GANDHI, ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE AND THE EARLY POSTCOLONIAL

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GANDHI, ANTI-COLONIAL
STRUGGLE AND THE EARLY
POSTCOLONIAL
Postcolonial theory draws upon key ideas and concepts developed in the anticolonial struggle. It
would not be accurate to say that postcolonial theory originated with Edward Said—though he
certainly generated the modes of ‘postcolonial reading’ that we now see everywhere—because
much of the ideas of resistance, cultural nationalism, nativism emerged in the contexts of anti-
colonial struggle in Asia, Africa and South America.

The anti-colonial struggle in India was of a very different nature from that in the other colonized
nations. Gandhi's satyagraha system of protest was a local and indigenous form of struggle that
was based on a larger idea of nonviolence. Passive resistance and personal discipline became the
key modes of struggle. In addition, his vegetarianism, support for local languages and culture,
and the anti-industrial stance all constituted key early elements in what postcolonial theory after
Fanon would consolidate, namely, cultural nationalism and cultural affirmation.

Gandhi's major contribution to postcolonial thought can be best identified as a moral one—which
is perhaps why he does not sit quite well with Marxist post-colonial theory—because his notion
of Swaraj (self-rule) was, as Robert Young notes (2000: 320), directed at both the nation and the
individual. Asserting moral superiority, of both the individual and the culture, against the
colonial ruler (for example, by not hitting back when beaten) was Gandhi's masterstroke.
Fasting, passive resistance and non-violence all contributed to the moral stance. His rejection of
an armed struggle against the British and the foregrounding of the moral offered a sense of
power to the anti-colonial as nothing else did. Gandhi's genius was to embody subaltern agency
and resistance not in violence but in passivity, not in revolution but in moral positions. It is this
that characterizes one of the most radical developments in postcolonial thought.

Gandhi was astute enough to see how colonialism was linked to capitalist modernity in the
West. His anti-industrial stance—which to many did, and continues to appear, rather naïve—was
born out of the belief that capitalism is inherently exploitative. His early moves in the
experiments in the anticolonial struggle were, therefore, really class struggles: peasant and
workingclass resistance in Kheda and Bardoli (eventually he distanced himself from unionism,
and even pleaded for some kind of benevolent capitalism where the capitalist would be a
‘trustee’ who would care for the labour). Ashis Nandy in his study of Gandhi (1983) has
persuasively argued that Gandhi developed a response to the ultra-masculine colonial. Gandhi
did not offer a counter-masculinity. Instead, what he did was to propose a masculinity that also
took into account a certain feminization.

Developed and compiled by Pushpraj Singh (Department of English, JNU Jaipur)

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Thus, Gandhi countered the machismo cult of colonialism with a feminized one. This gendered
resistance—not without its problems, though—would later reappear in the feminist dimensions
of postcolonial theory.

The turn to moral resistance in Gandhi was also, again problematically, linked to religion. His
effective deployment of the moral drew upon Hinduism and may well have contributed to the
schism within the Indian National Congress between the Hindus and the Muslims. The use of
Hinduism as a means of forging a cultural and national identity alienated large sections of
leaders and the population and, cleverly exploited by political leaders, resulted in the disaster that
was Partition.

This instrumental use of religion and cultural practices (and here Gandhi must be located
alongside figures like Bal Gangadhar Tilak) was, indisputably, effective in the anti-colonial
struggle. It produced a strong sense of national and cultural identity, but also ran the risk of
either homogenizing different cultural practices (in this case the so-called Hindu practices
becoming a code for ‘Indian’ practices when it was simply a majority practice) or alienating
minority and other practices (Muslim, Sikh, native Christian). Anti-colonial cultural nationalism,
as later thinkers like Frantz Fanon and others discovered, very easily swerved into intolerant
xenophobia, nativism and ‘tribalisms’. Gandhi's Hinduized cultural nationalism and anti-colonial
thought has, for this reason, not suited postcolonial theory very well because the latter seeks a
more secular version (Chakrabarty 2000).

What is often overlooked in Gandhi is his syncretism, the mix-and-match method of his ideas.
More recent work (Nandy 1983, Parekh 1997, Young 2000) has argued for a ‘hybridity’ in
Gandhi where, they propose, he adapted and adopted Western thinkers (his fondness for Ruskin
and Thoreau, for example) along with Hinduism (but a Hinduism without the scriptural
tradition). Gandhi spoke of the assimilation of cultures. In Hind Swaraj he famously declared:
‘The introduction of foreigners does not necessarily destroy the nation, they merge in it’ (Gandhi
1909, under ‘The Condition of India’). It is this syncretism, hybridity and cosmopolitanism that
later postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Ashis Nandy and others would appropriate in
different and startling ways.

Developed and compiled by Pushpraj Singh (Department of English, JNU Jaipur)