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Arundhati Roy’s Gandhi And Ambedkar

By Joe.M.S.

09 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org

The recent article of Arundhati Roy in Caravan, (http://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/doctor-and-saint) raises many important questions as regards the contributions of Gandhi and Ambedkar. She does it brilliantly and courageously. It also takes up the question of ecology and progress.

Thus, Gandhi, she avers, remains a very interesting character in history, but is beset with inconsistencies, beyond resurrection by hagiography. Gandhi has been, not only by the bourgeois press, but even by well meaning leftists and post colonialists, hailed beyond criticism, and has been projected as the propounder of anything and everything in the world. Arundhati, on the other hand, tries to bring out his human mistakes, vulnerabilities and biases in his basic ideology. This becomes a continuation of the great tradition of the democratic and critical, dialogue as well as dissent, made by Periyar and Ambedkar, in the pre-independence era.

She recalls the incidents like Boer war in South Africa, the time period which made Gandhi a ‘Mahatma’, to drive home his apparently sheer racial attitude towards Africans. Gandhi was in his middle age then, when the whole progressive world has ardently started fighting for the freedom of Africans from racial slavery. This , it seems, has some thing to do with his belief system and ideology, as such, which draws from a strange mixture of oriental pride in Indo Aryan myth, and subscription to apparently pacific traditional religiosity, which as Arundhati points out, have been criticised by Ambedkar, as the root cause of discrimination.

One can always anticipate the culturalist answers of the Gandhian left against such observations that Gandhi’s responses are deep, mysterious, and undecipherable and traverses an entirely different philosophical realm, beyond criticism of the leftists sullied by western ideologies. This seems to be an endorsement of orientalist perspective which portrays static binaries of the east and west, where other streams of Indian thoughts and the itineraries of philosophies beyond the geopolitics of modernity, is discarded altogether. Thus, Arundhati says, history of Indian tradition is multifarious varying from Budhists to Bhakti movement, revealing that the notion of justice, equality and human rights were not alien to Indians and were not western imports. (One can always anticipate the bureaucratic fashionable expert historian’s sarcastic comment that what a novice she is to tread this field, were they have monopoly). This does not mean, one can undermine the important contributions of post colonial critique and consider it as homogenous (Thus, Ranajit guha, in the initial phase was critical of Gandhian politics, unlike the later stream of post colonialism which fully endorsed religiosity). Further more, if one, does not allow any great human being, whether it is Marx, Ambedkar Periyar or Gandhi, to be criticised, it is not fair. Gandhi’s so called deep religiosity, (and the so called transformation to be brought about in the heart of the enemy by non violent resistance, by shaming them) has to be contrasted with his shocking attitude to Africans and responses when Dalits served him food, as mentioned in Arundhati’s article.

There fore, as Martin Hagglund rightly argues, for Derrida, ‘absolute peace’ is a kind of totalitarianism, which denies alterity and differences and sees the present, in it’s complexities, as a fall from ‘absolute peace’. Gandhi, it seems, takes such an approach, where as a radical progressive politics should be, embracing alterity and life in it’s inherent finitude and mortality, where even ‘violence’ (not necessarily physical) is an inherent condition of justice (For instance, self defence of a victim).

Arundhati also hints at another important point through this article on the question of Gandhi’s ecology. Gandhi has been praised as founding father of ecology, at times rightly so, and the inspiration behind many ecological movements. This has important ramifications where classical left has failed miserably to address such question, and even now, many among them, entertain dreams of technocratic post revolutionary utopias. Having said that, there was contradiction in Gandhi’s ecology. Thus she points to studies which show that, Gandhi supported the cause of dams and even opposed the struggles of the displaced.

Arundhati’s most important critique is her views on the utopias entertained by Ambedkar and Gandhi. She correctly praises Ambedkar for all that he has done, his deep sense of justice, his radical championing of the cause of the down trodden, and the importance of the path he inaugurated for emancipation. However, she brings out the limitations in the understanding of many Ambedkarites. Thus the teleological conception of city as a space for liberation undermines the ecological disaster towards which such a model portends the world over. On the other hand, the Gandhian nostalgic ‘Ramarajya’, and the charm of an idyllic village, glossing over it’s narrow minded views on caste discrimination, is very highly problematic. Both these observations are very important lessons for the left.

Thus, one can surmise that a Marxism, as John Bellamy Foster espoused in Marx’s ecology, but vitalised and even critiqued by post colonial concerns and radical ecology, is the need of the hour.

Joe M S, is a social science teacher from Kerala. Worked in various places of India, now residing in Ireland.

 



 

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