The Bloodless Revolution
Page 54
By the late nineteenth century the teeming streets of Victorian London harboured several vegetarian restaurants. It was into this world that a young man from Gujarat arrived in 1888 to study law, and it was here that he would stumble across the Vegetarian Society, the ideology of which would become a linchpin in his transformation of global politics. If any man deserves Thoreau’s title of ‘benefactor of his race’, then this was he: Mohandas K. Gandhi, later to be leader of the Indian independence movement. Western vegetarianism had been heavily influenced by Indian culture for more than 300 years; in Gandhi’s hands it was re-exported to India as a core element in the great national freedom struggle.10
Gandhi had been brought up a strict vegetarian of the Bania caste in Gujarat, the heartland of ahimsa-endorsing Vaishnavite Hinduism. Ironically, however, in nineteenth-century India many modernising reformers had an anti-vegetarian agenda, and Gandhi was induced to eat meat secretly as a symbolic defiance of traditional Hindu conservatism and even British imperialism. Explaining that they had been inculcated with the old European dogma that vegetarianism made the Indians weak and feeble, Gandhi remembered many years later that ‘It began to grow on me that meat-eating was good, that it would make me strong and daring, and that, if the whole country took to meat-eating, the English could be overcome.’ However, struck with remorse about deceiving his parents and tormented by nightmares of animals bleating inside him, Gandhi soon abjured the experiment and decided to renounce meat-eating at least until his parents died.
Ambitious to get on in the world, Gandhi decided to finish his studies in London, despite the financial strain and the fact that his community leaders threatened him with loss of caste because ‘We are positively informed that you will have to eat flesh and drink wine in England.’ Having made a solemn vow to his mother not to succumb to such carnivorous British customs, Gandhi ignored the threats and embarked for London, resolutely clinging to his vegetarian vow despite his lasting conviction that meat-eating was the key to strengthening the Indian constitution ‘so that we might defeat the English and make India free’.11
At first Gandhi found it extremely hard to accommodate himself to the insipid vegetables that he boiled up for himself – spice-free – in his lodgings. But he was saved when his landlady told him about the numerous vegetarian restaurants serving cheap dinners all over London. Gandhi chanced upon one of these on Farringdon Street and, filled with joy, sat down to his first hearty meal in months. As he satisfied his deprived stomach, his attention was drawn to the array of vegetarian books displayed in the window, among them Howard Williams’ The Ethics of Diet, Dr Anna Kingsford’s The Perfect Way in Diet and the works of Dr Allinson (whose name is still carried by a brand of wholemeal bread). By far the most important discovery for Gandhi was the recently published Plea for Vegetarianism by the socialist friend of John Ruskin and Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt. Salt wrote five books about Shelley and edited the Vindication of Natural Diet; his enthusiasm for Shelley’s call for non-violent radical vegetarian protest (itself inspired by Hinduism) evidently rubbed off on Gandhi who mentioned both Salt and Shelley in his writings.12
Encountering these books in London was a turning point in Gandhi’s life. He became a born-again vegetarian, abstaining from meat, as he explained, ‘by choice’ rather than under the constraint of his vow. Until this moment he had retained the desire to overthrow vegetarianism in India, but ‘The choice was now made in favour of vegetarianism, the spread of which henceforward became my mission.’13 Vegetarianism had been for Gandhi a badge of colonial humiliation; he now converted it into a symbol of resistance. Reviewing his attitude to the ancient Indian customs he had been taught to despise, Gandhi now clung to them as an antidote to the malaise of Western civilisation.14
Vegetarianism was Gandhi’s first political cause; many of his earliest writings were articles in the journals of the Vegetarian Society and correspondence about his new vegetarian ‘mission’. ‘Full of the neophyte’s zeal for vegetarianism’ – as he put it – he quickly became an executive on the committee of the Vegetarian Society, and remained their agent long after leaving the UK, helping to establish centres of ‘vegetarian propaganda’ all over the world.15 While in London he also started his own vegetarian club, of which Edwin Arnold was the vice-president. With these activities he cut his teeth in the organisation of political movements; they also drew him into the ideological environment of the vegetarians, who were often neo-Luddites, socialists and critics of imperialism, among them Shaw, Annie Besant and Henry Salt (who had resigned his post at Eton after deciding that his colleagues were ‘cannibals, as devouring the flesh and blood of … animals …[and] living by the sweat and toil of the classes who do the hard work of the world’).)
Gandhi saw vegetarianism as a bridge that could unite the peoples of East and West. He advised Indians in London to treat the Vegetarian Society as a home from home, which would, he hoped, help to make India and Britain ‘indissolubly united by the chain of love’. On moving to South Africa to work as a lawyer for his uncle, he tried to convert Boer children to vegetarianism in order to instil a reverence for life which would simultaneously break down racial barriers. Increasing arable agriculture in the region, he promised, would double the number of inhabitants the soil could support and thus dissolve the competitive strife between Europeans and Indians. Indeed, it was at dinner in a Johannesburg vegetarian restaurant that Gandhi first met his principal political associates, Albert West and Henry Polak, with whom he founded his rural vegetarian communes Phoenix (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910). Indeed, it was with these fellow vegetarians that Gandhi forged his movement of satyagraha (literally ‘truth-firmness’), the struggle which started for the rights of Asians in South Africa and ended in Indian Independence.16
Although Gandhi was initially mainly interested in the health benefits and frugal economics of his diet, he eventually turned more to what he called the ‘religious’ and ‘moral’ reasons for vegetarianism.17 Ahimsa (non-violence), an ethic that he identified at the core of both Hinduism and Christianity, became a central plank in his political philosophy, and vegetarianism was one of its most potent manifestations. Gandhi tried to shift the Western vegetarian tradition towards the core Indian doctrine of ahimsa.18 But he also introduced Western arguments into the traditional debate about ahimsa in India. Once, after Gandhi put a calf out of its misery, an Indian critic complained that ‘You should confess that your views about ahimsa are imported from the West.’ Admitting that his mind was a fusion of Eastern and Western ideas, Gandhi defiantly replied: ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of if my views on ahimsa are the result of my Western education.’19 Indeed, it was in England, under the influence of the Theosophical Society, that Gandhi first took a serious interest in Hindu scriptures.20
Gandhi’s adherence to ahimsa determined the non-violent basis of his protests against British colonial rule, from his championing of homespun cotton in place of imported British cloth through to the non-cooperation movement which brought India to an intermittent standstill from 1919 until his death in 1948. Gandhi simultaneously applied ahimsa to the minutiae of each individual’s personal life. He hoped, like Thoreau, that by experimenting on his own body he could revolutionise the habits of his nation. Abstinence from meat, in this respect, was just the beginning; any food had a certain harmful impact – even eating vegetables and drinking water and milk killed microorganisms. This was to some extent unavoidable; but, he insisted, ‘It is a sin if you eat two morsels when you can do with one.’ Chewing thoroughly to make the most efficient use of food, he explained, could also ‘automatically reduce the dietetic himsa [violence] that one commits to sustain life’.21
The ultimate himsa-reduced diet he advertised was the ‘raw-food’ of sprouted wheat, which he first experimented with in London in his twenties (following a tradition that can be traced back to Shelley’s friends J. F. Newton and William Lambe, whose work Gandhi read about in Howard Williams’ Ethics of Diet) and which he tried again (until
it made him ill) in 1929. ‘To be rid of disease it is necessary to do away with fire in the preparation of foods,’ he declared. ‘We must take everything in its vital state even as animals do.’ By liberating people from the necessity of cooking, he promised that the raw food diet ‘enables serious men and women to make revolutionary changes in their mode of living. It frees women from a drudgery which brings no happiness but which brings disease in its train.’ The raw food diet, and other innovations such as abstinence from milk, were clearly fads which had roots in the Western vegetarian tradition, and numerous observers at the time pointed to Gandhi’s debt to the West.22 Throughout his life he acknowledged that ‘The seed, however, for all of them [his various arguments for vegetarianism] was sown in England.’23 What has not been recognised sufficiently (even perhaps by Gandhi) is that the vegetarian tradition he picked up in England was already infused with Indian philosophy.
Thoreau was one of Gandhi’s most important inspirations in his political deployment of ahimsa and his entire strategy of civil resistance. Gandhi read Thoreau’s seminal essay, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849) (later known as ‘Civil Disobedience’) when he was just beginning the satyagraha movement. Although Gandhi insisted that he had developed his method of civil resistance before reading Thoreau (despite some contemporaries’ claims to the contrary), he readily acknowledged that Thoreau’s ‘ideas influenced me greatly’. In an appeal ‘To American Friends’, Gandhi reiterated that ‘You have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me through his essay on the “Duty of Civil Disobedience” scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa’; and to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942 he wrote that ‘I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson.’ Many regarded this as the prime example of Gandhi’s re-export to India of Eastern-influenced Western traditions. As one American journalist put it somewhat wilfully: ‘It would seem that Gandhi received back from America what was fundamentally the philosophy of India after it had been distilled and crystallized in the mind of Thoreau.’ Gandhi himself revealed something similar regarding his enthusiasm for Emerson’s essays which, he said, ‘contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in Western garb. It is refreshing to see our own sometimes thus differently fashioned.’24
Although Thoreau was interested in the principles of harmlessness and stoic forbearance, he was not actually as committed to nonviolence as Gandhi’s enthusiasm has led some to believe (he was, for example, the staunchest defender of John Brown’s use of murder and violent insurrection against the slave trade).25 But Gandhi was inspired by Thoreau’s faith in the power and righteousness of individuals resisting unjust governments. Thoreau’s personal adherence to a ‘Higher Law’ in the face of social injustice was a dogma with which Gandhi became familiar during his residence in London where it was commonly espoused by vegetarians and Suffragettes.26 Indeed, Thoreau’s prophecy that one solitary individual, like Shelley’s Promethean hero, could lead mankind away from the barbaric practice of meat-eating appeared as the epigram with which Henry Salt opened his Plea for Vegetarianism, the work that inspired Gandhi with his new mission and committed him to a life of political protest.
Salt was Thoreau’s greatest champion in England and clearly regarded Gandhi as Thoreau’s representative on earth, for in 1929, having to his delight found that Gandhi in his Autobiography treated reading the Plea for Vegetarianism as a pivotal moment in his life, he wrote to him – by now a hero of political freedom movements across the world – humbly enquiring whether ‘you had been a reader of Thoreau, and had been at all influenced by him, as on many subjects your views and Thoreau’s seem rather akin’. Gandhi replied by relating how he had translated parts of ‘Civil Disobedience’ into Gujarati for his journal Indian Opinion and that later he read Walden and Salt’s biography of Thoreau ‘with great pleasure and equal profit’. The following year Salt wrote a poem celebrating Gandhi, the ‘one old, powerless, unresisting man’ fighting Britain’s ‘alien law’; the year after that Gandhi reciprocated during his visit to London to discuss Indian independence with the British government, when he took the time to deliver an address to the London Vegetarian Society in which he honoured Salt who sat proudly beside him.27 This iconic moment – Gandhi journeying full circle back to the Vegetarian Society of which he was once an executive, and as a leader of a movement incomparably greater – encapsulates perfectly the centuries of cross-cultural fertilisation which made this moment possible.
Henry Salt seated next to Mahatma Gandhi at the Vegetarian Society, 1931
Gandhi was interested by more than Thoreau’s theory of protest, his chastity and his self-sufficient frugality.28 He also stated that Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ ‘contained the essence of his political philosophy, not only as India’s struggle related to the British, but as to his own views of the relation of citizens to government’. Indeed, in his popular publications Gandhi quoted Thoreau’s mandate ‘That government is best which governs least.’ The dissolution of State power, Gandhi claimed, would nurture ‘a state of enlightened anarchy’ in which ‘everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbour.’29 Gandhi hoped to shift towards this situation in India by removing powers from the national government and replacing them with the sort of ‘village republic’ he modelled on his pacifist vegetarian self-sufficient ashrams. As with Thoreau, Gandhi’s belief in the viability of an anarchistic state manifested his faith in the benevolence of human nature – and this provides a key to understanding where Gandhi’s political theories belong in the historical heritage with respect to the nature of humans and their place in the ecological system.
Gandhi thought that history gave a distorted picture of human nature because it catalogued all the exceptional moments when people’s normal placid existence had been interfered with and plunged into conflict and war; left to themselves, humans would live in a harmonious state of mutual love and respect. As Gandhi demonstrated with his animal-friendly ashrams, this mutual love and respect also applied to man’s relationship with animals. One key passage in his autobiography is enough to reveal the source for Gandhi’s new ideological way of framing this perennial question, and it points to an ecological theory developed as an antidote to the dominant right-wing manifestations of Social Darwinism. Explaining the humanitarian case for vegetarianism as it was presented in fin de siècle London – and as he later espoused it – Gandhi wrote that ‘man’s supremacy over the lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man.’30 An explicit parallel is made between the relationship of ‘man and man’ and that of humans and animals; politics and ecology were one and the same.
Gandhi’s phrase ‘mutual aid’ points to the philosophical origins of this line of thinking, and clearly sums up his political outlook. ‘Mutual aid’ was the catchphrase of a school of socio-ecological thought that emerged in London during Gandhi’s residence there, according to which animal and human societies were founded on the instinct of cooperation. This movement was led by the Russian naturalist-anarchist Prince Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842–1921) whose oft-reprinted Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (published in 1902 but composed of essays published since 1890) provided the ecological foundation for socialist anarchy.31 Kropotkin had escaped from a Russian jail and fled to England after being arrested for stirring up revolutionary socialism among Russian workers in 1872. In 1888 (the year Gandhi arrived in London) he co-founded the Sheffield Socialist Group along with H. M. Hyndman the Marxist, Annie Besant, the Theosophist, and Edward Carpenter, the critic of Western modernity who had a lasting influence on Gandhi’s economic outlook. Carpenter – a vegetarian himself – was also responsible for translating the vegetarian essays of Prince Kropotkin’s great collaborator and fellow anarchist-agitator Jean-Jacques Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), who expanded Kropotkin’s communitarian ethics to encourage a
co-operative relationship between humans and animals. Henry Salt befriended Kropotkin and absorbed his theories, so at the very least Gandhi will have received Kropotkin’s ideas second hand.32 Kropotkin was also friends with Gandhi’s fellow vegetarian George Bernard Shaw, and Kropotkin’s daughter ended up translating a number of Shaw’s plays into Russian.33 Furthermore, Kropotkin, like most of this medley of dissidents and socialists in London, was a great admirer of Leo Tolstoy and applauded him in his article in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica for his experimental anarchistic village-farm communities. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), meanwhile, inspired Gandhi and led to a flourishing correspondence about vegetarianism and non-violence between the two.
Kropotkin’s main complaint – shared by Tolstoy, Shaw and clearly by Gandhi – was that the theory of evolution had been misappropriated by Malthusian advocates of individualism and social competitiveness. Chief demon in this amoral tribe of Social Darwinists, according to Kropotkin, was Darwin’s best-known disciple Thomas Huxley, who argued in his 1888 essay, ‘The Struggle for Existence and its bearing on Man’, that in the natural state ‘the weakest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest … but not the best in another way, survived. Life was a continuous free fight … the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.’ In order to escape the ruthlessness of nature, Huxley claimed, humans had to overcome their natural bloody instincts. This scarcely concealed political commentary was repeated with alarming enthusiasm across the Western world, not least by leading ecologists such as Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the man who coined the word ‘ecology’, and declared that ‘The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of an unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world.’34