A Moral Relevance : Of Sin, Sinner And System

1920 was The year in India when Mohandas Gandhi launched his signature politics with Non-Cooperation Movement against India’s British regime. The call was motivated by India’s recent and troubled past of military atrocity in Punjab, allies’ betrayal of Islamic Khalifa, and the promulgation of legislations to stifle a rising India into submission. The crux of the call, Gandhi said, was directed inwardly; it aimed at self-purification and penance. It was necessitated with a view to break India’s complicity in her own subjugation. “The English,” in Gandhi’s ideological assumption, as he had put down in Hind Swaraj, “have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them”.

The call received its energy from contemporary politics. But it had its roots that extended to the time when the British had begun Indian expedition proclaiming ‘trade and not territory’ as their goal. It seemed long ago and yet it was so near that debris of its impact was all visible, in the destruction of Indian industry, in the pauperization of Indian people and in the faminisation of Indian economy. If anything that most succinctly defined the British rule, it was its role in the destruction of the hand-spinning. It was this that drove Gandhi’s politics and that made his criticism of the British rule harsh. He saw the pernicious impact caused by a Satanic Empire that, in Indian metaphor, was the Ravan Raj.

A year later in 1921, Gandhi gave an inspired twist to his campaign against the British rule. At the height of his campaign, Gandhi called for the actual destruction of foreign clothes as a mark of self-respect. The foreign clothes, Gandhi averred, were contaminated with gory blood of Indians of yore. The only way one could now redeem one’s national existence was incinerating the individual stock of such clothes. On 31^st July 1921, he personally lit bonfire of a huge collection of foreign cloth on the ground of a friendly Bombay textile mill. The electrifying spectacle was witnessed by a sea of humanity that had worn coarse and white khadi. For Gandhi the exhilarating moment was a “soul-stirring sight” and he called it a yajna.

The central thesis of the non-cooperation was adoption of Charkha and replacement of foreign apparel by hand-spun hand-woven fabric of Khadi.

Through his speeches, writings, and the weekly silence, Gandhi brought home one point to his Indian audience: The foreign cloth revived “Black Memories” and therefore must be destroyed. In his speeches, Gandhi warned the public that “Foreign cloth constitutes our slavery. You should throw it off...Regard foreign cloth as no better than beef or liquor.” His political language was replete with reference to foreign cloth as “sin,” “filth....dirt....plague,” “pollution,” “a badge of our slavery” which required to be discarded, burnt and against which an aversion needed to be created.

The depth of the injury caused by the East India Company and the magnitude of suffering that India then went through loomed large over Gandhi’s consciousness and politics. By whatever means - fair or foul - the Company crippled the weaving industry, accumulated wealth, waged wars, acquired control of ports, monopolised trade and finally established their rule over India. The country was enslaved for satisfying the greed of the foreign cloth manufactures. India’s  indigenous cloth industry “was made to die”. The Company’s persecution was so cruel that Indian craftsmen were obliged to cut off their own thumbs, starvation and lives, the indigenous consumers got tempted to the imported clothes. “Who was tempted at the sight of their silver? Who bought their goods? History testifies that we did all this.” Indians therefore were required to perform a double penance; one for the oppression the ancestor producers had to endure and second, for the sin of having succumbed to Satanic influences of the foreign manufactures. If the former meant destruction of foreign clothes, latter required taking up spinning as a National Duty and Khadi as the State Dress. In such a scheme incineration of the foreign clothes was as much a sacrament as the spinning of the Khadi yarn.

In his public speech delivered on the occasion, Gandhi, who was yet to strip himself to the minimal clothing that became his iconic trademark for all his remaining life and beyond, hoped that the fire would not die out but similar fire would be lit  “every week.....in every town and every street of India.” That process was to continue, was the pinnacle of and was preceded by one of the most aggressive and determined campaigns in the history of modern India. The campaign had progressively accredited to itself an accusation for fomenting hatred and violence against the fellow human beings and their creations. He was accused of fostering narrow nationalism against India’s Vasudhaiv Katumbakam. And, he was also advised that instead of burning the clothes he should give it to the poor. The volley of accusation came from friends and foes alike. While friends were pained, foes felt vindicated at the sight of Gandhi’s violence, manifested in his act of lighting the pile.

“Cleansing of filth is not violence,” Gandhi’s was a point–blank reply. “It is a mockery to ask India not to hate when in the same breath India’s most sacred feelings are contemptuously brushed aside,” Gandhi wrote in response to criticism. He shrugged off all oppositions, even from so close a friend as Andrews who advocated giving the foreign clothes to poor instead of consigning them in fire. “The central point in burning,” Gandhi wrote to Andrews, “is to create an utter disgust with ourselves that we have thoughtlessly decked ourselves at the expense of the poor”. About the burning itself Gandhi said “it was a noble act nobly performed.” With this one act, Gandhi said, people were “silently and unconsciously transferring their hatred of sinners to sin itself.” Burning was a life-saving “surgical operation.” If there was any anger or ill will, the fire gave it a disciplined vent. Fire was symbolic of transformation of impotent hatred into conscious self-pity. Giving to the poor discarded foreign cloth was like giving “discarded costly toilet brushes to them.” “Such an inartistic and incongruous” charity was an insult to their sense of patriotism and the state of poverty. The sin was not the foreign fineries nor even the foreign conquest but folly of Indians falling to the conquerors’ bait in the past.

Past was an important reference point for Gandhi just as it is for the post-independent propendent proponents of Hindutva. In the contemporary contention for hegemony it is the present’s necessity to call for the past to stand a witness. Gandhi called for facts from past, aptly supported by historical research of Naoroji and Rajani Dutt, to support his argument that the British machinations rather than their machinery killed India’s flourishing craft of cloth–making and impoverished her. In drawing from past, Gandhi was as much legitimate as are the Hindutva exponents. The politics of Hindutva ostensibly revolves around the historical misdeeds of the medieval Islamic rules. Their temple-demolishing spree, the present-day cadres grieve, was an affront to Hindutva. The only way a mistake of past can be redeemed is by avenging in present a past-wrong.  Gandhi too said much the same. But, while Gandhi avenged through atonement for having succumbed to temptation and turmoil, the politics of Hindutva avenges through ethnic cleansing.  Gandhi not only fixed responsibility for destruction but also attempted reinstating the economy to tilt balance against the imperial needs. Responsibility was laid not on the perpetrators of the destruction but on Indians who caved in to pressure and temptation from the British traders.  So avenging the wrong perpetrated in the past did not mean to hate the present-day British rulers but reclaiming an empowered self by stripping all weaknesses. On the other hand, the ideology of Hindutva directs its destructive energy against the “Babar’s Santan,” the Muslims. By anointing the Muslims of today so it holds not just the Mughal ruler but the whole Islamic population of India responsible for India’s medieval “ignominy.” In this indiscriminate demarcation of enemy, there is no inward looking but simple blame–displacement.

Gandhi drew a distinction between bad actions and bad men. Gandhi’s politics, as he tirelessly repeated from umpteen platforms, was “directed not against men but against measures.” It was not directed against the Governors, but against the system they administered. The roots of his politics lay not in hatred but in justice, if not in love. “And so I hope this great movement....has made it clear. ....that whilst we may attack measures and systems, we may not, must not, attack men. Imperfect ourselves, we must be tender towards others and be slow to impute motives.” If he did use harsh language, Gandhi said, they were condemnation free of any evil intention. Even on 31 July 1921 when passion ran high at the sight of that massive bonfire of foreign clothes, there were English men and women on the platform along with Gandhi. Gandhi was striving to establish Swaraj in India by appealing to moral force to attain which he relied upon selfishness and sacrifice. “We should try to end British rule not by vising them with punishment but by acquiring strength through self-purification.” It is this fine distinction that needs to be understand by the free India even when it sets itself on the agenda of correcting the past. While Gandhi’s destruction of foreign cloth was meant to strengthen India as a nation, Hindutva’s destruction of Babri mosque brought her civil chaos and bloody reprisal.

- Gandhi Marg, January-March 2005