Gandhi: Great Soul or Egoist? (Long OP)

Great Debates
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I’m hoping you dopers who have a clear knowledge of history can help me out.

Here’s the background. My parents are from India, but I was born in the US. My boyfriend is from Mumbai (Bombay). I think Gandhi was a great man who used agressive non-violent civil-disobedience to liberate India from British rule. He thinks Gandhi was an egotistical, self-serving person who prolonged British rule in India for his own glory. His best friend who grew up in India holds the same viewpoint as well. When I ask my BF why he thinks this way, I get vague answers, or I’m told I’m a victim of Congress party propoganda. He doesn’t have many specifics to back him up, but his vehemence towards Gandhi is undeniable.

So, I’m trying to understand his viewpoint and see if there’s anything I’m missing. So, here’s a couple of the arguments:

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi’s non-violent campaigns only made the British think they could control Indians and made the world think of Indians as subservient people which later lead to naked agression by Pakistan and China, who knew the Indians couldn’t fight back.

My viewpoint: Gandhi was attempting to keep the country from descending into chaos. It was a powder-keg waiting to erupt, and by using non-violent techniques, he was able to make people respect the rule of law which is the major reason Indian democracy survives until this day, while many other post-colonial democracies have fallen by the wayside. Furthermore, the non-violent techniques (such as the salt march and boycotts) destroyed British economic control in India in a much faster way than violent techniques ever could have.

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi didn’t do anything to save Baghat Singh from execution.

My viewpoint: Gandhi did what he could, but since Baghat was using terrorist techniques, any serious intervention would have compromised his non-violence policies.

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi marginalized SB Bose.

My viewpoint: Bose had swung too far to the radical left, and was hurting the Congress Party’s unity and efforts to peacefully liberate the country.

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi is responsible for the creation of Pakistan.

My viewpoint: Pakistan was going to happen one way or another, and there was little Gandhi could do to stop it.

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi had a big-head by people constantly calling him Mahatma, so he couldn’t be bothered with other people’s opinions.

My viewpoint: Gandhi believed in a moral principle, and his unyielding belief in this principle is what drove him, not egoism.

BF’s viewpoint: Gandhi was a fool for halting the non-cooperation campaign in 1919 (?)

My viewpoint: I sort of agree that there wasn’t a need to halt it. Perhaps a little overzealous on Gandhi’s part, but everyone’s human.

I really don’t want this debate to degenerate into name-calling or anything like that. I am looking for factual events that either back up my viewpoint or my BF’s. Thanks for your help, and I hope I haven’t started anything that’s going to be too problematic.

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Excellent OP, BrightNShiny. I hope you get some good response from people more knowledgeable of the specifics than I am. For my part, I think your boyfriend has a perception of Gandhi which is colored more by events subsequent to Gandhi’s death than by events during his lifetime. This is forgiveable, as it’s almost a given that all of us perceive historical figures through modern lenses; however, even with as cursory a knowledge of the history as mine, it’s difficult either to question Gandhi’s political astuteness or to dispute the moral authority which the nonviolent resistance garnered his efforts to “be the change” he wanted in the world.

Your friend on the one hand denies the effectiveness of Gandhi’s movement in the eventual withdrawal of the British, yet on the other hand assigns responsibility to Gandhi for the failures of radicalism and terrorism to effect that withdrawal, and even for the final partitioning of British India and creation of Pakistan. You might ask BF how much influence he thinks the 300 years of British “divide and rule” policy had to do with the eventual appearance of the Muslim League and the political necessity this forced for creation of a separate Muslim state as a prerequisite (in the eyes of Great Britain and much of the world) for Indian independence.

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Hi BNS: I think xeno is right in saying that a lot of current anti-Gandhi criticism is the product of 20/20 hindsight, not a historically informed assessment of what the options were at the time. What exactly does your BF think that Gandhi ought to have done instead of what he did?

Gandhi was a fool for halting the non-cooperation campaign in 1919 (?)

Are you referring to the cancellation of the Bardoli civil disobedience campaign in February of 1922 after the Chauri Chaura riot where 22 policemen were killed? Given that the riot arose out of a clash between the police and an originally nonviolent procession in the non-cooperation campaign, I think Gandhi’s fears might have been justified. Perhaps, if the campaign had continued, participants elsewhere might have done a better job of preserving its nonviolent character, and it would have been a successful nationwide campaign of civil disobedience. On the other hand, suppose his continuing the campaign had been interpreted as a tacit acceptance of its decay into violence? Suppose the whole thing had spiraled into endemic violent rebellion and repression in a cycle that even the Mahatma’s authority couldn’t control?

Then British rule would probably have been prolonged even further and been even more oppressive, and carpers like your BF would now be complaining that Gandhi egotistically sought to promote his own power by pushing ahead with his non-cooperation campaign even after it was demonstrated that he couldn’t control its violence. As it was, Gandhi sent a clear signal to his followers that when he said “non-violent” he really meant “non-violent”, and he was able to launch more successful campaigns of non-cooperation later.

As for Gandhi’s personal motivations, I think they are shown much more clearly by his own writings and those of people who knew him than by anything I could say. Yes, he was firm in his opinions—an extremely stubborn man, in fact—and had little use for compromise. But I think anyone who ascribes his actions more to personal vanity than to devotion to principle simply knows very little about him.

All major historical figures who receive a great deal of admiration during their careers go through a certain amount of “debunking” after they’re dead or otherwise sidelined, and in some respects that’s a positive thing. However, attempts to classify someone like Gandhi as a mere “egoist” smack more of political ax-grinding than of healthy historical even-handedness. Antagonism toward Gandhi today is often a feature of militant “Hindutva”-type groups (unsurprisingly, since it was one of their number who assassinated him). Does your BF also believe, say, that Muslims in the second millennium “destroyed” “Hindu culture”, or that political secularism is merely a remnant of western imperialism? If so, I’m afraid you’re not likely to have much success in telling him anything he doesn’t want to hear, no matter how reasonable and factually accurate.

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I’ve read in several books that Gandhi ordered the destruction of statues, books, carvings, etc, that depicted homosexuality or amibiguous genders. When I first came across it, I didn’t believe it, but I’ve seen it mentioned far too many times to dismiss it out of hand.

I think the truth in the matter lies in a combination of the two extremes.

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Well, why can’t a man be BOTH a Great Soul and an egotist? A hero AND an oddball? An idealist AND a bit of a hypocrite?

In the wake of the movie “Gandhi,” a tedious whitewash that all but canonized Gandhi, conservative film critic Richard Grenier put out a short book called “The Gandhi Nobody Knows.” Grenier’s take was that Gandhi was a charismatic weirdo who constantly contradicted himself, and whose philosophy would lead to the triumph of evil.

Grenier was being unfairly harsh, but I think he did so because he felt he HAD to- that Gandhi’s post-Attenborough image was so saintly, he had no choice but to point out all of Gandhi’s faults, just to get people to realize that there WERE faults.

Gandhi WAS a great man who accomplished much, but he was also a fruitcake who wrote volumes (quite literally!) about bowel movements and constipation (it was something of an obsession with him). He also let his ideals lead him to insane conclusions- as when he suggested the Jews of Europe should have protested the Holocaust by committing mass suicide.

My conclusion: the OP and her boyfriend both have a point.

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astorian: Gandhi WAS a great man who accomplished much, but he was also a fruitcake who wrote volumes (quite literally!) about bowel movements and constipation (it was something of an obsession with him).

“Fruitcake”? Because he constantly monitored the health effects of his various vegetarian/vegan diet experiments and wrote about the results? Recollect that Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence also included—in fact, to some extent originated in—an absolute commitment to vegetarianism, in an era when most of the “civilized” world regarded a vegetarian diet as a bizarre and dangerous, if not positively suicidal, embrace of malnutrition. Gandhi was convinced that vegetarianism could, on the contrary, be healthy for anybody in any climate. He was to some extent obsessed with issues of nutrition and health for vegetarians/vegans (he experimented with abstinence from dairy products but lamented that he couldn’t seem to keep well without them), and he wrote very candidly about the physiological details involved, not only for digestion and elimination but for even more “taboo” subjects like sexual impulses. And, naturally, he had some notions that haven’t been borne out by modern medical science. But I think we need not confuse his deep interest in these topics with being a “fruitcake”.

He also let his ideals lead him to insane conclusions- as when he suggested the Jews of Europe should have protested the Holocaust by committing mass suicide.

Again, I think it’s instructive to look at the details of what Gandhi actually said. He certainly did not have any “insane” or unrealistic confidence in the immediate effectiveness of non-violence, and he did not think that self-immolation by the Jews would have magically changed the Nazis’ policies. In Gandhi’s own words from 1938,

That may be hyper-idealistic, but I don’t see anything “insane” about it: it’s the rational and logical conclusion of the premise that oppression must be resisted non-violently, and that heroic opposition is more important than survival. (He took some severe flack for his condemnation of Germany from the Nazi press, btw, including threats of reprisals against India, and didn’t back down.) Gandhi was also quite understanding of and sympathetic towards those who didn’t share his belief. In response to a critique of his opinion in New York’s Jewish Frontier, he said,

Yes, even the great have faults, and someone can be both an idealistic hero and egotistical. But I think we are misinterpreting Gandhi if we try to somehow “balance” his virtues and his flaws, or to think that they somehow contradict each other. Many of Gandhi’s views changed over time (e.g., his initial acceptance of “natural” racial hierarchy and the caste system), and many of his ideas seem strange to us, but his beliefs at any given stage were extraordinarily unified and consistent.

Words like “insane” and “fruitcake” seem to me to carry connotations of cognitive dissonance and lack of self-awareness. Gandhi, weird though his conclusions may sound to us in many ways, was probably one of the most thoroughly cognitively integrated individuals the world has ever seen.

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Thanks for all the responses.

Kimstu: *Are you referring to the cancellation of the Bardoli civil disobedience campaign in February of 1922 after the Chauri Chaura riot where 22 policemen were killed? *

Yes. That’s the incident I meant. I should have looked the date up. And thanks for the link too. Now, I’m beginning to understand why he did it and why people think he shouldn’t have done it. I myself now think it was the correct and actually a very brave thing to do - stopping the country in its tracks before it headed off in the wrong direction. I think my BF’s take on this incident is that it was provoked by the police and therefore was a justified attack. But, that is completely contrary to the principle of non-violence, since just about everything the British did in India was a provocation at that point. If Gandhi had even hinted that this outbreak of violence was tolerable, then there could have easily been an outbreak of violence at every protest or demonstration.

Kimstu: *Does your BF also believe, say, that Muslims in the second millennium “destroyed” “Hindu culture”, or that political secularism is merely a remnant of western imperialism? *

Actually, my BF is not very religious at all (I’m by far the more religious one), and he doesn’t really have a problem with Muslims, so that’s not the case here. His problems with Gandhi aren’t of a fundamentalist-Hindu nature, they’re political.

xenophon41: You might ask BF how much influence he thinks the 300 years of British “divide and rule” policy had to do with the eventual appearance of the Muslim League and the political necessity this forced for creation of a separate Muslim state as a prerequisite (in the eyes of Great Britain and much of the world) for Indian independence.

Here, I think my BF’s stance is that Gandhi’s hegemonic control of the Congress Party marginalized Jinnah (just as it did Bose). My BF feels that the Muslims were afraid of how they would fare in a Hindu-dominated India, and Gandhi wouldn’t consider alternate proposals for semi-autonomy to adress these concerns.

I, myself, think that Jinnah probably had genuine concerns, but also wanted power, and that he knew that he wouldn’t be able to have much power in a Congress dominated post-British India. The British fed into this, thinking their divide-and-rule policy would continue to allow them to maintain control, but it backfired.

**ava: ***I’ve read in several books that Gandhi ordered the destruction of statues, books, carvings, etc, that depicted homosexuality or amibiguous genders. *

I’d be interested to hear more about his. My BF and I are gay, so maybe that’s where some of his hostility stems from, although he’s never mentioned this aspect.

Thanks for all your responses.

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Kimstu
You have done an excellent job refuting the notions that Gandhi was a egoist and a nutjob.

One has to read his autobiography and fully follow and understand his Life to see how extraordinarily consistent, and humane his ideas were. In the context of his dietary suggestions, how many have the courage to experiment rigorously on their own body for years together? His “obsession” stems from the POV that basic human needs such as food, clothing, sex etc were not for titillation. This POV was part of how he regarded Life, which does encompass one’s physical habits, as a spiritual quest.

The Gandhi-bashing that is going in India can be traced to the meteoric rise of militant Hindu nationalism that views Gandhi’s humane and secular notions, which embraced Islam, and his perpetual fight for religious unity, as virulent. It is not a co-incidence that the same people adore Bose who wanted to overthrow the British through military means because crudely put, that serves as a potent phallic symbol for Hindu power. It is also not a co-incidence that the people who devise and propagate wrong theories and notions about Gandhi are in fact from the same intellectual sewer that produces “academics” who seek to revise Indian history in multiple ways, such as painting Muslim invaders as savages who ruined India, and claiming that there was never any “Aryan” migration into India (the latter however is still a controversial issue).

IMHO, the false theories about Gandhi attracts the attention of youth as it gives them some satisfaction in rebelling against the Gandhi-is-a-God idolization that otherwise existed in Indian society. It could be that your BF belongs to this category. The best way to clear the air is to challenge him to back up his claims. Apart from resorting to propaganda from the Hindu fanatical groups, I am afraid he would have nowhere else to go.

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Yes. That’s the incident I meant. I should have looked the date up. And thanks for the link too. Now, I’m beginning to understand why he did it and why people think he shouldn’t have done it. I myself now think it was the correct and actually a very brave thing to do - stopping the country in its tracks before it headed off in the wrong direction. I think my BF’s take on this incident is that it was provoked by the police and therefore was a justified attack. But, that is completely contrary to the principle of non-violence, since just about everything the British did in India was a provocation at that point. If Gandhi had even hinted that this outbreak of violence was tolerable, then there could have easily been an outbreak of violence at every protest or demonstration.

— Exactly. One cannot condone ANY outbreak of violence when relying on the philosophy of non-violence. The philosophy literally called for turning the other cheek.

Kimstu: Does your BF also believe, say, that Muslims in the second millennium “destroyed” “Hindu culture”, or that political secularism is merely a remnant of western imperialism?

Actually, my BF is not very religious at all (I’m by far the more religious one), and he doesn’t really have a problem with Muslims, so that’s not the case here. His problems with Gandhi aren’t of a fundamentalist-Hindu nature, they’re political.

—Read my post above. It could be a fascination with “anti-establishment” notions. (I have had many myself and still have some!). Alternately, your BF could find Gandhi’s philosophy impractical and weak. It is extremely hard to believe that not responding to an attack is not a sign of weakness.

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BNS replied to ava: *“I’ve read in several books that Gandhi ordered the destruction of statues, books, carvings, etc, that depicted homosexuality or amibiguous genders.”

I’d be interested to hear more about [this].*

Sounds like a rather inflated account of Gandhi’s initial approval of the intent of some ascetically-minded group to destroy the erotic carvings on medieval temples at Khajuraho—not just ones depicting homosexuality or gender ambiguity, by the way. Gandhi had extremely strict ideals of sexual and religious purity, and thought that erotic temple statues degraded the holiness of divine worship. However, he was persuaded to change his mind by his friend and “Gurudev”, the renowned poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the erotic carvings were left intact.

Whatever Gandhi’s views on homosexuality in the abstract may have been (and I have never seen a reference to them, so I don’t know), they did not prevent his having a lifelong friendship with the reportedly-gay English clergyman, C. F. Andrews. Tell your BF to put that in his pipe and smoke it. :slight_smile: (Glad to hear, though, that his views are not in fact stemming from doctrinaire Hindutva-think.)

& thanks for the good word, litost!

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Yesterday, just to drive my BF crazy, I told him that Gandhi was the incarnation of Dharma. Heh.

Seriously, though, I don’t want to just dismiss his thoughts as youthful rebellion, uninformed, or Hindutva-think. He’s intelligent, he’s just not good with logical debating style.

The thing I’m curious about now is this Baghat Singh issue, because it came up again last night. All my history books just briefly touch on this matter. What exactly were Gandhi’s options in this case? Could he really have stopped the execution? Did he even consider it?

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Here’s a passage from Gandhi regarding Bhagat Singh. I offer at a source for discussion only, since I am by no means knowledgeable enough to have an opinion of what Gandhi’s chances were to prevent Singh’s execution.