Bindu Puri’s research while affiliated with Jawaharlal Nehru University and other places

This essay will suggest that Gandhi’s true/real politics can be best understood in terms of the integrity of his ideas. This integrity refers to the fact that Gandhi was a man of integrity but more importantly to the fact that there was an integrity between his ideas and practice and between his ideas themselves. The continuities that we read in Gandhi—between politics and religion, politics religion and morality, the human being and nature and the past and present—can best be unpacked if one were to understand this integrity. This essay will argue that one way to understand it would be to see that Gandhi’s arguments in economics, politics, religion, and even aesthetics drew from his fundamental moral convictions. Accordingly, the first part of this essay will suggest that Gandhi’s politics was premised on his integrity, i.e. on the idea that a human being ought to live an undivided life integrated around and by a commitment to his/her fundamental moral beliefs. The second part of the essay will argue then that a truly meaningful philosophical critique of Gandhi’s politics would only be one which could demonstrate how and where Gandhi’s politics failed to remain integrated with his fundamental moral convictions, i.e. which demonstrated how the integrity between Gandhi’s ideas themselves and between his ideas and practice broke so to say. In this context, the second section of the essay will bring in and philosophically examine Ajay Skaria’s, (Skaria, 2016) argument that satyagraha as a religion of the question (always seeking the truth which the satyagrahi did not know) involved the use of force and the imposition of the thekana/proper on the other. The essay will discuss this critique with a view to examine if it demonstrates that Gandhi’s practice disrupted his integrity both of his character and that between his ideas.KeywordsIntegrityContinuitiesSwarajSwabhavaTapasyaSatyagrahaThekanaReal politicsPower politicsCoercionDeath of God

This essay will examine Gandhian ahimsa in its inseparability from truth. In this context, it will take issue with those who have argued that Gandhian ahimsa was either (entirely or in part) drawn from Tolstoy or (entirely or in part) from the anekantavada of the Jains; arguing that while Gandhi was influenced by both these sources, his ahimsa was drawn (in his own admission) from an altogether different source, i.e. from the metaphysics and ethics of the Bhagavad Gita. Even if one were to disregard for the moment the differences between Gandhi and the other interpreters of the Gita (specially from those who were his contemporaries), Gandhi’s drawing of ahimsa as non-violence and a non-passionate universal love from the context of the war between cousins in the Gita might seem surprising. Gandhi’s contemporaries like Tilak and Sri Aurobindo (among others) had argued that the Gita had justified the exception to the law of harmlessness for the sake of duty and suggested that the aim of the Gita was to undertake a critique of the ethical and confirm it’s subordination to the political. Gandhi however had argued (to the contrary) that the metaphysics of oneness in the Gita brought out in the vision of Sri Krishna’s divine form recommended both desireless action and absolute ahimsa; given that to harm anyone or anything in the universe was, quite literally, to harm oneself.KeywordsAhimsa/non-violenceSatya/truthTolstoyMetaphysics Bhagavad Gita EqualityEqui-mindedness Isha Upanishad Yoga Vasistha Desireless actionTeleologyPresent centred action

As is fairly well-known several issues raised by Tagore became a subject of some debate between Gandhi and him during the years between 1915 and 1941 (Puri, 2015). These issues could be broadly categorized into two, those concerning an uncritical adoption of the western modular nation as the end/goal by those engaged in the movement for India’s freedom and those concerning satyagraha (in the form of non-cooperation, boycott, fasting, etc.) as the unquestioned “moral” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 49) means to that end. This essay will examine the first set of issues and argue that though Tagore had difficulties with what he described as “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996: 425) these difficulties did not amount to a rejection of the “case for self-determination-the forging of the national links” (Berlin, 1999: 264) or of an independent politically reorganized Indian nation but were targeted at the uncritical acceptance of “the nation of the west” (Tagore, 1996. 425)/“cruel epidemic of evil” (ibid., 424) which was “sweeping over the human world” (ibid.); as the goal of India’s struggle for freedom/swaraj. This essay will take issue with scholars who argue that Tagore’s arguments against the western nation did not distance him from Gandhi because both shared insights into the illegitimacy of the nation-state. It will suggest, to the contrary, that what these thinkers had rejected was the modular western nation-state which they saw as a product of enlightenment modernity, and that this was not a rejection of the nation per se. Gandhi and Tagore came together in their “love of country” (Bhattacharya, 2008: 70), expressed in/by a resolve of building a praja or great eastern nesan in continuity with the premodern communities of India’s past. One which was modelled closely along the lines of harmony in diversity and in the spirit of Tagore’s swadeshi samaj/indigenous Indian society.KeywordsGandhiTagoreNation of the west Nesan Great Eastern NationFriendship/maitriMachineCooperationHerderFichteEnlightenmentKantRationalismUniversalismAnthropocentricismSwadeshi samaj

This essay will suggest that Sri Aurobindo thought it was necessary to achieve a freedom/svaraj in ideas to revive the old world mind of India which had simply lapsed under the weight of an ideational subjection to colonialism. Drawing from K. C. Bhattacharya’s 1928 piece entitled Svaraj in ideas the essay attempts to unpack Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive contribution from within (what K. C. Bhattacharya describes as) the ‘vernacular mind’ of India to mainstream English literature, philosophy, Environmental philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, social and political philosophy and moral philosophy. In this context the essay discusses Savitri: a legend and a symbol as Sri Aurobindo’s recasting of his own philosophy from prose to poetry and traces that philosophy and its different aspects across the seventeen essays in the eight parts of the book.Keywords Savitri Svaraj in ideasMantra in poetry Stoma AffirmationsEvolutionLila/PlayRelevance of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy Advaita Vedanta Five dreamsIntegral yogaEthics of the environmentHuman unityPhilosophical agnosticism

Sri Aurobindo spoke about the nation, the state and the ideal of human unity. Whether Rabindranath Tagore had read Sri Aurobindo or not, it is clear that his arguments against the nation-state came fairly close to Sri Aurobindo’s position on the state. This essay will attempt to bring out these similarities and discuss their positions on the ideal of human unity. Unlike the liberals, both Sri Aurobindo and Tagore had made primarily religious (rather than strictly political) arguments for human unity. However, it would also be correct to say that neither of these arguments was “religious” in the sense of being entirely drawn from any one sectarian/conventional religion. In this context, the essay will argue that Sri Aurobindo’s idea for “the religion of humanity” and Tagore’s ideas on “the religion of man” were far more exacting than (and marked a shift away from) liberal arguments recommending the political unification of humanity in the form of a world state. KeywordsSvaraj in ideasOrganized stateNationCountryCosmopolitanismKantPerpetual peaceThe spiritual religion of humanityThe religion of manOnenessInter-relationshipHarmony

The introductory chapter to this book on the Ambedkar–Gandhi debate will bring up three important questions, answers to which, underlay the conflicts between them. These are questions about the relationship between the present and the past and can be spelt out as follows; can one access the past from the standpoint of the present; How should one relate to an emotion (whether such an emotion be in the present or in the past) which overrides all other emotions and dominates one’s mental life? And lastly, how ought one to understand and respond to a politics of suffering. This chapter and the book will unpack Ambedkar and Gandhi’s very different answers to these questions.KeywordsPresentPastEmotionSelfIdentityCommunityJusticeOwnersAuthors Itihaas MeasureFour Noble TruthsHistoryJudgementModernityTraditionContinuityPolitics of suffering

This chapter moves beyond a discussion of the conflicts and the incommensurability between Ambedkar and Gandhi’s contrary understandings of the self, community, justice, history and the ‘it’ so happened of itihaas. The chapter brings out insights about why it might be necessary to countenance the theoretical and practical possibilities for extending the understanding of suffering/duhkha from those born into the community which suffers to all those to whom such an experience is at the very least intelligible. Moving between the debate between Gandhi and Ambedkar, and the much later essays put together by Professor Guru and Professor Sarukkai (2012), this chapter will suggest that the possibilities of generosity lie both in the realm of theory and those of polity. In the context of theory, one can argue that it is necessary to make ideas about experience/reality available as theory which can be applied to understand experiences no matter to whom such experiences might (or might not) belong. In the context of polity, the chapter suggests that one can break out of the circle of suspicion only by locating something to trust. In this connection, it brings in arguments from Rabindranath Tagore as an ever present third in the debate between Ambedkar and Gandhi.

This chapter will move away from the more apparent differences between Ambedkar and Gandhi to examine the differences between their conceptions of memory, history and itihaas. While the modern discipline of history involves “measure” and a third-party judgement of the past; Itihaas or it so happened, is a retelling of what happened in the past without any attempt at a third party adjudication by measure. The chapter will argue that Ambedkar’s self-understanding was “present-centred” and that he saw the past as history and made forays into it by writing two histories—that of the Shudras and of the untouchables. For the old-world Gandhi however there was no writing of history only the telling of an itihaas of a people/nation.KeywordsHistory/itihaasThird partyModern identityMemoryAlternative pastsSwabhava/own most orientationSpecificRavidasKinshipSatya/truthAmnesia

Re-thinking the plurality of religions is meaningful only to the extent that one is fastidious and self-conscious in recognizing it to be unfinished, a project in the making, as it were. It is here that one might find Liberalism to be wanting given that it offers, what it considers, the best possible response to religious plurality. This Chapter makes a case for modesty in ideas and argues for a conceptual pluralism in philosophical theory. In this context the chapter suggests that there is need to think about the plurality of religions from outside the framework of the terms set by European and Anglo American notions of ‘religion’.

Gandhi and Tagore were both sensitive to the complex ways in which religious and cultural beliefs were interwoven in diverse ways in the lives of individuals and communities. They had given much thought to the relationship between moral-religious culturally diverse people. Gandhi was no stranger to the conflicts caused by cultural and religious pluralism having dealt with three serious self and other conflicts—with the religious racial and colonial other. Tagore also was no stranger to conflicts caused by pluralism and his arguments against (what he called) “Western” Nationalism had emerged from a deep appreciation of the diversity that characterized India. This essay will suggest that Gandhi’s affirmation of kinship between religions and Tagore’s conception of the religion of man were far more exacting than liberal positions that recommended (at best) tolerance between religions. Gandhi and Tagore both seemed to suggest that rather than tolerate diverse others one needed to be in harmony with difference being able to honour the world view of religious others as one would one’s own.