Gandhis Life and Thought

Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan

relation between suffering and proximity to God was acquired from these sources. Often, moksha and martyrdom seem to coincide for him.

Unity of Means and Ends

he biography of a philosopher can be summed up in, He was born. He thought. He died. Aristotle wrote it for himself and for posterity. The philosopher, though, is not the only kind of thinker. Mahatma Gandhi thought dif ferently, as a hypophysician for whom nature is value and value is exclusively moral. Accordingly he had a definition of the life of the thinker that he was, my life is its own message. Life and thought are convertible. This convertibility draws his biographers to give an adequate summary of his life and thought. It is a quest for the annulment of the disjunctive. The two biographies of Gandhi under review have attempted what is proper to the notion thought is life and life is thought.

book review
Gandhi: Naked Ambition by Jad Adams (London: Quercus), 2010; distributed by Penguin India; pp xi + 323, Rs 699. Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life by Kathryn Tidrick (London and New York: IB Tauris), 2006; First South Asia edition, IB Tauris, 2008; distributed by Viva Books; pp xv + 380, Rs 495.

are the effect of the moral imperfections of men. These beginnings develop into the other chapters of Gandhis life.

Retrospective Document
Historically, the attempt has been to devise a general principle through which Gandhi speaks coherently. There are some variations within this common act. The reduction of his writings to his politics is the most common of all where political contingencies explain the apparent confu sions and conflicts in his writings. The formula can be summed up thus: Gandhi was a great politician whose singular ambition was to get independence for India and he did whatever he could to do that. Then there is the failed philosopher formula. Gandhi wanted to be a philo sopher, but he was not the well trained sort. So he left these fragments of thought which are to be systematised comfortably by the scholar of today. Tidrick on the other hand shows a nontraditional and nonacademic mixture of ideas about his origins and a Gandhi who himself hid his lineage, erased his tracks, baptising himelf in an ancient India which he con structed out of this lineage:
Indians who have written seriously about Gandhi have found it difficult to come to grips with the Hinduism he professed in his maturity... Some at least of Gandhis unorthodox or just off key renderings of traditional Hindu beliefs can be understood in the context of Esoteric Christianity (and theosophy, where the two systems overlap).

Beginnings and Development

From the beginning, Tidrick gathers a library of ideas and books encountered by Gandhi in London during his days as a student which were to continuously deter mine his life and his politics: Esoteric Christianity, Theosophy, Gospel of Vitality and other ideas which were considered to be fads by his contemporaries. Gandhis library is neither occidental nor oriental in the strict sense. The unity of his life and thought and the thoroughbred line of his descent, be it western or eastern, are unintended comedies. For example, the Christianity which absorbed Gandhi was not that of the Catholic variety, nor did he harbour any fidelity to Hindu tradition when expressing his need for moksha in this life. Tidrick writes in the second chapter titled Beginnings, Gandhis biographers have not taken seriously his connection with the Esoteric Christian Union, and its doctrines have received little attention from Gandhi scholars (p 33). Esoteric Christianity understands nature as made up of spirits close to the earth and hence allied with matter (p 33) which grounds Gandhis hypophysical utterances such as that natural calamities

This coincidence explains, later in Tidricks book, the baffling statements Gandhi made about the martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh, There was only one remedy for the governments policy of repression another Jallianwala Bagh, if necessary many repetitions of the Jallianwala Bagh (p 176). That is, martyrdom in itself was a good thing. In another example, Gandhis insistence on the unity of sacrifice and feminity, and a projection of feminine self awareness are not symptoms of abnormal psychic dynamisms but the praxis of mod ern esoteric Christianity, ...The Perfect Way had taught that Christ must, through experience and knowledge, become both man and woman (p 314). Tidrick also shows those instances where ideas splin ter the sinews of life and cause life to reticulate into a body almost unbearable; ideas had riven his body into an indeter minate zone of age Gandhi suffered pre mature loss of teeth and at the same time even in the last years he was capable of bouts of hyperactivity and endurance. Gandhis food experiments often gave him diarrhoea and his experiments with brah macharya gave him hypertension. Even in situations where the advisable mode of transportation was by car the thought of the unity of means and ends forced him to walk:
As he travelled the country on his un touchablility tour, preaching the pure Hinduism of yore, he became troubled by the inconsistency of his message of simplicity and his manner of delivering it. He announced on 8 May that he would no longer use a car and continue on foot. Like the rishis of old he would propagate dhar ma using natural methods of locomotion, speed being probably inimical to spiritual progress (p 271).

The autobiography is a retrospective document written in the light of this canon and meant to shroud it. The positive

The life of the thinker for Tidrick is the pack of images of incommensurate self determination of constitutive forces with respect to the ideas images of action named by chapter numbers, like a Pollock painting such as No 5, 1948.
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One can contest most of Tidricks posi tions: there is indeed an importance placed on suffering in traditional Indian religions as well and the investment of ambivalent sexuality in divine figures in Hindu religion is not uncommon. Yet, future discussions on the canon that made him will have to consider Tidricks Gandhi since she presents her Gandhi as a case of thoughts which set his life off and bound it. To do so she has gathered most of the important writings on Gandhi as well as information about the authors, and relat ed the two. However, at times Tidrick reads intentions into episodes and actions of Gandhis life. For instance, regarding his rather late endorsement of the Con gress Partys support for the British during the war, she says He saw that to separate himself from Congress now would be to condemn himself to irrelevance (p 291). Biographies often proceed from the dis covery of obscure, forgotten or misunder stood intentions; like a palaeontologist the biographer discovers fossils of docu ments and events and writes a life as though it were a circulation of intentions through them. In Tidricks book these mo ments stand out like an ill grafted branch or organ since her biography is one which operates on the threshold of life and thought, a biography critically nearing a monograph of the thinker.

Events and Their Comprehension

For Jad Adams Gandhis life is the reso nance of certain early events. It is not a psychoanalytic biography in which a life is tempered by the resistance to the tena cious yet unyielding memory of primal events. Rather, events which are always in memory perform a division in the think ers life. Until these definitive events take place life is merely an awaiting and after these events life is their comprehension to which thoughts are a mere means. These events are complex: the devotional life of the mother, the wedding, the death of the father. The mother fasted regularly and often refused to break them when the omen to do so was insufficiently clear such as the partial appearance of the sun from which she drew another omen that the gods wished her to remain hungry The effect on Gandhi was to instil in him the perception of a close connection
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between religious observance and every day life, something he would always dis play as a mature man (p 9). The early marriage to Kasturbai critically opened his appetite for the pleasures of life even though Gandhi seemed to regret it all. In fact he seems to have had a normal healthy sexual appetite, the expression of which had, despite his youth, been sanctioned by local custom and by his family. The revul sion was something he brought to the affair himself, in later reflection (p 14). The event which introduced retrospective revulsion is the night of the death of the father. The teenager was eager to have sex with Kasturbai, whom he woke up for the purpose. In a few minutes, however, a servant came to the door. Gandhi sprang out of bed to be told, Father is no more... He could never forgive himself for having been in the grip of lust at that moment. Even at the age of fiftysix when he wrote the memoir of the event, he was still dwelling on it (p 18). His devout mother led Gandhi to pursue in his readings and practice a relation between nature and value where actions which are in accordance with nature alone yield the good. The mothers fearlessness towards hunger would be repeated by Gandhi in all his 17 fasts. The difficult yet intimate presence of pleasures would con tinue with him all his life. Guilt would knock on the door on each of these occa sions of pleasure demanding penance, often in the form of fasts. Adams shows how the life of the thinker is the move ment between the three primary feelings hunger, pleasure, guilt.

the central problem of Gandhis life the discordance between ideas derived from life and political action. For example while the most important campaign in his life was the Salt March Gandhi had little use for salt he had in fact tried excluding it from his diet (p 188). The ambition for obtaining to a greater truth, the spiritual perfection which would annul the merciless repetition of the three events in an overcoming of the body with in this life, was corporealised in ascetic experiments where the corpus both the social body and the personal body was often in discord with this ambition which Gandhi expressed as I want to have moksha in this life. These discordances are listed by Adams throughout his book. He writes about Gandhis denial of the Armenian Holocaust for the sake of the Khilafat movement, He was blinded by his spiritual light into thinking that the only important thing was individual experi ence of God, ignoring the bigger picture (p 164). However the image painted by Adams does not explain these dissonant expressions of truth the facts of Gandhian logic: he did not lie, but he had his own interpretation of truth (p 249). Yet it is within the ambition of this bio graphy to not give a Gandhian logic but

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Discordances
Gandhi was never patient with books He freely admits his own academic defi ciencies and later he would dismiss the importance of education and books which included the neglect of the education of his own children. Gandhis ideas about diet and sex seem idiosyncratic to the point of mania, but there may have been a physiological reason why different diets worked to lower his sexual urge. He had serious constipation (p 92). The idea of ashram life was the effect of Gandhis life and in practice the members of the ashrams followed his conduct. However it is in relation to diet that Adams states
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instead to show that logical discussions are mere effects of the events which Gan dhi sought to master. Both Tidrick and Adams deal with the sexual theories and practices of Gandhi in an explicit fashion. If one pursues the details of Gandhis brahmacharya experi ments Tidricks book is certainly more detailed and is an acknowledged pre cursor to Adams. However these two bio graphies are different. Together they make manifest the idea of biography itself, that is, how to account for a life. In the literal sense of accounting biographies often show publicly agreed upon good deeds against the bad ones in a life and are written as a report on the basis of this difference. Gandhi himself constructed the very ideas of good and evil on the

basis of which he accounted for his own life. There have been biographies, such as Narayan Desais (My Life Is My Message), on the basis of his own moral rules. However the biographies by Tidrick and Adams are not moral accounts, even though one finds certain instances where a little table of good and bad appears. Adams gives us a life of battling forces out of which arises a theoretical atmosphere which often smothers this very life. Tidrick discovers a recursive genetic or der which explains why certain books were the mute canons of the thinker and why certain events of life continued to discharge these thoughts; an archival pla centa that never leaves Gandhi. Hence these biographies are distinct from the psychoanalytical accounts of Gandhis

life. There is only one genus of life for psychoanalysis and each life manifests as the specific symptom of the general pathology of life. With these two bio graphies we have the foregathering of lives and the lived, irrespective of their physical or temporal distance, conjugated to the name Gandhi. They are the obverse and reverse of a life that has not yet formed the coin. The disjunctive between these two biographies expresses the im passable agitation between thought and life which does not pass away in death. The compulsion of the impassable agitation generates accounts of the thinkers life.
Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan (shajdivya@ gmail.com) are philosophers based in India.

On Disasters
Subhradipta Sarkar

period, and finally, embarks on a discus sion on the impact of globalisation in this discipline.

Missed Opportunities Galore

Vulnerable India: A Geographical Study of Disasters by Anu Kapur (New Delhi: Sage), 2010; pp xxi + 269, Rs 850.

hen in Chile 33 miners emerged from the underground alive after a 69day ordeal, the entire world was awestruck! What was mesmer ising was that the place of the incident was not any developed western nation, but Chile, a developing nation. So much so that in jest filmmaker Michael Moore told CNNs Larry King: ...[N]ext time we have a hole (resulting in oil spill) in the Gulf of Mexico, we need to call in the Chilean government. Notwithstanding the fact that most parts of India are disasterprone, meticu lous planning and effective implementa tion in disaster management by the gov ernment are almost nonexistent. Rather, there is an attitude of utter indifference. That is why even smallscale floods claim quite a good number of lives, yet we pooh pooh the enormity of the matter using journalistic jargons, like natures fury. It took some megadisasters in the last decade to shake the conscience of the Indian state to a large extent and affirm the fact that disaster management cannot be treated as a one offprogramme of the regular administration, but requires spe cial knowledge and expert intervention.

Newer research and literature, gradually emerging in this area, have also played a pivotal role in this respect. And this work of Anu Kapur is a contribution to that knowledge bank.

Defining Disasterscape
Vulnerable India primarily deals with 16 types of geophysical disasters like floods to droughts, earthquakes to cyclones, dust storms to hailstorms the origin, evolu tion and functioning of which is inde pendent of man (pp 2829). The book is broadly divided into three sections: Fact, Response and Reality. In the first sec tion Kapur introduces a unique term disasterscape which she defines as a place where human life is lost or dam aged, relationships ripped and livelihoods disrupted (p 5). The Response section examines the tra ditional concept of natural disasters and the changes the western philosophy brought about courtesy British rule rues the missed opportunities in the postcolonial

A disaster is not about the dead. Ironically, it is about the living (p 91). In fact, our success in disaster manage ment depends on the strategies and tech niques we devise for the protection and amelioration of the living victims in the pre or postdisaster situation. Whatever may be the origin of the term, there is no denying the fact that it was during the colonial era that an official structure to deal with disasters was set up. Whether it was the establishment of the Department of Revenue and Agriculture and Com merce in 1871 to deal with famines, or the Meteorological Department in 1875 to forecast storms, or to record the impact of disasters on people in the Imperial Census carried out from 1881 to 1931 it was the British who sowed the seeds of modern disaster management. After independence, disasters received stepmotherly treatment from every quar ter of governmental activities. Citing vari ous statistics, the author demonstrates that the fiveyear plans treated disasters as a fringe issue and confined them to relief and compensation. The First Finance Commission took note of the occurrence of several disasters, yet conceded we have not taken these factors separately
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