Contrary to Popular Belief, Gandhi had Many Critics

While it is not always brought to the forefront of discussion, Gandhi had many critics. It was Nathuram Godse who assassinated Gandhi, but his assassination represented a larger issue that Hindu elites had with him. In Ashis Nandy’s piece “The Final Encounter,” he explains that the Hindu elites’ problem with Gandhi is twofold: “The first was his continuous attempt to change the definitions of the centre and periphery in Indian society; the second was his negation of concepts of masculinity and femininity implicit in some Indian traditions and in the colonial situation” (Nandy, “The Final Encounter” p.71). Gandhi altered the Indian social order such that Brahmins were pushed to the margins and women and Dalits found themselves with power. Gandhi’s nonviolent model introduced a kind of politics that the Hindu elites saw as soft and womanly. In their view, Gandhi feminized Indian politics which made India weak and set India up to fail in the era of the modern nation-state.

Before Gandhi came into the public sphere, the Hindu elites spearheaded Indian politics. Many upper caste Brahmins felt unrepresented by Gandhi and betrayed by his bias towards the lower castes. This betrayal was complicated by Gandhi’s appeasement of the Muslim community which hit Maharashtrian Brahmins like Godse particularly hard because of their long history of struggle against Muslim rulers (Nandy, “The Final Encounter,” p.77). Godse ultimately felt that the only way to preserve the Hindu “motherland” was to murder Gandhi (Godse,“May it Please Your Honor,” p.51). He felt that it was Gandhi who made the creation of Pakistan permissible because he allowed the Muslims to take their demands to the extent that they did.

Gandhi’s approach to independence was perceived as harsh on Brahmins because of his insistence that freedom was indivisible and his understanding that “liberation ultimately had to begin from the colonized and end with the colonizers” (Nandy, “The Intimate Enemy,” p.63). Gandhi worked relentlessly to incorporate women into the independence movement and to criticize class hierarchy. This is because he was concerned that at the advent of independence “middle-class intellectuals would only perpetuate their own dominance” (Nandy, “The Final Encounter,” p.71). If the class structure and patriarchal structure embedded in Indian society was not dismantled and the communalist battle did not end, India would never be liberated from its oppression. India’s colonization by the British would just morph into the colonization of one constituency by another.

The poet Rabindrath Tagore, on the other hand, was a friendly critic of Gandhi. Tagore was aware that Gandhi was unique and that he was marked to lead the country better than anyone else. Gandhi and Tagore engaged in a correspondence for many years. One of Tagore’s main issues with Gandhi is his political asceticism. Gandhi’s approach often looked past moral principles for the sole purpose of adherence to his non-cooperation campaigns at the cost of the well-being of the Indian people. This is particularly evident in Tagore’s critique of Gandhi’s campaign to boycott British schools. Indeed, Tagore wrote “our students are bringing their offering of sacrifice to what? Not to a fuller education, but to non-education (Tagore qtd. in Battacharya, “The Mahatma and The Poet,” p.8). While British education did not do justice to Indian language or history, it would be even worse to deny Indian children any education outright. In this manner, Tagore felt that Gandhi did not have any respect for the physical body, and that he took his campaigns too far at the cost of the quality of life of others.

On the other hand, it can be argued that Gandhi’s discipline is exemplar of someone who holds the physical body of himself and of India in the highest regard. Gandhi’s body was incredibly disciplined. He fasted, walked, and never left a letter unanswered. He never disassociated from his surroundings and always held personal responsibility for his actions. Gandhi was not willing to settle for inadequate British education. In his view, the modern British education system was abominable. Children educated in the British system might learn math, but they would be deprived of something more important—their personal relationship to the space they occupy like the land they live on and thus their connection to their physical bodies. What’s more is that the boycotting of British institutions like schools effectively paralyzed the British government because all of the Indians working for the government did not come to work. The sacrifice of ordinary Indians was necessary for the boycott to be effective. While Gandhi’s reasoning seems to lack a practical understanding of the problem of children not attending school, his theory is grounded in political strategy and has a moral backing.

Another issue that Tagore took with Gandhi was his irrational thinking. This is the case with Gandhi’s response to the earthquake in Bihar in 1934. Gandhi described the earthquake as evidence of the wrath of god. He argued that this was god’s chastisement of the upper caste Hindus in the region for their treatment of the lower caste. Tagore argued that Gandhi’s decision to say this publicly was tragic because the Indian masses were already too superstitious to begin with. There is a clear scientific explanation for the earthquake grounded in plate tectonics that Gandhi just decided to overlook. On the other hand, Gandhi would have argued that the Indian masses would not believe the scientific explanation. He would say that the rational explanation is not always the best explanation. In other words, “the craving we have for meaning, for reading acts of nature in light of human experience and the language of poetry, is not so easily exhausted” (Lal, “The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate,” p.4). Gandhi would argue that we need various kinds of languages in which we get our ideas across. Pure science is not always sufficient.

While Gandhi’s critics claims are certainly valid and they pointed out flaws in his ideas, Gandhi’s belief system was air-tight. Gandhi approached his own life and the sphere of politics with absolute consistency. Gandhi’s beliefs are admirable, but even more remarkable is his strict adherence to his method.