Welcome back to this Lecture series on postcolonial
literature. As you know, we have been discussing
the rise of the middle class nationalist discourse
in India over the past few Lectures. And as
we have seen, this middle class discourse
of nationalism and of decolonisation was underpinned
by certain particular patterns, thought patterns.
And we have traced the development of these
thought patterns throughout the 19th century
starting from the works of Henry Vivian Derozio
to the works of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay.
Now in our previous lecture we have focused
on two significant characteristics of this
discourse.
If you remember the first one was the cyclical
pattern of a golden past, degenerate present,
and a promise of future recovery, a future
reverting back to that golden past. And this
cyclical pattern was coupled with a second
pattern which was a deep regard for the knowledge
and cultural and civilizational values of
the coloniser which were used in fact as a
template to script the path towards decolonisation
and the recovery of the golden past.
And this is of course familiar to you from
our previous discussion. In today’s lecture
we are going to see how by the second decade
of the 20th century this nationalist discourse
and its underlying patterns and assumptions
was starting to get transformed. And the main
figure behind this transformation was of course
M.K. Gandhi. And in this lecture today we
will explore Gandhi’s impact on the underlying
thought patterns of the middle class nationalist
discourse.
And after doing that we will then move on
to Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura to see how
this discourse as well as the charisma of
Gandhi as a middle class anti-colonial leader
was moulded in the form of fiction by Raja
Rao in his novel Kanthapura. Right. But first
let us focus on the figure of Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi who emerged as the supreme nationalist
leader of India in the years immediately following
the first world war.
Now Gandhi’s dates most of you will probably
be familiar are from 1869 to 1948. And again
if you study the career graph of Gandhi we
will come across a trajectory that is typical
of the Indian middle class as I have defined
it after Sumit Sarkar in one of my previous
Lectures. Now for instance Gandhi too received
an English education. And indeed like many
of the middle class nationalist leaders Gandhi
went to England to study law.
Therefore by profession he was again, like
many middle class leaders, a Barrister. And
his early career as a lawyer was spent in
South Africa. It was also in South Africa
that Gandhi emerged as an anti-colonial political
leader. And if you remember during the first
half of the 20th century, during the early
20th century, when Gandhi was in South Africa
both South Africa and India were British colonies.
So Gandhi arrived in India, he returned back
to India, in 1915 to participate in the freedom
struggle at the behest of Gopal Krishna Gokhale.
And when he arrived in 1915 he was already
an established political figure. Now in fact,
by the time he arrived Gandhi had already
published his seminal text Hind Swaraj, which
would significantly transform the nature of
the middle class nationalist discourse.
And it is interesting to note that Hind Swaraj
was first published in 1909. And Gandhi became
the President of Indian National Congress
in the 1920s when he truly became the leader
of the middle class led Nationalist Movement.
So there is a gap of quite a few years between
the publication of Hind Swaraj in 1909 and
his becoming the accepted supreme leader of
the nationalist movement in India.
But in spite of that gap if we read Hind Swaraj
we can identify almost all of the traces of
Gandhian political ideology that he was to
bring to play post the 1920s. And so in that
way Hind Swaraj remained a very relevant text
throughout Gandhi’s career. And it is still
relevant as a text to understand the Gandhian
political ideology and Gandhi’s intervention
into the Nationalist Discourse.
Now contrary to the version of the national
discourse that we have traced till the late
19th century writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,
the Gandhian discourse undermined the earlier
intertwining of the respect towards the civilizational
attainments of the western coloniser and the
desire to decolonise India. And it broke this
intertwining in two very significant ways.
The first way was through questioning the
fact that west represented a superior civilisation.
So for instance, this is famous incident where
in which Gandhi was apparently asked, “what
are your views on Western civilisation?”
And he said that Western civilisation would
be a good idea. Which means that according
to Gandhi Western Civilisation did not even
exist till the point when he was speaking.
So the first major way in which Gandhi disrupted
the earlier intertwining of a respect for
the coloniser civilisation and Indian nationalism
was by attacking the very idea of Western
civilisation.
But there was also a second way in which he
was critiquing the earlier nationalist discourse.
And that was by making nationalism a more
mass based thing. And we will talk about these
two points separately in today's Lecture.
So the late 19th century argument that we
have already discussed. There in order to
become a true Indian/Hindu if you remember,
when we have discussed Bankim, we have seen
a problematic overlapping between terms like
Indian, Hindu, Bengali, etcetera.
So according to this late 19th century argument,
in order to become a true Indian/Hindu it
was imperative to learn from the European
colonisers and become more like them. And
this desire to fashion oneself after the European
coloniser was, I would say, rather ambiguously
associated with a desire to decolonise oneself.
And this ambiguity is best established in
the attitude towards the colonial authority
that people like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
showed.
Thus for instance, in spite of Bankim being
convinced that anyone with a dark skin did
not stand a chance to receive fair treatment
in any employment under the British colonial
authority, Bankim was, as I have said earlier,
equally convinced that the rule of the British
was essential to teach the “Uncivilised
and Uneducated people of present day India”.
The present day people who had fallen from
that glorious state of the past.
It was imperative for them to learn from the
Europeans elements of civilisation that they
had once possessed but they have now lost.
So we are already familiar with this pattern
that the British with their civilizational
virtues were actually seen as good teachers
who will teach the Indians the very same civilizational
values which they had once possessed during
the golden age but which they have now lost
and fall in into a state of degeneration.
Now Gandhi in his turn completely rejected
this argument. Because for him the loss of
Indian civilizational values could be traced
back precisely to the European incursion in
colonial India and to the importation of “Western
Civilisation” in the subcontinent during
the course of colonialism. So what unlike
Bankim, say for instance, what Gandhi was
arguing was that Western civilisation rather
than being a cure was itself the problem.
Because the fall of the Indian civilisation
according to Gandhi can be traced back precisely
to the moment of European colonial subjugation
of India. So it is important to note here
however, that for Gandhi not every European
was tainted by the Western Civilisation that
he was speaking against. In fact in his Hind
Swaraj Gandhi specifies that he derives a
significant part of his critique of “Western
Civilisation”.
From the works of such westerners like Tolstoy
for instance, or Ruskin, Turow, and Emerson,
these were all really profoundly influential
figures as far as Gandhi was concerned. But,
Gandhi’s text also makes it evident. Thus,
that these intellectuals represent a minority
that stands beyond the pale of the Western
civilisation which Gandhi considered to be
really a Satanic civilisation.
A Satanic Civilisation, which had otherwise,
to quote Gandhi, “taken such a hold on the
people in Europe, that those who are in it,
those who are in Europe, appear to be half
mad”. And here it is interesting if you
compare this with, say Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
and Marlow’s perspective, Marlow seeing
the Africans from his boat and considering
them to be mad men. Here in Hind Swaraj we
have Gandhi comparing the entire European
population under the thrall of Western Civilisation
as half mad people.
Now hence whereas for Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay
it was important to learn from the colonisers.
For Gandhi it was important for India to unlearn
what she has learned for the many years that
she had been colonised by the Europeans. According
to Gandhi Western Civilisation was essentially
different from Indian civilisation. And here
it is an important a very crucial point. For
Bankim it was possible to learn elements of
the Indian civilisation from the European
colonisers.
Because if you remember our discussion of
Anandamath, Bankim is speaking about how to
revert back, how to recover the Sanatana Dharma
which is typically an Indian/Hindu thing.
But he is also saying that in order to recover
it we should learn from the European colonisers.
Which means that there are certain elements
of that Sanatana Dharma which is possible
to learn from the European colonisers.
What Gandhi is saying here is that Western
Civilisation and Indian civilisation are essentially
in essence two very different things. And
therefore it is wrong to assume that you can
learn one aspect or more than one aspect of
one civilisation by following another civilisation,
right. So you cannot learn anything about
Indian civilisation by following Western Civilisation.
Because they were fundamentally incompatible
with each other. Thus in his Hind Swaraj Gandhi
argues, and here again I quote, Gandhi’s
own words.
The tendency of Indian civilisation is to
elevate the moral being that of the Western
Civilisation is to propagate immorality. The
latter which means the Western Civilisation
is godless. The former which means the Indian
civilisation is based on a belief in god.
Gandhi further states that the essence of
this deeply moral and theistic Indian civilisation
had been perfected by the ancestors of the
modern day Indians.
And, as I said, found true on the unwell of
experience. Therefore in India there was nothing
to learn from anybody else. Thus according
to Gandhi any attempt to emulate Western Civilisation
was, for an Indian, tantamount to becoming
detached from his or her ancestral heritage
and deviating from his or her true identity,
what Gandhi considered to be his or her true
identity.
And in here we arrive therefore at a fundamental
critique of the desire to emulate the coloniser’s
civilisation which we had detected in the
Nationalist Discourse of the 19th century.
For Gandhi such an emulation is not a necessary
step towards recovering the lost glory of
the past. In fact on the contrary, it is regarded
by him as a deviation from this path to recovery.
Indeed for Gandhi, attempting to imitate the
westerners was equivalent to, and he uses
this metaphor quite often, it was equivalent
to contracting a disease.
And he uses the disease metaphor quite often
in Hind Swaraj for instance. Contracting a
disease. What kind of disease? The disease
of the Satanic Western Civilisation. Now Gandhi
however argues that the spread of this disease
of Western Civilisation in the Indian subcontinent
was not complete. I mean the disease had not
been able to spread everywhere. But rather
it was limited to a specific section of the
Indian society.
And which was the section? According to Gandhi
this was the section of people who had out
of their own moral frailty or own moral shortcoming
became enamoured with Western Civilisation
and who now sought to get rid of the English
so that they could rule over India just like
the English. In other words, they were to
perpetuate the English rule without the Englishman.
And here again this is really very interesting
thing, that Gandhi does in his Hind Swaraj,
where he is saying that people who have been
transformed to the Western Civilisation, Indians
were been transformed to the Western Civilisations,
how can you really distinguish them from the
English colonisers who are oppressing you.
So if the English educated Indian middle class,
to which incidentally Gandhi himself belong,
if those kind of people come to rule, if those
kind of people who were enamoured with Western
Civilisation come to rule in India even after
throwing out the British, then it would not
be very different. Because they had already
these Indians had already transformed themselves
through their engagement with the Western
Civilisation into, well, Pseudo British, if
you would like to call it that.
Now the assertion near the end of Bankimchandra’s
Anandamath about English rule being beneficial
for India is therefore turned on its head
by Gandhi. For him, a rule by the people who
transforms themselves into Englishmen by acquiring
their knowledge, was inevitably going to be
as foreign as the English rule. Hence the
process of regaining the golden past and the
true Indian identity of that past did not
involve being under Colonial tutelage.
Rather it involved moving away from the fear
of influence of Western Civilisation and moving
away into the remote villages of the subcontinent
where the modern civilisation of the west
had not yet been able to penetrate. And this
is an important point that Gandhi makes in
Hind Swaraj. And therefore I would like to
quote that section. So this is the voice of
the editor.
If you read Hind Swaraj you will see that
Hind Swaraj is basically a dialogue between
an editor of a journal who represents the
voice of Gandhi and a questioning reader who
first comes to the editor representing Gandhi
with a lot of scepticism. But then is won
over by the logic of the editor, right. So
this is the editor speaking.
And where this cursed modern civilisation
has not reached. By modern civilisation Gandhi
is referring to what he considered to be the
Satanic Western Civilisation. Where this cursed
modern civilisation has not reached India
remains as it was before. The inhabitants
of that part of India will very properly laugh
at your new-fangled notions. The English do
not rule over them nor will you ever rule
over them.
Now ‘you’ is referred to the reader. But
it also refers to the section of people who
are, according to Gandhi, who are enamoured
with western values and who have therefore
tried turning themselves into Englishmen.
So Gandhi goes on to say that those in whose
name we speak. By ‘we’ he refers to the
English educated middle class leadership.
Those in whose name we speak we do not know
nor do they know us.
“I would certainly advise you and those
like you who love the motherland to go into
the interior that has yet not been polluted
by the railways and to live there for six
months.” This statement about not knowing
those “in whose name, we speak”. And the
appeal to try and connect with them leads
to the second point regarding how Gandhi complicated
the Nationalist Discourse of the earlier period
of the 19th century.
Indian middle class nationalism as it developed
during the 19th century was in essence largely
Elitist. And as noted earlier for someone
like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay for instance
becoming a true Hindu/Indian and to regain
the glory of the past was to move away from
the state of ignorance in which the ordinary
Indian has fallen at present. So when I say
Elitist I mean I do not want you to get me
wrong here.
19th century nationalist leaders had a lot
of concern for the masses. But the reason
for which I am saying that there was an Elitist
angle to this was because the very ideology
was based on trying to move up from the present
state of degeneration which Indian masses
had apparently fallen into. And this elevation
according to the 19th century nationalist
would be possible through western style education,
right.
So when I say Elitist I refer to this trend
of elevating yourself up from the masses.
Because the mass is looked upon as already
degenerate representing the degenerate state
of present day India. Now in contrast, as
the Indian leader, who was most successful
in channelizing mass protest against Colonialism,
Gandhi repeatedly emphasised the need to integrally
connect with the masses in whose name we speak.
Thus rather than trying to elevate oneself
from the masses Gandhi's emphasis was unconsciously
going down to the level of the villages and
the peasants and becoming one with them. In
Gandhi’s own words the so called upper classes
have to learn to live conscientiously and
religiously and deliberately the simple peasant
life knowing it to be a life giving true happiness.
So as you can see, for Gandhi there is no
notion of elevating oneself through western
education. Rather it is all about a process
of unlearning the influence of the west and
going back to the state in which most of India's
village population uncontaminated by the Western
Civilisation resides in.
So now that we have summed up the basic features
of the Gandhian Nationalist Discourse and
how its thoughts about Decolonisation differed
from those present in the Nationalist Discourse
of the 19th century, let us move on to the
novel Kanthapura, and see how it makes use
of this Gandhian discourse. Now Kanthapura
was published in 1938. And was the first novel
of the Indian Author, Raja Rao.
Raja Rao’s dates are 1908 to 2006. So he
led a marvellously long life. And he was born
in the princely state of Mysore. And spent
his early life in Hyderabad. But later on
he moved to France to pursue higher studies.
And it was here in France that Rao wrote his
English novel, Kanthapura. Now this novel
by Rao can actually be considered as a belonging
to that cluster of new Indian English fiction
that was coming up in the 1930s.
And indeed Rao was one of the three fiction
writers who completely change the course of
Indian English novel post 1930s. The other
two writers belonging to this group of three
are of course Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayan.
But coming back to the novel Kanthapura, though
it was written in France it does not contain
any trace of Rao’s life and experience in
that country.
And in fact Raja Rao was going to write about
that, his experience in France extensively,
later on in his novels like The Rope and The
Serpent for instance, or the Chess Master
and His Moves. But, in Kanthapura we do not
find anything like that. Rather here, we see
Rao, engaged with the transformative effect
that Gandhi brought about in the social and
political lives of Indians during the 1920s
and the 1930s.
Now on the one hand, Kanthapura is an attempt
to represent in fictional form the Gandhian
discourse of nationalism which, by the time
Rao was writing his novel, had gained a significant
amount of traction in India. But on the other
hand, Kanthapura was also an attempt to trace
the fault lines that run through the Gandhian
discourse. So the novel is simultaneously
a representation and a critique of the Gandhian
discourse.
But we will have to come back to this point
of critique in our next Lecture. In today's
Lecture let us see why Kanthapura is so widely
recognised as a novel about Gandhi and Gandhianism.
Now the main focus of this novel is on a character
called Moorthy who journeys to the city from
his native village Kanthapura. That is also
the name of the novel. And he goes to the
city to gain western style university education,
right.
So here again we see the career graph of a
middle class emerging. But then Moorthy comes
back to the village. He comes back without
even completing his education. And the novel
is primarily about this return. And the Gandhian
influence that inspires Moorthy to make this
return.
Now as we learn during the course of the novel,
Moorthy while in the city, has a grand vision
in which he sees Gandhi urging him to give
up his foreign clothes and his foreign university
education and go back, in the words of the
novel, “to the dumb millions of the villages”.
Now this is of course is an exact echo of
the sentiments of Gandhi as expressed in Hind
Swaraj. And remember, this is a text published
in 1938.
But of course, the 1909 publication Hind Swaraj
is still evident, evidently relevant here.
And 1938 Kanthapura is equalling 1909 Hind
Swaraj. And in the way Kanthapura equals Hind
Swaraj we can see Gandhi's version of the
cyclical pattern of the golden age fall and
return that we have already traced in Derozio
and Bankim.
Now in this Gandhian pattern the golden age
of civilisation is not represented by a distant
past. But rather it is represented by the
present generation of Indians who have remained
unaffected by the Western Civilisation. These
are the people about whom Gandhi talks in
the quotation that we have discussed earlier.
These are the people of the villages where
railways have not yet reached and have not
yet connected them to the urban centres where
the disease of Western Civilisation is rampant.
Now the fall in this Gandhian pattern is thus
a journey to the city where one contracts
the disease of the Satanic Civilisation of
the west. And as we see in the novel, when
Moorthy has his vision of Gandhi, he is already
in that diseased state, he is already in the
city where Western Civilisation or engagement
with the Western Civilisation is rampant.
The return to the golden age in the Gandhian
discourse, is in turn, a spatial return to
the village. And an attempt to reconnect with
the aspects of Indian civilisation which had
remained uncontaminated by western values.
So the vision of Gandhi that Moorthy has,
makes him give up his “Foreign Education”.
And I use ‘foreign’ within quotes. Because,
whether to consider this really foreign can
also be a matter of argument.
So after having this vision of Gandhi, Moorthy
gives up his foreign education as well as
his foreign clothes that he had obtained in
the city. And he returns to his village where
he tries to fulfil Gandhi’s socio-political
agenda by organising the people of Kanthapura,
organising them. Not only them in fact but
also the people of the nearby Coffee Estate,
called the Skeffington Coffee Estate, to wage
a non-violent war against the Colonial rule.
Now this effort to organise the villages is
not merely political in its intent but also
has a social and cultural aspect to it. So
Moorthy, while trying to organise the villagers
to fight Colonialism, also makes them fight
caste segregation as well as some of the segregations
that are imposed by patriarchy. Thus in the
novel you will see Moorthy himself getting
gradually transformed into a local Gandhi
who wage3s an incessant war not only against
Colonialism but also against the social evils
which Gandhi considered pernicious to the
Indian society.
In our next Lecture we will see how Raja Rao
uses his character Moorthy not only to fictionalise
the real historical figure of Gandhi but also
to criticise Gandhian intervention into the
social, political, and cultural lives of Indians.
Thank you.
