Shervin Vakili's Note in Kargadan Weekly, Titled Gandhi and Gujarat

Gandhi's life can be divided into four periods. The period of childhood and adolescence, which spans from his birth to the age of nineteen; the period of his rise and political maturation (1889 to 1915), which encompasses twenty-six years and is mostly spent in South Africa; the period of the struggle for Indian independence (1915 to 1930), which ends with the declaration of Indian independence and the formal retreat of England; and finally, his period of old age, which covers the final eighteen years of his life (from 1930 to 1948). Thus, the seventy-nine-year life of this man is divided into four periods of roughly equal length: nineteen years of infancy in Gujarat, twenty-six years of youth in South Africa, fifteen years of maturity back in Gujarat, and eighteen years of old age in various parts of India and other lands.

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Shervin Vakili's Note in Kargadan Weekly, Titled Gandhi and Gujarat

Gandhi's life can be divided into four periods. The period of childhood and adolescence, which spans from his birth to the age of nineteen; the period of his rise and political maturation (1889 to 1915), which encompasses twenty-six years and is mostly spent in South Africa; the period of the struggle for Indian independence (1915 to 1930), which ends with the declaration of Indian independence and the formal retreat of England; and finally, his period of old age, which covers the final eighteen years of his life (from 1930 to 1948). Thus, the seventy-nine-year life of this man is divided into four periods of roughly equal length: nineteen years of infancy in Gujarat, twenty-six years of youth in South Africa, fifteen years of maturity back in Gujarat, and eighteen years of old age in various parts of India and other lands.

Among these four periods, two important periods of his life were spent in Gujarat. He was born and raised in this region, and later launched a civil movement and took its leadership. Nevertheless, in the interval between these two periods, twenty-six fateful years passed for Gandhi, during which the first, Gujarati adolescent transformed into the second, political activist. What is usually overlooked is that it was during these very twenty-six years that Gandhi formulated all the key concepts of his outlook, learned leadership skills, gained renown as an anti-colonial force, and founded his strategies and follower organizations. Strangely, Gandhi lived outside India throughout this entire period and accomplished the bulk of these tasks in South Africa. That is, the tree of Gandhism, aside from its roots and fertile stems in Gujarat, also has a sturdy trunk, part of which lies in England and a larger part in South Africa. The process of transforming that shy nineteen-year-old youth into that mature forty-five-year-old man, who was a seasoned politician and a theorist in organizing civil movements, took place entirely outside India, and it was in South Africa that Gandhi was born with all his political appurtenances and implications.

Many books have been written about Gandhi's being influenced by various schools and religions, and numerous studies have also demonstrated his impact on the intellectual and political currents of the twentieth century. In this article, we will only address one of the origins of Gandhi's thought, which lies within India, and leave the discussion of the influence he received from his surrounding culture in England and South Africa to another article.

A review of the sources shows that throughout his life, Gandhi was indebted to and dependent upon concepts and theoretical elements that he gathered from various corners, the majority of which were neither traditional nor Indian. The propaganda apparatus that created Indian nationalism under Gandhi's leadership presents such an exalted, inviolable, and monolithic image of him that it automatically and unquestioningly merges him with India and Indian tradition. However, a review of Gandhi's biography and writings shows that the stereotype of the "Indian saint" is fabricated and incorrect.

          It is of course important to note that during Gandhi's lifetime, something called a unified Indian civilization and country did not yet exist. Both then and in our own era, India remains a constellation of seventy-two nations, differing in appearance, language, religious beliefs, and lifestyle, each observing its own intellectual tradition and cultural norms. This cultural diversity and complexity was even greater in the era before British dominance over India, and with the arrival of modernity, it advanced toward homogenization and a normative state. Nevertheless, the deep historical roots and the strange diversity of India's semantic treasury are such that, to this day, it has not yet led to a pervasive and uniform condition.

Gandhi was born and raised in one of the micro-cultures of this collection, belonging to the territory of Gujarat, and in this short article, we will only emphasize his connections with this subsystem of Indian culture. In Gandhi's autobiography, which only covers events up to 1920, we read that during his childhood and adolescence, he was interested in reading ancient Hindu texts and practiced diligently in this field. Nevertheless, it emerges from these same sources that during his adolescence, he doubted the truth of the Hindu religion and even violated the principle of abstaining from meat-eating. After his period of residence in South Africa, a large part of Gandhi's life (between 1915 and 1930) was also spent in the Gujarat region. Almost all of the organizations and institutions supporting him were located in Gujarat, and his own base and that of his party was Ahmedabad, from where he led the Indian independence movement.

Gujarat was one of the old political and religious centers of India, and Porbandar, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, which constituted the geographical center of Gandhi's activities, had long been the capitals of Iranian dynasties. This region is a nexus where the native Hindu culture intermingled with two Iranian cultural currents. One was the old Zoroastrian culture, through a layer of Parsi elites who had long settled in this region. The other was the political and cultural influence of the Mughals and Iranian-descended kings, who were the disseminators of the Persian language, Iranian art, and the Islamic religion. In this same region, elements such as vegetarianism, fasting, chastity, and sexual abstinence, following ascetic mentors, had long existed. The Iranian political tradition governing the region had also established the custom of seeking refuge in the ruler's justice and petitioning him for redress. In this way, a significant part of Gandhi's later political approaches was rooted in the culture of the people of Gujarat.

As he himself emphasized, the major part of the conceptual elements that Gandhi employed already existed in the Indian context of his upbringing and development. The concept of Satyagraha is mentioned in Vedic sources and became an ethical pillar in the Buddhist religion, and particularly in the form Gandhi propagated, it already existed in the Zoroastrian religious reform movement. Ahimsa, or non-violence, is similarly a pervasive concept that Hindus, Buddhists, and especially followers of the Jain faith steadfastly defend. In this context, the influence of the Jain religion on Gandhi is particularly evident, as we know his mother had close connections with Jain monks. The concept of 'Syadvada,' meaning abstention from dogmatism and the belief that truth is a diffused matter, a piece of which is found with everyone, also has its roots in Jainism. Likewise, the roots of the belief in the equality and fraternity of all human beings, and the tradition of honoring and supporting women, can be found among Muslim Sufis. During Gandhi's lifetime, powerful branches of Sufism were active and popular in Gujarat, among which the Naqshbandi and Suhrawardi orders were the most important, and the aforementioned concepts were clearly considered authoritative in these two branches.

          With this account, it appears that the conventional and customary subject, namely the Hindu lineage of Gandhism, is open to doubt. He drew these conceptual elements from a specific subsystem of the cultures established in India, which were points of contact between Iranian and Indian ideas. In fact, the body of cultural order and the sphere of meaning in which Gandhi was nurtured and from which he borrowed his ideas is Iranian and not Indian, meaning Zoroastrian, Sufi, and Iranian political elements are more visible in it than Hindu and Jain strands. Although Gandhi expressed all these concepts in the language of his family religion, in a Hindu idiom, and thereby communicated with a vast number of Hindu audiences.

If we look at Gandhi's life and studies in England, we find that a particular branch of the culture of the people of Gujarat had the greatest influence on him. There is evidence that Gandhi's first mentor and spiritual guide in England was a Parsi Zoroastrian and a very prominent figure from Gujarat named Dadabhai Naoroji (दादाभाई नौरोजी) (1825–1917), who was simultaneously a wealthy cotton merchant, a popular politician, and a passionate advocate of Zoroastrian ethical principles in India. This man was undoubtedly a brilliant genius. He was the first Indian to attain a university professorship in the English academic system, achieving such an unlikely position at the height of English colonial arrogance in 1850, when he was only twenty years old. He gradually took on teaching more subjects, so that by 1855 he was teaching both mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Bombay.

Naoroji was a pioneer and founder in several fields. He was simultaneously the founder of Indian nationalism, the reviver of the Zoroastrian religion, and the formulator of the policy of assertive cooperation with the colonialists. His early activities were mostly focused on modernizing the Zoroastrian religion and transforming it into a universal faith. In 1851, Naoroji founded the "Rahnumai Mazdayasnan Sabha" (Guides of the Mazdayasni Path) school in Gujarat, and shortly thereafter established the "Rast Goftar" (Truth Teller) publication. His activities were not limited to organizing the Zoroastrian community of India; they led to Zoroastrian ethical principles being propagated among the people of India, sometimes in a non-religious format. In 1886, he wrote the book "The Manners and Customs of the Parsees" and published it in Bombay, which attracted considerable attention and gained him many followers among the people of Gujarat. This book was later printed in London and attracted a group of English followers.

At that time, the English bureaucratic system considered Indians fit only for menial activities; for instance, Indians had no place in the army or government positions. Gandhi later spent a major part of his political life continuing this same line of struggle, and a significant part of his conflicts with the British government and the mobilization of forces he carried out during the war can only be understood when we consider their background with Naoroji. A few years later, Naoroji published the book "Poverty and Un-British Rule in India," in which he spoke of the inevitability of India's independence and the necessity of treating Indians as an equal civilization.

The policy of assertive cooperation that Naoroji formulated succeeded after ten years, and the English authorities were convinced that if they wanted a lawful government in India, they would have to open the upper levels of the political hierarchy to Indians as well. Although this was done, as usual, with great caution and many precautions. In any case, Naoroji himself was elevated by the British to the position of Prime Minister of the princely state of Baroda in 1871. His friends and students were similarly appointed to important political positions and gained considerable influence, especially in the Gujarat region, their birthplace. In this way, his civil struggle for the advancement of Indians within the British political system bore fruit. After that, the British government appointed a number of Indian citizens to high governmental positions in the colonial territories. Most of these individuals were Indian Parsis and were considered associates and colleagues of Naoroji.

Naoroji moved to England in the mid-1860s and became a professor of Gujarati at University College London, the very place where Gandhi would later study. In London, he wrote the book The European and Asian Races and subsequently launched a civil campaign to combat the views of the "Ethnological Society of London"[1], fiercely attacking the racist opinions of these scholars. To a large extent, he single-handedly managed to alter the myth of European racial superiority over Indian natives, which was widely accepted among the English. In 1868, he wrote a treatise titled The Admission of Educated Natives into the Public Service and published it in London. This was the first strategic formulation designed for the legal penetration of Indians into the bureaucracy of England. The treatise defended the legal and civil equality of Indians and the English, emphasizing that Indians were also citizens of Great Britain and should have a role in all service sectors and be able to advance within the administrative hierarchy.

In 1876, when Gandhi was a seven-year-old child, Naoroji delivered an important lecture to members of the East India Company in Bombay and published its content under the title Poverty of India in the same city. This treatise was an economic study and constituted a bold attack on the colonial system. This text is, in fact, one of the first written about the colonial economy, predating the works of European Marxists and socialists in this field, and it influenced its audience almost contemporaneously with the publication of Marx's works.

In this lecture, Naoroji likened England to a bloodsucker draining the lifeblood of India, and through calculations, he demonstrated that the British government was plundering two hundred to three hundred million pounds annually from the raw resources of Indians. Shortly afterward, in the city of Madras, he published the book The State of India, in which he pointed out the necessity of political organization among Indians and the modernization of their civil institutions.

Naoroji's activities and theories were one of the pillars of the emergence of national self-awareness among Indians and the reorganization of the Indian independence movement in a modern framework. In 1885, Naoroji and his friends founded the Indian National Congress in Gujarat, the very institution that later became a broad-based party and led the Indian independence movement to victory. Gandhi was a sixteen-year-old adolescent at this time, living a quiet life nearby. Naoroji assumed the presidency of the Congress in 1886 and later took on this role again in 1906.

Around the same time that Gandhi was going to London as a young student, Naoroji also relocated to the city. By this time, he was an established university professor and a renowned politician who had left a lasting mark on the intellectual and political atmosphere of England. It is likely that while Gandhi was studying at University College London, Naoroji was a professor of Gujarati there. But his role was not confined to the academic sphere, for Naoroji was also the first Asian to be elected to the British House of Commons, holding a seat in this house in London between 1892 and 1895. During this period, he was considered a member of the Liberal Party of England, and shortly thereafter, he also became a member of the Second International, where he was a colleague and friend of Plekhanov and Kautsky. The origins of many of Plekhanov's views on colonialism, and particularly Lenin's perspective in this area, can be traced to his ideas.

In 1901, Naoroji published the book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, which is a very important work and the first scientific theory in the field of economics to describe the mechanisms of colonialism. This book also presents the first formulation of the drain theory[2] and, in this respect, is considered a forerunner of Marxist theorists in this field. In this way, one can surmise that the theoretical framework and general mold of Gandhi's views existed in a prior form in the books and theorizing of Naoroji. Gandhi was not the only one influenced by this man, and two other renowned politicians who are indebted to him in this regard are Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was his assistant and disciple in England, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who was considered a student and follower of Naoroji and, through his influence, became a member of the Bombay Legislative Council in 1899, later becoming one of the leaders of the Indian National Congress and one of those who established Gandhi within this party.

          Thus, one of the currents influencing Gandhi, which was independence-seeking, anti-colonial, and moralistic, arose from Naoroji and his followers. But this was not the only source of inspiration that Gandhi had access to in London. Naoroji, despite the debt owed to him by Gandhi for formulating the concept of political independence, anti-colonialism, and moral rectitude, was opposed to any form of asceticism and mortification of the body due to his adherence to the Zoroastrian religion, and considered fasting and the denigration of the body to be undesirable, and these were elements upon which Gandhi later insisted greatly, and tracing their roots and genealogy is a detailed and fascinating story that must be addressed in another writing.

[1] Ethnological Society on London

[2] Drain Theory

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Download pdf of Shervin Vakili's note in Kargadan Weekly

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Shervin Vakili's note in Kargadan Weekly No. 7

Gandhi and Gujarat | 8 Khordad 1395

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