Ajay Skaria talks with Omair Ahmad
about his new book
Excerpts from this conversation
were published earlier in The Wire)
It is rare to speak of “religion” in the political domain these days, and
you mention your own difficulties in breaking out of the secular mould to read
Gandhi in this light. Could you explain?
I must
confess that, like most others who had come of intellectual age as part of the
Indian left, I was for long suspicious of Gandhi because of his overt
religiosity. Certainly, if you had asked me as late as 2000 whether there was
any chance that I would work on Gandhi, I would have emphatically said “no.” And
I would have said so partially because both as a college student, and later in
my work in adivasi regions, I often encountered too many Gandhians running
ashrams that effectively practiced an upper caste Hinduism. Even now, to my mind,
his Hinduism as a social phenomenon likely enabled the later rise of Hindutva.
I was
drawn into Gandhi’s writings completely by accident. In 2000, I was teaching
the English Hind Swaraj in an
undergraduate class, and a passage from it intrigued me. Since I happened to
have the Gujarati text close at hand (I had in fact just bought it during my
trip earlier that year to Ahmedabad since the person I was then working on,
Indulal Yagnik, was first an associate and then a critic of Gandhi), and so I
consulted it. There was considerable divergence between the Gujarati and
English. As I read more, I realized that the divergences were quite frequent. It
became increasingly clear to me that Gandhi’s writing was doing something quite
different from what he may have intended it to do.
And
this is one thing I would stress—my arguments are not at all a claim about what
what Gandhi “really said,” or even about Gandhi as a historical figure. As a
historical phenomenon, I think the scholarship of Ranajit Guha, Shahid Amin,
David Hardiman and Partha Chatterjee is still quite persuasive—as Partha puts
it, Gandhi’s ideology acquires “tremendous power,” because it enables the
“political appropriation of the subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for
political hegemony in the new nation-state.” As for any arguments about what
Gandhi “really said”, it is impossible to read Gandhi’s explicit arguments
without a sense of profound disquiet, sometimes even outrage—for example, his
repeated defense of varnadharma, his claim that only he (and not Ambedkar) can
speak for the untouchables, or that moment when he cuts the hair of two girls
in his ashram because boys have cast an ‘evil eye’ on them.
At the
same time, my sense is that what makes rigorous thinkers interesting is precisely
that their thinking is not exhausted by the arguments that are most evident in their
writings. Here I would like to stress a beautiful word that Heidegger has given
us—“unthought.” Heidegger says in What is
called Thinking, “The more original a thinking, the richer will its
unthought be. The unthought is the most precious gift that a thinking has to
convey.” If we are to depart a little (but only a little) from what Heidegger
goes on to say, then we could parse that statement as follows: An unthought is
not what a thinking fails to think or does not think—that would merely be an
inadequacy of the thinking. Nor should we confuse the unthought with an
interpretation (something we add later, and sometimes presume is the implicit
meaning of the thinking) or a contextualization (something we do when we place
a thought in its surroundings). Rather, the unthought is what a thought cannot
think, what is at its margins, but what it is nevertheless given from. Even
when the unthought has the form of thought, it might undo and even destroy the
thought; besides, it may not even have the ‘form’ of thought.
Gandhi
is one of the most tenacious thinkers of dharma or “religion.” But it is the
fate of all thinkers of the new that their context, and the very working of
language, obscures their newness even from themselves. So it is with Gandhi.
What I try and do in my book is elicit both what Gandhi thinks, and what he
cannot think. Sometimes doing the latter requires bringing out how Gandhi’s
explicit arguments come undone in his own writing. This undoing is not my
interpretation of Gandhi, nor is it a criticism. Undoing is rather here a way
of being faithful to a thinking or writing—betraying its explicit arguments so
as to stay more intensely with what the thinking or writing gives, with what is
most audacious in them but what may nevertheless be obscured in them. In being
faithful to Gandhi this way—by betrayal, we can also think critically about
many concepts we take for granted.
I have
found Gandhi’s religion in this other senseincreasingly unsettling
and thought-provoking. Gandhi describes satyagraha as the religion that stays
in all religions. He says there can be no politics without religion. He
describes “modern civilization” as adharm,
irreligion. But what is this religion? Most evidently, it articulates a
profoundly conservative politics. On closer attention to the fissures and
divergences, however, it is clear that Gandhi’s writing also offers, often
against his explicit intentions, maybe even against his desires (unlike
intentions, one is not in control of one’s desires), a far-reaching critique of
liberal secularism and liberal equality; it potentially offers us some terms
for thinking the equality of all being.
You mention how Gandhi emphasised that the British themselves were
trapped by modernity, and that we must be free of both the British and
Britishisms, such as Parliament. How coherent was this thought? What
alternative forms of governance did Gandhi realistically expect to work?
This is not a
coherent thought. When we are engaged in the task of interpretation, we are
often trying to tease out a coherent argument from a text. But when as in this
book we are attending to arguments that Gandhi may even explicitly oppose but
that nevertheless emerge from his writing, this question of coherence is not as
important. What we are attending to instead is the moment of danger when the
coherence of the text may be undone. If we attend to Gandhi’s writing in this
spirit, then we could say that one most unsettling (again, notice, not most
evident) trope is the way it questions the equality of ‘modern civilization’, of
what we are today likely to identify as liberal equality. Liberal traditions
affirm a public life centered around autonomy—around a community that is free
and equal because it gives itself (auto) its own laws (nomos). These traditions
conceive equality in terms of measure. They do emphasize the immeasurability of
the human—this is why we have the emphasis on the inalienable rights of man and
citizen. But here immeasurability itself is conceived in terms of
measure—immeasurable beings are those who can rationally exercise measure. Relatedly,
the ability to master or measure is itself the sign of the immeasurability that
sets citizens apart from animals, things, or from non-citizenly humans such as
terrorists or felons. Simultaneously, in a democracy, sovereignty must be
equally shared among the vast multiplicity of citizen-sovereigns. So, another
sign of immeasurability is the ability to recognize and submit to abstract
measure (for example, the principle of “one person, one vote”) and assume
citizenship.
Gandhi is deeply disturbed by this liberal equality,
describing it as an ‘equality of sword.’ As that phrase indicates, in his
writing liberal equality is based on domination. And one can sense how. As I
have argued in the book and elsewhere,
first, this order grants equality only to those beings presumed to possess the
power to reason and measure, and in this way systematizes domination over all
other beings—equality can only be between humans. And because the line between
the human and the animal passes through humans, this equality also requires
domination over other humans—there are those humans who are presumed to be not
quite human, such as women, slaves, the colonized, or in our times terrorists
and anti-nationals. Second, autonomous beings inflict a massive violence on
themselves, for they lose the power to love, which in Gandhi’s writings
requires the surrender of autonomy and even sovereignty. (It is because of this
loss that in Gandhi’s writing the English deserve ‘pity’.) In both these ways,
autonomy institutes a rule of the major, even an equality of the major. Here,
freedom and equality is possible only through domination over the minor. What
is lost is the possibility of an exit from subalternity that does not
participate in domination or majority. It is in part because of these
hierarchies that Gandhi can describe “modern civilization” as adharm or
irreligion, that the Editor in Hind
Swaraj describes parliaments as ‘emblems of slavery.’
The
alternative to the equality of measure for him is satyagraha. But he is acutely
aware that satyagraha is not an alternative form of governance. Satyagraha
requires instead abandoning sovereignty or governance over both others and
oneself. So satyagraha is not an institutional or governmental alternative to
the equality of measure. This is why even as he criticizes parliaments, he
retains a strong taste for parliamentary democracy. As the leader of the
Congress, he is constantly demanding parliamentary representation; it may also
be partially why perhaps he affirms Nehru over Bose or Patel.
And
one can sense why he is so drawn to the equality of measure. That equality is
very enabling, which may be why not only liberal but also feminist, Dalit and
Marxist movements have drawn on it. The equality of measure is at work in every
demand for rights, for due process, rule of law, and so on. For example,
amongst the things that is so outrageous about the BJP government is the way it
constantly abrogates this equality of measure, constantly abandons the rule of
law (even more than the Congress, which was certainly no model in this regard).
One
may ask: is this not a contradiction—that he demands what he also attacks as an
emblem of slavery? I would say: no, it is rather the symptom of the relation of
relinquishment that the satyagrahi seeks with state power and more broadly with
autonomy.
There
is an anecdote, which I have discussed in one of
my essays, that illustrates this point very well: Somewhere in
the 1920s, one of Gandhi’s associates writes to him, reporting a theft in his
house. In keeping with what Gandhi argued for, the associate writes, he had not
registered a case with the police. But he still felt angry at the thief. Gandhi
responds by arguing that if the associate was resentful of the theft, then it
was his duty to report it to the police; he should refrain from registering a
complaint, Gandhi adds, only if he could forgive or practice satyagraha against
the thief. In other words, if the satyagrahi cannot abandon the desire for
police action against the thief, then the satygrahi should by all means seek
it. The point is to relinquish rather than master the desire for state action
against the thief. In a similar vein, satyagrahis can discipline themselves so
that they are more capable of relinquishing the desire for mastery, measure, or
parliament. But they cannot choose to relinquish that desire; rather, the
relinquishment must seize them. This is perhaps also one sense in which Gandhi
often says that he does not choose to do satyagraha, that the compulsion to
satyagraha seizes him.
Why do you describe his political philosophy as a religion?
It is Gandhi who
describes his politics as a religion, who insists repeatedly that there can be
no politics without religion. All I am trying to do is figure out what this
religious politics entailed and entails. From the perspective of the liberal
secularism that is our common sense, Gandhi’s assertions seem downright
dangerous. Liberal traditions, because they privilege autonomy, necessarily
regard religion with some suspicion. From their perspective, religion is
constituted by affect or faith. And to be religious in the public sphere is to
be unfree, for it is to function by laws that one has not given oneself.
This is not, of
course, to say that liberal traditions dismiss religion. Rather, they institute
some version of the distinction between political society or the public sphere,
and civil society or the private sphere. Here, the public sphere is where the
‘rights of citizen’ are exercised, and the private sphere is where the ‘rights
of man’ or what we today call human rights—the private individual’s rights—are
exercised. This is not only a freedom from religion in the public sphere; it is
also a freedom for religion in the private sphere, which is why religion
becomes a private matter. And the secularism that is created in the process
could be described as a theological secularism: now secularism provides the
highest values in the immanent world.
There
have been some very powerful secular critiques of liberal secularism. This for
example is what the young Marx offers in “The
Jewish Question.” He points out that even though the two spheres are
supposed to be distinct, with political society dominating civil society,
actually things are the other way round, and civil society dominates political
society. In other words, the secular state is the ‘perfected Christian state.’ As
I have argued
elsewhere, this does not mean that the state surreptitiously
preserves some Christian values, or even that it embodies a secular version of
Christian values—not at all. That kind of Hegelian argument, which is still
surprisingly widespread amongst scholars, is what the young Marx is
criticizing. For Marx, the secular state is the perfected Christian state in a
profoundly ironical sense. What the young Marx is arguing is that
Christianity—and religion more broadly—is marked by man’s alienation from his
“species being”, and this alienation is perfected by the liberal and secular
state. Marx thus has a critique simultaneously of religion and liberal
secularism. We have usually picked up his critique of the former, but glossed
over his critique of the latter. (This may be partially because Marx himself
does not follow through on his critique of the latter, but that is a different
issue).
But
Gandhi is not offering a secular critique. He is instead insisting on a
religious critique. And with this, we are on unfamiliar ground. To engage with
it, we must begin with the question: what is religion in Gandhi’s writing
(notice that I do not say ‘for Gandhi.’) I think we must remember that Gandhi
writes after the death of God—that is to say, after secularism has emerged in
the world as a force that must be confronted.
And
what is striking about Gandhi’s writing is the way it stages that confrontation.
Indicatively (this by no means an exhaustive typology), we can distinguish in
this context between four ‘forms’ of religion. The first form of modern
theological religion is liberal secularism itself. It is theological in the
sense that it grounds itself in the affirmation of humanity or universal human
values—as for example in the attempts to justify western military interventions
as humanitarian, or the very word terrorism, which is by implication inhuman. If
it insists that religion cannot and must not ground the immanent world, this is
only because it now seeks to ground
that world. The second form—and most relevant perhaps in India today—is the
remaking of religion as ‘culture,’ as for example with Modi’s Hindutva or
secular Zionism. And culture, like the concepts of nationalism and ethnicity
that accompany it, is a constitutively exclusionary category (as my colleague
and friend Qadri Ismail has argued in a recent
book), one which converts religions moreover into social
entities with homogenous traits, and capable moreover of being enumerated into
majority and minority. In this remaking, as several scholars have noted, a
profound secularism creeps in—the question of doctrinal beliefs, or for that
matter of faith, for example, becomes relatively unimportant. The third form is
the explicit creation of a new theology, as for example with the rise of
Orthodox Judaism, the Iranian revolution, or the emergence of a militant
cluster of Hindu swamis and sadhvis since the nineties.
Two
points about these three theologies. First, to describe all these three as
theologies is not at all to say that they are all equally violent. Between
these three, I, for one, have in principle an extremely cautious but
nevertheless unabashed taste for liberal secularism. That is because liberal
secularism is marked by a distinctive autoimmunity (to slightly repurpose Jacques
Derrida’s phrase)—that of the question. Liberal secularism enshrines the
question: it sees its knowledge as constantly produced, revised, and governed
by questioning and critical thinking. This critical thinking goes to the point
where secularism is willing to destroy its own institutional forms—hence
autoimmunity. Perhaps the most systematic form of this autoimmunity is what
Claude Lefort has
called the ‘empty place of power’ in modern democracies. As
he says, power ‘appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as mere
mortals who occupy it only temporary or who could install themselves in it only
by force or cunning. There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot
be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into
question. Lastly there is not representation of a center and of the contours of
society; unity cannot now efface social division. Nevertheless, a theology
organizes modern democracy—not just in the sense that Lefort presumes (as a
latency that is activated when resurgent religions attack secular democracy),
but also in the way that liberal secularism continues to be based on sovereignty. In this sense, liberal secularism’s
autoimmunity is very distinctive—it kills itself only so that it can be born
again as more sovereign and more powerful; its empty place of power constantly
makes for a more powerful state.
Second,
there is a relation between these three modern theologies. I think it is not
too much to say that the second and third theologies, which explicitly seek to
found the public sphere on religion, emerge at least partially in response to
what they can only see as the hypocrisy of secularism—the fact that (as Marx
helps us see) secularism’s invocation of a humanist universalism or an empty
place of power always dissimulates and diffuses a very particular complex of
interests. To secularism’s empty place of power, the second and third
theologies counterpose a full place, but they do so partially because of their
suspicion that there is no empty place anyway. (In this sense, they repeat, as
ideology, the argument that Marx made as critique.)
To
elaborate: in his forthcoming book, The
Age of Anger: A History of Our Present, Pankaj Mishra, writing of the
climate that produces these theologies, recalls Nietzche’s remarks about the ‘men of ressentiment’
who seethe with ‘rabid mendaciousness and rage.’ What this paradoxical phrase
says is: they are angry, but they have made themselves angry by lying to themselves,
and their lies are moreover rabid. Nietzsche’s targets in this passage are the ‘noble
Pharisees’, amongst whom we could surely include the liberal secularists. In
other words, a certain rabid mendaciousnesss already marks liberal secularism. If
we cobble Nietzsche and Marx together, we might speculate that this
mendaciousness is the assumption or hope that the public sphere can be dominant
over the private sphere. And we might add: the Modi or Trump phenomena are but
reactions to the mendacity of this theological secularism, even if their
mendacity makes the latter mendacity look almost trivial.
What
sets the fourth ‘form’ (though here, for reasons that it would take too long to
go into, the word ‘form’ is inappropriate and yet indispensable) apart from the
other three theologies is that it opens onto a modern political mysticism. I say
modern because, like the second and third theologies, it emerges within the
field marked by dominance of theological secularism. I say political because it
is concerned, in a way that cannot be resolved, with the question of the part
of those who have no part, to paraphrase Ranciere. I
say mysticism because unlike the theologies, this fourth form does not seek to
fill up the empty place of power with a new grounding religiosity. Instead, it
radicalizes the empty place of power.
Gandhi
is to my knowledge one of the most tenacious thinkers anywhere of religion in
this fourth sense. A paradoxical double move constitutes his political
mysticism. First, it accepts the secular characterization of religion as
groundless faith. But, second, it refuses to accept the secular insistence that
religion be limited to the private sphere. It says rather: there is only faith
without ground, groundless faith, even in the public sphere. This assertion has
dizzying implications. On the one side: first, as critique: if authority cannot
claim grounding, then the exercise of sovereignty—whether the sovereignty of
the state, or the everyday sovereignty of the autonomous citizen—is never just,
will always be unjust, and any freedom organized around such autonomy or
sovereignty is no freedom. Second, as affirmation: if faith is groundless, then
it cannot claim superiority over other faiths or other beings. It must rather
affirm an absolute or unconditional equality with all being—this unconditional
equality is what is most proper to groundless faith.
On the
other side: conversely, absolute equality can only be a religion—religion in
the sense of faith without ground, or groundless faith. I say this because
there can be no grounded way to claim equality with beings as different (to
name some of those that Gandhi is concerned with) as snakes, scorpions, ants,
trees or crops. They cannot share an equality of power of the kind involved in
claims to rights (animal rights is a well-meaning idea, but it is profoundly
inadequate). Equality here would require relinquishing autonomy, or the
everyday sovereignty we exercise over ourselves. In the book and elsewhere, I
call this an ‘equality of the minor’ to distinguish it from the ‘equality of
the major’ that is possible with parliamentary democracy.
Groundless
faith and unconditional equality—these are two names from different angles for
the same phenomenon. To this phenomenon, he gives the name satyagraha.
But
satyagraha is not an answer. It is a question: how is this equality without
condition, this faith without ground, to be experienced or enacted? Satyagraha
is ahimsa or non-violence, but in a very specific way. It is certainly not
non-violence as an attenuation of force, as an abstention from physical force
under all circumstances—Gandhi is too sophisticated a thinker to not realize
that such a concept of ahimsa is simply indefensible, that it would actually
collude in the worst violence. Rather, I prefer to describe satyagraha as
surrender without subordination. If surrender is to a sovereign power, then
those who surrender become subordinate. But in satyagraha surrender is a way of
refusing subordination, of not only claiming equality with opponents, but of
giving to opponents that equality which they have obscured from themselves.
Still,
to describe satyagraha as a surrender without subordination can seem puzzling. After
all, one might say, mystics surrender to a divine form in which they can lose
themselves, and which welcomes them. In contrast, satyagrahis are political
mystics: they surrender to eminently human or even animal interlocutors who are
often their opponents. How would surrender without subordination work here?
If we are to faithfully betray Gandhi—which is
to say, follow the opening offered by his writing in a way that might go
against his intentions and even desires—then perhaps we could say this:
satyagrahis submit unconditionally to their interlocutors, but in doing so they
resist their interlocutors and call the latter to a similar submission. By
surrendering, satyagrahis strive to participate in their interlocutors’ being,
and by doing so they not only sustain an unconditional equality with the
interlocutors, but also receive, give, and intensify their difference from the
other. The greatest equality is thus here also the greatest difference.
One
can in these ways perhaps offer a pre-definition of satyagraha. But the
question remains: what is satyagraha? That question remains because of the very
nature of satyagraha. Satyagraha is religion in the sense that it does not
spring from either knowledge or even choice. I cannot choose to have faith. Having
faith is here like falling in love—one falls in or into faith. It is
symptomatic perhaps that on several occasions Gandhi says that he does not
choose to go on satyagraha; rather, the command to satyagraha seizes him.
Nor
can one know that one has faith—as Gandhi notes on several occasions, what the
faithful are most aware of is the inadequacy of their faith. Put differently,
the overwhelming knowledge that the faithful have of their faith is that they
do not have faith. Wherever and whenever absolute equality has been accomplished,
there one might say that there is adequate faith. But this does not solve the
problem—the accomplishment of absolute equality is not a knowable fact. This is
why it seems to me that when Gandhi says that there can for him be no politics
without religion, this is true in ways that he can perhaps only apprehend, not
know.
But
precisely because it is marked by non-knowledge and faith, because it is a mystical
religion, satyagraha is not just the moment of greatest hope but also the
moment of the greatest danger. Satyagrahis strive for absolute or unconditional
equality. But how will they know unconditional equality? What conditions,
unknown to themselves, organize satyagrahis’ struggle for unconditional
equality? Since satyagraha does not rule out violence (Gandhi is quite emphatic
about this), when does the struggle for unconditional equality topple over into
its converse—the most immeasurable inequality? These are some of the questions
that I hope the book is sensitive to.
Doesn’t this ask us to reframe what the term “religion” itself is? What
you describe of Gandhi’s thought might work for Indic systems such as Buddhism,
but maybe not for Abrahamic faiths.
I am
reluctant to distinguish between Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions. In a suggestive
book,
Aaron Hughes has reminded us that the term “Abhrahamic religions” itself is a
modern projection. While Islam, Judaism and Christianity might all invoke
Abraham, and while there has obviously been considerable interaction between
them, these religions do not share some essential characteristics that either
unite them, or set them apart from other traditions. Relatedly, I am hesitant
to draw on the phrase ‘Indic’ religions.
Yes, what
Gandhi does is indeed a reframing of religion. I would only add: here,
reframing is also a return: he is returning to what is central to the ‘concept’
of religion. Derrida offers in one of his essays a beautiful ‘pre-definition’
of religion: ‘it is always a response that is prescribed, not chosen freely….
There is no doubt that it implies freedom, will and responsibility, but let us
try to think this: will and freedom without autonomy.’ I like the caution of
this word ‘pre-definition.’ I take it that while a definition would identify
the formal contours of the object being defined, a pre-definition describes the
opening within which these contours are unfolded. And I like the pre-definition
too. It avoids the usual secular conceit—shared for example by Marx—which sees
religion as a realm of unfreedom. Rather there is here a freedom where one does
not give oneself one’s laws (as one does in autonomy, the freedom of citizens),
You can sense why Derrida prefaces his pre-definition by saying, ‘let us try to
think this.’ It is indeed difficult to think: how can one be free if one is
following laws prescribed by another, laws that one cannot claim to have assented
to freely and rationally (as we are broadly presumed to have in a liberal
democracy, though again Marx reminds us that we are doing nothing of that sort)?
If on
this question Gandhi is so compelling to think with, then that is because his
writing reactivates an old distinction—that between theology and mysticism or
faith. You find both these traditions ‘in’ almost all the religions (in
Hinduism, for example, in the contrast between the priesthood of the stable
caste order and wandering mendicants): doctrines and institutions are organized
around theologies, whereas mysticism recoils from such groundings and
foundings—seeking God, it encounters the abyss, it keeps missing God. (Of
course, one can say mysticism only in a non-historical sense: the moment we
look at anything as a historical phenomenon, we shall find social integuments
that necessarily constitute every historical mysticism. Nor even would one ever
find a pure mysticism—historically, mysticism and theology are always entangled
phenomena. My point is only that mysticism as a ‘concept’ has an agonistic
relation with its integuments, its social locus.) While theology organizes
itself around knowledge, faith begins from the encounter with those moments
where knowledge becomes impossible. Relatedly, while theology institutes a
sociality that marginalizes solitude (and, relatedly, the minor), faith
requires a sociality organized around solitude. Gandhi’s writing—once again, not
always Gandhi in his explicit pronouncements—activates and intensifies religion
in this mystical sense.
Second,
and this is what is strikingly new about Gandhi, his is a political mysticism. That
is to say, unlike many mystical traditions, which are concerned with a freedom
that requires shedding social bonds, Gandhi’s mysticism involves a freedom in
society. This is what brings it so forcefully in conversation with liberal
secularism, with autonomous or republican democracy, which too is concerned
with freedom in society. But where liberal secularism organizes its freedom
around an equality of measure, Gandhi’s writing (though not his explicit
formulations) offers a freedom organized around unconditional equality. Unconditional
equality can only ever be experienced as faith. But this insistence on faith
also opens up new questions. For example: if the relation between theology and
faith is not oppositional, how else can it be conceived? Is unconditional
equality the necessary ‘form’ of the sociality and justice of political
mysticism? And how can unconditional equality be enacted? These are some of the
questions that my book begins—but only begins—to open up.
A key part of your descriptor of Gandhi’s “religion” is his idea of
immanence, of God being a living force in the world. How does Gandhi resurrect
God after Nietzsche eloquent burial of him?
Nietzsche’s
eloquent burial, as you so nicely put it, is of the theological God—of the God
who would be sovereign over us, of the God embodied in various institutions. And
he does not bury only the God that we usually associate with religion. As Heidegger says, when
Nietzsche says ‘God is dead,’ this also signals the death of the suprasensory
world—of that world of ideas and ideals which has been taken in so many
traditions, including those in the South Asian subcontinent, to be more true
and real than the changeable and sensory world. After the death of the suprasensory world, there can
no longer be a straightforward assertion of ‘higher values’ such as those
involved in humanism, or what I have been calling theological secularism. This
is why, Heidegger says, for Nietzsche now ‘nihilism, "the most uncanny of
all guests” is standing at the door.’ Nihilism: this word signals, in an
entirely different register, the critique we saw the young Marx making—that the
higher values presumed to be embodied in political society are constantly
suborned and dominated by the values of civil society, of ‘egoistic man.’
But Gandhi
is concerned with a mystical God, not a theological God. And though he invokes
God all the time, Gandhi inhabits a world after the death of God. To begin
with, he finds it difficult to affirm a ‘kinglike’ or sovereign God. Instead,
he says repeatedly, that satya is god. And unlike the knowledge that
constitutes theological secularism, this satya itself is not sovereign or
kinglike—it cannot command everybody’s loyalty. Rather, satya is a matter of
faith—one knows satya only through bhakti. This emphasis on bhakti implies that
now satya is only one’s own satya, and there is a plurality of satya.. As he
wrestles with the question of how to demand justice where there is a plurality
of satya, he comes to his formulations about ahimsa and satyagraha.
Your reference is to “equality”, but much of Gandhi’s thought also
focussed on propriety – you call him a “radical conservative”, and although
this evolved – you mention how his words went from “Kaffir” to “Zulu”- it continued
to be a problem in his imagination of the caste system, as did his inability to
imagine those out of their “proper” places, such as prostitutes.
I
would rather say: amongst the things that Gandhi most gives to think is the
question of how to think equality and propriety together. Questions of the swa or the proper or the ownmost are
crucial to Gandhi. Just think of so many of the words that matter to
him—swaraj, swadeshi, swadharma, or swabhav. His critique of ‘modern
civilization’ brings him to this emphasis on the proper. For him, even in his
explicit formulations, the fundamental violence of ‘modern civilization’ is
that it knows no limits—that it breaches limits and makes finite beings
infinite. Indeed, becoming infinite through measure—specifically, the citizenly
measure condensed in autonomous reason—is the violence distinctive to modern
civilization. To it Gandhi opposes ‘true civilization,’ which is organized
around self-limitation.
This
emphasis on self-limitation is the crux of what I call Gandhi’s radical
conservatism. To my mind, what is distinctive about modern conservatism is the
way it discerns something proper to entities, moments, phenomena. Moreover, it
conceives this proper in terms of a constitutive separateness or substantive
finitude—for example, the sense that the differences between men and women, or
castes, or various social groups are immeasurable or incalculable. Conservatism
is not innocent of measure (how can there be a claim to immeasure that has not
experienced measure!), but by its terms the violence of measure lies in making
the incomparable comparable, thus creating false unities that do not allow for
plurality.
We
often miss out on on this emphasis that, as we might infer from Uday Mehta’s
work or Sunil Agnani’s recent book,
modern conservatism in its classical form places on plurality. Edmund Burke conceives
his idealized English society as a stable and harmonious whole whose plural
parts are each oriented to what is proper to them, but nevertheless complement
each other externally, without participating in or unsettling each other. And
if Burke attacks the French Revolution so fiercely, it is partially because for
him its emphasis on abstract measure will not allow for this kind of plurality
within a whole. In other words, Burkean conservatism is dissatisfied with the
kind of plurality made possible by theological secularism’s public-private
distinction (where plurality finds its primary anchor in the private sphere);
it seeks a more vigorous plurality than the latter allows.
This
conservative claim to enable a more vigorous plurality can, has been, and must
be challenged. Conservatism (which could, to add to our list, be considered a
fourth modern theology) is certainly as violent the other three theologies. But
its violence is organized differently—around an insistence on propriety, on
substantive finitude and separateness. And conservative traditions consistently
fail to recognize that this propriety is sustained through a distinctive domination
and oppression—one marked by immeasure. Certainly, if so many marginal groups
have found theological secularism enabling, this is because its measure and abstract
equality has allowed them to challenge the domination that discourses of
propriety render invisible.
(This
schematic account should also indicate that the Hindutva brigade’s lurid
fantasies about JNU’s “organized sex racket” and drinking parties have very
little in common with classical conservatism. Hindutva strives to wrench
immeasure out of colonial measure, but it does so by internalizing measure. Even
where it invokes the proper, that proper and its immeasurability is understood
in terms of culture, an enumerable category. It fears always moreover that this
culture eludes it, and hence its frenzied violence both towards those presumed
to be part of it, and those presumed outside it. And it hates internal
plurality—whether that at work in conservatism, or in the public-private
distinction.)
In the
book and elsewhere, I describe Gandhi’s religion as a radical conservatism.
Here, radical does not refer to left or right. Rather, I wish to re-call the
etymology of radical—that which goes to the roots, whether to uproot or reroot.
Gandhi is drawn to conservatism perhaps because it offers the most powerful way
(I sometimes fear the only way) of questioning ‘modern civilization.’ But he
seeks to conserve something strange—faith without ground, or equality without
conditions. These are not substantive values of the sort that conservatism
usually affirms. In order to conserve unconditional equality, for example, it
would be necessary to destroy caste, as also gender hierarchies. There is thus
a tension, even dare one say an aporia, in Gandhi’s writing between the
conservatism that he must start from and the equality or faith he must
conserve.
It is
perhaps because of this aporia that there is a fundamental and even undecidable
instability in Gandhi’s politics, that there are two radical conservatisms
rather than one. On the one side: very often the conservatism that he starts
out from makes it impossible for him to think unconditional equality. You can
find many symptoms of this all over—his remarks on varnadharma, the very
concept Harijan, and the way that he is unable to consider the possibility that
prostitutes of Barisal can offer satyagraha. And in his writing these symptoms
together articulate more a classical conservatism than a nationalist Hinduism. For
example, when Gandhi defends varnadharma,
he does not do so on by providing a functionalist account of it as a division
of labor (of which defense Ambedkar acerbically remarks that caste is a
division of laborers, not labor.). Rather, for him, varnadharma names the idea
that people limit themselves to their caste and its associated obligations, and
that such self-limitation allows them to focus on what is really
important—their spiritual wellbeing. Going by this argument, the inequality
between castes is a later accretion, and can be taken away so that varnadharma
is left in its purity. This conservatism is radical in the sense that it pushes
conservatism much further than ever before; it remains however profoundly
violent in that the proper remains sovereign. Not only that, the sovereignty of
varnadharma might even be strengthened since its propriety can now be
maintained with a clear conscience.
On the
other side, there are those moments, rarer but nevertheless often destabilizing
or even breaking through into his explicit pronouncements, where conservative
sovereignty is destroyed by the emphasis on a faith without ground and an
equality without conditions. Here, satyagrahis practice the impropriety proper
to unconditional equality. Much of the book is devoted to teasing out this
second ‘form’ of radical conservatism.
All
that is perhaps everywhere visible is only the first radical conservatism. Does
he ever practice conservatism in the second sense? The problem with this
question is that it is impossible to answer. If conservatism in the second
sense has ever been practiced, it belongs to its nature that it has been
practiced unknowably and invisibly, not least of all from the practitioner. Which
does not mean without power.
Like the death of religion, there has also been a death of the state –
in that those who had faith that modernity would lead to a more moral life seem
to be confounded by the amorality, even immorality, of states. Does Gandhi’s
philosophy allow us out of this trap?
There has indeed been the death of the ideal of the
state—whether the communist state or the liberal state. That death may in part
be because of the realization (not of course cast in these terms) that
political society or the public sphere is always being undone by civil society
in its various forms: capitalism, caste, and the theological religions, to name
some. The communist solution—the abolition of civil society—led to what Arendt
has so powerfully described as totalitarianism. The rise of neoliberalism and
the neoliberal state is amongst other things a symptom of this disillusionment
with both the socialist and the liberal state.
I do not think Gandhi allows us a way out of this bind—that
the state and more broadly political society is constantly dominated by civil
society. But he does offer one way, one very compelling way, to responsibly inhabit
this bind. In quite a prescient manner, he attacks ‘modern civilization.’
Satyagraha is deeply suspicious of both civil society and political society,
and it offers another sociality, another discipline. This sociality does not
overcome civil society and political society. But it remains outside them, and
seeks to make them more responsible.
Gandhi remained a devout Hindu, but is this because Hinduism is so vast
a field where he could redefine his “religion” drastically and still consider
himself devout?
I would hesitate
to make that argument. It is by no means clear that Hinduism is any vaster a
field than, say, Christianity, when you take into account the varieties of
Christianity. After all, even within the United States, both Martin Luther King
and David Duke declare themselves Christians. I would say rather than the way
he could redefine his religion has to do with some of the potentiality of
mysticism as a ‘concept’ that is both borne and obscured in all ‘religions,’ so
to speak.
How, today, are these thoughts – this approach to philosophy – relevant?
In an interview,
Derrida describes his relation to Heidegger and Freud as one of fidelity and
betrayal: “I betray them because I want to be true to them.” This betrayal he
calls a counter-sign or counter-signature. The counter-signature, he says, is
‘this strange alliance that occurs between following and not following,
confirming and displacing; and displacing is the only way to pay homage, to do
justice.” The counter-signature is simultaneously the most intense following
and the most intense difference. Unthought and counter-signature—each of these
‘concepts,’ I am tempted to say, calls forth the other.
To my
mind, the counter-signature (which I think it would be too simplistic to describe
as the hallmark of a school called deconstruction) is especially pronounced in
the work of many scholars of India of my generation or younger whose work I
find most inspiring and thoughtprovoking—for example, Prathama Banerjee, Faisal
Devji, Leela Gandhi, Aishwary Kumar, Udaya Kumar, Simona Sawhney, Sanil V, and
Milind Wakankar. I do not think these scholars can be said to share an approach—they
differ and disagree in crucial ways from each other. The counter-signature,
after all, is not quite an approach. Rather, it is a difference that arises in
the process of the most faithful following, or conversely a following that
arises in the process of the most insistent differing. What they might share
then is not so much something substantive as a modality of following and
differing.
And if
the counter-signature is relevant and even urgent today, that is because it
offers a very distinctive way of relating to our pasts and presents. It avoids
the two most common secular conceits—of beginning from a clean slate, and
conversely of understanding matters in their historical context (here, context
becomes the term that smuggles in a modernist concept of time and space).
Instead, the counter-signature enacts a curious traditionalism—what might be
called a destructive (in Heidegger’s sense) relation with tradition. And that
relation may be one way of acknowledging the inadequacies of our usual
distinctions between the public and the private, or between political society
and civil society.
I wish
I could say that Gandhi’s writing, when read in this vein, provides some
answers, that now it is only a matter of the political will necessary to follow
or implement them. But with the most rigorous thinkers things are never that
clear. What we receive from them is not answers but new questions, and even
more new ways of formulating old questions. And Gandhi’s writing, read
carefully, offers many questions to think with.
Most
of all, he gives us the question of religion as political mysticism. Recall: political
mysticism (as distinct from political theology) emerges from being struck by the
apprehension (but not knowledge) that there is only faith without ground, and
that proper to such faith is the equality without conditions of all being. To
his articulation of this political mysticism Gandhi gave the name satyagraha. Given
how deeply the first radical conservatism runs through Gandhi’s writing,
perhaps neither that name, satyagraha, nor his articulation of it need
necessarily be retained today (though I would worry that any effort to begin
anew too quickly might end repeating old mistakes in new ways).
Also, at least for some us, to stay with
the question of political mysticism today would also be to encounter a radical
or even mystical secularism. What such a secularism would be—this remains to be
thought. Suffice here to say that radical secularism is not a militant
secularism. Militant secularism seeks to eliminate religion from civil society.
By contrast, radical secularism (of which we can discern in Ambedkar perhaps
the most intense articulation) is acutely aware that the distinction between
political and civil society, or between the public sphere and religion, is also
empowering, and cannot be simply eliminated or even relinquished—it must rather
be reworked. And radical secularism reworks the distinction through a focus on the
social question. Arendt describes the social as a curious and somewhat hybrid
realm between the public and the private. But especially when framed as a
question, then the social is no longer a realm—it becomes a criterion. And as a
criterion, it asks: how can the public-private distinction enable the equality
of the most marginal? Would the distinction between public and private become
mystical in such an equality? If so, how? I think of Ambedkar’s searching conversion
to Buddhism as part of his struggle with these questions.
Still,
I often worry: is political mysticism—whether as radical conservatism or
radical secularism—even relevant at a time like this, when the vicious violence
of the BJP and its affiliates threatens to replace the measured equality of
theological secularism with Hindutva as a cultural theology? Is posing new
questions, reframing one’s questions, even a valid concern at a time like this?
Should we not simply push for the implementation of—even the will for the
implementation of—the answers that we already somewhat know? I am not sure of
this, nor am I sure that these two options are opposed to each other. But I
also remind myself that satyagraha itself is formulated during British rule, a
time likely even more viciously violent than now.
Hardback|Rs 895| 406 pp | Copublished with University of Minnesota Press
