Economies of Violence: TheBhagavadgītāand the Fostering of Life in Gandhi's and Ghose's Anticolonial Theories

Abstract

T his article compares the political theories that Mohandas Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose develop around the assumption that harm or violence is an unavoidable feature of all human action. Both Ghose and Gandhi venerated the Bhagavadgītā and shared a concern to foster life, and they shaped Hindu political theory by combining modern biological concepts with spiritual perspectives to determine the impact of harmful human actions within a totality of interdependent living beings. Although each thinker develops his anticolonial theory by balancing the value of life, the acceptance of an economy of violence, and the duty to act rather than renounce action, they diverge on the acceptability of violence whether in politics or in interactions with nature. Analyzing their framing of human actions as simultaneously biological and spiritual opens up a new perspective on Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resistance to British colonial rule in India.

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“…Yet, In Sanskrit ahimsa is not simply avoiding harm to living beings. It also means action: ‘none can renounce action out of a foolish attempt to avoid harm’ (Klausen, , p. 183). For our purposes, the best translation of ahimsa is ‘the force unleashed when the desire to harm is eradicated’.…”

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“…It was far from clear, however, that satyagraha would always be successful as a political strategy, and Gandhi's argument in Hind Swaraj is weak on this point. Aurobindo Ghose argued that Gandhi had claimed for a limited truth “a universality which it cannot have" (Klausen, ). There were many other contemporaries who regarded satyagraha as inappropriate in contexts where the ruling powers did not feel themselves to be constrained by law and reputation in the same way as the British in India (Buber, [1983]; Weil, [1949]).…”

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“…Darwinism and evolutionism, I contend, grounded not only critiques of Eurocentrist chauvinisms, but also the (re)constructive ambitions of Indian nationalists. Finally, while South Asian intellectual history has episodically touched on Darwinism's traces in turn-of-century nationalisms (Dalton 1982;Kapila 2007a;Sartori 2003;Sultan 2021;Bayly 2011;Klausen 2014), it has not, to my knowledge, delved into the distinctive ways that evolutionist paradigms inflected subcontinental anticolonialism, as I endeavor to do here.…”