all the original political nuances of turning the other cheek etc., he did (mistakenly) see in Jesus's crucifixion an act of satyagraha against the Roman Empire: "Buddha would have died resisting the priesthood, if the majesty of his love had not proved to be equal to the task of bending the priesthood. Christ died on the cross with a crown of thorns on his head defying the might of a whole empire. And if I raise resistance of a non-violent character, I simply and humbly follow in the footsteps of the great teachers." But really satyagraha was new with Gandhi. Martin Luther King saw in him (from a Christian point of view) "the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale". Gandhi himself said that whereas "Tolstoy [had] talked of passive resistance": "The resistance for which I had to coin a new name ...is not... a weapon of the weak but... of the strongest." This strength was due to an Indian capacity for extreme self-discipline, which Gandhi had learned primarily from his mother: "She would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching.... To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her." Strong self-discipline was vital to his understanding of many basic social concepts for instance, of democracy: "A born democrat is a born disciplinarian. Democracy comes naturally to him who is habituated normally to yield willing obedience to all laws, human and divine. Let those who are ambitious to serve democracy qualify themselves by satisfying first this acid test of democracy." Of civilisation: "Civilisation, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment." And even of marital bliss: "My wife and I tasted the real bliss of married life when we renounced sexual contact.... Our companionship blossomed." I see here quite a difference vis vis (1) the classical Western view of moderation as set out in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, where each virtue is defined as a mean between two forms of excess (for instance courage between caution and rashness), and also (2) the Buddhist teaching of a "middle path of moderation", which might originally have been in reaction to Mahavira's asceticism. Yet Gandhi's grasp of non-violence was deepened by his long familiarity with, and thoughtful rejection of, Jain teaching: "Jain monks... would pay frequent visits to my father ...[and discuss] subjects religious and mundane.... Jainism was strong in Gujarat and its influence was felt everywhere and on all occasions." "The emphasis laid on the sacredness of sub-human life in Jainism is understandable. But that can never mean that one is to be kind to this [sub-human] life in preference to human life.... To benefit by others' killing [of sub-human creatures] and delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religious and non-violent, is sheer self-deception.... In life it is impossible to eschew violence com-

pletely. The question arises, where is one to draw the line? ...To allow crops to be eaten up by animals in the name of ahimsa while there is a famine in the land is certainly a sin. Evil and good are relative terms. What is good under certain conditions can become an evil or a sin under a different set of conditions." It was nonetheless a Jain, Rajchandra, whose spirituality enchanted Gandhi in Bombay in the early 1890s: "I felt in him every moment the spirit of vairagya.... His eyes... were extremely bright and free from any sign of impatience or anxiety.... These qualities can exist only in a man of self-control." And Rajchandra's subsequent correspondence with Gandhi helped him make up his mind not to convert to Christianity. I have mentioned Gandhi's rejection of the Marxist doctrine that reform forestalls revolution. He criticised also the Soviet Russian model (which in 1928 enchanted his political heir, Nehru): "[State ownership] is better than private ownership. But... if the State suppresses capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the evils of violence." Gandhi's political mentor, Gokale, said (in 1895) that Indian civilisation was being "once again [my italics] galvanized into life" by "contact with a younger... civilisation of the West". So I should include here some of Gandhi's references to Islam. It brought out his rationality: "Every true scripture only gains by criticism. After all we have no other guide but our reason to tell us what may be regarded as revealed and what may not be. The early Muslims accepted Islam not because they knew it to be revealed but because it appealed to their virgin reason." "Whatever may have been necessary or permissible during the Prophet's lifetime and in that age,... [stoning] cannot be defended on the mere ground of its mention in the Koran. Every formula of every religion has, in this age of reason, to submit to the acid tests of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent." "[Gandhi told a delegation of Muslim League leaders that] his respect and regard for Hazrat Muhammed was not less than theirs, but authoritarianism and compulsion was the way to corrupt religion, not to advance it. Shamsudden Saheb agreeing with Gandhiji quoted a verse from the Koran to the effect that there could be no compulsion in religion." He found in it a universal human message: "The very word 'Islam' means peace. The Muslim greeting 'Salam Alaikum' ['Peace to you'] is the same for all, whether Hindus or Muslims or any other." And he felt so at home with it his best boyhood friend and his biggest supporters in South Africa were Muslims, and his mother had been raised in the Kabir Panthi sect, which was (according to Gandhi) looked upon as "crypto-Muslim" that he could say, during the terrible days of 1946: "If Muhammed came to India today, he would disown many of his so-called followers and own me as a true Muslim." And then in 1947, by which time his daily prayers were addressed to "Ishwar Allah": "Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me the same God. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully." (The equating of Rama and Rahim goes back to Kabir and is proverbial in Gujarat. Two intimate accounts of Gandhi's last words one published in Harijan shortly after the assassination, the other published later by Manubehn agree that he said more than just "He Ram". However, no Muslim was standing nearby to leave an eye-witness account.) Gandhi's cosmopolitan religious knowledge strengthened his natural inclination to reconcile religious feeling with rationality: "Put no trust in the predictions of astrologers. Do not take any interest in the matter at all."

"I never received communications from the spirits of the dead.... All those within my experience have been deranged or weak-brained and disabled for practical work whilst they were holding, or thought they were holding, such communications." When asked what he meant by calling his religious faith "humble", he explained: "Faith should not be undiscriminating or blind. For instance as regards some question which can be solved by human intelligence, someone may say, 'I do not care what the intellect has got to say in the matter; I will hold a particular belief from faith'; [in that case] his faith is not characterized by humility. It is for the human intellect to decide whether the earth is round or flat.... If someone says he has full faith that it is flat, his faith is not coupled with humility." In the 1920s he "could not think of politics apart from religion"; when asked in 1940 if it was still so, he said: "Yes [but] here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government...." In the dark days of 1947 he lamented that he had "noticed no definite progress in any religion. The world would not be the shambles it had become if the religions of the world were progressive." And in 1948 he fasted explicitly in the name of "Truth" but not of "God", since so many people were lying and killing in the name of God. His rationality made him consider with discrimination his own venerable Hindu traditions. In his autobiography he recalled that already as a child, "I told my mother she was entirely wrong in considering contact with Uka [the household scavenger] as sinful", and that when he "come across Manusmriti... amongst my father's collection" and read it, "the story of the creation and similar things in it did not impress me very much". As an adult he was pragmatic: "My unconventionality [as a Hindu] I carry to the point of rejecting the divinity of [even] the oldest shastras if they cannot convince my reason. But I have found by experience that if I wish to live in society,... I must limit the points of utter independence to matters of first-rate importance." Theology was not so important to him. (Some of his remarks about it bewilder us either/or-minded Westerners for instance: "I believe God to be creative as well as non-creative. This... is the result of my acceptance of the doctrine of the manyness of reality.") He offered his praises every day even though he believed that "God is not a person"; "God exists, and yet does not. He does not, in any literal sense"; and "There is no God but Truth". It was a matter of the heart. * Gandhi said that if practically all the shastras were lost, one mantra from the beginning of the Isa Upanishad would suffice for him: "Enveloped by [supreme] Consciousness [is] everything whatever that fluctuates [every phenomenon] in the universe. Therefore, enjoy with renunciation [and] do not covet that which is due to others." This text expresses beautifully a sense of enjoying life with discipline and an ecological sensibility. The latter is expressed also in the way Gandhi explained cow-protection to Nehru: "The cow is merely a type for all that lives. Cow-protection means protection of the weak, the helpless, the dumb and the deaf. Man becomes then not the lord and master of all creation but he is its servant." The weak and helpless included of course the "half-starved, half-naked" people he discovered in India after his return home in 1915. In the 1920s he said: "You regard me as a mahatma, not because of my truth, nor for my non-violence, but on account of my deep attachment to the poorest of the poor.... That is why you feel that Gandhi counts for something."

It became, as everyone knoes, his lifelong priority: "Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.... In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and... self melting away." But it did not mean to him that India's economy should "take off" like an airplane and soar to American materialistic heights. He never retracted his views outlined in Hind Swaraj (though he later said he would express them in somewhat different terms): "It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American [one].... India's salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years or so. The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like all have to go." "Machinery ...the chief symbol of modern civilisation... represents a great sin.... I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery.... [We should] gradually do away with it." By 1940 this latter view was softened to: "I do visualize electricity, ship-building, iron works, machine-making and the like existing side-byside with village handicrafts. But the order of precedence will be reversed." His two main objections to machinery were that it causes economic unemployment (this objection dates back to the British Luddites of 1811-13) and that it tends to make us physically idle: "Who knows all the ill effects, moral and physical, of the cessation of bodily labor? ...I do not discount the value of intellectual labor, but no amount of it is any compensation for bodily labor which every one of us is born to give for the common good." (It was Ruskin's Unto This Last which, when Gandhi read it overnight on a train in 1904, had made it "as clear as daylight" to him indeed he "arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" that since "the good of the individual is contained in the good of all", therefore "a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work", and a life of physical labour "is the life worth living".) "We are destroying the matchless living machines, viz., our own bodies by leaving them to rust and trying to substitute lifeless machinery for them. It is a law of God that the [human] body must be fully worked and utilized. We dare not ignore it." He would also tell Western-style health-care professionals: "We are making a fetish of illness.... Most of the illnesses we suffer from yield to hygienic treatment.... Let us not think of having services which millions in all parts of the earth cannot command." "If you ...analyze... [the] illnesses that the flesh is heir to, you will find that most are avoidable, and [that the] mind has a great part to play in creating illness and promoting [them].... This is a subject which, as some of you know, I have been studying or experimenting with as a quack for [many] years." His "quack" diets and cures (some of which were remarkably effective) were as much influenced, however, by British or German as by Indian sources. And, the same humanism which caused him in later years to teach that poisonous snakes should be killed rather than caught and set free (perhaps to kill a neighbor) brought him already in 1929 to the following view of smallpox vaccination: "Smallpox mostly results from insanitation.... In order to produce the smallpox vaccine, innumerable animals are tortured, and it passes my understanding how vegetarians can ever take such vaccine. But... no one has the right to endanger society through his obstinacy. Hence, when smallpox spreads in a community which believes in vaccination, those who do not believe in it should, in addition to observing the rules of sanitation, segregate themselves voluntarily from that society."

As an American I note with particular interest (1) Gandhi's relation to Thoreau, (2) his disapproval of maintenance grants to the unemployed, (3) his encounter with Margaret Sanger, and (4) the change in his view of the caste system (which we Americans are brought up to regard as even more benighted than the European trappings of aristocracy). (1) Thoreau was one of the mid-19th-century "Boston Brahmins" whose radicalism was influenced by reading Hindu scriptures in translation. His Civil Disobedience is a classic. He was among the five American writers whom Tolstoy said influenced him the most, and that was particularly in the early 1890s when Tolstoy wrote his work which most deeply influenced Gandhi, The Kingdom of God is Within You. About a year before Gandhi first contacted Tolstoy (from London), he had, in jail in South Africa, "managed to read two books by the great Ruskin [and] the essays of the great Thoreau" (as well as some of the Bible, some books in Gujarati, and "the Bhagavad Gita almost every day") and had found "the doctrine of satyagraha in the writings of Ruskin and Thoreau". On the ship bringing him back to South Africa from London he wrote Hind Swaraj, in which: "I have... endeavoured humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson [another 'Boston Brahmin'] and other writers, besides the masters of Indian philosophy. Tolstoy has been one of my teachers for a number of years." In 1931 he told a friend: "The persons who have influenced my life as a whole in a general way are Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau and Raychandbhai [Rajchandra]. Perhaps I should drop Thoreau from this list." Indeed the other three comprise the more familiar list (in his autobiography and elsewhere). Yet Thoreau is mentioned some 65 times in Gandhi's Collected Works. I wonder if his removal from the list may have been due not only to Tolstoy's and Ruskin's greater genius but also to a feeling that once the British were sent packing, it might be a good idea to cultivate non-violence and self-discipline more than civil disobedience. (2) Gandhi said in 1925: "My ahimsa would not tolerate the idea of giving a free meal to a person who has not worked for it in some honest way, and if I had the power, I would stop every sadavrata where free meals are given. It has degraded the nation and it has encouraged laziness, idleness, hypocrisy and even crime." For more than fifty years we Americans did not see it that way, but nowadays there is a growing consensus that our "welfare system" ("welfare" not in Amartya Sen's broad and subtle sense, but specifically meaning doles) has had the kind of disadvantages described by Gandhi there are even some poor families which have led for generations now a way of life with teenagers having babies but not marrying because it would endanger their payments for aid to dependent children and this has led to some reforms curtailing the U.S.A. welfare system. (3) Margaret Sanger was a nurse who, working in the slums of New York, founded in 1917 an organisation called Planned Parenthood, and was often thereafter harassed and imprisoned for her lifelong work promoting birth control. In January 1936 she visited Gandhi at Wardha, but he rejected her appeal for moral support. He felt: "This little globe of ours... has not suffered from the weight of over-population through its age of countless millions. How can it be that it is in danger of perishing of shortage of food unless birthrate is checked through the use of contraceptives?" This suggests an essentially steady-state, non-evolving world, perhaps even with an implcit premiss that population cannot expand because every soul has just had a previous incarnation (whereas Christianity attributes a new eternal soul to each baby and one may thus wonder if the hereafter could ever become crowded: "How many angels can dance on the tip of a pin?"). Apart from this, Gandhi had already explained to another Westerner:

"I have heard protagonists of birth-control arguing against regarding chastity as a virtue. And personally, if I were to admit that indulgence is a virtue, I do not see how we can escape the natural deduction that free love is also a virtue. That is my difficulty." His talks with Margaret Sanger, whose courteous yet ar-dent sincerity was as strong as his and who did not regard chastity as an uplifting kind of discipline for young marrieds, caused him some psychological and, indeed, medical problems for which he was taken to hospital in Bombay. Of greater significance for us is that

the human population explosion was far less palpable then than now. Indeed India's population had declined between 1911 and 1921, and in the '20s the subcontinent was only a fourth as crowded as now (and its population expanding less than half as fast as now). I appreciate Gandhi's view expressed at the end of the following passage: "Women in the ashram are not subject to any restraint which is not imposed on the men as well.... Women are of course exempted from work which is beyond their strength; otherwise men and women work together everywhere.... A woman as soon as she enters the ashram breathes the air of freedom... and I believe that the ashram observance of brahmacharya has made a big contribution to this state of things." But I believe that if he were alive today, the appalling human conditions reflected so abstractly in the graph would have moved him to regard the use of contraceptives as a worthwhile form of discipline. Such a change would have been less drastic than the change between 1921 and 1946 in his view of the caste system.

(4) For many years Gandhi felt that the caste system, though laden with "excrescences", had "saved Hinduism from disintegration" and there would "be chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra" or vice-versa: "The beauty of the caste system is that it does not base itself upon distinctions of wealth-possessions. Money, as history has proved, is the greatest disruptive force in the world.... Caste has allowed new groupings to suit the changes in lives. But these changes are quiet and easy as a change in the shape of the clouds. It is difficult to imagine a better harmonious human adjustment." "As time goes forward and new necessities and occasions arise, the custom regarding interdrinking, interdining and intermarrying will require cautious modifications or rearrangements"

 even though those new-fangled practices were not, in Gandhi's opinion, "essential for the promotion of the spirit of democracy". In the fullness of time, however, he changed his mind so much that when he was asked in 1945 to supply a preface to a reissue of his own book, Varnavyavastha, he sent a "Key to My Writings" that must have dismayed the editor: "I do not have the time to read this book again. I do not even wish to.... A man daily moves either forward or backward. He never stands still. The whole world is moving and there is no exception.... Where are the four varnas of the Gita today?... There prevails only one varna today, that is, of 'Shudras', or, you may call it, 'Ati-Shudras'.... If I can bring round the Hindu society to my [current] view, all our internal quarrels will come to an end." In 1946 he said he "was trying to create a classless and casteless India" [my italics], vowed never to attend or bless a Hindu wedding unless it was between a Harijan and someone varna-born, and declared that he expected, if he lived the full span of 125 years, to persuade the entire Hindu society that caste must be eradicated "root and branch". He remained cautious of love matches (and broadly speaking I think the weakness of American family life provides plenty of evidence in support of his view). His preference was for a caste-no-bar arranged match with the unforced consent of both partners. * Equally astonishing to me, and equally indicative that Gandhi's capacity for inner growth increased during his later years, is the change in his attitude toward moksha. For years he had spoken fairly often of it, as in the preface to his autobiography: "I have been striving and pining... these [last] thirty years... to attain moksha"; but by the mid-1940s he would no longer mention it and instead would speak only occasionally, and then in rather down-to-earth terms, of mukti: "We all desire mukti but, perhaps, we do not know precisely what it means. Deliverance from the cycle of birth and death is one of its several meanings. "The poet-saint Narsinh says: 'A man of God seeks not deliverance from birth and death; he asks to be born again and again.' Viewed from this angle, mukti takes on a somewhat different form. "Extreme non-attachment is salvation, according the the Gita.... How to develop non-attachment? This can be done by regarding joy and sorrow, friend and foe, mine and thine, as all alike. Thus another name for non-attachment is equanimity. "As drops add up to make the ocean, we can be friendly and become an ocean of friendliness. The world would be transformed if everyone in the world lived in a spirit of mutual amity." This appeals to people like me who regard transmigration of the soul as no more likely than the sudden transubstantiation of bread and wine into flesh and blood. Nehru was in effect the Westerner closest to Gandhi in his later years, so it may be appropriate to conclude with some remarks from one of Gandhi's last letters to him: "Man should rest content with what are his real needs and become self-sufficient. If he does not have this control, he cannot save himself.... You must not imagine that I am envisaging village life as it is today.... My ideal village will contain intelligent human beings. They will not live in darkness and dirt as animals. ...No one will be idle, no one will wallow in luxury."

KUMARAPPA

Joseph Chelladurai Kumarappa was born in 1892 in a village near Madurai. His father was in the civil service; his mother's Christian piety "and sympathy for and love of her neighbours" was expressed, he later recalled, "by her attempt, however humble it may have been, to help those in distress".

He studied history at Madras Christian College, qualified in London as a chartered accountant, and prospered in that profession in London and then in Bombay for several years after World War I, all the while loyal to the Empire. In London his boss's wife taught him not to buy low-quality goods and thereby "encourage the production of such goods by affording a market for them": "She often told him of the consumer's duties towards the producer and placed the blame for inferior goods more on the consumer than the producer, as the producer only follows the lead given by the consumer. Besides, such inferior goods may only tend to bring disrepute to the nation's manufactures." In the mid-1920s he decided, while visiting a brother of his in the U.S.A., to improve his professional qualifications. He earned a B.S. degree in business administration at Syracuse University and then enrolled in 1928 at Columbia University (in New York) in an M.A. program in public finance. He objected to the views of the professor, H. J. Davenport, in one of his seminars there: "Kumarappa's arguments made him red in the face, yet he recognised Kumarappa's courage and original thinking and marked him at the end of the term as an A-1 student.... [Thus] Davenport... drove him from complacency." This man was 70 years old and it was his last term of teaching. His method was socratic; his Outlines of Economic Theory (1896) begins: "Ask yourself some unanswerable questions questions about Eletricity. About Light, Ether, a Flower, a Chair, a Dab of Mud. "What does Tennyson mean when he says: "'Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, Hold you here root and all in my hand Little flower, but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.' "In what sense is it true that a perfect kowledge of any one fact is a perfect knowledge of all facts? ...From the point of view of how many sciences can you discuss a stick of wood?" Throughout the book are lists of stimulating questions, like "Tell what you mean when you speak of the law of gravitation.... In what sense is the term 'law' used in relation to statistics, prices, the course of things in history?.... Is machinery the labourer's assistant or his competitor? Would wages be higher if we had one arm instead of two?", and also provocative citations (with no evaluations from by Davenport) from other writers, like: "Our eyes, though very useful, require nothing more for themselves than a pair of spectacles, an outlay which ought not greatly to disarrange our finances; it is the eyes of others that ruin us. If all the world were blind excepting myself, I should have need neither of fine rainment, nor of palaces, nor of extravagant furnishings." [Benjamin Franklin] "What riches give us let us then enquire. / Meat, fire and clothes. What more? Meat, fine clothes and fire." [Alexander Pope] "It matters far less for the future greatness of a nation what is the sum of its wealth today, than what are the habits of its people in the daily consumption of that wealth; to what uses these means are devoted." This breadth of vision is reflected in the last paragraph of Kumarappa's thesis: "One of the greatest benefits that a nation reaps from its expenditures is the immeasurable advantage it derives from the accumulation of experience and wisdom by its administrators who, after their period of active life, retire into the councils of the nation to aid and guide the next generation. [Thus in India] the British civilian gains experience and the Indian taxpayer pays for it, but when mature,

the civilian retires to Great Britain and India loses the advantage of the wisdom it has paid for, and that loss again is Britain's gain. Who can say how much Britain owes her present leadership in the political world to the wider range of viewpoint provided by her sons who were trained in India?" His other main professor was Edwin Seligman (1861-1939), an internationally renowned scholar whom the Dictionary of American Biography decribes as having "played a prominent role in almost every important issue of economic or social reform that arose in his day". He advocated progressive taxation (i.e. taking more from the rich than from the poor), supported the trade-union movement (and enjoyed debating with socialists), served for years as president of the Society for Ethical Culture (whose leader in Chicago wrote the book of which Gandhi's paraphrase is Vol. I of the six-volume Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi), advocated forest conservation, etc. His Studies in Public Finance (1925) has a chapter on the French colonial fiscal system, but none on the British. Kumarappa soon after arriving in New York gave a public talk on India's poverty; The New York Times published a story about it; and Seligman saw it and suggested that he write his master's thesis on the causes of India's economic decline in the 19th and (early) 20th centuries, which he did. It brought him to a shattering revelation as he studied the British drain of wealth from India about which R. C. Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji had already written around the turn of the century (in books with titles like "Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments" and "Poverty and Un-British Rule in India"). At Seligman's prompting, Kumarappa sent his thesis to Gandhi, who appreciated it and invited him to visit. He joined Gandhi and simplified his outer life accordingly. (This entailed some acculturation. At a khadi shop in Bombay he learned that dhotis are ready-made, not cut to measure. Then, to display his new clothes he called upon a friend and, when she came to the door, bowed and pulled off his Gandhi cap. She laughed and taught him to remove his chappals instead.) In reaction to police brutalities in 1930 against people making edible salt without paying the tax, Kumarappa asked Christians to speak out and sent a copy of his appeal to the Bishop of Calcutta, who in reply declined to "support [Gandhi] when he has, unlike Jesus Christ, identified himself with the political aspirations of the nationalists". Kumarappa answered with a fairly scorching letter (replete with brilliant biblical exegesis): "What I... [requested] was not that you should support Gandhi in his political campaign, but that you should urge the government to use non-violent methods. Surely any Christian on either side can do that even while vehemently condemning the other side.... [Your] callousness is tantamount to a denial of our Lord, and the only hope is that it may be followed by repentance and more ardent service as in the case of the rugged Apostle [Peter].... Yours Fraternally...." A week later he told the satyagrahis: "To understand is to forgive.... To understand the Western mind one has to look back on the antecedents of Western civilization. It is primarily a civilization of hunters.... No sport seems more exhilarating to the populace than a boxing match, and the aristocracy finds its delight in shooting down innocent animals and birds. In politics, the hunter's prowess finds its prototype in the imperalism of today. Even in religion... violent methods of propagation were substituted for Christ's injunction, 'Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.'... Hence is it well for us satyagrahis to remember that violence forms almost a second nature to the Westerner.... This throws a greater burden and responsibility on our shoulders and calls for greater forbearance on our part." In July he told the National Christian Party: "We find two distinct types of nationalism manifesting themselves today. One we shall call 'Sheepflock or Herd-type Nationalism' and the other, 'Wolf-Pack Nationalism'." Then he was jailed. He had meanwhile led the first of his several systematic economic surveys which in due course rendered him uniquely well informed about India's rural economy. While in jail from 1932 to '34, he is said to have prepared some texts which grew into a book (1936) entitled "Why the Village Movement?" and elaborating in detail, for the first time, the concept of appropriate technology. The underlying principles came from Gandhi's khadi programme and not from any Western source that I know of.

When he and Gandhi were released from jail in 1934, Gandhi had him keep accounts for the relief efforts after the Bihar earthquake. He did it so meticulously and with such strict honesty (Mahadev Desai and the others called him "the Colonel") that Gandhi, thinking he might make a good administrator, had Congress found the All-India Village Industries Association with Kumarappa as organising secretary. Its headquarters were at Wardha. Kumarappa's house there was an experiment in improved low-cost construction with materials and techniques that any village could muster. He said: "Designing one's own house or furniture is a fertile field for the play of one's personality.... Man is so constituted that the less he thinks on problems, the less he is fitted for life. Therefore the allconsiderate ...modern manufacturer, who professes to do all the thinking for the consumer, is really crippling him." For Congress meetings in 1936 and '38 he prepared influential exhibits on the decadence and potential renewal of village-based industries. He spent part of 1939 in jail, and then in 1939-41 coordinated teamsurveys of the economy in central India 600 villages and in the Northwest Frontier Province. In 1943-44 he was again detained; this time he wrote two books: Practice and Precepts of Jesus and Economy of Permanence. Practice and Precepts of Jesus is an analytical meditation based on four English translations of the Bible or New Testament (the only books he was allowed to read at the time). Gandhi's preface (1945) calls attention to the "novel and refreshing" interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. An example: in regard to the phrase "Our Father which art in Heaven", Kumarappa after saying that "the fatherhood of God the Creator means that all humans are brothers and sisters", discussed also "our relationship to our other fellow-creatures commonly called the lower orders animals, birds etc. which also owe their existence to the same Father". This interpretation is far more likely due to Hindu influence than to that of St. Francis of Assisi. Economy of Permanence begins with a note on the meaning of "permanence" in economics: "[A] human life rarely reaches even a hundred years while the unit to measure the life of Nature will run into astronomical figures.... It is in this relative sense that we speak of 'an economy of permanence'." (Here I see Davenport's A-1 student.) Then a section on Nature sets out some basic distinctions for an analysis of our way of life in relation to the Earth. In regard to energy-sources and raw materials: "The world possesses a certain stock or reservoir of such materials as coal, petrolium [and] ores or minerals like iron, copper, gold etc. These, being available in fixed quantities, may be said to be 'transient,' while the current of flowing water in a river or the constantly growing timber of a forest may be considered 'permanent' as their stock is inexhaustible in the service of man if only the flow or increase is taken advantage of." According to Kumarappa: "Basing our life pattern on the economy of permanence paves for world peace, while the other [kind of economy, based on dwindling sources of consumable energy and raw materials] leads to disharmony, unhealthy competition, enmity and world wars." He uses also an analytical scheme of five basic types or aspects of economies: (1) parasitic; (2) predatory; (3) productively enterprising (such as when birds build nests); (4) gregarious (such as when bees make honey); (5) by serving other individuals, as when a mother nurses her baby:

"All the return she gets is the joy of seeing her children well fed and happy that is her 'wage'. From this there is a fall to the 'economy of enterprise' when a wet-nurse feeds the baby.... When the extravagant claims of [synthetic] baby foods do not bear any close relation to facts, we go right down to the 'parasitic economy' where the profit made is the overruling consideration irrespective of any harm that may befall the baby.... The dignity of work of the mother is lost along with the healthy constituents attached to it." (This was written in 1943-44.) He describes primitive human economy as having been largely parasitic and predatory, and hence violence-prone, but modern human economy as more enterprising and productivegregarious, sometimes violent and yet with a growing desire for permanency and non-violence. He distinguishes between our fundamental "physical" and superficial "material" needs, and hence criticizes the academic concept of a standard of living: "For a standard based on material considerations, the more suitable terms will be 'complex' and 'simple' rather than 'high' and 'low'.... "A mill-owner... will plan on his workers leading a complex standard of existence which he will be pleased to call a 'high' standard of living. To achieve this end he will pay his workers higher wages, support a liberal-welfare scheme and get them accustomed to amenities of factory life such as clubs, tea rooms, games, cinemas, good housing etc. The result of this will be that the worker... will be loath to change places even if his principles are violated by the factory owner.... [When the worker] is habituated to spending money on material wants, these assume the role of necessities without which, he is led to believe, he cannot live.... Such a standard functions like a nose-string to a bullock." In regard to drudgery vs. fulfillment, he says: "Machines... [that render] it impossible for the laborers to take an intelligent interest in their operations... create drudgery. A man detailed out to perform but one operation all day has the quintessence of drudgery." In 1948 he served as head of a national commission on agrarian reforms. Most of its recommendations (e.g. in regard to land-reform) were not enacted, so in 1951 he co-founded a political organization, Arthik Samata Mandal, to promote the elimination of gross economic and social inequities. In his remaining years he became a voice in the wilderness, working in rural India, now and then travelling abroad, and all the while criticising capitalism and Nehru's common-sense beliefs in top-down five-year plans and in all the latest Western technology: "Merely placing tons of [chemical] fertilizers in [the] hands of farmers who have not been accustomed to the use of such materials and who have no means of analysing the soil... will be like giving sugar-coated quinine pills [to children]." (This is an example of his self-defeating tendency sometimes to overstate the case. Sugar-coated quininepills would kill a hungry child much quicker than chemical fertilizers ruin the soil.) "Hand-produced sugar... is more than ten times richer in iron content [than mill sugar].... [yet] the central government wants the hand process discouraged.... At Lyallpur Agricultural College... they have various kinds of electric machinery to remove... nutritive elements from wheat... [and so] produce white bread.... Is there any place for such in a famine-stricken land? ...White rice, white sugar, hydrogenated oils is this where science is leading us?" "In recent years, one has been hearing and reading of planning in every sphere of life, more especially in the economic world. People have come to realize that 'free trade' and laissez-faire are highways to world wars.... [Yet] do we escape cruelty and violence under a planned economy? Turn towards Russia. In the history of the world, has there been a parallel to the violence generated internally by the planned economy followed by Russia? What is the sacrifice in human lives with which the set goals of economic production have been attained? What has been the part played by [forced labor in] Siberia?... How were the stupendous public works the great canals, the huge dams, the marvellous electricity-generating stations etc. brought into existence?...

"Then is there no way of planning without tears? Yes. There is. But that is not centered around material production but around human personality. The economic sphere does not dominate the whole of human existence.... It is a means to make the higher life of man possible.... "A planner should... be like a gardener. He first prepares the soil, sows the seed and waters it, and, having done his part, stands aside.... Similarly, [economic] planning should ensure wholesome conditions for the growth of human beings.... The method of starting with a predetermined output and working toward it is not the way of Nature." He said: "Gandhian economics... [entails] principles which, when carefully followed, will allow man to satisfy his needs without injuring his neighbors, and, at best, while helping fellow men.... "We have also to follow how man expresses himself by his work.... "Beyond the pale of human society are our mute brethren who minister to our needs animals, birds etc.... [They and] the land we draw our sustenance from, the water, sunlight, air and the rest of the physical world, claim our attention and regard while we strive to satisfy our needs. If we fail to consider these factors, Nature will retaliate." * Are Gandhi and Kumarappa influential today in the West? In 1997 a popular national American newspaper asked its readers to name the greatest man of the century and the overwhelming majority said Gandhi. It is true that his dramatic political use of non-violence has only now and then been successfully adapted outside India (in the U.S.A. most notably by Martin Luther King). But meanwhile some other aspects of satyagraha have been applied with considerable success by recent politicians and diplomats around the world. Three such aspects are: reconciliation, as in the politics of Nelson Mandela; "win-win" negotiation, for instance by Tony Blair and George Mitchell in Ireland, by ex-president Jimmy Carter in Haiti, Nicaragua, Korea and elsewhere, and perhaps (the outcome is not yet clear) by Bill Clinton in regard to Israel and Palestine; the careful avoidance (e.g. by Mr. Clinton) of sarcasm, caricature or strong emotional language in regard to one's political antagonists. (When a journalist reported that Mrs. Clinton tried to contact Gandhi's ghost through a "medium", she said she did nothing of the kind but only asked herself, when facing tough problems, "What would Gandhi do?". Kumarappa's name is little known in the West, but four big ideas that he propounded (before any other economist did, as far as I know) are now becoming important in economic thinking worldwide: "appropriate technology"; the distinction between "renewables" and "non-renewables"; "small-is-beautiful" as an antidote to the malaise for which 19th-century German writers coined the term "Entfremdung" ("alienation"); and "sustainable development" integrating economic and ecological thinking. Millions of people in the USA sense the falseness of modern consumerism and some of them are taking up neo-Gandhian ideas. This is described in a recent book by Barbara Brandt, Whole Life Economics. She analyses how capitalism suffers from economic addiction ("the inability to set limits or say no to our economic activities") and economic invisibility ("the fact that many activities essential for human well-being are not officially considered part of the economy"). She says that people who are free to develop economic activities under their own direction, without catering to the demands of a hierarchically superior group or of an addiction-driven system, will find their work meeting not only their "survival needs" (food, clothing, shelter), but also "cyclical needs for care" (in childhood, illness, bereavement or senility), "ongoing needs for amenities" (hygiene, artistic expression, etc.), "occasional needs for luxuries" (such as vacations and ice cream: these retain their charm only if we have them fairly seldom) and the "ongoing need to replentish the sources that support and sustain us". She surveys constructive innovations currently being developed in the U.S.A., including new roles for men and women, new kinds of enterprises (such as cooperatives) and local money of

various kinds; and she discusses a number of organisations: "Businesses for Social Responsibility", "Center for Ethics and Economic Policy", "Center for Neighborhood Technology", "Center for Rural Affairs", "Coop America", "E. F. Schumacher Society" and so on through the alphabet to "Voluntary Simplicity Organization", "Women's Environment and Development Organization" and "Workwell Network". Most of their activity is neo-Gandhian in that it embodies ideals of non-exploitive human equity and non-violent change and is based on Gandhi's concept of civilisation as consisting not in the multiplication but in the "deliberate ...restriction of wants". Since writing the book she heard about Kumarappa and read Economy of Permanence. It cost her two nights' sleep and she said, "Now I know where my ideas came from." The vital question, however, is not whether foreigners will properly credit Indian culture with having given them Gandhi's and Kumarappa's insights. Instead it is the one put in 1948 by MacArthur, the top American general in Asia (whose theatre of operations included Hiroshima and Nagasaki), when he said that all men must accept Gandhi's lesson, if civilisation of any kind is to survive. Will we do it? A distinguished current American capitalistic economist, Lester Thureau, points out that capitalist decision-rules, according to which nothing should be done to prevent future ecological crises, are now promoting collective suicide: "A generation will eventually arrive who cannot survive in the earth's altered environment and by then it will be too late for them to do anything to prevent their own extinction." So it may be that Gandhi was too hopeful when he wrote in Hind Swaraj: "Indian civilization is the best.... The European is a nine-days' wonder. Such ephemeral civilizations have often come and gone and will continue to do so." With more large-scale ecological gambling and some poor luck, modern world civilisation may render the higher forms of life on Earth so ephemeral that perhaps all the, say, great-grandchildren of my younger readers might die without issue. How are we to prevent it?