The Mahatma’s battlefield of non-violence
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s book on Gandhi is a political and intellectual history written with a literary flair. An account of the last 15 months of the Mahatma, the book focuses on his solitary peace missions in Noakhali, Calcutta, Bihar and Delhi. It stands out for its sensitive treatment of not only Gandhi’s epic mission but also his thought.
Right at the outset, the author posits Gandhi as a “thinker-practitioner” and also demonstrates a keen understanding of how his praxis shaped his thought. As the title suggests, Bhattacharjee’s is an attempt to explore the limits of Gandhian non-violence in a historical context of genocidal violence.
In a quasi-book length and dense introduction, the author maps the long arc of Hindu-Muslim relations in the decades leading up to the communal carnage of the mid-1940s in order to contextualise Gandhi’s peace efforts. The question of Hindu-Muslim unity is analysed through the writings of political activists and thinkers like Swami Shraddhanand, Savarkar, Aurobindo, Vivekananda among others. Bhattacharjee makes an important distinction between Hindu thinkers of a communal sensibility and thinkers of Hindu nationalism, arguing that the former shouldn’t be clubbed with the latter.
Spread over five chapters, a lion’s share of the book deals with Gandhi’s mission in Noakhali and quite rightfully so for Noakhali can be considered as the ‘battlefield of non-violence.’ As the author poignantly points out, in Noakhali “Gandhi was faced with the impossibility of the moment, seeking rapprochement between two communities divided by violence… The method of non-violence faced its most formidable block. Gandhi was finding it difficult to locate the space for recovery, both within people’s hearts and in their neighbourhoods.”
The book relies primarily on published primary sources for historical reconstruction. These include the much-mined Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) as well as the recently published ‘The Diary of Manu Gandhi’ (1946-1948), an account by Mahatma’s grandniece, translated by the noted Gujarati and Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud. Other important sources include the works by Gandhi’s associates such as his secretary Pyarelal Nayyar and the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose who worked closely with Gandhi in Noakhali and Bihar.
In methodological terms, Bhattacharjee rejects disciplinary parochialism, summoning, “literature, philosophy, political theory and history”, to both “reflect through them, and sometimes, reflect on them”. Stylistically too, the author’s eclectic approach and poetic sensibility makes the book a fine read. Philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas share theoretical space with poets like Octavio Paz, Pavvo Haavikko and Nicanor Parra in Bhattacharjee’s reflections on Gandhi and history.
For Bhattacharjee, any atemporal discussion of Gandhi’s ideas is pointless as these ideas were shaped by, among other factors, Gandhi’s dialogue with his contemporaries, (forged in) the crucible of politics and by the contingencies of history. Bhattacharjee’s book departs from some recent works which while examining the themes of violence-non-violence in Gandhian thought eschew the ‘messiness of history’. It is precisely by skillfully navigating and unpacking the messiness of history that Bhattacharjee is able to shed new light on Gandhian non-violence.
A typo introduced while quoting from CWMG on the very first page of the introduction was avoidable, so were a few others which can be found in the text. But perhaps these are minor quibbles in what is otherwise a brilliant work.
— The writer is a freelance contributor and a Masters in Modern South Asian History from SOAS
Book Review