Wesleyan University

Gandhi and History

Author(s): Balkrishna Govind Gokhale
Reviewed work(s):
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1972), pp. 214-225
Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504587 .
Accessed: 03/05/2012 06:53
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Blackwell Publishing and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to History and Theory.
http://www.jstor.org
GANDHI AND HISTORY
BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE
Perhaps more than any other leader of his time Gandhi had, deeply rooted
in him, a sense of history, though he often spoke disparagingly of the valuc
of conventional histories. Furthermore, in many of his historical general-
izations on Western or Indian civilization he betrayed an unhistorical trait,
for in his condemnation of the one or admiration of the other he was both
sweeping and simplistic. Despite such an anti-historical bias in Gandhi's
thinking, several attempts have been made to construct Gandhi's philosophy
of history.' The purpose of the present paper is not to make another attempt
in a similar vein, but to frame certain questions which may help our under-
standing of the nature and role of the historical dimension in Gandhi's thought.
Specifically, what did Gandhi mean by history, and did his sense of the his-
torical, as he understood it, bear any perceptible relationship to the traditional
Hindu understanding of the sense and meaning of history?
At the outset, however, we must identify the nature and scope of Gandhi's
intellectual and spiritual horizons before the foregoing questions can be an-
swered. Gandhi was not, and never did claim to be, an academic thinker.
His formal education simply did not prepare him for that. The broad details
of his eventful life are fairly well known. He was born on October 2, 1869,
in an orthodox Hindu family in Porbunder in the present Gujerat State. His
father was a leading court official in a small princely state, and his mother
was very devout and pious in her religious inclinations and practices. Gandhi
had his school education in Porbunder, Rajkot, and Ahmedabad before he
left for England in 1888 to qualify as a Barrister-at-Law. He was taught the
usual subjects, such as history, mathematics, and Sanskrit, in his schools in
Gujerat but he was not an outstanding student. His education in England
was strictly professional and did not have any significant humanistic con-
tent in its curriculum. He returned to India in 1891 and a year later went
to South Africa to argue
a legal case for an Indian client. He remained in
1. See for instance Raghavan N. Iyer, "Gandhi's Interpretation of History" in Gandhi
Marg 6, No. 4 (1962), 319-327; Madan G. Gandhi, Gandhi and Marx (Chandigarh,
1969), 61-66; 0. P. Goyal, Gandhi; an Interpretation (Delhi, 1964), 80ff; V. P. Varma,
The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and Sarvodaya (Agra, 1959), 62ff.
GANDHI AND HISTORY 215
South Africa until 1914. From 1914 to 1920 Gandhi served a kind of ap-
prenticeship in his Indian political career. From 1920 to 1942 he was the
undisputed leader of the Indian nationalist movement. He served his last
jail term from 1942 until May 1944. The events of 1946-47 proved an anti-
climax to Gandhi's long and distinguished career. During his last years, which
ended on January 30, 1948, when he was assassinated in Delhi by a Hindu
fanatic, Gandhi was saddened to see his dreams and principles reduced to
ashes in the frenzy of religious killings in India and Pakistan.2
Gandhi's life of seventy-eight years falls into three broad well-marked
phases, each dominated by a set of easily identifiable attitudes and operational
principles. The first was that of his childhood and adolescence wherein the
most profound influences came from two rather disparate religious traditions.
From his family he inherited his lasting adherence to the tenets and practices
of Vaishnavism, with its emotional comprehension of the Deity and its doc-
trine of Love as a means not only of spiritual development but also as the
basis of social relationships. Philosophically Gandhi was not certain whether
he preferred the absolutistic monism (Advaita) of Shankara (A.D. 788?-
821?) or the qualified monism (Vishistadvaita) of Ramanuja (A.D. 1017?-
1137?), for he often spoke of God as an impersonal principle (Truth-Love)
as well as a person. But the other great religious influence on Gandhi's early
life came from Jainism, founded by Mahavira (6th century B.C.), which was
a strong and influential religious persuasion in the part of India where Gandhi
was born and brought up. Jainism is an austere and demanding religion and
stresses, among others, the twin principles of non-violence (ahimnsa) and
non-acquisition (aparigraha), both of which played an important part in
Gandhi's personal philosophy. Jainism also advocated the doctrine of Pluralis-
tic Realism (Syadvada or Anekantavada), arguing that all human knowledge
is only probable and that absolute affirmation or denial of any position or
phenomenal object is impossible.3 Gandhi combined in his philosophy the
absolute faith in God as demanded by his Vaishnavism with the Jain method
of regarding every statement or position relating to reality as only relative.
This was the dominant element in his philosophy of Satyagraha and also in-
fluenced his view of history.4
2. Gandhi wrote an account of his life until 1921 in An Autobiography or the Story
of My Experiments with Truth. (First published in Ahmedabad in 1927; the edition
used for this paper is that of May 1956.) See the first ten chapters for his early life;
D. G. Tendulkar in his Mahatma has written a comprehensive account of Gandhi's life
in eight volumes (published in Delhi between 1960-1963). There are numerous other
biographies of Gandhi of varying merit.
3. For details of the Jaina philosophy see S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (Lon-
don, 1948), I, 302-304.
4. For the influence of Jainism on Gandhi's life and thought see Pyrelal, Mahatma
Gandhi; the Early Phase (Ahmedabad, 1965), I, 276-279.
216 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHIALE
In London Gandhi acquired two other sources of his philosophy. These
were his reading of the Bhagavadgita (or Gita, The Song of the Lord) which
he regarded "as the book par excellence for the knowledge of Truth. It has
offered me invaluable help in my moments of gloom." Gandhi offered his
own interpretation of the Gita, which he regarded as the gospel preaching
selfless non-violent action.5 It was also in London that Gandhi was introduced
to the Bible. Of this experience he says that he could not "possibly read
through the Old Testament. I read the Book of Genesis, and the chapters
that followed invariably sent me to sleep. . . But the New Testament pro-
duced a different impression, especially the 'Sermon on the Mount' which
went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. The verses, 'But I
say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coat
let him have thy cloak too' delighted me beyond measure."6 Gandhi seems
to have been particularly influenced by the two great doctrines that he learned
from these two sources; one was that God was always present in history and
that unqualified non-violence was the only means of coming to terms with
His historical destiny for man.
The last two sources of his philosophy Gandhi encountered in the early
part of his South African career. These were Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of
God Is Within You and John Ruskin's Unto This Last. From these works
he came to the conclusion that the modern period of human history, especially
Western history, was one of dangerous deterioration in human values, so
that unless modern industrial civilization accepted non-violence as preached
by the Sermon on the Mount and curbed its acquisitive spirit, humanity would
surely meet its doom.
The seminal ideas in Gandhi's philosophy, then, were a sense of guilt or
sin, the need to return to God, the pre-eminence of non-violence as an instru-
ment of human progress, and the value of bread-labor as the basis of peace in
society. The sense of guilt or sin was created by certain events in Gandhi's
early life. He speaks of these as his carnal dalliance with his young bride
just when his father lay dying, his attempt at theft, his eating meat, which
was a taboo according to the Vaishnava faith, and his frustrated visit to a
"den of vice."7 This sense of sin created in him a belief in the dialectical
interplay of virtue and sin in human affairs and history. His interpretation of
the doctrine of non-violence led him to distrust conventional history as merely
a record of violence; and the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin gave him the notion
that human progress must not be interpreted, as was usual in conventional
5. See Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita According to Gandhi
(Ahmedabad, 1956).
6. Autobiography, 68.
7. Ibid., 8ff.
GANDHI AND HISTORY 217
histories, in terms of the extension of power over territory or men or nature
through the use of machines. The degeneration of Western values was demon-
strated to him through his experience of European racism in South Africa
and British imperialism in India. These beliefs formed the ground on which
Gandhi attempted to build the structure of his own interpretation of history.
II
Conventional history to Gandhi was worse than useless, for it was merely a
chronicle of the "doings of kings and emperors," a "record of the wars of
the world," a "record of every interruption of the working of the force of
love or of the soul."8 In this chronicle of conventional history the spirit of
man lay buried under such events as wars and revolutions, empires and domi-
nation of one race by another. The real history of mankind, according to
him, should concern the changes in man and his nature, society and its func-
tions, the meaning of civilization, and the progress of man along the steep
and narrow spiritual path through the practice of truth and non-violence.
This history is contained in the myths and legends of the great religions of
the world, in the life-stories of the great spirits
-
he calls them avatars
-
and
the ascent of man from animalism to the spirit. Almost with tongue in cheek
he says: "It is my pet theory that our Hindu ancestors solved the question
for us by ignoring history as it is understood today and by building on slight
events their philosophical structure. Such is the Mahabharata. And I look to
Gibbon and Morley as inferior editions of the Mahabharata. . . . The sub-
stance of all these stories [in the Mahabharata] is 'name and forms' matter
little, they come and go. That which is permanent eludes the historian of
events. Truth transcends history."9 But events for Gandhi are not mere illu-
sion or maya, for they are very much there. An intense and ceaseless move-
ment is going on all around in the world for "nothing in this world is static,
everything is kinetic. If there is no progression, then there is inevitable
retrogression." He further says: "I do dimly perceive that whilst everything
around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all a living power
that is changeless, that holds together, that creates, dissolves and recreates."
For Gandhi "Man is a special creation of God precisely to the extent that he
is distinct from the rest of His creation" and "the individual is the one supreme
consideration."10 Man is endowed with a twofold freedom, inner and outer,
and the two are interrelated both in their nature and extent. The inner freedom
is part of the spirit dwelling within him; the outer freedom flows from his
8. Hind Swaraj (Ahmedabad, 1958), 77-79; Tendulkar, Mahatma, IT, 111; IV, 165.
9. Mahatma, II, 111.
10.
Harijan,
August 11, 1940, 245; Young India, October 11, 1928, 378.
218 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE
freedom of will which enables him to make a choice between virtue and evil.
The outer freedom may be influenced by a variety of factors related to the
stage of evolution of the society in which man lives.
Gandhi has faith that human nature is perfectible, and that it is working,
consciously or unconsciously, toward the essential unity of mankind.11 Man's
life is an integrated whole in which all activities, social, economic, political,
should not be compartmentalized, but rather informed by the same ethical
values which form part of his spiritual outlook and actions. He declares:
"That economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values" and
"True economics never militates against the highest ethical standard, just as
all true ethics to be worth its name must at the same time be also good eco-
nomics. An economics which inculcates Mammon worship, and enables the
strong to amass wealth at the expense of the weak, is a false and dismal sci-
ence."'12 The role of reason in human affairs is that of a corrective to whatever
is potentially or actually immoral. The man of reason, therefore, is essentially
an ethical man and functions in human history as such. But conventional his-
tory is often the record of man's unreason as made manifest in wars and violent
revolutions, economic tyranny, and social injustice.13
Despite the fact that man is endowed with inner freedom and outer choice,
he is prone to be oblivious of the free spirit within him and the use of reason
in outer freedom which should enable him to make the right choice. Gandhi
views the functioning of human society in a series of dialectical situations
which stem from the simultaneous presence of two opposing tendencies within
man and society. There is always a conflict going on between man's spirit
and the Devil in his body, and between truth and non-violence on the one
hand and violence and greed on the other in society. While man as flesh may
succumb to the forces of evil from time to time, Gandhi is convinced that
the Good are never destroyed, for "right which is truth cannot perish; the
wicked are destroyed because wrong has no independent existence." Man
qua man will ever remain imperfect, but again, as man, will always strive
toward perfection. "Man's destined purpose," says Gandhi, "is to conquer
old habits, to overcome the evil in him and to restore the good
to its rightful
place." Man cannot be at peace with himself "till he has become like unto
God. "14
The true history of man, therefore, is to be seen in his ceaseless striving
to be at peace with himself and with the society in which he lives. This history
11. Young India, September 25, 1924, 313; Selections from Gandhi, ed. N. K. Bose
(Ahmedabad, 1948), 27.
12. Young India, December 26, 1924, 421; Harijan, October 9, 1937, 292.
13. Harijan, December 12, 1938, 346.
14. Desai, Gospel of Selfless Action, 127, 196, 348; Bose, Selections, 9; Young India,
December 20, 1928, 420; Desai, Gospel of Selfless Action, 129,
GANDHI AND HISTORY 219
is revealed less in the conventional chronicles which pass muster for history
than in the inner history which is told in allegories and parables, myths and
legends whose chronology is stated not in terms of centuries, decades, years,
and dates but in periods and cycles of ages which are parts of cosmic pro-
cesses. In this historic rise of man toward God, of time becoming eternity,
God is always with man. In order that the universe may function at all God
must ever act. God is ever watchful of the man engaged in the task of being
good, for He is benevolent, Love, the Supreme Good, the Law-maker and
the Executor, the indefinable mystic power that pervades everything, the King
of Kings. But He can also be wrathful, for Gandhi explains certain natural
catastrophes such as drought and famine, floods and earthquakes as God's
displeasure with man's moral lapses.'5
The second factor in the unfolding of history, according to Gandhi, is so-
ciety. Essentially society is "a ceaseless growth, an unfoldment in terms of
spirituality." But like man, society is riven with a twofold conflict, an inner
and outer. The inner conflict occurs within a given social group when the
acquisitive urge comes into conflict with justice, when one man or a group
of men acquire more property than is his or their due, when exploitation
becomes rampant, and means and ends become confused. Gandhi does not
accept the doctrine of class-war, which he declares to be "foreign to the es-
sential genius of India." He accepts that "class divisions there will be, but
they will then be horizontal, not vertical." He insists that the real way of
progress is class-cooperation and not class-conflict, which is really a conflict
"between intelligence and unintelligence." He does not want to liquidate the
capitalist but to convert him and make him behave as a trustee in behalf of
the workers for the property he claims to own.16
The ethos of a society is reflected in its civilization, which Gandhi defines
as "that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Perfor-
mance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe
morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing we
know ourselves." He further states that "civilization, in the real sense of the
term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary
restriction of wants." As in society so in civilization there is going on a cease-
less change, resulting in progress or retrogression, reform and reaction. Prog-
ress is gained through making mistakes and securing their rectification, for
''no good comes fully fashioned out of God's hands but has to be carved out
through repeated experiments and repeated failures by ourselves."''7
15. Desai, Gospel, 184; Young India, November 10, 1928, 340; Harijan,
February 24,
1946, 24; September 7, 1935, 233; February 16, 1934, 4.
16. Bose, Selections, 89, 94-97; Young India, May 1, 1921, 4; September 16, 1926,
324; December 26, 1924, 424.
17. Hind Swara], 61, 93; Bose, Selections, 37, 39.
220 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE
For Gandhi there exist two "Golden Ages": one was in the dim and distant
past when man was uncorrupted by acquisitiveness, greed, and violence; while
the other is his own dream of a "utopia" when means and ends become con-
vertible terms, and when man will stand face to face with God in a just and
non-violent social order all over the world. In the long interval between these
two there has been some progress but much degeneration. The worst degenera-
tion of man has taken place, according to Gandhi, under the influence of the
modern industrial civilization. The major guilt of modern Western society
lies in its making merely bodily welfare its sole object in life. Its excessive
mechanization dehumanizes man, and, most of all, the worker is trapped in
the coils of the machine and the greed of the capitalist which leads to the
exploitation of workers. This civilization "takes note neither of morality nor
of religion" and is headed toward self-destruction. It is tired of its body and
is weary of its soul. It has seized India too. In the past India was unique
because it evolved a civilization "not to be beaten in the world." But Indians
lost their heritage through greed, disunity, and fratricidal hate and were con-
quered by the British. Under British rule modern civilization has been imposed
on India, and Indians have also become slaves to the machine. Creativity of
work is entirely lost, and society is riven by conflicts between capital and
labor and conflicts between nations, which tend to assume cataclysmic pro-
portions.18
This degeneration also affects the nature and functions of the state. Gandhi
is suspicious of the power of the state. He says: "I look upon an increase of
the power of the State with the greatest fear, although while apparently doing
good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by
destroying individuality which lies at the root of all progress." Personally
he would prefer to be an "enlightened anarchist"; but since this is next to
impossible for society as a whole, he would limit the power of the state to
the minimum.19
Gandhi's "Golden Age" to come envisions a peasant-centered society of
numerous village republics in which the conflict between work and creativity
would be reduced to the minimum. Gandhi idealizes the peasant, who be-
comes the hero in his historical thinking. He says: "Peasants have never
been subdued by the sword, and never will be." The peasant's work is es-
sentially life-creating rather than life-destroying, which is the characteristic
of the machine-age civilization.20 Most of these ideas are obviously derived
from Gandhi's reading of Tolstoy and Ruskin. Gandhi was influenced by
Tolstoy's belief that the essential Christian doctrine of non-violence and re-
18. Hind Swaraj, 34-38, 94; Bose, Selections, 88ff, 93, 142; Hind Swaraj, 38-43, 60.
19. Bose, Selections, 27.
20. Hind
Swaraj,
83; Young India, October 10, 1926, 348.
GANDHI AND HISTORY 221
sistance to war as a means of resolving conflicts had been denied by the mod-
ern West. Ruskin gave him an insight into the concept of creative labor and
the just distribution of its rewards. Both Tolstoy and Ruskin were critical
of the manner in which the modern Western civilization was developing, and
Gandhi based his critique of the modern West on their premises.21 Of Ruskin's
book Gandhi says: "The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun
it. It gripped me [that] I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected
in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me
transform my life." Tolstoy's work, Gandhi says, "overwhelmed me. It left
an abiding impression on me."22 His South African activities involved prac-
ticing the principles advocated in the two works, while the Indian period of
his leadership attempted to apply these principles to a problem and situation
of larger dimensions and an entirely different nature.
Gandhi's particular contribution to thought lies in his doctrine of Satya-
graha. Gandhi did not discover it, for it had been practiced in traditional
India for centuries. In numerous villages there was the practice of dharna,
wherein an aggrieved person resorted to fasting and non-violent protest against
his opponent in order to create moral pressure against him and arouse the
conscious disapproval of the community by inflicting suffering upon himself.
Gandhi took up this idea, but vastly refined it and applied it to situations
where he sought to remedy social, economic, and political injustice and ex-
ploitation on a mass scale by involving large numbers of disciplined passive
resisters. This was the Gandhian dialectic. In a dialectical process there is a
primal conflict between two opposing forces. Hegel and Marx have pro-
pounded the concept of a dialectical progression, but, as Joan Bondurant
points out, the Gandhian dialectic is significantly different in conception, prac-
tice, and results from the Hegelian and the Marxist. She says:
Hegelian dialectics is a system of logic describing inherent, natural processes;
Marxian dialectic is a method embracing not only man's original nature, but his
class relationships, an historical method by which both the direction and structure
of conflict are pre-determined. Gandhian dialectic, as distinct from Hegelian logic
on the one hand and the Marxist adaptation on the other, describes a process
resulting from the application of a technique of action to any situation of human
conflict - a process essentially creative and inherently constructive.23
Gandhian dialectic is not simply an instrument, creative and constructive,
of conflict-resolution between one group
of men and another but has impli-
cations for Gandhi's thinking on history.
This dialectic begins with the arising
21. See R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin (New York, 1967), 14, 16, 60, 73, 221-223;
Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, ed. Leo Warner (Boston, 1951), 118,
127, 135.
22.
Autobiography,
137-138, 298-299.
23. Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence (Berkeley, 1965), 192.
222 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHALE
of a conflict between what Gandhi would call forces of injustice, exploitation,
and wickedness on the one hand and those of truth (which is justice), equity,
and virtue on the other. The two forces may represent ideas and/or classes.
but above all, for Gandhi, they involve human beings. In this dialectical in-
terplay moral suasion and conversion of the opponent are the only means
used, and these are entirely of a non-violent nature. In this dialectic there
is no destruction of the one or the other but a unity of the two on a higher
plane of truthful understanding and moral harmony. This is possible because
the means used are pure in moral terms, and for Gandhi means and ends are
convertible terms. Man's inner history as well as the true history of mankind
should reveal this interplay of forces in the Gandhian manner. This has been
going on, says Gandhi; otherwise mankind would have been long destroyed
by the innumerable wars conventional history has recorded. Conventional
history does not reveal all of man's potentialities, and "to believe that what
has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the
dignity of man." Furthermore, "if we are to make progress we must not
repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by
our ancestors." Gandhi has no doubt about man's capacity for making such
new history, for the ethical perceptions and values inherent in human nature
are indestructible and invincible, though they may lie dormant or be over-
whelmed from time to time. For they are the expression of soul-force that
moves history, the force of love "which is the same as the force of soul or
truth."24
The makers of history, then, in the Gandhian view, are of two kinds. One
is the peasant, about whom something has already been said above. The other
is "a small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their
mission" who "can alter the course of history." The real history of mankind,
Gandhi avers, is the history of "men who had the courage to stand alone
against the world" in vindication of their ethical and spiritual principles. They
have secured the advance of mankind from one level to a higher through their
wisdom and suffering. These are the avatars, incarnations of the Divine Spirit,
who performed extraordinary services to mankind and invested human history
with new meanings.25 To some, such a view may appear to be a kind of
theological determinism,
but this is only partially correct.26 The Gandhian
instrument of historical progression-Satyagraha
-is composed of eternal
verities such as truth, justice,
and love. They reflect the operation of the Di-
vine Spirit in history but operate in events through human beings who have
the freedom of making a choice. Historical progress, according to Gandhi,
24. Hind Swaraj, 65; Young India, May 6, 1926, 164; Harijan, August 22, 1936, 220.
25. Young India, February 28, 1929, 71; October 10, 1929, 329-330; Desai, Gospel,
128.
26. See V. P. Varma, The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, 62.
GANDHI AND HISTORY 223
is due to "the sum total of the energy of mankind," which is "not to bring
us down but to lift us up, and that is the result of the definite, if unconscious
working of the law of love."
His units of historical progress are very much different from the stages
marked in conventional histories. They pertain to progress in the inner being
of man rather than an extension of his power over nature or other human
beings or territories. He says:
If we turn our eye to the time of which history has any record down to our time,
we shall find that man has been steadily progressing towards ahimsa. Our remote
ancestors were cannibals. Then came a time when they were fed up with can-
nibalism and they began to live on chase. Next came a stage when man was
ashamed of leading the life of a wandering hunter. He therefore took to agricul-
ture and depended principally on mother earth for his food. Thus from being
a nomad he settled down to a civilized stable life, founded villages and towns,
and from member of a family he became member of a community and a nation.
All these signs are signs of progressive ahimsa and diminishing himsa.27
It is interesting to note here that Gandhi is primarily concerned with man's
progress from animal behavior to higher planes characterized by greater non-
violence. Ultimately, Gandhi believed all of mankind would embrace the
doctrine of non-violence through the comprehension of love or soul-force
or truth, all of which are synonymous with God. At that point man will finally
come to terms with his own destiny when he stands face to face with his own
being which is a part of God. All conflicts will then be finally resolved, and
history will transcend its own time-bound nature.
III
To a very great extent Gandhi personified, consciously or unconsciously, the
immemorial Indian peasant steeped in the Hindu tradition based on the two
great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Gita and the Puranas.
To these he added selected parts from the Christian tradition such as the
Sermon on the Mount and the works of Tolstoy and Ruskin. But these Western
ideas were used only to sharpen the basic concepts which he had inherited
from his Hindu-Jain tradition. The Hindu tradition gave
him the central con-
cepts of God and His role in
history, of man as the
battleground
of forces
of virtue and sin, of the tremendous potentialities of love as an instrument
of human relations, and the acceptance
of
myths
and
legends
as the core of
human history. The influence of Jainism is
apparent
in his
interpretation
of
the doctrine of non-violence and its application to human situations and the
theory that Absolute
Reality
can
only
be
relatively comprehended
and stated
27. Bose, Selections, 22-23.
224 BALKRISHNA GOVIND GOKHIALE
in human affairs (Syadvada). It was Franklin Edgerton, the great American
Sanskritist, who pointed out the persistence in traditional India of two habits
of thought
-
which he called the "ordinary" and the "extraordinary"
-
form-
ing two distinct norms of valuation and judgment. Conventional history is
primarily concerned with the "ordinary" norm or reckoning, wherein events
involving kingdoms, empires, conquerors, and conquests mark the vicissitudes
in forms of temporal power placed in the context of a more-or-less firm chron-
ological framework. On the other hand, the "extraordinary" norm or level is
related to the central affirmation of the Hindu metaphysics, the affirmation of
the identity of man within his innermost being with the transcendental reality.
The first habit of thought is concerned with discrete facts; the second with
truth, which, as Gandhi declared once, transcends history. The disconcerting
fact, to the modern mind, is that the "ordinary" and the "extraordinary" levels
in traditional Indian thinking often interpenetrate. Mere man (Nara) strives
to become a cosmic archetype (Narottama) finally merging into the Deity
(Narayana). History, in such a view, may not always be preoccupied with
"here and now," for it takes for its theme the transformation of the nature
of man from being a hero into immutable goodness and his final absorption
into the Deity. History assumes ethical and cosmic overtones.28 The dimen-
sion of time in this view of history is altogether different. "Time," as Zimmer
points out, "is a becoming and vanishing, the background of the element of
the transient, the very frame and content of the floating processes of the
psyche and its changing, perishable objects of experience.
29
The order of
progression and regression is related to the advance or deterioration in human
qualities, for events are constantly happening and as Gandhi says "nothing
remains static. The human nature is such that man must either soar or sink."30
The Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Puranas are testaments of such soaring
or sinking of man and men. The units of time used here are quite different
from those of conventional history for they have a larger rhythm and a larger
interval; the word used is Yuga, an entire age or aeon. If chronology and
archaeology, the two essential indices of conventional history, he "called the
vertical coordinate, myths and mythologies
form the horizontal one." The
horizontal coordinates of myths and mythologies do possess a substratum of
history though it is largely social and cultural in its implications. The emphasis
is on an historical apperception
of culture systems,
their
growth and decay
within which man soars or sinks.3'
History, then, must teach ethical lessons and reveal man's progress or de-
28. For a discussion of the subject see B. G. Gokhale, Indian Thought Through the
Ages; a Study of Some Dominant Concepts (New York, 1961), 12-15.
29. H. Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Cleveland, 1961), 450.
30. Tendulkar, Mahatma, VII, 403.
31. See D. P. Mukerji, On Indian History (Bombay, 1945), 61-65.
GANDHI AND HISTORY 225
generation. It is in this sense that Gandhi rates the Mahabharata superior to
the works of a Gibbon or Morley. In the tradition of Hindu thinking, especi-
ally at the devotional and mystical level of peasant India, history has cosmic
overtones for Gandhi, for in its very womb lies embedded the spirit of the
Cosmic Man. The Gandhian view of history is hopeful of man, for he is
essentially a noble creature, endowed with ethical perception and spiritual
values. From time to time he may find himself in situations of conflict within
himself, with his fellowmen, and between his own immediate society and
another. He has the capacity to make his choice of the instrument to resolve
such conflicts, and sometimes he does make the wrong choice when the soul-
force, love, truth, justice, and even God are abnegated. These mean war,
acquisitiveness, injustice, exploitation, racism, or imperialism. But Gandhi
has abundant faith in man, who, in his thinking, is never utterly and irrevo-
cably doomed. For the spirit of God broods over the processes of human
history, and after initial mistakes, which may sometimes be persistent and
seemingly enduring, man must rise and march toward his tryst with destiny.
Gandhi has faith in such a march of man and his final ascent to where history
and "mythology" lose their apparent distinctions and become an integrated
saga of the story of man in search of himself. If and when he finds himself,
that will be the moment of the ultimate fulfillment of human history. That will
be the "Golden Age" when the cyclical procession of events will cease and
historical time transmuted into spiritual eternity. For Gandhi, history is, then,
the saga of man's striving to discover his own humanity, which is but a reflec-
tion of the Supreme.
Wake Forest University