Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action

"Dennis Dalton is a retired American professor who is now in his eighties. I’ve never met him, but I have admired his work for a very, very long time. He did a PhD in England in the 1960s and later on taught at Columbia. In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote a series of pioneering articles on Gandhi, which greatly impressed me when I read them. Those articles then became the basis of this book, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action, the third of the five that I’ve recommended. I want to say a little bit about the hallmarks of Dalton’s work and why it’s particularly important. The first thing is that it is absolutely grounded in primary research. Unlike other Gandhi scholars, Dalton does not restrict himself to the collected works. There are 90 volumes of Gandhi’s own writings and it’s very easy to write a book—or indeed many books—just based on analyzing and re-analyzing what Gandhi said himself. Dalton, while he knows Gandhi’s collected writings very well, also looks at contemporary newspapers and what they were saying about Gandhi. He also looks at what Gandhi’s political rivals and adversaries were writing. In his book, he has a very interesting account of the Indian revolutionaries who disparaged nonviolence and thought armed struggle would be more effective and quicker in getting the British out. They saw nonviolence as weak, womanly and so on—a kind of macho attack on Gandhi’s nonviolence. He talks about Ambedkar, the great low caste revolutionary who disagreed with Gandhi. The book also has two very good set pieces: a fine account of the Salt March and as well as of Gandhi’s great fast of September 1947, which brought peace to Calcutta. “Whether Gandhi or Marx or Hobbes or Mill, any great political thinker is living his or her life day to day and adapting and changing his or her views” The other interesting thing about Dalton’s work—and this is very, very important—is that he looks at the evolution of Gandhi’s thought. Because a life is lived day to day. Whether Gandhi or Marx or Hobbes or Mill, any great political thinker is living his or her life day to day and adapting and changing his or her views. Those who don’t look at the evolution of a life, who don’t have a historical or chronological or developmental understanding of a life, are forced to cherry-pick. They want consistencies that don’t exist. Dalton shows the evolution of Gandhi’s views. For example, he shows that Gandhi had very conservative views about caste and race, but how over time he shed his prejudices and arrived at a more capacious, universalistic understanding of humanity. It’s a good corrective to those ideologues who want to make a certain case and selectively quote Gandhi from that earlier period in his life. So I think as an account of the development of Gandhi’s political philosophy and as an analysis of Gandhi’s Indian critics—who had serious, profound and sometimes telling political disagreements with Gandhi—Dalton’s book is particularly valuable. Yes, and to elaborate on that point, the last chapter of Dalton’s book, before the conclusion, is called “Mohandas, Malcolm, and Martin.” It talks about Gandhi’s legacy in twentieth-century America and what Malcolm X did not take from Gandhi and what Martin Luther King did take from Gandhi. There’s an analysis of the ways in which you can trace the influence of Gandhi’s legacy on Martin Luther King and race relations in America. The book came out in the early 1990s, so it was a little early to assess Gandhi’s impact on Eastern Europe, but he did also have an impact there. The leaders of Solidarity, particularly thinkers like Adam Michnik, the great Polish writer, acknowledged their debt to Gandhi. Dalton is telling you how particularly Gandhi’s technique of shaming the oppressor through nonviolent civil disobedience can still be relevant. I think you’re right on the first count, that nonviolence could work against the British whereas it may not have worked against a more brutal oppressor. There’s a nice story—possibly apocryphal, but worth telling nonetheless—of Ho Chi Minh coming to India in the 1950s and telling a gathering in New Delhi that if Mahatma Gandhi had been fighting the French, he would have given up nonviolence within a week. Likewise, against either the Dutch (who were really brutal in Indonesia) or Hitler, it would be absurd to try it. In my book I have an account of Gandhi advocating nonviolence for resisting Hitler and the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber taking issue with him–and rightly so. So yes, the British were embarrassed in ways in which maybe a more insensitive or callous ruler might not have been. It’s also the case that one powerful segment of British opinion, represented by the Labour party, was always for Indian independence. From about 1905–6, well before Gandhi returned to India, Keir Hardie committed the Labour party to independence. Then, as the Labour party grew in influence within Great Britain through the 1920s and 1930s, there was an influential constituency of politicians and intellectuals supporting the Indian freedom movement. There were writers like George Orwell , Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman , Fenner Brockway and Vera Brittain (the remarkable pacifist who was a friend of Gandhi’s) writing in the British press about the legitimacy of the Indian demand for independence. It’s not clear whether Ho Chi Minh had similar people lobbying for him in France. So it is true that nonviolence had a better chance against the British as compared to the Dutch in Indonesia or the French in Vietnam. “There is a moral core to Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. He is trying to shame the oppressor in preference to obliterating the oppressor out of existence.” Having said all that, it wasn’t simply tactical. There is a moral core to Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. He is trying to shame the oppressor in preference to obliterating the oppressor out of existence. Gandhi is saying, If I were to shoot the colonial official who is oppressing me, it means I am 100 per cent right and he is 100 per cent wrong. Otherwise how am I justified in taking his life? Let me harass him, pressurize him, put him to some trouble, squat outside his office, not allow people to go into his office and then let’s see what he says. Nonviolence also rests on a moral understanding of interpersonal relations, which says, ‘Look, the guy who is oppressing me also has some humanity in him. Let me stoke that. Let me try this and that and then the guy can come around and we can reach a kind of mutual respect and understanding.’ So it is not simply tactical and instrumental and pragmatic: there is also a moral core to nonviolent resistance, which I think one must never forget."