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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2020
This article investigates the relationship between ideas of nature and those of politics in the thought of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In particular, it seeks to elucidate the connection between conceptions of nature and the use of violence as a means of revolutionary action in the philosophies of both thinkers, locating the point of their divergence on the question of violence in their respective understandings of the natural world. For Savarkar, such a relationship manifests itself in the ways in which he understands the notion of borders, both geographic and political. In contrast, Gandhi places his focuses on the individual's use of their body. Both understandings, this article holds, depend on a view of nature as politics.
I am immensely grateful to Sunil Amrith for his advice and suggestions regarding the initial formulation of this article and its prior iterations, and to Amartya Sen for his steadfast encouragement. I also thank the editors and anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1 Nandy, Ashis, ‘A Disowned Father of the Nation in India: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Demonic and the Seductive in Indian Nationalism’, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies vol. 15 (2014), pp. 91–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Heredia, Rudolf, ‘Gandhi's Hinduism and Savarkar's Hindutva’, Economic and Political Weekly vol. 44 no. 29 (2009), pp. 62–67Google Scholar. For a particular focus on the role of the Gita in the disagreement between Gandhi and Savarkar, see Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ‘Rethinking Knowledge with Action: V. D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and Histories of Warfare’, Modern Intellectual History vol. 7 no. 2 (2010), pp. 417–435CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Cederlöf, Gunnel and Sivaramakrishnan, K., Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), p. 3.Google Scholar
4 For a distinct but related study of the relationship between nature and political thought, see Forrester, Katrina and Smith, Sophie (eds), Nature, Action, and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Bombay: S. S. Savarkar, 1969)Google Scholar.
6 Savarkar returns to this rhetorical mode at the end of his text as well, remarking that ‘the actual essentials of Hindutva are … also the ideal essentials of Hindutva’: ibid., p. 136.
7 Shortly before Savarkar offers the pronouncement quoted in footnote 6, he writes, ‘The Hindus are about the only people who are blessed with these ideal conditions that are at the same incentives to national solidarity, cohesion, and greatness’: ibid., p. 136.
8 That Savarkar begins his text with general terms and then turns his analytic attention to the specific case of Hindusthan seems to have been largely ignored by previous scholarship on Hindutva. For instance, in his masterwork on Hindu nationalism in the twentieth century, Christophe Jaffrelot instead characterizes the pamphlet as explicitly focused on the unique territoriality of the Hindu nation: see Jaffrelot, Christophe, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst, 1996) esp. pp. 25–32Google Scholar. However, this misses the importance of the sequence in which Savarkar's arguments appear in his text, for he takes care to begin in generalities before moving to the specific case of India, as evidenced by his own words at the text's beginning and end. Such a recognition of the importance of the text's structure is missing from Janaki Bakhle's close reading of Hindutva as well: see Bakhle, Janaki, ‘Country First? Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) and the Writing of Essentials of Hindutva’, Public Culture vol. 22 no. 1 (2010), pp. 149–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chetan Bhatt comments briefly on Savarkar's ‘obsession with taxonomies, definitions, and nominal reasoning’: see Bhatt, Chetan, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 88Google Scholar.
9 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 42.
10 Ibid., p. 28.
11 The word ‘organism’ is an important one for Savarkar—it appears three times in the text, each time to signal the conjunction of existence and consciousness: see ibid., pp. 2, 28, 39. He also uses its adjectival form—‘organic’—12 times in the text.
12 Savarkar addresses this directly in his consideration of the hypothetical possibility of an American becoming an Indian citizen—‘the term Hindu has come to mean much more than its geographical significance’: ibid., p. 84. The analytic frameworks of Jaffrelot and others, which place an outsized emphasis on territoriality, cannot capture that it is the precise combination of all the elements identified above that yield a nation, in Savarkar's understanding, and not any one element taken in isolation.
13 Savarkar writes of the ‘national self-consciousness’, which acts as a safeguard against the ‘ferociousness and brutal egoism of other nations’: ibid., p. 25.
14 Ibid., p. 82.
15 Ibid., p. 2.
16 On the issue of names in particular, see Sharma, Arvind, ‘On Hindu, Hindustān, Hinduism and Hindutva’, Numen vol. 49 no. 1 (2002), pp. 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sharma's central argument—that the concern motivating Savarkar's definition of Hindutva was the avoidance of ‘the political fall-out of an excessively narrow definition of Hinduism’—reinforces the primacy of the natural in Savarkar's thought, for (as is discussed later in this article) the river Sindhu is found to be that entity which commands neither too broad nor too narrow an allegiance.
17 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 1. On Savarkar and the invention of a unified Hindu identity, see Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, ‘Hinduism and Self-Rule’, Journal of Democracy vol. 15 no. 3 (2004), pp. 108–121Google Scholar; Ashis Nandy, ‘The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia’, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics no. 44, February 2009, hpsacp.uni-hd.de, [accessed 18 February 2020]. Additionally, there is a vast literature on the problem of the construction of a unified Hindu identity for Hindu nationalism more generally. For a perceptive discussion of this topic and some of the secondary literature, see Raychaudhuri, Tapan, ‘Shadows of the Swastika: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Hindu Communalism’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 34 no. 2 (2000), pp. 259–279CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Lochtefeld, James G., ‘New Wine, Old Skins: The Sangh Parivār and the Transformation of Hinduism’, Religion vol. 26 (1996), pp. 101–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Vinayak Chaturvedi has also demonstrated the importance of the practice of naming within the doctrine of Hindutva, specifically the giving of the name ‘Vinayak’ to children. Such a ‘desire to give names’, according to his argument, signifies a ‘return to the basic principles outlined by Savarkar in Hindutva’: see Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ‘Vinayak and Me: “Hindutva” and the Politics of Naming’, Social History vol. 28 no. 2 (2003), pp. 155–173CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Consequently, it seems that the centrality of naming and the name itself cannot be overstated within the construction of Hindutva. Indeed, Savarkar wrote, ‘the name seems to matter as much as the thing itself’: Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 2. See also Janaki Bakhle on the politics of naming as a rhetorical strategy used by Savarkar: Bakhle, ‘Country First?’, pp. 158–160.
19 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 31.
20 Ibid., p. 3.
21 Ibid., p. 46.
22 For that matter, nearly every study of Savarkar and the ideology of Hindutva has commented on the territorial grounding of Hindutva. As examples, see Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, pp. 26–28; Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, p. 94; and Bakhle, ‘Country First?’, p. 53. While no doubt important, this author holds that territory is only one aspect of a broader reliance on the concept of nature as politics in the text.
23 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 11.
24 Jaffrelot, Christophe, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, p. 86.
26 Additionally, in his account of the history of the name ‘Sindhu’, Savarkar writes, ‘Hindu would be the name that this land and the people that inhabited it bore from time so immemorial even the Vedic name Sindhu is but a later and secondary form of it’: Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 10.
27 Ibid., p. 42; Misra, Amalendu, ‘Savarkar and the Discourse on Islam in Pre-Independent India’, Journal of Asian History vol. 33 no. 2 (1999), pp. 142–184Google Scholar.
28 An oft-remarked-upon quality of Hindutva ideology as a whole is its appeal to the antediluvian, most notably through the use of archaeology. For a discussion of this as it relates specifically to Hindu nationalist interpretations of the archaeological, see Humes, Cynthia Ann, ‘Hindutva, Mythistory, and Pseudoarchaeology’, Numen vol. 59 no. 2 (2012), pp. 178–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 P. B. Mehta notes this desperate search for identity markers in Savarkar, but neglects to register Savarkar's solution in his use of nature: see Mehta, ‘Hinduism and Self-Rule’, pp. 117–120.
30 Such an approach extends to Savarkar's other texts as well—for a brief discussion of the role of enmity in Savarkar, V. D., The War of Independence of 1857 (London: s.n., 1909)Google Scholar, see Sharma, Jyotirmaya, ‘History as Revenge and Retaliation: Rereading Savarkar's “The War of Independence of 1857”’, Economic and Political Weekly vol. 42 no. 19 (2007), pp. 1717–1719Google Scholar.
31 The necessity of a violent, militant outlook on politics appears in both the theory and practice of Hindutva. On the theoretical grounding of this warlike approach, see Chaturvedi, ‘Rethinking Knowledge with Action’; and Bhatt, Chetan and Mukta, Parita, ‘Hindutva in the West: Mapping the Antinomies of Diasporic Nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies vol. 23 no. 3 (2000), pp. 430–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quite importantly, Savarkar's emphasis on the pursuit of physical strength through martial arts training has remained a cornerstone of Hindutva practices, appearing as a prominent feature of the ideology's enactment: see Hansen, Thomas Blom, ‘Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim “Other”’, Critique of Anthropology vol. 16 no. 2 (1996), pp. 137–172CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Appearing concurrently with Savarkar's commitment to martial arts is the deeply gendered disposition of Hindutva ideology. There is considerable secondary literature on the role of gender in the structure of Hindutva thought: see Nandy, ‘A Disowned Father of the Nation in India’, p. 95; and Bhatt and Mukta, ‘Hindutva in the West’, pp. 426–431. On the role of gender in Savarkar's thought specifically, see Kumar, Megha, ‘History and Gender in Savarkar's Nationalist Writings’, Social Scientist vol. 34 nos. 11–12 (2006), pp. 33–50Google Scholar. The Sindhu poses a peculiar problem for this form of analysis, however, for while Savarkar does not apply a specific gender to the Sindhu, he very clearly genders violence and militant action as masculine. That the Sindhu exists in both spheres shows these divisions to be sometimes curiously porous in Savarkar's thought.
32 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 22.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 20.
35 Ibid., p. 28.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., p. 22.
38 Ibid., p. 24.
39 Ibid., p. 23.
40 Ibid., p. 3.
41 On Herbert Spencer's influence on the development of the ideology of Hindutva, see Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, p. 81; Kapila, Shruti, ‘Self, Spencer, and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism 1890–1920’, Modern Intellectual History vol. 4 no. 1 (2007), pp. 109–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, ‘Suicide and Self-Dedication’, savarkar.org, [accessed 18 February 2020]. The existing secondary literature on this essay is quite thin; however, it seems that among Savarkar's writings, the pamphlet presents some of the most daring (and perhaps representative arguments) crafted by the thinker, given the circumstances of his own death.
43 Of course, this raises the interesting question of what Savarkar's politics might have looked like if he witnessed, perhaps even participated in, contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene. Although some scholars place the temporal markers of the Anthropocene to include the period in which Savarkar lived, the idea that humans could be the dominant force in shaping the environment was clearly a unfamiliar one to him.
44 Manjari Katju has offered a view of freedom's function in Hindutva ideology as functioning solely for Hindus—while this is perhaps true at the level of individual (namely, that, on Savarkar's construal of the idea, only individual Hindus living in India might have a legitimate claim to the utilization of freedom and its fruits), this can hardly be seen to be true at the level of the collective. Furthermore, this view, as it applies to the freedom of individuals, cannot account for Savarkar's stance on suicide or his own actions on this matter. For Katju's argument, see Katju, Manjari, ‘The Meaning of Freedom’, Social Scientist vol. 39 no. 3 (2011), pp. 3–22Google Scholar.
45 Uday Mehta eloquently describes this preoccupation of Gandhi's in his article on the subject; here we offer the additional interpretations as a complementary lens through which to understand Gandhi's view of the ethical. See Mehta, Uday Singh, ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life’, Modern Intellectual History vol. 7 (2010), pp. 355–371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Parel, Anthony, ‘The Political Theory of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj’, Asian Studies vol. 7 no. 3 (1969), pp. 279–301Google Scholar. On the importance of Hind Swaraj to the interpretation of Gandhi's philosophy, see also Bilgrami, Akeel, ‘Gandhi's Radicalism: An Interpretation’, in his Beyond the Secular West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
47 I define ‘ethics of nature’ in line with K. Sivaramakrishnan, who describes it as ‘a set of abiding concerns and guiding principles that humans ponder, articulate, and deploy in their interactions with the non-human world’: see Sivaramakrishnan, K., ‘Ethics of Nature in Indian Environmental History: A Review Article’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 49 no. 4 (2015), pp. 1261–1310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Ibid., p. 263.
49 Lal, Vinay, ‘Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life: Thinking beyond Deep Ecology’, Environmental Ethics vol. 22 (2000), pp. 149–168CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 Guha, Ramachandra, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the Environmental Movement in India’, Capitalism Nature Socialism vol. 6 (1995), pp. 47–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Guha does acknowledge that Hind Swaraj, more so than any other piece of writing produced by Gandhi, is taken as evidence of his connection to the environmental movement by those seeking to establish as much. See also Guha, Ramachandra, ‘Ideological Trends in Indian Environmentalism’, Economic and Political Weekly vol. 23 no. 49 (1988), pp. 2578–2581Google Scholar.
51 For instance, see Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Key to Health [pamphlet] (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948)Google Scholar.
52 Parel, ‘The Political Theory of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj’, p. 280. See also Parel, Anthony, ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, (ed.) Parel, Anthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar (hereafter HS). In his brilliant essay, Ramachandra Guha disputes the long-standing primacy of Hind Swaraj in the construction of a full understanding of Gandhi's thought: see Ramachandra Guha, ‘A prophet announces himself’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 September 2009. His central reason for doing so is that ‘Gandhi was not principally a thinker … as he liked to say, his life was his message.’ Thus, Guha finds, we must focus on his later writings, for it is here that he offers a mature philosophy, one that is worthy of deep study. I believe this to be a misstep. Though Gandhi undoubtedly evolved as a thinker over the course of his lifetime, he was always more than just a philosopher—we cannot count this as a reason for not taking his early work seriously. We are right to see his life as a message itself, but the novelty and clarity of his thought should not be ignored simply by virtue of his engagement with actual politics (or the later lack thereof). If we are to take this view of philosophy and philosophers, then we must remove the title of ‘thinker’ from whole swathes of the canon, including Plato himself. On this point, see Allen, Danielle, Why Plato Wrote (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)Google Scholar. Viewing Gandhi as a thinker as well as a political actor allows us to see the depth and philosophical consistency in his thought across his lifetime, pointing to the place of Hind Swaraj in our analyses.
53 Parel holds that it was common knowledge in the social circles in which Gandhi moved at that time that Savarkar was the one who urged on Dhingra. Parel also cites an article of Gandhi's in the Indian Opinion in August of 1909 which argues, ‘He was egged on to do this act by ill-digested reading of worthless writings … It is those who incited him to this that deserve to be punished. In my view, Mr. Dhingra himself is innocent’: Parel, ‘Editor's Introduction’, in HS, p. xxvii; and Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), Vol. 9, p. 245, https://www.mkgandhi.org/cwmg.htm, [accessed 18 February 2020]. See also Chaturvedi, ‘Rethinking Knowledge with Action’, pp. 427–428.
54 HS, p. 30. Ajay Skaria explicates the boundary between proper and improper, and Gandhi's use of the prostitute/veshya metaphor in: Skaria, Ajay, ‘Only One Word, Properly Altered: Gandhi and the Question of the Prostitute’, Postcolonial Studies vol. 10 no. 2 (2007), pp. 219–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 As discussed later in this article, Gandhi also used the language of impropriety to characterize the violent use of one's body as a means of anticolonial resistance.
56 HS, p. 63.
57 Ibid.
58 Gandhi returns repeatedly to the fundamental asymmetry between the body and the mind. In 1925, he writes, ‘It is only in a lean body that a strong atman lives. As the atman grows in strength, the body becomes leaner. A perfectly healthy body can be very lean. A strong body usually suffers from some disease. Even if it has no disease, it is quick to catch infection or contract a disease, whereas a perfectly healthy body will never catch an infection’: see ‘Brahmacharya’, in CWMG, Vol. 28, p. 14.
59 ‘God or Nature to Blame?’, in ibid., p. 127; ‘Speech in Reply to Students’ Address, Trivandrum’, in CWMG, Vol. 30, p. 244.
60 The relationship between mental weakness and illness holds firm for Gandhi throughout his writings. He later writes (concerning his views on medicine), ‘I have not Indian Home Rule before me, but I recollect sufficient to be able to say that I have nothing to revise about the views set forth there … As I hold that appendicitis was a result of infirmity of thought or mind, so do I concede that my submission to the surgical operation was an additional infirmity of mind. If I was absolutely free of egoism, I would have resigned myself to the inevitable; but I wanted to live in the present body’: see ‘My Mission’, in CWMG, Vol. 27, p. 162.
61 This passage also presents strong resonances with Gandhi's engagement with the idea of the nature cure, to which he remained committed until his death. The nature cure, in Gandhi's estimation, both cured one of one's current illness as well as prevented future sickness, through ‘right living’ and in the absence of drugs: see ‘Talk with a Casual Visitor’, in CWMG, Vol. 90, p. 119. Gandhi's focus on the nature cure is complementary to the idea of ‘nature as politics’ presented here, for it underscores Gandhi's view of the body as an entity functioning in accordance with influences beyond the reach of an individual's control. The thrust of the nature cure is that one must yield to the force of nature, that illness is brought on by disregarding nature's fundamental rules and that the only way to correct such a misstep is to cede all power to nature's machinations. We see the same line of thinking appear in Gandhi's views on fasting as a form of satyagraha.
62 This view underwrites Gandhi's faith in the nature cure, for it is the same sort of intentionality on behalf of the individual that both allows for the contraction of an illness and for nature to do ‘its work’. What is needed is for the individual to recognize such a form of agency on the part of the natural and to heed to it.
63 Intention, both in reference to justification for actions and as the site of bare agency, is of central concern to Gandhi: see Bilgrami, Akeel, ‘Gandhi's Integrity: The Philosophy behind the Politics’, Postcolonial Studies vol. 5 no. 1 (2002), pp. 79–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; first published as ‘Gandhi's Integrity’, Raritan vol. 21 no. 1 (2001), pp. 48–67.
64 The locus classicus of this argument is Joseph Alter's extensive work on Gandhi's body: see Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
65 Gandhi's critique of Western civilization as it relates to issues of medicine is often read as a criticism of modern science itself. For a rejection of this characterization of his views in his own words, see CWMG, Vol. 30, p. 244. Akeel Bilgrami takes up this issue as well, sketching Gandhi's position as one that critiques a particular form of scientific rationality (and not science per se) and as view that has antecedents in Western intellectual history: see Bilgrami, Akeel, ‘Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment’, Social Scientist vol. 34 no. 5/6 (2006), pp. 17–35Google Scholar. Bilgrami, an astute reader of Gandhi, briefly addresses his view of nature, too, in his essay—however, he leaves open the question of the normative implications of Gandhi's thought, focusing instead on a line of thinking in Gandhi, similar to Max Weber's, that argues against the ‘disenchantment’ of nature brought on by a particular viewpoint of the modern sciences. Our central question thus remains: on the issue of nature, in what specific ways did Gandhi's political and moral theory overlap?
66 Though Gandhi later softened his rejection of Western medicine, he maintained his insistence that one must reject Western civilization's, and, by extension, Western medicine's, compulsion to ‘[prolong] man's earthly existence’. Keeping this in mind, we see that Gandhi continues to hold the same attitude towards the body and its alienation from one's self that already we find present in Hind Swaraj. His shift on the issue of medicine is to acknowledge that both modern medicine and homeopathic (such as ayurvedic) remedies can fall prey to the mindless preservation of bodily health (though not necessarily so), while also rejecting his previous view that Western medicine must necessarily be directed at the unthinking continuance of physical life (which we find in Hind Swaraj). However, he never wavers in his stance that medicine's immediate impulse towards bodily preservation is fundamentally mistaken. See CWMG, Vol. 71, p. 439; also Ramachandra Guha, ‘Cures from East and West’, The Telegraph, 14 May 2016.
67 For more on Gandhi's relationship to the Bhagavad Gita in particular (and his transformation of the terms found therein), see Devji, Faisal, ‘Morality in the Shadow of Politics’, Modern Intellectual History vol. 7 (2010), pp. 373–390CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Bhikhu Parekh's article situating Gandhi's view of ahimsā (non-violence) within a broader Indian tradition of non-violence, while also highlighting Gandhi's distinct deviations from the same: Parekh, Bhikhu, ‘Gandhi's Concept of Ahimsā’, Alternatives vol. 13 no. 2 (1988), pp. 195–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 For the role of the body in Hindu theology, see Holdrege, Barbara A., ‘Body Connections: Hindu Discourses of the Body and the Study of Religion’, International Journal of Hindu Studies vol. 2 no. 3 (1998), pp. 341–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 Easwaran, Eknath (trans.), The Bhagavad Gita (New York: Vintage Books, 2000)Google Scholar.
70 Nandy, Ashis, ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, in his At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 72Google Scholar; for another discussion of Gandhi's project of reinterpreting Hindu concepts, see Madan, T. N., ‘Whither Indian Secularism?’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 27 no. 3 (1993), pp. 667–697CrossRefGoogle Scholar, particularly pp. 674–677.
71 Iyer, Raghavan, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 304Google Scholar.
72 HS, p. 95, n. 191.
73 It seems worthwhile mentioning that the question of whether or not Gandhi viewed fasting as a mode of satyagraha can sometimes be seen as an open one. See, for instance, Parekh, Bhikhu, Gandhi's Political Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), p. 59Google Scholar. However, a close reading of Gandhi's writings on fasting—particularly the ethics of fasting—demonstrates that the fast is very much part of the doctrine of satyagraha in Gandhi's mind. For instance, he labelled (both publicly and privately) his September 1932 fast as a means of resistance: see ‘Letter to Ramsay MacDonald’, in CWMG, Vol. 56, p. 372; and ‘Diary, 1932’, in ibid., p. 480; see also ‘Fasting in Non-Violent Action’, in CWMG, Vol. 83, p. 132.
74 Alter, Gandhi’s Body, p. 28.
75 Gandhi, quoted in Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 204.
76 Gandhi makes explicit this link between influencing the consequences of one's actions, fasting, and nature in ‘God or Nature to Blame?’, in CWMG, Vol. 28, p. 127. Here, he offers that ‘[O]ne who knows the laws of Nature can also, by fasting, prevent the harmful consequences of his actions.’ Gandhi also comments on the effectiveness of fasting in ‘Ethics of Fasting’, in CWMG, Vol. 61, p. 385.
77 Gandhi, quoted in Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 207.
78 Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
79 Particularly telling on this point is the use of fasting by individuals incarcerated by the British colonial regime: see ‘My Jail Experience—VI: Ethics of Fasting’, in CWMG, Vol. 28, p. 01.
80 HS, p. 89.
81 Ibid., p. 77.
82 Ibid., p. 51.
83 Ibid.
84 Mantena, Karuna, ‘Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence’, American Political Science Review vol. 106 (2012), pp. 455–470CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 Gandhi is very clear to make note of this fact, drawing a direct contrast to this view of the body from one that promotes strength and physical fitness with the aim of joining a violent army. See ‘Physical Training and Ahimsā’, in CWMG, Vol. 79, p. 255.
86 Mehta, ‘Gandhi on Democracy, Politics and the Ethics of Everyday Life’, p. 357. Closely tied to this view of time is Gandhi's view of instrumentality; for more on this, see Devji, Faisal, The Impossible Indian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), particularly pp. 98–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 In a later reflection on the ethics of fasting, Gandhi himself offers the language of limitation and prevention, writing that, ‘What the fast does is to prevent repetition of evil.’ Such an inhibiting character comes from the fast's curtailing of bodily functions, as Gandhi's next line holds that, ‘Most, if not all, evil comes from attachment to the flesh’: see CWMG, Vol. 61, p. 385.
88 Alter, Gandhi’s Body, pp. 46–47. Gandhi believes that bodily penance, of which a fast is the most extreme version, is the ‘only’ remedy to get rid of untruth: see ‘History of the Satyagraha Ashram’, in CWMG, Vol. 56, p. 170.
89 That the purification of oneself may lead to the purification of one's surroundings if undertaken correctly is particularly important for Gandhi's concept of the fast, for it is precisely this enactment of nature's laws of purification that lends the fast its potency in Gandhi's view. This is why fasts hold such importance for Gandhi in both theory and practice, especially in the functioning of Satyagraha Ashram. The ashram is a community constructed so as to abide by the rules of nature, meaning that the fast is the only means through which one can address particularly pervasive or serious forms of wrongdoing. One sees this in Gandhi's comments on the fast in ‘History of Satyagraha Ashram’, in CWMG, Vol. 56, p. 170, and in his own 1933 fast undertaken for ‘self-purification’: Alter, Gandhi’s Body, pp. 46–47.
90 On Gandhi's insistence that adherence to the doctrine of non-violence (understood as ahimsā) requires more than a refusal to kill, see Parekh, ‘Gandhi's Concept of Ahimsā’, pp. 199–208.
91 In her work on Gandhi, Farah Godrej has emphasized the public nature of self-suffering for Gandhi, arguing that the possibility of the instantiation of bodily harm in public fora, as brought about by the practice of satyagraha, is what rendered the doctrine politically practicable in Gandhi's view: see Godrej, Farah, Cosmopolitan Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 73–97Google Scholar. In contrast, I hold that it is not so much the public character of this suffering as its concreteness that is important for Gandhi. The body stands as the closest approximation of the direct perception of one's commitments sans intermediary. The difference between publicity and tangibility resides in the latter's private existences. The body permits of the realization of inwardness, for one to become cognizant of one's own commitments—without an audience. To see the body as important to Gandhi only insofar as it allows for one to engage in forms of moral communication with others is to miss the overwhelming importance of self-knowledge in Gandhi's thought. On the role of self-knowledge in Hind Swaraj, see Mehta, Uday Singh, ‘Patience, Inwardness, and Self-Knowledge in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj’, Public Culture vol. 23 no. 2 (2011), pp. 417–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 HS, p. 69.
93 Gandhi repeats this connection between moral and mental fortitude and physical labour: ‘[W]e have shunned body-labour to the detriment of our brains’: ‘Speech at Public Meeting, Indore’, in CWMG, Vol. 66, p. 685.
94 HS, p. 36.
95 Gandhi, quoted in ibid., p. 66. This qualified view of machinery is what some scholars have taken as a concession or mediation by Gandhi of his view of machinery over time. See, for instance, Krishan, Shri, ‘Discourses on Modernity: Gandhi and Savarkar’, Studies in History vol. 29 no. 1 (2013), pp. 61–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, it is also possible to read Gandhi's earlier and later views as compatible: all machinery is not of the same type. The 1924 letter to which Krishan and others refer reads, ‘[E]ven this body is a most delicate piece of machinery. What I object to, is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on “saving labour” till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all … The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man’: CWMG, Vol. 29, p. 229. This is the same sort of reluctant reliance on machinery, guided by a focus on human needs and good, that we already find present in Hind Swaraj. Thus, there are at least two categories of machines in Gandhi's view—those that further ‘the machinery craze’ and those that curtail and ameliorate the same. The text of Hind Swaraj shows us this. When the editor says, ‘sometimes poison is used to kill poison’, in response to the reader's question as to whether or not ‘it is a good point or a bad point that all [the editor is] saying will be printed through machinery’, we are to know that these poisons, while belonging to the same category of object, are of a different kind: HS, pp. 110–111. That is the only way such a metaphor can be squared. Gandhi continues in this vein, writing, ‘As it expires, the machinery … says to us: “Beware and avoid me. You will derive no benefit from me, and the benefit that may accrue from printing will avail only those who are infected with the machinery craze”: HS, p. 11. Here, too, we see that Gandhi is in line with his later self, taking his primary target as the machinery craze and evaluating all machinery by this measure. Thus, if we read Gandhi's later writings on machinery as a change in stance, we inadvertently mistake a difference in kind as a difference in degree.
96 Gandhi, quoted in Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 311.
97 For more on this point, see Devji, Impossible Indian, particularly Chapter 4.
98 We point again to Gandhi's claim that, ‘One who knows the laws of Nature can also, by fasting, prevent the harmful consequences of his action’: CWMG, Vol. 28, p. 127.
99 Ibid.
100 Gandhi continues, ‘[I]n saving ourselves from even unwitting transgressions lies the health and well-being of the self. If, in thus trying to save oneself, one falls a prey to bodily illness, one need not lament over it: ibid.
101 HS, pp. 48–49.
102 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 6.
103 HS, p. 51.
104 Savarkar, Hindutva, p. 3.
105 Ibid., p. 90.
106 Cederlöf and Sivaramakrishnan, Ecological Nationalisms.
107 Herbert Spencer's influence is clear on this point and is discussed in-depth in Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer, and Swaraj’. On the relationship between the development of nationalist ideology and the turn to ideas of nature as the justificatory grounds of nationalism, see Pick, Daniel, ‘The Politics of Nature’, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, (eds) Jones, Gareth Stedman and Claeys, Gregory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 673Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
108 Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Ethics of Nature in Indian Environmental History’.