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NATIONAL IDENTITY FOR AN
ALTERNATIVE FUTURE
MIRA SINHA BHATTACHARJEA
By Way of Explanation
M.K. Gandhi and Mao Zedong
continue to be highly controversial political figures even decades after they
have faded away from the political scene. Questions of a fundamental nature
regarding their political roles and philosophies still surround them. For
instance: Was Gandhi a saint, a religious and ethical teacher, or a wily
politician? Was he really an uncompromising opponent of modernity? Was Mao
more Chinese, less Marxist? Did his “thought” contribute to the relevance and
enrichment of Marxism in the changed world of the 20th century? Or was it a
denial of ideological fundamentals? Did their philosophies and praxis have
significance beyond the historical time and the national space in which they
lived and worked? It is therefore necessary to begin by outlining my approach
to an understanding of these two men as well as the whole integrated complex
of thought and action that together constitute, the historical role they
played.
I regard Gandhi and Mao as the
most outstanding of the many remarkable men that Asia, and perhaps the world,
has known in this century. The ideas they advocated and the methods they used
were unique and novel. They cannot be appreciated in their fullness if they
are located within the narrow confines of the nation, its culture and
history, or even of the spiritual knowledge and intellectual traditions on
which they drew. The historical context in which they functioned was of
course, national. But, what they opposed and the objectives they set for
their national struggles were global and holistic. To explain: Both men
struggled against and rejected not merely the colonizing or invading power (Britain
for Gandhi and Japan for Mao) but the system as each perceived it that these
powers represented. This was western civilization, industrialization or
modernisation as Gandhi termed it. Or, imperialism, colonialism and
capitalism, as Mao called it. The phenomenon both opposed was, to put it
loosely, the West.
Although Gandhi and Mao
approached this phenomenon from widely different if not mutually hostile
perspectives, both understood it as being exploitative, oppressive, violent and
dehumanizing. Both also perceived the West (qua system) as rapidly becoming
hegemonic across the globe, ready to draw in all post-colonial newly
independent nations. This was the only and seemingly inevitable future for
all nations, including their own, which they rejected. It was, however, a
desirable and tempting future for many, replete as it was with the promise of
progress, modernity, and national strength. Gandhi and Mao advocated instead,
a value-centred alternative future, and experimented with new type political
and economic institutions and social relationship as interrelated parts of an
equally holistic and integrated system. Neither, however, specially Gandhi,
had a road map or detailed blue print of the alternative future. For Mao,
there was the example of the Soviet Union which, however, he did not follow,
and which, in later years, he treated as a “negative” not positive example.
Both men, I argue, perceived
their national political circumstances in essentially similar ways. One was
that the challenge of the West qua system, confronted the nation in both the
outer (external) and inner (domestic) spheres of national life. This in turn
dictated the dual objectives that each set for his national struggle:
independent statehood, and an end of the dominant-subordinate equation that
characterized the colonizing/aggressor power and the nation in the outer
sphere. And, in the inner sphere, the objective was to catch up with
modernity and the modem world. In the 20th century modernity, it can be argued,
was a historical necessity and not a matter of choice specially for large
entities like India and China. To these objectives that were common to
all newly independent countries, Gandhi and Mao added the objective of
guiding the country towards rejecting the West and envisaging an alternative
future.
The other was the national
condition of India and China. The two countries were continental in size and
population, with a diversity of nationalities, religions and, in India,
languages They were rural, poor and in the main, pre-modern in every aspect
of national life, including an underdeveloped sense of the national self in
modern political terms.
It was towards these ends that
the two leaders aroused a proud and self-reliant nationalism among the
masses, and used a political idiom that borrowed heavily from popular
tradition and culture. Both based their national struggles on the peasant and
the countryside; gave priority to agriculture; to collective and manual
labour over the machine, whether tractor or factory; to traditional but
improved means of production (the spinning wheel and the hoe). Both also
rejected the intellectual traditions and educational systems of the West as a
package, and borrowed selectively what was useful. Simultaneously, however, both
stressed the need for the masses to acquire features of modernity like
punctuality, efficiency, objectivity, rationality, individual rights and of
course technology.
Gandhi and Mao also, in broadly
similar fashion, attempted to convey a picture of their preferred alternative
societies to the masses. They did so again, in cultural and pre-modern terms.
Gandhi spoke of the future as Rama Rajya and Mao of Tatong. These terms
were invested with radically different content and meaning which, yet again,
was conveyed to the people in startlingly similar ways. For one, the method
of political struggle was itself a teaching/learning experience which, over
the long term, helped generate a new political culture, as did participation
in productive work and, of course, formal instruction. The preferred
mode of conveying the new meaning to the people for both, was personal and
leadership example. It was also perhaps the most effective.
It was towards these ends
within view Gandhi and Mao in fact conceptualised and constructed a
culturally rooted, poor peasant national identity. This contrived identity
not only reflected the national condition, it formed the basis of a new
national unity and the focus of policy. Even more, it contained the seeds of
its evolution over time into a future identity as satyagrahi for Gandhi, and
the proletariat for Mao, appropriate to their envisaged futures. Each
personified this complex identity by his personal identification with his
nation and its poor peasant. At the same time, each also personified the
evolving identity of the satyagrahi or true proletariat immanent in it.
Images are powerful things. The
images of Gandhi and Mao as nationalists and peasant leaders are still
powerful enough to discourage any serious considerations of the universalist
dimension of the national identities they constructed, and of the alternate
systems they advocated not for their nations alone, but for all humankind.
The essay that follows, is a
preliminary attempt at examining how Gandhi and Mao came to construct such
complex national identities and why these identities have been rejected by
both societies.
I
The life and personality of
Mahatma Gandhi were such as to create a series of indelible images each
symbolic of the man, of his political role, and of his larger message. Four
such images are evocative and compelling.
One is of the quiet withdrawn
ascetic working his charkha in deep empathy with the peasant. The second is
of the spindly legged leader, at the head of a ragged band of equally spindly
legged followers, marching to the sea to defy the mighty British Empire, by
the simple mundane act of making salt from sea water. The third is of a
determined, half-naked fakir striding proudly up the steps of Buckingham
Palace. The fourth, is again of a Gandhi working his charkha. But this time,
withdrawn into grey silence in Calcutta, face turned away from the
Independence Day celebrations in Delhi. All four images unmistakably
establish Gandhi’s identity as an Indian, as one of India’s dumb millions.
This is the Gandhi Nehru described in 1944 as “the great peasant, with a
peasant’s out-look on affairs and a peasant’s blindness to some aspects of
life...”1 who nevertheless,
symbolized the nation and awakened it to life, hope and courage.
The last image, for Nehru at
least, was symbolic perhaps of Gandhi’s “peasant blindness” to some aspects
of life, modernity, industrialization and machine magic, which was the
Congress choice in 1947, denying the Gandhian alternative. This last image
conveyed in a manner that words cannot, the depth of Gandhi’s depression over
the Congress decision to accept partition, which for him was an evil and a
“sin” - and the failure of his chosen heir, and of the nation, to walk him
towards swaraj.
All four images convey without
ambivalence, Gandhi’s Indianness, an identity that has never been seriously
questioner either by his political opponents or by his followers. Gandhi was,
in appearance, in dress, in the political vocabulary and in the political
symbols he adopted, as well as in the methods of political action that he
innovated, deeply and rootedly Indian. He was not uncertain of his lndianness
as was Nehru and, in Gandhi’s view, the westernized Indian, “a queer mixture
of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home no where” as Nehru
described himself.2
Yet only the last image conveys
also Gandhi’s universalism in its inability to celebrate only a transfer of
power from British to Indian hands, and the rejection of his alternative
future. This nation-transcending identity however, has never been seriously
examined and explored. On the contrary it has been more often rejected and
denied by locating him exclusively in Hindusim and as a discrete Indian. Yet
Gandhi’s refusal to celebrate independence or to regard it as the end goal of
the struggle he had led, his sojourn in Noakhali and in riot-tom Calcutta,
taken together with his major post-independence activity, testify to his
commitment to the goal of Puma swaraj as an alternative future for all
nations and for humankind as a whole. In short, Gandhi’s identity with all
mankind and indeed with all forms of life, has not been recognised in his own
country. This is ironic for Gandhi’s concern for all forms of life has been
universally acknowledged. Recognition of the universalism of Gandhi’s message
came even during his lifetime - from Leo Tolsoy as early as 1910 and, decades
later, from Albert Einstein who regarded Gandhi “as the only truly great
political figure of our age”. ‘The veneration in which Gandhi has been held
throughout the world” he wrote, “rests on the recognition, for the most part
unconscious, that in our age of moral decay he was the only statesman who
represented that higher conception of human relations in the political sphere
to which we must all aspire with all our powers... It is my belief that the
problem of bringing peace to the world on a supranational basis will be
solved only by employing Gandhi’s methods on a large scale.“3 In later years, Gandhi’s
method of non-violent political revolution inspired movements as varied as
those of Martin Luther King in the US, of Czeck students during the Prague
Spring; of the Vietnamese bonzes; and the Eritrean rebels whose motto was
“Gandhi in one hand and the gun in the other” and even of a section of
Chinese students who demonstrated at Tiananmen in 1989. That Gandhi’s
universalist identity was visible through his Indian idiom in politics is
also affirmed by the number of non-Indians who were drawn to work with him
from his earliest days in South Africa upto his death. Indeed, it is possible
to assert that Gandhi’s identity as a universalist thinker is more relevant
and commanding today than is his identity only as an Indian nationalist.
The same seems to be broadly
true of Mao Zedong the other great Asian personality of this century. Like
Gandhi, the Chinese peasant identity he represented was widely valued and
acknowledged through the years of the national struggle, but has lost its
appeal and relevance in today’s China. But, unlike Gandhi, Mao’s universalist
or Marxist image has also suffered largely because of the collapse of the
communist experiment worldwide. It has, however, still more vitality and
universal appeal than does that of Stalin or even of Lenin.
In Mao’s case however, despite
his deliberate choice of Marxism-Leninism as the fount of his ideas and
practice, his Chineseness was never in doubt. A year after Mao’s death, Wang
Gungwu assessing Mao wrote: “No one surely could mistake Mao for anyone but a
Chinese.”4 Like Gandhi, Mao’s
Chineseness resided in his appearance, in his dress (the blue jacket of the
peasant), his language, in the symbols and methods of political action that
he innovated. And, above all, like Gandhi, it resided in his identification
with the peasant. Unlike Gandhi, Mao’s identity as peasant was more
spontaneous and natural, He came from peasant stock and had not been
denaturalized by western education and culture as had Gandhi. Consequently,
Wang Gungwu observed that “Mao never wasted time worrying about his
Chinese identity or about the decline and fall of Chinese civilization. He
was effortlessly and supremely confident about being Chinese almost the
way Churchill was about being English, and never suffered the agonies
and self doubts, which paralysed so many of his generationan.”5 Mao could therefore, he
said, take a foreign ideology like Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese people “as
if it were the most natural thing for him to do. “6
Again, like Gandhi, since Mao’s
chineseness was never in doubt, its imprint on the borrowed ideology was
proudly acclaimed in the signification of Marxism. In turn, despite Mao’s
self-identification as a Marxist, the seriousness with which he undertook
theoretical explorations and innovative practices of Marxism (and his
deliberate attempts to uproot the Confucian basis of Chinese culture),
provoked wide debate on whether or not Mao was a Marxist. In the late 1980s,
as Sino-Soviet relations worsened, Moscow and the CPSU, as the explicators of
Marxist doctrine, placed Mao firmly in the category of a chauvinist Chinese with
a feudal mentality thus challenging his Marxist identity, “Mao thought” was
condemned as being parochial, as having no universalist theories, by Soviet
theoreticians. Within China, Mao’s post-1958 Marxist innovations were
condemned by his domestic political opponents as “mistakes” having no
relevance to Marxism or to China or to its economic development. The tragic
Cultural Revolution was Mao’s last attempt to revitalise the struggle for
liberation at least within China, and to put the Chinese and world revolution
back on the right tracks. If Gandhi turned his back on the achievement of
independent statehood for India in August 1947, and even on the Congress
Party a few months later by advising it to disband itself, then Mao, it may
be said, turned his back on all the achievements of the Chinese Communist
Party and the Chinese state over some 35 years, by calling upon the people to
“Bombard the Headquarters” at the start of the Cultural Revolution.
Like Gandhi, Mao, it seems, was
prepared to plough a lonely furrow, to risk sacrificing the political future
of China, if necessary, for the cause of making revolution world wide.
As political leaders and
thinkers, Gandhi and Mao had dual objectives, dual concerns and they
followed, therefore, dual strategies. They walked politically, to borrow a
Maoist phrase, on two legs. Gandhi’s striving throughout his life, was to
seek and “do truth”, just as Mao’s was to pursue his socialist truth and, in
like manner, to “do socialism”, or in his words to “make revolution”. For
both each individual act and policy therefore had to be illumined by, and
reflect this search. Each act had also to contain the seed or the germ of its
own enlargement into an ever higher dimension of “truthful” (for Gandhi) and
“revolutionary” (for Mao) life, that would lead to the desired future. Few,
if any, of their acts were finite or limited in purpose, meaning and symbolic
significance. It would however be incorrect to assume that the two great
leaders began with the gift of certitude about the desired future. Instead,
each acknowledged the experimental and tentative nature of his search and of
his truth and liberating action. The only certitude both had was that of what
should not be. For Gandhi this was what he variously termed as modern, western
or industrial civilization best epitomized in Imperial Britain and its
political, social and economic institutions. For Mao it was “capitalism” best
epitomized in western imperialism, and after World War II, in the United
States and its social and economic institutions. It is important to emphasize
here, that both Gandhi and Mao were opposed to the systems that colonialism
and imperialism represented not merely to the country that was the nation’s
imperialist enemy i.e., to British colonisation of India or to Japanese
aggression in China. For both it was not the British and Japanese nation or
people that was the enemy or the other. It was their system and the values
and policies it advocated and adopted. The fact of colonisation and
aggression only provided the occasion, the external condition, and the basis
for invigorating their oppressed countrymen into collective struggle for
national independence as the first major step towards the higher goal of
swaraj or socialism. Thus from the earliest their separate political activity
was conducted at two distinct levels of objectives, method and organisation.
The one, independence, was limited in time to the short run, and in space,
only to the nation. The other, namely swaraj or socialism, extended into
epochal time and encompassed all of humankind.
On his return to India, Gandhi
worked through the Indian National Congress and its leaders for political
independence from British rule. It was for the attainment of this objective
that he was to name Jawaharlal Nehru as his heir, in acknowledgement of
Nehru’s national standing. Mao, in Yanan, was as unaware of Gandhi’s
political thought and action, as Gandhi was unaware of his. The two great
leaders were distant neighbours. But, in 1937 when the second united front with
the KMT was formed, Mao like Gandhi, also worked for China’s national
liberation from Japanese aggression through the KMT and its leader, Chiang
Kai-shek, acknowledging thereby the national following that Chiang could
command. Both, as history and even their successor regimes testify, were
successful in the way they worked this strategy. In 1947 India and in 1949
China emerged into nationhood and independence. India’s post-independence
leaders acknowledged Gandhi’s contribution and leadership gratefully, and
en-shrined im as the father of the nation. In China, after the death of Mao,
Deng Xiaoping and his comrades continued to praise Mao for his leadership of
the national liberation movement, even as they proceeded to diminish his
Marxist contributions.
Both leaders were at that time
and for a considerable time thereafter, minor or side currents within the
mainstream of the national movements of their countries and within, as it
were, their parent parties, the Congress and the KMT. Both however, honed and
trained their own corps of followers distinct from what I have called their
parent parties: Gandhi, through his constructive programme trained satyarahis
and Mao, in Yanan, trained and disciplined the communist party. These were
their “troop in the struggle for the higher goal of swaraj for Gandhi and
socialism for Mao. For both leaders, however, there could be no sharp divide
between the two broad goals. It would be incorrect therefore to describe them
as first stage and second stage goals. Instead they were for both Gandhi and
Mao, umbilically linked parts or aspects of a whole. To explain: It was said
earlier that or both men each individual act even in the struggle for
independence contained the seed or the germ of its own enlargement into ever
higher dimensions of swarajist or socialist life. Thus the method, the
programme and the leadership of the movement or the attainment of political
independence were to be the womb and guarantors of this later enlargement.
For Gandhi the effort as to transform the Congress from within, to
commit it to the use of “truthful and non-violent means, and to the service
of the dumb semi-starved millions who inhabited India’s 700,000 villages.
Towards this end, he tried to transform the Congress by giving t a mass
(peasant) base, a four anna membership, as well as khadi, the livery of the
empowered poor, and to have the Congress employ Hindustani instead of
English, and make it the common language of the people.
That was in 1920 when the
special session of the Congress held in Calcutta, which seemed to usher in a
Gandhi era in Indian politics. Writing his Autobiography, Nehru recalled
how “the whole look of the Congress changed; European clothes vanished
and soon only khadi was to be seen… the language used became
increasingly Hindustani... and there was a growing prejudice against
using a foreign language in our national work, and a new life and enthusiam
and earnestness became evident in Congress gatherings.7 It was then that Congress
and with it, India, adopted the Indian identity that Gandhi had so carefully
constructed, and made it their own. Two years later violence broke out at
Chauri Chaura. This and many other happenings made Gandhi realize that
neither Congress nor its leaders like Nehru had been converted to his
philosophy of non-violence, that the majority were uncomfortable with the
identity he had created. It seemed likely then that they would not share in
the struggle and sacrifice for puma swaraj. Gandhi then
withdrew organisationally from the Congress to train his satyagrahis for
carrying the struggle beyond independence to swaraj with, without, or even
against an untransformable Congress. Nevertheless Gandhi continued to work
with the Congress and to influence its decisions in the direction of adopting
only non-violent methods of struggle even if it did not accept his
philosophy, and towards a compromise form of system that he called
“parliamentary swan However, the manner in which independence was finally
accepted by Congress, namely its voluntary acceptance of the
partition of India on religious grounds, destroyed that identity and unity of
the Indian nation and the Indian people which he had so deliberately
constructed and of which he had made himself the living symbol.
II
Gandhi’s own Indian identity
was slow to evolve. The process began when he was a young boy, and reached
its loin cloth, sandalled image only in middle age. As a child he ate
the forbidden meat because, as he confessed in his autobiography, “he wished
to be strong and daring and wanted my countrymen a/so to be
such, so that we might defeat the English and make India free.”8 Little is known of his
childhood experiences to explain this early sense of nationalism, of country
and nation. We may safely presume that political nationalism was in the
Indian air, as it were, as was its corollary, the urge for political freedom
The Englishman in his strength and stature (five cubits tall), remained the
model for the young nationalist to emulate. This was further reinforced
in London when he encountered the resident British and found them to be
highly principled and tolerant. So Gandhi’s first response was to become “a
proper Englishman” in dress, in manners and in accomplishments. Yet he
remained a hungry vegetarian for he had vowed, under maternal pressure, not
to eat meat. Vegetarianism however soon became a matter of faith and belief for
Gandhi began to redefine the meaning of strength. In articles that he wrote
for the Vegetarian he set out to prove that Indians, though vegetarians, were
“as strong, if not stronger than Indian meat eaters and for that matter, even
Englishman ....”9 He also abandoned the
attempt to become a fancy English gentleman and began to advocate the virtues
of simplicity and frugality. Gandhi’s ideal type from then on was that of a
strong sturdy vegetarian “shepherd: who led an outdoor life in harmony with
nature. Where Gandhi derived this idea from is not known. Just as I have been
unable to explain why, suddenly, Gandhi became aware of salt as a heavily
taxed article, a burden on the poor millions of India, and therefore an act
and a symbol of the great injustice of colonialism and of the ruling British.
Gandhi never lost sight of these ideas, Rather, they came to provide the
first rough sketch of the Indian identity that he was to conceptualise, construct,
and assume over the coming years in South Africa and complete in India.
His years in London were
evidently a period when Gandhi experienced deep confusion about his identity,
and what it meant to be an Indian. This was also the period in which he
became aware of his ignorance and of his very limited knowledge of
things Indian. Thus, when asked by Quaker friends to compare the English
version of the Gita with the original, he was ashamed at having to confess
that he was neither familiar with its text, nor could he read Sanskrit. In
similar fashion, it was a Conservative member of Parliament whose advice led
him to read Indian history and to familiarise’ himself with Indian customs
before he began to practise law in India. It was also in London that Gandhi
discovered religion and was strongly drawn towards Christianity. He joined
the Theosophical Society but resisted conversion on the plea of his ignorance
about the religion into which he had been born. It was perhaps only a deep
innate sense of national pride that precluded him from being converted. Thus
began his search for his Indian roots, and a discovery of India quite unlike
that of Nehru, for it was more an exploration of the meaning of India and of
being Indian.
This exploration took the form
of learning about Hindu, not historical India; of studying not his provincial
language, but Sanskrit, the classical language ‘of India and of its great
philosophical writings; of finding a way to live and practise law, ethically
and honestly. He returned to India a compulsive social reformer, beginning
first with his own family. He introduced all manner of reform -- though still
on western lines - including physical exercise, dietary changes, the wearing
of shoes and of European instead of Indian dress and so on. Unable to
compromise with the moral corruption he saw all around him, and even in the
profession that was supposed to ensure justice, he failed miserably as a
lawyer. His only success was to draft a memorial for a poor Muslim farmer
whose land had been confiscated, for which he charged no fee. Nevertheless
the debts he had accumulated had to be met, so Gandhi escaped to South Africa
when the opportunity arose.
In South Africa, Gandhi’s life
was scan dominated by the world of politics, and the relationship between
imperial Britain and its subjects. I have said elsewhere that he experienced
South Africa in that he reacted with deep humiliation to racial
discrimination as its social practice and its official policy. Even the rich
established traders of Durban did not, he found, react to ‘conditions which
implied grave insult” because, as Gandhi observed, “they did not mind such
things being habituated to them.”10 Gandhi had arrived in
South Africa when anti-Indian feeling was on the rise and the law described
the Hindus as ‘semi-barbarous Asiatics or persons belonging to the
uncivilized races of Asia, who were therefore not legally entitled to the
rights enjoyed by the “civilized”11 The worst sufferers were
the Hindus, the only Indian group to be called “Asiatics”. The Mussalmans,
though Indian, declared themselves to be Arabs, the Parsees claimed to be
Persians, and the Indian converts (who were largely waiters), to be
Christian, and were therefore not, by legal definition, “Asiatics” and
uncivilized. Only the Hindu was called a “coolie”, with all what that
term denoted. Gandhi, to his distress discovered that there was no ‘Indian”
community, for none of the 150,000 Indians in Natal, was aware of his
identity as an Indian.
Gandhi had gone to South Africa
only on a year’s contract and was reluctant to undertake practical action to
rectify this state of affairs. Nevertheless, he used his time to investigate
the Indian condition in South Africa and to impress upon the traders the
gravity of the problem as he saw it. He also wrote letters to the newspapers
to establish insult, to protest insult to the traders, and to create a sympathetic
public opinion by appealing to the much admired British system of justice and
to Christian values. he also advised the traders to organise themselves. And,
when his farewell party turned into a working committee meeting because of
the proposed government move to defranchise even the propertied traders,
Gandhi decided to stay on and to fight.
As Gandhi constructed the
problem, he perceived it to be principally one of identity. Many years later
at his famous trial in Ahmedabad, Gandhi would say that it was in South
Africa that he discovered that as a man and an Indian he had no rights. “More
correctly I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an
Indian.”12 The identity imposed on
them, that Gandhi felt had to be rejected by those of Indian origin, was that
of the Hindu as coolie who was by legal definition therefore, uncivilised.
Even Gandhi himself, respected in London and Bombay, was regarded as a coolie,
being Hindu, though he was a lawyer trained at the inner
Temple. Gandhi therefore swiftly drew up a strategy of petitions to the Natal
Legislative Assembly and to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in
London. The very first petition rejected the coolie identity and claimed a
new identity for all Indians. It began with the sentence “Your petitioners
are British subjects”. This phrasing placed all Indians as
British subjects, under British protection even from Natal’s colonial
legislation. The sanction for claiming this identity was derived from the
Queen’s Proclamation of 1885 which promised “our subjects, of whatever race
or creed be freely and impartially admitted to office in our
service....” Indians in South Africa, Gandhi argued, were first subjects of
the British Empire because the Indians of India were its subjects, and were
as such resident in South Africa. Gandhi was to convert this claimed identity
into a statement of political fact not open to infringement or compromise.
This petition, according to Gandhi, sowed “the seed of the fight for national
self respect”13 of the despised Hindu and
Indian in far away South Africa.
His activity thereafter took on
that rounded character so characteristic of all Gandhi’s political action. He
used this identity to fuse the divided, apathetic and demoralised
Indians, into a self aware and united community. He built ties between this
new community and India as the mother country; and made both the Congress and
the British Indian government aware of his struggle against what he called
“national injustice”. Simultaneously he insisted that the Indians as
British subjects, should demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown, and as
Indians, should organise themselves. So the Natal Indian Congress was
established and the rich traders became its mainstay, the Christians its
translators and the indentured labourers, the only real coolies, its mass
base. Under his direction, the Natal Indian Congress became a “teaching
shop.” Its members learnt to speak up, to question, to participate in
discussion and decision making. They were introduced to Indian history and
culture to counter the charge of being uncivilized, and were educated in
election procedures, hygiene, sanitation, keeping accounts, recording
proceedings and punctuality. In short, the members were being forged slowly
but deliberately into a modem Indian community united across
religion, language, social status and caste. And, when famine broke out in
India, the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) collected donations for “the starving
poor” in India, thus forging links with the motherland. Gandhi also committed
the NIC meaning the rich traders, to serve and support “the poor and the
helpless” meaning the indentured labourers or coolies, with whom they had
little in common. This was perhaps his first experiment with political
trusteeship. A few years later, when the strategy of petitions needed to
be strengthened with more direct political action, the wealthy traders would
become “coolies.” The sold vegetables from door to door, like coolies, in
support of the indentured. Later, Gandhi would lead his long march of the
indentured to defy the Transvaal laws, dressed in the loongi of the coolie,
the identity he was now ready to assume.
During his stay in South
Africa, Gandhi returned to India several times. In 1902 he attended the
Congress session at Calcutta. Each visit seemed to confirm the extreme degree
of alienation of the Indian, particularly the educated Indian, from his
cultural and religious roots. The dirt and filth he saw all around seemed to
him to symbolize the extent to which Indians had lost both national and
personal self respect. He was disappointed at the manner of functioning of
the Congress, at the lack of seriousness and of debate, the disinterest of
the only national party in the plight of the South African Indians, and so
on. Each time on his return to South Africa, he tried to ensure that the NIC
would not develop on the same lines, or function as India National Congress
did.
Almost exactly a century ago,
in 1894, Gandhi began an intensive search for the Indian identity that was to
lead him back to Hinduism. There was a certain deliberateness about his
pursuit of this interest, for Hinduism did, not at that time, influence or
form an important part of Gandhi’s personal life nor of his public and
political life. He made the Gita his book of daily reading, but not as
prayer. Instead, Gandhi sought in it a way to integrate personal morality
with social and political morality and found this to lie in its emphasis on
duty. This exploration into Hinduism was, for Gandhi, both a personal and a
political exploration in search of his own identity as an Indian and that of
India as a nation. For Gandhi there could be no divide or distinction between
the India he represented in his person and the Indian nation which he sought
to identify in contemporary terms. The interface that he sought between his
inner and his outer lives, came about through his own interpretation of
Hinduism and of the Gita.
In his private life Gandhi
sought to do his duty. He assumed responsibility for all his actions and for
those of his followers; discovered what he called the “true” practice of law
and later of journalism; began to dispossess himself of worldly material good
including a petty life insurance; took the vow of sexual
abstinence; and experimented through political organizations and the
farms he founded to live the alternative life style, “the life of the tiller
of the soil and the handicraftsman”. His, it will be recalled, was the model
of the strong Indian, that he had advocated as a student in London. His
public life rested on unpaid service to the community; on invoking God - as
morality not religion, to bind the multi-religious Indian community to its
vows and promises; on transforming all organisations he created into
institutions based on service to the most needy and deprived; to make
trusteeship the commanding principle; and above all to make the various
groups of Muslims, Parsees, Hindus and Christians aware of a single
shared identity, as Indians. And, as Indians, to empower them to struggle
against the prevailing racial injustice through what I have called
elsewhere, “truth action”. These developments both resulted from and resulted
in a growing disenchantment with western/English/modern/industrial
civilization, which reached its apogee in the years from 1908-1909. It was
expressed in a small booklet that he wrote hurriedly on his voyage back to
India, called Hind Swaraj.
Gandhi’s years in South Africa
were years of intense learning and unlearning, of experiment in the
individual ‘and collective practice of his moral and political philosophy, in
the shape of truth action” or sahlaaraha. In the Drocess. he borrowed from
the counter currents of western thought particularly from Tolstoy, Ruskin and
Thoreau, as well as from the leaders of the Indian national movement.
However, Gandhi acknowledged no religion, no ideology and no guru as his own.
Only Gokhale came close to being his mentor but even then Gandhi made his
differences with Gokhale quite evident. By the time he returned to India in
1915, Gandhi had adopted an identity for himself and constructed one for
India that bore little resemblance to any identity advocated by other Indian
leaders. The Ramarajya he invoked was a national construct not a historical
fact. It symbolized swaraj a society based on truth and truth-action, on
nonviolence, high personal morality, and a commitment to selfless service.
This society, as Gandhi envisaged it, would be comprised of free individuals
(satyagrahis) able to act individually against injustice, who contributed
their labour and who, above all, were in harmony with nature and all living
things, willing to die rather than compromise with untruth and violence. In
brief, what Gandhi did was to construct a revolutionary identity for India
and the Indian, which would convey the essence of its long civilization, the
realities of India as it struggled against colonisation and subjugation, and
the India that he would like it to become.
Gandhi derived this national
identity from two sources. One was his unfolding understanding of the external
condition, that is of the world of politics dominated, as he saw it, by
British power and western civilization. As this understanding was enlarged by
his experience of oppression, injustice, racialism and, above all, by
Christian hypocrisy, the identity he constructed comprised all its
dialectical opposites. It was displayed in 1930, in Gandhi’s most perfect
act, the Dandi March, that symbolically pitted the unarmed, hungry, oppressed
but courageous peasant, against the armed and rapacious British lion. It was
as backdrop to this act that Gandhi had announced his disillusionment with
British imperial principles and policies and his metamorphosis into a
non-violent non-cooperative west-rejecting rebel and nationalist, at his
trial in 1922. Political independence and swaraj became his, declared goals,
long before the Congress resolved to demand independence, not dominion status
in 1930.
The second source of the
identity that Gandhi constructed for India, was his perception of the
domestic Indian reality, its dominant Hindu culture and its Hindu majority,
its communal, and provincial divides; its diversity of language and custom,
the excrescence of the caste system and of untouchability, its moral decay,
its apathy, its cowardice and its loss of a sense of self. The recovery of
the Indian self became his principal objective for which he provided an image
and identity that bypassed the western educated Indian to extol the peasant
still untouched by western civilization. His economics and his emphasis on rural
development too were derived from his perception of the Indian reality, “The
economics and civilization of a country, where the pressure of population on
land is greatest, are and must be different from those of a country where the
pressure is least. Sparsely populated, America may have need of machinery.
India may not need it at all. Where there are millions upon millions of units
of idle labour, it is no use thinking of labour-saving devices.”14
This composite national
identity was not a past or present reality, It was both Gandhi’s preferred or
reinvented reality as well as the ideal type to which he, at that time
aspired. In sum, he reinvented the Indian nation as a civilizational unity of
many religions and many languages, proud of its tolerance of diversity and of
community, capable of ahimsaic action, of forging a global alternative to
western civilization, that would be life sustaining not life destroying. He
was fond of repeating “if we are to make progress [towards swaraj] we must
not repeat history but make new history”. And, to make new
history, to make the imagined identity a present reality, the central tasks
he listed were to ensure Hindu-Muslim unity, eradicate untouchability and promote khadi.
This identity as mentioned
earlier energised the Congress and the masses and ushered in the short-lived
Gandhi era. By the mid-1930s Gandhi had begun to part ways organisationally
and programmatically with the Congress, Rather it may be more accurate to say
that Nehru and the Congress majority became increasingly intolerant of
Gandhi’s higher level goal of swaraj. The one remaining link was the shared
objective of achieving independence. But the manner in which this came about
– through partition - destroyed the very basis of Gandhi’s preferred identity
for the Indian nation, namely unity between Hindu and Muslim.
Jinnah’s two nation theory
became, after 1947, the new reality to which Gandhi began to respond by
constructing a new Indian identity, a new political programme and new symbols
which would, at the same time, convey his larger message to India and to the
world. This was the problem to which he addressed himself after 1947. Gandhi
resumed writing in the Harijan and began a series of articles which should
count amongst his most serious writings. He wrote on what he called “things
of eternal value,” to be woven into “a system of ethics and morals suited to
the present day.” But the truth-action he undertook in those critical years before
his assassination was, as in Noakhali, individual not collective. This was
symbolic of his altered appeal –to the individual in independent India not as
before independence, to the national collective. It was, in brief, the
identity of the solitary individual - as a variant of Gandhi’s example
of the solitary satyagrahi, willing and prepared to pit himself against the
organised power of his own state, that for him could still link the altered
present to a swarajist future.
III
Mao in China followed a broadly
similar circuitous route before he came to conceptualise and construct an
identity for the Chinese nation and people. He began, like Gandhi, with
rebellion against injustice and an early sense of injured nationalism. Unlike
Gandhi, however, he rebelled against, his father and left home. His early
reading consisted mainly of classics and old romances about peasant
rebellions. In the course of his studies he came across a pamphlet that
opened with the sentence “Alas China will be subjugated!“. It bemoaned the
loss of outlying areas of the Chinese empire like Korea, Taiwan, Indo-China
and Burma to the western imperialists, and left a lasting impression on Mao.
He also learnt of the advances in western technology that introduced railways,
telephones, steamship etc. and wanted to have them for China, and he read
biographies of the years leaders of the west. From all this he drew the
conclusion that China had to be made rich and strong and free of imperialist
control. From then on India, as a full colony, became the negative example of
a fate that must not befall China. Mao like Gandhi, manifested a strong sense
of nationalism even in early youth, and also a spirit of social reform. He
supported the 1911 revolution that destroyed the old imperial system, admired
Sun Yat-sen and joined the regular army briefly. Then followed the formative
years of his intellectual development, his interest in the relationship
between ethics and good government, in attacking old social customs and traditions
and in the self-cultivation of mind and specially of the body. “... when the
body is strong” he wrote, “then one can advance speedily in knowledge and
morality....”15 (emphasis mine). In 1918
at the age of 21, Mao went to Beijing where he worked as a library assistant
at Beijing University. There he was exposed to socialist ideas, to
parliamentary democracy and to anarchism. He recalled being confused, still
Yooking for the road”. His only certainty was that he knew he was
anti-imperialist and anti-militarist. On his return to Changsha a year later,
he had already settled on the socialist idea and at the same time had
instincively identified himself with the poor and the hungry, especially the
peasant. Equally instinctively he sensed that a great union and a great
progressive force was latent in the masses of the Chinese people. All this
led him to help found the Communist Party in 1921 that was committed to
opposing both the imperialists and the militarists.
Nevertheless, Mao’s uncertainty
about the road and the method of revolution continued. With hindsight the
reason for this persisting uncertainty are not too difficult to identify, For
one, the “anti-imperialism” that was, written into the first and second
manifestos of the CPC (1922) was in the context of China’s times, a mewling
bloodless abstraction which was given rather short shrift. In vulgar
imitation of Soviet Russia, the manifesto referred to “anti-imperialism” more
as an ideological slogan than as a dominant and oppressive national reality.
Czarist Russia, it may be recalled, was not a victim or object of imperialist
aggression: it was itself imperialist. For the Bolsheviks, therefore,
“anti-imperialism” was directed only somewhat vaguely against “world
imperialists”, and more urgently against Czarist imperialist policies - at
home in relation to non-Russian nationalities, and abroad to Czarist
expansionism, particularly in China. “Anti-imperialism”, as included in the
CPC manifesto, blindly followed this formulation. It conveyed little of the
gravity of the imperialist onslaught that China had suffered since the Opium
Wars. It resonated even less, with the contemporary and growing menace of
expanding Japanese aggression.
Moreover, for the Comintern and
for all Marxists including the young CPC, nationalism was suspect. It was
regarded as the “handmaiden” of the bourgeoisie, the dynamic only of the
bourgeois democratic revolution. The leadership of the Chinese revolution
which was democratic and national was consequently gratuitously entrusted to
the KMT by the CPC. Thus, while it supported the bourgeois” revolution led by
the KMT, the CPC in keeping with Comintern orthodoxy, awaited the right
historical moment when, as the vanguard of the proletariat, it would be
called upon to conduct China’s proletarian revolution. For almost fifteen
years thereafter, that is, for as long as it held to this understanding
imperialism and of its own historical role, the CPC was unable to register success,
or to discover that its awaited historical opportunity had arrived or was
about, to arrive. The CPC needless to say, had no solutions or answers to the
central political question in China namely, how to save China, for the simple
reason that it did not pose the central question as a national question.
Mao’s confusion therefore persisted. Some decades late he was to
describe his dilemma thus:
“When I
joined the Communist Party, I knew that we must make revolution, but against
what? And how were we to go about it? Of course we had to make revolution
against imperialism and the old society. I did not quite understand what sort
of a thing imperialism was, still less did I understand how we could make revolution
against it. None of the stuff I had learned in thirteen years was any good
for making revolution. I used only the instrument language.”16
In those intervening years, the
revolution and the CPC failed in its repeated attempts at formenting urban
insurrections and suffered a major defeat at the hands of the KMT in 1927.
Around that time Mao began a
long journey of investigation away from party and Comintern orthodoxy, to
seek answers to what “making revolution” was all about, who would “make
revolution”, and how it was to be made. In order to do so, he moved from the
realm of the “idea”, to that of China’s objective situation, that is to its
contemporary social and political realities. This led to a unique Maoist
understanding of the concrete substance of domestic and external aggression
and of the strong linkages between them. His investigation into domestic
oppression resulted in his discovery of peasant unrest and revolutionary
ferment in Hunan in response to the multiple oppression of the peasantry.
From the specific investigations he conducted in Hunan in 1927, Mao
generalised an entire Chinese countryside with revolutionary potential. He
concluded that without the peasantry, and more specifically, without the poor
peasant, there would be no revolution of the oppressed. As for external
aggression, Mao found evidence of it writ large across China: It pointed to
Japanese imperialism as the aggressor at a time when the western imperialists
seemed to be in retreat. It was through these twin “discoveries” that Mao
came, as he put it, 40 understand the objective world of China”. Working
thereafter from inside out, from Chinese reality to the Marxist idea, from
CPC practice to CPC theory, Mao summarised the revolutionary experience of
those fifteen years, and gradually arrived at the ‘correct line”, that is, at
the strategy and tactics for “making revolution.” The conclusions he drew
from his discoveries of the what, who and how of “making revolution” came to
form the basis of his strategy of revolution and what has been called his
Signification of Marxism.
In brief, Mao concluded that
Japanese aggression posed the principal danger a$ well as a new threat to
China in that Japan, unlike the western imperialists, was determined to
control the whole of China and to transform it into a colony like India.
Anti-imperialism for the CPC unlike for the CPSU could not therefore, remain
an abstract slogan; it codified the hegemonic reality of China. He argued
that his new danger had fundamentally transformed class relations within
China, making resistance to Japanese imperialism a national and not a CPC’S
issue. The CPC’s past experience of unsuccessful urban insurrection and his
discovery of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, led Mao to transfer
the locale of the revolution from the cities to the countryside. But, in
those early years, it was still with the objective of setting up Soviets, on
the model provided by the Soviet Union.
The theoretical question that
Mao faced thereafter, was how to link together the two dominant features of
China’s “objective world”: an oppressed therefore revolutionary peasantry,
and a nationwide anti-Japanese struggle, and how to do so without denying the
ideology he had espoused, that is, while pursuing the goal of “making
revolution”. By relying on his perception of China’s “objective world” and by
rejecting Soviet/Comintern, CPC orthodoxy, Mao was to stumble upon and so
discover the “key”, as he put it, to “making revolution”.
The essential features of Mao’s
strategy are well known. They are: controlled guidance of peasant revolution,
to direct it not only against “feudal elements” and “militarists” as the
direct oppressors of the peasantry, but also against them as natural allies
of Japanese imperialism; the call for a nationwide struggle against Japanese
aggression; the innovative strategy of the united front from above; the
legitimation of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT as leaders of the united front in
the national war of resistance; the separate but simultaneous training
and honing of the CPC and the Red Army in Yanan, for later seizure of power
from the KMT; and finally the establishment of intimate, inseparable and
critical linkages between the outside world (including the imperialists) and
the Chinese struggle and the call for building a parallel international
united front against Japan (or Fascism).
It was also at this time that
Mao undertook a reconstruction of the concept of China as a “single
multinational state”, and of the Chinese nation as “a union of all nationalities”,
including the Han. No longer was the party to promise statehood and
self-determination to the various nationalities of China as it had done in
the Ruijin Constitution of 1931. Instead, Mao began to posit a larger unity -
that of the “people” - which included all, regardless of ethnicity or social
class, who supported the struggle against Japan. Mao’s reconstructed China
was presented as a country with a “rich revolutionary tradition”, but which
was “semicolonial and semifeudal” and for whom imperialism was the most
ruthless enemy”. Japanese imperialism in China was thus cast as the most
important contemporary reality, a non-national external factor that
threatened the entire Chinese people and the Chinese state. Accordingly, the
principal goal of the Chinese Revolution was redefined as resistance to Japan
and not just the struggle against militarist and anti-democratic forces
within China.17 Hence the high
ideological CPC objective of conducting a pure or orthodox proletarian
revolution led by the working class to usher in Socialism was also scaled
down. Thereafter the task of the CPC was to resist Japan and complete the
national and democratic revolution that had so far been entrusted to the KMT
Thus by the mid-thirties, the CPC, under Mao, was no longer content to
patiently await conditions for a proletariat-led revolution: It was to use
the struggle against Japan to create the conditions for this eventuality to
come about. In Mao’s new strategy this called for direct CPC participation in
the national struggle and the later leadership of the national democratic
revolution, and its transmutation into a movement of national liberation.
From about that time the enlarged meaning given to the term “national
liberation, and the revolutionary role assigned to it by Mao and the CPC,
were to differ from Soviet usage and practice. These differences were to
persist and to be reflected in CPC strategy and policy, even after the PRC
came into being.
The identity that Mao - a self
confessed Marxist, conceptualised for China as a nation, and the
revolutionary role he assigned to the peasantry, bear greater similarity to
the identity that Gandhi created for the Indian nation and people, than they
do to those envisaged by his contemporaries whether Marxist or not. Neither
identity was cast in class terms as it had been in 1922. Nor did it take the
urban worker as its model, even as the future was envisioned in proletarian
terms. Mao, in fact, displayed some of the same distrust of China’s urbanised
workers and the urban educated as Gandhi did of the westernized urban Indian.
Many years later, Mao was to describe the peasantry as being “poor and blank”
thus suggesting that it was neither “contaminated” by the ideas of western
liberalism nor by the mainstream Soviet and CPC doctrines on “making
revolution”. The Long March was the most symbolic of Mao’s revolutionray
acts: It pitted the ragged, ill-fed, ill-equipped millions of Chinese
peasants, against the better fed, better equipped forces ranged against them.
The images of the peasant as representing China and as revolutionary, were
then fused into a composite identity that symbolised the essence of being
Chinese with the potential of becoming socialist. At that time, this identity
seemed both true and relevant to China’s situation. Like Gandhi again, Mao
based his strategy of development -- political, social and economic, on the
villages. The commune that he innovated in 1958 can be imaginatively regarded
as the experiment in the field of Gandhi’s governing idea of a self reliant,
multifaceted, multiproductive, self governing (in the main), and peaceful
village community. For Gandhi this was the unit of a future swarajist society
that would expand from the village to the nation, and beyond to the world,
consisting of fully enlightened swarajist individuals. The communes that Mao
advocated in 1958 were similarly to be the building blocks of a future
socialist society, which would also expand beyond the geographic, cultural
and racial frontiers of the nation to the whole world. For both men,
liberation or salvation could never be for just the individual or his small
national community: It required the salvation of all humankind. Like Gandhi
again, Mao laid great emphasis on changing the way the people perceived
themselves, their reality and their future, and of the importance of changing
their ways of thinking, their value systems and their social relationships.
The tragic Cultural Revolution that Mao embarked upon in later years, was
intended to bring about just such a transformation, not only of party leaders
and cadres, but also of the people, by “touching their souls” because, as Mao
once put it, “you have to be reborn to be a communist.”
Unlike the struggle led by
Gandhi, the revolution led by Mao was an armed struggle, undoubtedly dictated
by the Chinese political reality but also by his ideology. If is always
interesting to speculate how a Gandhi transplanted into Mao’s China would
have perceived and responded to the situation: As Mao did, or by Sincising
satyagraba? Mao, in a quite literal sense, armed the oppressed Chinese
peasant and created the legendary Red Army as the people’s army.
Simultaneously, however he placed the army firmly under civilianl/political
leadership and control and disciplined the soldier to till the soil, work the
machine, and serve the people. It is possible to see in Mao’s writings his
preference for the use of non-violent means whether for overcoming the enemy
or for changing society and the individual. Also through his writings runs a
concern for ethical values and a socialist truth to be discovered
beyond, and perhaps inspite of, Marxist doctrine. That he regarded all
orthodoxies as man -made and therefore open to reinterpretation and
further development, is suggested by philosophical statement that new
contradictions would arise even in a socialist society.
After his death Mao, like
Gandhi in India, has been hailed as the father and liberator of the nation.
The present leadership however has abandoned all empathy with this long term
goal of “making revolution” as he envisaged it. The culturally rooted
peasant revolutionary identity that he created for the nation and the people
and which he attempted to realise in political life, after 1958, is no
longer resonant with the economic policies and political goals of today’s
China. This identity has instead faded into history as has that of
the Indian nation created by Gandhi. This loss of a revolutionary identity
symbolised in the persons of these two leaders, has resulted in two things.
One is its replacement by an emergent elitist identity in keeping with that
of the modernised west. The other is the metamorphosis of the nation into the
state in both countries. India and China have become or are in danger of
becoming what I have described elsewhere as “ordinary” countries, fast
becoming integrated into that system that Gandhi and Mao had opposed. They
are no longer making or are even concerned with making what Gandhi called
“new history”.
3. Albert Einstein, “On Peace -
And Gandhi”, in Norman Cousins (ed), Profiles of Gandhi (Delhi
: Indian Book Company 1969), p. 99.
4. Wang Gungwu, “The Chinese”,
in Dick Wilson (ed.) Mao Tse-tong in the Scales of History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) p. 273.
16 “Talk on Question of
Philosophy” with Kang Sheng and Chen Boda, 18 August 1964, in Stuart Schram
(ed:) Mao Tse-fung Un rehearsed (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1969) p. 20.
17. See “The Chinese Revolution
and the Chinese Communist Party” (1939) in Selected Works of Mao
Tse-tung (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954) Vol. Ill, pp. 72-101.
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