Ahimsa Conundrums – Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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Ahimsa Conundrums – Mahatma Gandhi 

 

As you are no doubt aware, the Intermediate Prose Text-Book, Pearce and Aryatna’s Models of Comparative Prose, used in most Intermediate Colleges in India this year, contains a selection about five pages long from your book The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The selection is entitled “Ahimsa”, and contains your discussion of this most challenging principle and its application to our lives. The fifty students in my prose class, and I, their instructor, have been spending several class periods studying and discussing the above essay.  At one point, however, both the students and I, their instructor, have been unable clearly to understand the precise nature of your views. I refer to your statement about the conduct of a votary of ahimsa in case of war, particularly the following passage: “When two nations are fighting, the duty of a votary of ahimsa is to stop the war. He who is not equal to that duty, he who has no power of resisting war, he who is not qualified to resist war, may take part in war, and yet whole-heartedly try to free himself, his nation, and the world from War.”

A little further on (discussing three methods of recourse in case of the European War, for yourself): “. . . or I could participate in the war on the side of the Empire and thereby acquire the capacity and fitness for resisting the violence of war. I lacked this capacity and fitness, so I thought there was nothing for it but for me to serve in the War.” We should be deeply and humbly grateful if you would expand and clarify this subject and your past and present views upon it... I do not know that I need have suppressed the name of the college or the names of the signatories. The learned professor has sent me a stamped envelope for answer. This presumes a personal reply. But I have only limited time at my disposal especially when I am nursing two precious patients. I would not miss my weekly talk with the readers of Harijan. I am, therefore, with apologies to my correspondents, combining two purposes to save my time. The question raised in the letter is of very great importance and has always caused me the greatest difficulty, not much in deciding upon the action to be taken at a given moment but in justifying my conduct in terms of ahimsa. For the same action may outwardly be taken by the believer and the unbeliever. At these times the motive alone decides its quality. At the time of writing I have neither the text-book nor the original in Gujarati of which the text is a translation. But I have a recollection of what I wrote. What is more, so far as I am aware, my views on ahimsa, as I held them, remain the same today. The general proposition that I laid down in the quotation was derived from my conduct during the European War.

I had thrown myself whole-heartedly into it at the peril of my life not because of the risks attendant upon serving at such times, but because at the time I was attending drills and camps I was suffering from pleurisy and general weakness as I had hardly regained the strength I had lost during an exhausting fourteen days’ fast I had undertaken two or three months or before the War. I believed then the British Empire to be on the whole a system beneficial to humanity. I had dreamt of one day converting it to methods of peace instead of war for the sake even of its own existence though in another form. But I was fully conscious of my limitations. I was an insignificant atom ineffective for resistance to its general policy whether I joined the War or not, I was helplessly party to it, inasmuch as I ate the food protected by the British fleet. I was enjoying personal liberty too under its protection. If, therefore, I helped the War somehow or other, I felt that for me as a votary of ahimsa, it was better to take a direct part in it so as to enable me the sooner to end War. It is quite possible that all this was argument of the weak and that if I felt that war was an evil, I should have gone away from it even if it meant starvation or a rebel’s death. Anyway I did not think so then, nor do I now. It is wholly beside the argument what my attitude would now be, seeing that I no longer believe in the Empire as on the whole a beneficent power. To illustrate my answer, let me take another argument from my own life.

Even when I was a little urchin my heart and intellect rebelled against untouchability. But being then an insignificant member of the family I acquiesced in their conduct towards Harijans which I should not do now. Needless to say, I could not then have argued out my conduct. My personal belief did not appear to me to be inconsistent with my living in the family. Indeed life is made of such compromises. Ahimsa, simply because it is purest, unselfish love, often demands such compromises. The conditions are imperative. There should be no self in one’s action, no fear, no untruth, and it must be in furtherance of the cause of ahimsa. The compromise must be natural to oneself, not imposed from without. I should not at all wonder if my answer has given no satisfaction to the professor and his pupils. I must be pardoned for the constant reference to my own actions. The reason is obvious. I am not a well-read man in any sense of the term. All I know of ahimsa is in the first instance derived from my own experiences and experiments carried on in broad daylight in a humble scientific spirit and in the fear of God which is Truth.

 

Reference:

Harijan, 17-10-1936