In recent days, I have been reading essays on Mahatma Gandhi, an architect of the national independence of India from British colonial rule. One among them is Akeel Bilgrami on ‘Gandhi as Philosopher’, where he articulates that integrity is an essential element of Gandhian thought. Another is Faisal Devji’s Gandhian logic of suffering as inherent to Gandhian nonviolence.
And others include Karuna Mantena, Uday Mehta, Ashis Nandy, Gene Sharp, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, and Ajay Skaria, who have all discussed an aspect of Gandhian thought which constitutes his logic of worldmaking after empire.
In his essay, “Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi”, published in 1980, Nandy argues that Gandhian thought and ideas posed a threat to the traditional society that persisted in India. Nandy suggests that Gandhi was ‘neither a conservative nor a progressive’: neither did he seek to preserve the past nor to protect the new.
Nandy would effortlessly transcend between the two—and in doing so, he ‘simply reconciled the common essence of the old and the new’. However, despite the synthesising act, Gandhian thought was highly subversive of the Indian, or the Hindu, culture.
Gandhian thought had two intrinsic aspects that posed a threat to the traditional authority of the Hindu society.