Vinoba: The Spiritual Pragmatist

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Vinoba Bhave, born Vinayak Narahari Bhave, often called “Acharya”  (meaning teacher) who will be remembered in the history of India for his role in the land-gift and village-gift movements, represented an extraordinary amalgam of spiritual wisdom and political pragmatism. Gandhi introduced him to the Indian nation in October 1940 in the following words: “He is an undergraduate having left college after my return to India in 1916. He is a Sanskrit scholar. He joined the Ashram almost at its inception. He was among the first members. In order to better qualify himself he took one year's leave to prosecute further studies in Sanskrit. And practically at the same hour at which he had left the Ashram a year before, he walked into it without notice….. He has abolished every trace of untouchability from his heart. He believes in communal unity with the same passion that I have…. He has taken an active part in the previous Satyagraha (non-violent civil disobedience) campaigns. He has never been in the limelight on the political platform. With many co-workers he believes that silent constructive work with civil disobedience in the background is far more effective than the already heavily crowded political platform. And he thoroughly believes that non-violent resistance is impossible without a heart belief in and practice of constructive work.” This biographical sketch of Vinoba by Bapu where completed later by Mahadev Desai who said: “Vinoba has something which others have not. His first rank characteristic is to resolve his decision into action the moment the former is once made. His second characteristic is continuous growth… Besides Bapu , I found this quality in Vinoba alone…” The New York Times correspondent to India, Robert Trumbull described Vinoba Bhave as “the God who gives away land” and added: “ He is, no doubt, a phenomenon that could happen only in India.”

It was the good fortune of Vinoba that India was his birthplace and nonviolence his creed. As a true follower of the Mahatma, he embodied in his life and action the spirit of nonviolence. He first met Gandhi on 7 June 1916 at the Kochrab Ashram. Remembering his first meeting with Bapu, Vinoba wrote: “ When I was at Kashi, my main ambition was to go to the Himalayas. Also, there was an inner longing to visit Bengal. But neither of the two dreams could be realized. Providence took me to Gandhiji and I found in him not only the peace of the Himalayas but also the burning fervor of revolution typical of Bengal. I said to myself that both of my desires had been fulfilled.” Several months after Vinoba’s arrival at the Sabarmati Ashram, Gandhi described him to Charles Andrews as “one of the few pearls in the Ashram, who came there not to be blessed, but to bless it.”  Vinoba took a leading role in the Ashram and became a faithful disciple of Gandhi. He lived in accordance with the eleven rows, included in the Gandhian daily prayer viz, non-violence, truthfulness, absolute honesty, chastity, poverty, annual work, temperance, fearlessness, respect for all religions, independence in the matter of money and non-recognition of caste distinctions. Gandhi sent him to Wardha in 1923 to start an ashram on the lines of Sabarmati Ashram. Sometime later in a memorable letter Mahatma Gandhi reconfirmed his spiritual relation to Vinoba : “I don’t know what epithet to use in respect of you. Your love and character overwhelm me. I am not competent to judge you. You have tried yourself and I accept your judgment as mine. I accept the position of father you have asked me to. You come very near fulfilling my expectations of you. I hold that a truthful father produces a more truthful son to himself. A true son is he who carries forward the father’s work. If the father be truthful, resolute and kind the son inherits these qualities in a more pronounced degree, I see you have done so. I feel they have come to you through non efforts of mine. I, therefore, accept the position of father you have offered me as a gift of love. And I shall try to deserve it….” Gandhi had made it clear in his letter to Vinoba but also to India that Vinoba could contribute more than anybody else to the life of the Satyagraha movement.

Due to his close association with the Gandhian thought, Vinoba appeared after Gandhi’s death on the Indian public scene as the “spiritual heir” of the Mahatma. However, Vinoba was quite aware of the fact that there was no such thing as “Gandhism” and on this issue he took Gandhi at his word and counseled the nonviolent activists of India to think for themselves and have the courage to take further Gandhi’s principle of nonviolence. For Vinoba, “Those who regard ‘Gandhism’ as an ‘ism’ have not correctly understood his way…” “ Gandhiji”, proclaimed Vinoba, “said and did many things, all of which should be studied in the proper perspective. Instead of a bookish adherence to his words we should discover the spirit that inform them…. Should we merely preserve his statue and mechanically adhere to his ‘message’, Gandhiji would become lifeless and ‘out of date’.” Vinoba refused to invoke Gandhi’s name in order to justify his own action. Like Gandhi, he searched for Truth and as such he was his own man. Hence, as he used to say, “I am a man of my own ideas.” The outcome a Vinobian one, was to take Gandhi’s nonviolence to the next step beyond the struggle for India’s independence. In 1951, Vinoba advised that, now that India had reached its goal of independence the new goal of the nonviolent movement should be a Sarvodaya society where the goal was welfare of all. Single-handedly, Vinoba attempted to bring social justice to India by spreading the concept of “village self-sufficiency”. It was during a good-will march through Hyderabad that Vinoba was approached by Harijans who asked him for a bit of land to cultivate. The idea of “ Bhoodan Yajna” was born. From that day onwards, Vinoba toured on foot from village to village asking for land donations. Vinoba described “Bhoodan Yajna” as an application of nonviolence and “an experiment in transformation of life itself.” He further explained that the Bhoodan movement was a task for the establishment of a Sarvodaya society. The movement was later transformed from a land-gift to a village-gift (Gramdan) movement, in which a major part of a village was to be donated to the poor. Vinoba received 1.61akh villages as Gramdan, especially in Bihar and Orissa. To the question: “Gramdan: why and how?”, Vinoba replied: “ We are building up a new society in the villages. The village republic is our ideal but that does not mean that we should neglect the intelligentsia who live in the towns. Our universities must be made to take note of Gramdan and make their own contribution for the development of the Sarvodaya pattern of society.” In other words, from Vinoba’s perspective, Bhoodan and Gramdan were not just simple techniques to achieve land reform legislation, but mainly symbols of individual transformation which pointed towards a new society. “Gramdan is a beginning and not an end” declared Vinoba. “It only lays a firm foundation on which a new society can be built up(….) Gramdan is the foundation of social reconstruction.” According to Vinoba, the Bhoodan and Gramdan movements were essentially experiments in the nonviolent way of bringing about radical social and economic reforms in India. As such, Vinoba used the Bhoodan movement as an excellent medium of education. Drawing a difference between the two concepts of “standard of life” and “standard of living”, he got to the conclusion that man does not live by bread alone. He , therefore, required moral and spiritual standards which needed to be provided and improved. For Vinoba, the aim was to realize the spiritual basis of all human endeavors. Thus he layed a great stress on the spiritual foundation of education and not merely on its extent. “The quality of education”, he observed, “is not to be measured by its length and breadth, but only by its depth. What counts in study is depth, not extent.” He considered Basic Education as a new approach to life and learning based on a new set of social, cultural and economic values. For that reason, he distinguished Basic Education from simple methods of education. “People have got into the habit of thinking of Basic education as if it were one method or system of education among others, like the Montessori Method or the ‘Project Method’, affirmed Vinoba. “But it is not a matter of method or technique; Basic Education stands for a new outlook, a new approach.” As with Tagore and Gandhi, Vinoba laid the great emphasis on the link between the natural environment and education. “True education”,  he observed, “ is bound up with Nature.” For Vinoba education like Nature was an ever-new process. “I mean” , he asserted, “ that education ought to be like the water in a river, what is here today is not what was here yesterday, and what is here today will not be here tomorrow. The river goes on flowing, but its water is never the same. In the same way, education should go on changing continually, with the experience of every passing day.”

Vinoba’s life was a day-to-day experience with Truth. Nothing could interrupt him from learning and growing spiritually at every level of his struggle for the welfare of the others. He spoke Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi. He had also learned Urdu, Bengali, Oriya and Punjabi. And in addition to these he had knowledge of English, French and Arabic. He had translated Bhagavad-Gita from  Sanskrit into Marathi in early 1930s and had also prepared a book of selections from the Qu’ran and published it under the title The Essence of the Qu’ran. Once in response to the question of a villager in Kashmir who asked him if he was a Hindu or a Muslim, he proclaimed openly: “ I am a Hindu and also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Parsi, a Sikh, a Jain etc.” By this he meant that for him no true religion was exclusive, because the essence of all religions was Truth. In his “Appeal to Christians” he wrote: “ What I want to stress upon is that I seek a synthesis of all religions. People of various religions should have one heart and all should unite together to oppose evil… Today, due to their vain arrogance, religions have only served to tear hearts asunder. If they do not take to synthesis or cementing hearts, a great danger looms ahead…” That is to say, for Vinoba the critique of sectarianism went hand in hand with the idea of unity of religions. He saw spirituality as the inner core of all religions. He used to say: “ Religion will go and spirituality will remain and politics will go and science will remain.” He believed that with time science and spirituality would replace politics and religion. As a spiritual pragmatist he wanted to relate the inner and the outer dimensions of human reality by bringing about structural changes in the worlds of politics and religion. For this reason, he went as far as to say that “Parliamentary democracy on the basis of party system was not suitable to Indian conditions.” By underlining this fact, he had in mind a society in which cooperation could not be induced by the State. As an anti-authoritarian satyagrahi, he rejected both political parties and the idea of rule by majority. “I do not recognize parties at all” he said. “Moreover my study of history, experience of current affairs and thinking, all lead me to the conclusion that parties in our country can, not only, not do much but are in the long run likely to prove disastrous.” As a post-Gandhi gandhian, Vinoba concentrated his constructive outlook on a cooperative pattern of political life, where all decisions would be taken according to the general consensus of opinion rather than by elections. While Vinoba passionately pleaded for the abolition of classes, which were saddled, in State power, he had a clear attitude towards communists and communism in India. “To be a communist is to serve the poor.” He affirmed in one of his speeches in Telangana. “But, however, the communists have indulged in violence and murderous acts… If the communists abandon their practice of violence, all good and moral people will cooperate with them.” Vinoba considered the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence to be ahead of the communist ideology. To him communists were “ bhavishya satyayugwadis” (believers in the State-free society of the future), while the advocates of the Sarvodaya were “ vartaman satyayugwadis” (soldiers trying to build a State-free society in the present). He invited his fellow Indians to think in terms of  “Samya Yoga” rather than in terms of “Samyavad” because the final goal was dedication to society and not the dictatorship of the proletariat.. As a practitioner of Sarvodaya, Vinoba Bhave opposed his concept of “pragya” (a people governed society) as opposed to “rajya” (a state governed society). According to him, the power of the people was superior to that of the State. “Today”, wrote Acharya, “ the people have become subordinate and depend upon government for everything. The question is how to get rid of this terrible situation.” In other words, Vinoba conceived of a consensual approach to society based on his assumption of man as a spiritual being, rather uniquely a political animal. Like Gandhi, Vinoba pleaded for the “spiritualization of politics”. In direct opposition to the communists, he urged in transferring the spiritual elements into the political domain in order to transform it. He affirmed, “in a revolution there is a change of heart, a change of values.” Under such conditions, he defined the people’s power (jana shakti) as distinguished from the power of violence (hinsa shakti) and the power of the State (dand shakti). As a servant of the people ( jan sevakatva) he distinguished his task from those who aspired for power and considered themselves as the leaders of the people. The logical corollary of this assumption, therefore, was a samya yogi politics or an all-embracing politics which perceived all human beings as equal. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Vinoba’s concept of “spiritualization of politics” was elaborated on the idea of nonviolent elimination of conflictual structures in human society. That is to say, by adopting the consensual approach of Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba explained the need for establishing a Sarvodaya society as an effort to limit the centralized power of the State and to construct a model for democracy at the grassroots level, based on direct participation of the people. However, when in his later years, Vinoba put forward his idea of “ the cooperation of five powers” underlining janta shakti (power of the people), sajjana shakti (power of the righteous), vidwatjana shakti (power of the learned), mahajana shakti (power of the merchants) and shashana shakti (the power of the State) and aiming at “the collective liberation of the society”, he was severely criticized by Jayaprakash Narayan and his followers who were already urging for the process of politicization of the Sarvodaya movement. Once influenced by Vinoba, J.P. Narayan was emerging in the early 1970s as the new leader of the Gandhian movement.  Yet the same J.P. Narayan , who had made a public criticism of Vinoba, had once wrote of him: “ Revolutionary and pathfinding thinkers in history have usually been followed by mere interpreters, systematizers, analysts. There have been rare exceptions, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin in the case of Marx. Vinoba is such an exception in the case of Gandhi.” One should not forget that both J.P. Narayan and Vinoba Bhave were the acknowledged leaders of the Gandhian movement and Because J. P. Narayan wanted to join Vinoba in walking through the villages, he had resigned in 1953 from the first cabinet under Nehru after India gained independence in 1948. Through the Bhoodan and Gramdan movements both Vinoba and Narayan picked up on Gandhi’s radical proposals for “setting democracy on the march.”, but among the two it was Vinoba who emphatically declared that the “ whole world ought to be set free from the burden of its government.” He declared that government was a state of slavery and in contrast defined true Swaraj from two perspectives: “ no outside power exercises control over you and you do not exercise power over anyone else.” According to Vinoba real Swaraj required that people transcend party lines and open their hearts to ideas and to each other. “It follows”, proclaimed Vinoba,  “that we shall have Swaraj when all the people have acquired the strength of self-control and have realized their duties. Until then, we shall only have government.” Even though Vinoba from 1955 throughout the rest of his life adopted silent contemplation of truth, non-violence and compassion as his only form of public action, many continued his path of nonviolent educator and activist by undertaking various projects aimed at encouraging popular self-organization. Today Vinoba is remembered and honored by all lovers of peace and goodwill around the world. He was probably the first person after Gandhi in India and elsewhere to lift the Gandhian principle of nonviolence to a powerful and effective social and economic force on a large scale. As he used to say “Peace is something mental and spiritual. If there be peace in our (personal) life, it will affect the whole world.”