Gandhian Nonviolence: A Pedagogy for Intercultural Dialogue

Ramin Jahanbegloo

In a globalized world, where there is global interdependence and consciousness of the one world but also comparative interaction of different world views, distinct communities, highlighting the virtues of particularism, are bound to produce new cultural conflicts. In such conflicts, religious traditions play a special role, since they can be mobilized to provide an ultimate justification for one's view of the globe. Closely linked to the process of globalization is therefore the problem of interaction between cultural or religious actors and communities holding different views of world order.  Therefore, while the very idea of a clash of civilizations is wrong, a civilization of clashes is today’s reality. That is what makes dialogue among cultures and peoples an urgent matter of international politics and global ethics. But dialogue to be meaningful has to proceed in a spirit of reciprocity, mutual recognition and solidarity. Dialogue to be meaningful has to be infused with cultural broad-mindedness. Intercultural dialogue can be inspired by several considerations and in each case it takes the form of a hermeneutical quest for inter-civilizational reflection on the modes of global existence. This dialogue might be intended to foster mutual understanding. Or it might be considered as a way of addressing global issues such as climate change. Or it might be undertaken as a process of tolerance education in order to ensure that there will be no more conflict between cultures. The main question then is to know whether in today’s world cultures should, could and would engage in a dialogue with each other. This is a hard question with which Gandhi wrestled in his times, while trying to find an answer for it through his own life experience.

Tolerance, cultural broad-mindedness, mutual understanding are the hallmarks of Gandhian view of religion and politics. Mahatma Gandhi was deeply interested in the comparative study of cultures and religions since the days of his youth. The major portion of Gandhi’s life was spent in dialogue between East and West, between the East of his native India and the West of the colonizers. But his dialogue was not merely with words or ideas or theory, as can so easily become the case in our own day of dialogue. His was a lived dialogue, springing from his love for Truth (Satya) and nonviolence (ahimsa). He once said: “In order to transform others, you have to first transform yourself.” The heart of Gandhi's message is to first look within one self, change oneself and when the world see's a different you, then it automatically change itself. At a more fundamental level Gandhi, speaking out of his own interpretation of Hinduism, could not see nations — or individual people — as isolated entities, one of which might be chosen by God among all others to play a special role in history. Therefore, Gandhi rarely spoke in terms of linear world history. His goal for every culture (including his own) was the same as his goal for every individual: to find Truth. This was for Gandhi a way to opening the full truth of the person or reality encountered in a direct, immediate way. For Gandhi, himsa — a selfish desire to control others’ behaviors — inevitably prevented us from direct immediate awareness of truth. At a more philosophical level, in Gandhi’s view every culture can and should learn from others. As such, Gandhi argues that there is truth in every culture but none represents the Absolute Truth. According to Gandhi, “Preservation of one’s own culture does not mean contempt for that of others, but requires assimilation of the best that there may be in all the other cultures…” [1] Such a dialogical attitude conducted at the deepest level and in a spirit of genuine reciprocity and solidarity was not for Gandhi just a moral requirement, but also a political necessity. Gandhi’s conception of “enlarged pluralism” takes on the task of fostering togetherness and solidarity among cultures and traditions in the interest of democratizing modernity and bringing about a more just global order. One reason why he was able to do this is that he had pluralism in his bones and he never made the mistake of rejecting or underestimating other traditions of thought in his approach to truth and in his stress on nonviolence. Although his thought had a strong Hindu core and contained elements that sat ill at ease with other cultures and religious traditions, he insisted that everybody had a right to right to interpret and revise his tradition of thought and that the spiritual quest of each individual went beyond a simple sense of belonging to a community. That is why Gandhi affirms that, “There is in Hinduism room enough for Jesus as there is for Mohammed, Zoroaster and Moses.” “For me, says Gandhi, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree.”[2]

That is what made Gandhi’s approach unique. He was not always successful, but his dialogical engagement proceeded from a ruthless internal interrogation of his own tradition of thought.  In other words, he was always free from the deadly vices of fundamentalism, dogmatism and self-righteousness. Gandhi rejected the idea that there was one privileged path to God. Second, he believed that all religious traditions were an unstable mixture of truth and error. Third, he encouraged inter-religious dialogue, so that individuals could see their faith in the critical reflections of another. One of his notable innovations was the inter-faith prayer meeting, where texts of different religions were read and sung to a mixed audience. If this provides an evidence as to what sort of cultural pluralist Gandhi was, we can add that for him the sacred texts of all religions had contradictory trends and impulses; sanctioning one thing, but also its opposite. Gandhi, however, urged that people recover and reaffirm those trends that oppose violence and discrimination while promoting justice and non-violence. For him a culture or a religious tradition that denied individual freedom in the name of unity or purity was coercive and unacceptable. When some women were stoned to death in Afghanistan for allegedly committing adultery, Gandhi criticized it, saying that “this particular form of penalty cannot be defended on the ground of its mere mention in the Koran.” and he added, “every formula of every religion has in this age of reason to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.”[3]   What Gandhi calls “the acid test of reason” is actually experimentation which according to him is a far better approach to cultural and religious traditions than empty reverence.  Therefore, Gandhi was in favor of submitting all cultures to experiment, to see how they are able to enter dialogue with others. This brings out another feature of Gandhi’s understanding of cultural plurality. Aware as he was of the threat of self-centeredness and individual dogmatism, he also knew that there was a collective counterpart of this. It was rife in the colonial and imperial desire to civilize and to convert “others” and to disallow all forms of dissident voice. This explains why Gandhi broke with the tradition of “civilizational” discourse developed by his predecessors on the right and on the left. As Bikhu Parekh points out correctly, “Unlike his predecessors, Gandhi’s explanation and critique of colonial rule was essentially cultural… (because) Unlike his predecessors, Gandhi insisted that the colonial encounter was not between Indian and European but ancient and modern civilizations.”[4] Gandhi neither did  refuse to examine and borrow critically European values and practices of dissent, nor was he convinced and felt frustrated by what many Indians considered as the “ superiority” of Western civilization. Since Indians were constantly challenged through colonial domination by the cultural dilemma of take and give, their self-esteem came to be integrally tied up with what was worth preserving in their civilization. Gandhi’s cultural task, therefore, was as difficult as his political one. He had to show the practicality and relevance of Indian culture while being critical to its unjust, unwise and impractical aspects. Furthermore, he had to help his countrymen to regain their violated self-esteem by renewing an indigenous system of knowledge and practicality which was marginalized and labeled unscientific and culturally backward by British colonialism. But he also had to devise alternative ways of seeing Indian culture and being Indian by privileging a culture of criticism. Gandhi’s writings were not a context of self eulogizing or articulation of a culture of false pretentions but an acknowledgement of self criticism. Gandhi, thereby, created a public spherein which the concept of “culture” was redefined and re-elaborated as a moral enterprise of individual regeneration and national regeneration. The spiritual component in this enterprise is obvious, but Gandhi was also a pragmatic politician who knew how to draw the line between the order of governmentality and the forces that operate among human beings. It is in the former that he discovered the nonviolent strength of togetherness in pursuit of just causes. He fully believed that “there are many powers lying hidden within us and we discover them by constant struggle…”[5]

Gandhi is very conscious of talking of the idea of equality of cultures without being accused of cultural relativism. Gandhi was not a genuine relativist but he understood that the world was composed of different and inter-related cultures, each with something profound to give, and he tried to form a bridge among them based on common moral principles. Gandhi believed in the toleration of other cultures because he believed that they are crucial aids to understanding and evaluating one's own. Gandhi always saw other cultures as equal conversational partners and his plea of equality of cultures was based on the paradigm of inter-cultural spirit which was based on a creative interplay of concepts and values. His greatest ideas, like Satyagraha were neither purely Eastern nor purely Western, but came from a process of living in between cultures. His ability to find a paradigmatic role as a path maker and a change facilitator in India was indicative of the cultural journey he had traveled. Gandhi was at the same time the “other India” and the “other westerner”. He was an outsider in both cultural horizons. As a matter of fact, he brought to his intercultural interactions his own sensibili­ties about where the cultural boundaries were and how “Indian” or “Western” cultural patterns ought to guide his behaviors. “I hate distinction between foreign and indigenous.”[6] wrote Gandhi. Gandhi's achievement lay in embracing an 'inclusivist' vision and a philosophy devoid of a polarization of “us” and “them”. Certainly Gandhi was not without his sense of the 'Other', but he had too much respect for persons and cultures to render them into the dangerous 'Other'. Central to Gandhi, after all, was the notion that the truth, power and moral force of a movement are inseparable from the truth, power and moral force of its actors. For this reason, Gandhi attached the utmost importance to heterogeneous components in the micro communities. Gandhi expected communities to be molded on the ability to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. Gandhi considered such a policy as essential because the aim for him was to avoid the danger of cultural conformity and to move towards a genuine comity of cultures based on mutual exchanges and creative synthesis. According to Gandhi, this was a call for the simultaneous awareness of commonalities, the acceptance of difference and the recognition of shared values. Tolerance of difference was vital to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence because tolerance for him meant before anything else an awareness of others, an attitude of open-mindedness, and an effort to know, understand and learn from others. As such, Gandhi was constantly experimenting with modes of cross-frontier cultural constellations. His understanding of religious plurality and cultural diversity went hand in hand with his reaction to a cultural conformity. As he once said, “I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”[7] This statement of Mahatma Gandhi has particular relevance to our cultural situation in a globalized world. Gandhi’s ‘house’ can be understood as a metaphor for an independent and democratic self-organized system within a locally controlled, decentralized community of ‘houses’, and where communication between equally respected and equally valid cultures can take place. The capacity to engage constructively with conflicting values is an essential component of practical wisdom and empathetic pluralism in Gandhian nonviolence. When Gandhi identifies ahimsa with love, as he does so often, he is actually underlining the concept of empathy as a dialogical response to the presence of the other.  Empathy contrary to sympathy or compassion, demands that an individual vicariously share in the thoughts and feelings of the other and temporarily become the other. Therefore, the first step of  Gandhian empathy is to assume that not only are there differences between people, cultures, and political or social conditions, but also that people may have different value systems which need to be understood and respected critically. This is a practical application of Gandhi’s concept of “religious pluralism.” Herein we also find Gandhi’s attempt to inject the idea of empathy into Indian communal debate as early as 1907 in an article in Indian Opinion in which he declares: “If the people of different religions grasp the real significance of their own religion they will never hate the people of any religion other than their own…” [8] The dialogical nature of Gandhian tolerance is expressed here in the idea of a ‘self-respecting’ community who strives to remove its own imperfections instead of judging others. Therefore, for Gandhi the acceptance of one’s own imperfections was a call not only to cultivate humility, but also to foster pluralism. The reference here seems to be to the ethical content about which Gandhi believed there was substantial consensus in all cultural and religious traditions. Here, Gandhi's cultural pluralism is opposed to relativism, since it is based on a belief in a basic universal human nature beneath the widely diverse forms that human life and belief take across cultures. It also involves a belief in the fact that understanding of moral views is possible among all people of all cultures because they all participate in the same quest for Truth. This why Gandhi affirms, “Temples or mosques or churches…. I make no distinction between these different abodes of God. They are what faith has made them. They are an answer to man’s craving somehow to reach the Unseen.”[9]

Such a view is essential if we are to avoid the danger of cultural conformity and move towards the recognition of shared values and the practice of cultural tolerance. If we agree that globalization is not just about an extension of market principles or an increase in capital flows, but also about the cross-border flow of ideas that affect cultural diversity, we can say that Gandhian  nonviolent approach to cultural plurality is a way of bridging differences and  developing intercultural awareness and understanding in today’s world. Of course, dialogue without listening and leaning is merely a discussion. Therefore, the Gandhian intercultural dialogue is an important step in being able to understand not only other cultures, but to bring different cultures together and to find a common path towards the future. But most of all, intercultural dialogue is about understanding other people and being able to see under the surface of difference. At the same time, through this interaction we also learn how to understand ourselves – who we are, what is important for us and how we want to live in this world of crisis. Mahatma Gandhi once said that “The future depends upon what we do in the present.” Our task today is not to make cultures ready for cultural conformity but to democratize cultural conformity with a true dialogue of cultures.