gandhian socialism and hindu nationalism: cultural domination in the world system 1

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Gandhian socialism andHindu nationalism: Culturaldomination in the worldsystemRichard G. Fox aa Duke UniversityPublished online: 25 Mar 2008.

To cite this article: Richard G. Fox (1987) Gandhian socialism andHindu nationalism: Cultural domination in the world system , TheJournal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 25:3, 233-247, DOI:10.1080/14662048708447521

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Gandhian Socialism and Hindu Nationalism:Cultural Domination in the World System1

by

Richard G. FoxDuke University

. . . if Gandhism is 'reactionary' in that it wants to revive the highesthuman values, we have no objection to being bracketed withGandhiji as 'reactionaries'.

M.S. Golwalkar, RSS Sarsanghchalak, 19492

In caustic summary of the early stages of Indian nationalism, G.K.Chesterton opined that it was neither very nationalist nor very Indian.3

The cultural authenticity of Indian nationalism continues to be animportant issue. At stake is understanding the cultural authorship of thenationalist movement: who and what enter into its making; who and whatdetermine its social effectiveness? For quite some time Anil Seal4 andLloyd and Suzanne Rudolph5 have defined the scholarly antipodes of thisquestion. For Seal a rising Westernised Indian elite authored nationalismto gain greater leverage with the British colonial administration. Thistribe of Macaulay Indians pursued materialist goals and opportunitiesdefined and provided by the very British rule they challenged. FromSeal's presentation, the obvious conclusion is that such elite interest-group lobbying could hardly have effectively represented the Indianmasses or benefited them - not withstanding this elite's claims of culturalauthenticity and representativeness. The Rudolphs, conversely, press foran indigenous authorship of nationalism, at least in its Gandhian phase.As Gandhi projected his own personal dilemmas into nationalist activity,so they argue, he thereby universalised and politicised the generalexperience of the Indian people under colonialism.

Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee in recent studies of Indiannationalism conserve the positions set up by Seal and by the Rudolphsand combine them.6 Nandy persuasively argues that the British-Indiancolonial encounter affected Indian self-perceptions, which meant thateven in their anticolonialism, the early nationalists employed andreinforced British stereotypes of India. Then, as still today, Nandyclaims, 'ornamental dissenters' created a 'non-West which itself is a

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234 JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS

construction of the Wes t . . . [ , ] even in enmity . . . [an] homage to thevictors'.7 Gandhi, however, escaped this colonial cultural domination,according to Nandy. Gandhi stood outside the shared system of ideas thatconfigured both British imperialists and other Indian nationalists andpresented an authentic and effective Indian nationalism. For Nandy, theMahatma was neither simply 'a genuine son of the soil' nor 'a totallyatypical Indian'.8 He championed and transformed folk values that 'hadremained untamed by British rule'9 and he thereby constructed a denialof the West that was also not of the West.10

Chatterjee11 presents much the same combination of Seal's approachwith the Rudolphs'. He too notes how powerfully British colonialistsconfigured the self-perceptions of early Indian nationalists. Gandhi'smoral philosophy and nationalist programme stood apart, however.Chatterjee argues that Gandhi's critique of modern civilisation stood'outside . . . post-Enlightenment thought, and hence . . . [Indian]nationalist thought as well' and represents a 'standpoint which could havebeen adopted by any member of the traditional intelligentsia in India,sharing the modes and categories of thought of a large pre-capitalistagrarian society, and reacting to the alien . . . colonial rule'. TheMahatma's disavowal of modern civilisation was an authentic andeffective expression, which utilised European commentaries but whichwas in essence unauthorised by British domination, although it nevercompletely escaped its control" and eventually got 'domesticated' andvitiated in Nehru's nationalism.14

Chatterjee and Nandy acknowledge that British exploitation of Indiadominated the cultural perceptions and identities of its inhabitants just asit deformed its economy. They do not recognise a world system of culturaldomination - that is, a single set of hegemonic cultural beliefsconstructing identity and self-perceptions in all corners of the world.Chatterjee and Nandy reserve an area of cultural production separatefrom such a world system. This preserve of cultural autonomy,personified in a Gandhi, can resist cultural domination from outside:Gandhi builds an effective nationalist resistance, independent of Britishdefinitions. Although they do not say so explicitly, Nandy and Chatterjeepermit such authorship of culture outside the world system because theymay otherwise find difficulty in explaining how a world system of culturaldomination can nevertheless internally generate true cultural resistanceto it. But then they confront an equally vexing problem: are there reallycultural crannies that remain proof against the world system long after its(albeit uninvited) arrival?

I propose an alternative view that recognises a world system of culturaldomination but also permits effective resistance to that domination, eventhough such resistance is often ultimately handicapped by its world-systemic origins. Alongside the capitalist world system that began todevelop in the sixteenth century, there grew up a world system of culturalbeliefs, within which there existed cultural dominance and inequality,areally defined. This specialization and stratification of cultural beliefs

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CULTURAL DOMINATION IN THE WORLD SYSTEM 235

was equivalent to the unequal division of labour spawned by the capitalistworld economy. Sets of cultural beliefs developed within this worldsystem that served as ideologies, or charters, for its inequalities. Oneexample was the set of beliefs about the so-called East - but by necessityalso beliefs about the so-called West - that Edward Said labels'Orientalism'.15 Orientalism orientalised Orientals as well asOccidentals, as Nandy and Chatterjee acknowledge in a limited way, andas Stephen Hay has perhaps most impressively documented in a singlecase study.16 Such world-system beliefs attempt to displace or transformexisting indigenous systems of cultural belief, as the world systemenvelops new regions - much as precapitalist forms of labour andproduction are swept away or harnessed to the expanding worldeconomy. There can be an effective resistance to these world-systemideologies, but this too necessarily takes place within the world systemand is constrained by it.

John Richards, following Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that the worldsystem had major repercussions on India in the eighteenth century, whichwould mean that Gandhism occurred not in the first flush of indigenousresistance but only after nearly two centuries of the world system'spenetration and domination.17 Indigenous resistance outside the worldsystem, I suggest, only takes place in early contact situations and usuallyinvolves armed resistance under newly strengthened indigenous leaders,as, for example, the prophets among the Nuer. Sumit Sarkar makes asimilar distinction between primary and secondary resistance. Indigenouspopulations, primarily intent on protecting their continuing or recentlylost ways of life, undertake primary resistance in the earliest phases ofdomination. Secondary resistance occurs later, when the indigenoussociety has changed and the leadership and its goals are different.18

Primary resistance to the world system usually results in genocide orcultural destruction. Secondary resistance, precisely because it grows upand is limited by the world system of domination, has better chances ofsuccess. Its flawed accommodation to the world system permits suchresistance to survive and even prevail.

'Gandhian socialism' is my cover term for a secondary resistance thatprevailed, at least up until Indian independence. Gandhian socialismconsists of a set of cultural beliefs that effectively resisted the dominationencoded in an Orientalism presuming to typify Indian culture. ThisOrientalism, which, by the nineetenth century had come to prominencein the Western-controlled world system, defined India as passive,otherworldly, tradition-ridden, esoteric, caste dominated, and thereforeweak, backward, and unchanging. In resistance, Gandhian socialismpremised a distinctive path for India, neither like Western capitalism orsocialism. It asserted that religious and moral values must infuse andcondition secular advance and therefore emphasised personal disciplineand altruism over consumption and acquisitiveness. Gandhian socialismalso espoused class conciliation rather than class conflict; village-leveldemocracy against state welfarism; local-level not large-scale indust-

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rialisation; self-production or 'bread labour' rather than 'wage slavery';and a consensual society in which the rich serve as trustees for the poor.Gandhi's pre-Independence programme of sarvodaya publicly articu-lated this programme clearly. But Gandhian socialism was foreshadowedin images of India held by earlier reformers like Swami Vivekanana andSri Aurobindo. It continues to inform belief and practice in India afterIndependence - as with Vinoba's bhoodan movement and JP's call forTotal Revolution in 1974.19

Gandhian socialism built cultural resistance by accepting the pejorativestereotypes of India encoded in the world system and making themaffirmative: other-worldiness became spirituality; passiveness becamepassive and then nonviolent resistance; absent national integrationbecame the integrated consensual village community and the 'oceaniccircles' of people's democracy; insufficient individualism becamealtruistic trusteeship.20 These nationalist cultural beliefs, which ostens-ibly stood in opposition to those beliefs dominating the world system,were not independent of the world system, however. Gandhi and theother authors of Gandhian socialism accepted the ultimate Orientalismthrust upon them - that India was radically different from the 'West' - andthen claimed a superior nationalism and a more humane society as thepossible outcomes of this India, spiritual and organic.

This cultural resistance never escaped the world system because:

1. This cultural resistance never contested the basic notion behindcultural domination, that Indian culture was essentially different,based on deep-seated, relatively immobile, and age-old principlesantithetical to the West and encoded in Hinduism. All it did wasshift positive evaluation from modern (Western) society totraditional (Indian) culture. Thus, the new India of Gandhiansocialism is from the outset the old India of Hindu identity, andboth of them are the Indian cultural beliefs constituted within theunequal world system.21

2. The authorship of this cultural resistance is complex, a processalso set within the world system. European and American Uto-pians used their positive stereotype of India to negate capitalismat home, while Indian nationalists marshalled the Utopian idealsfrom afar against colonialism. In both instances, foreignershelped transform pejorative Orientalism into affirmativenationalism: the vegetarians Salt and Maitland, the socialistsCarpenter and Ruskin, the simplifiers Thoreau and Tolstoy, theromantic nationalist Mazzini, the esoterics Olcott, Besant, andNoble, and even the academic orientalist Miiller, not to mentionthe Britons of the Bengal Renaissance. The authors of India'scultural resistance thus arose within the world system itself, andtheir forms of resistance resounded throughout the world system,not only configuring a Utopian future for India but condemningthe distopian present in the core.22

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Nandy and Chatterjee read the Gandhian programme as authentic andindependent of (although of course contingent on) external dominationbecause it effectively enlisted (for Chatterjee, disciplined) peasants andother subalterns into the nationalist movement. This argument is verysimilar to the Rudolphs' notion that Gandhi's personal programmeresonated with the Indian masses.23 Their argument presumably is that anunauthentic and dominated nationalism would not have attracted thesepopulations, whose folk mentalities are corrupted but not co-opted bycolonial domination.

Studies of Gandhian politics, including recent studies of subalterns, tella different story: that local 'subcontractors' representing the lowermiddle class used long-standing ties of patronage and domination tomuster out subalterns, that the peasants who responded to Gandhi'smessage put their own interpretation on it, and that their agitations andprotests often threatened to go far beydnd the effective control ofGandhian leaders (indeed, the colonial authorities were often importantagents of'discipline' at such moments).24

The lack of fit between Gandhian beliefs and subaltern resistancereflects an essential weakness of a cultural resistance that develops withinthe world system. Just as cultural domination depends on stereotype, sothe resistance fashioned from it is also limited. Gandhian socialism canaccomplish very little of the Utopian future it promises. An amusingexample of failure: for nineteenth-century English vegetarians, likeHenry Salt, a vegetarian India proved that an ancient and greatcivilisation could be built by humans who neither feasted on their fellowcreatures nor cannibalized by capitalist wage labour their fellow man.Knowing that contemporary India was 'no longer' wholly vegetarian,they, with Indian collaborators, constructed vegetarian societies tore-enculturate Indians. A much sadder example: Gandhi's suppositionthat in the age of atomic bombs, India's spirituality could teach the West.A generation later, India had its own bomb.

Worse than limited, cultural resistance is often co-opted. The Utopiathat Gandhian socialism promised before Independence led only to apassive revolution25 or 'deferred revolution'.26 Rather than an image of aUtopian India that could be, it can easily turn into an authorisation ofIndia as is, no longer now resistance but justification for current internalsocial inequalities as well as inequalities in the world system. The Utopianimage presenting a revolutionary challenge to the present and thepossibility of a better future becomes only an ideology that legitimatescontemporary society.27 This transformation or devolution is most likelyto come when the cultural resistance fails to achieve its Utopian goals(because of its flawed image of indigenous society) and can then beappropriated by various vested interests, themselves usually the sports ofworld-system economic exploitation or political repression. Such adevolution occurred for Gandhian socialism in the 1974 JP Movement, as Ishall try to show, but there was always tension between Gandhiansocialism as ideology and as Utopia even before Independence.28

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THE JP MOVEMENT

How shall I show that a Utopian resistance, in part because it is generatedin a dominating world system, can degenerate into an ideologicallegitimation of the status quo?29 I shall try to explain a strangeconjunction of cultural belief and political practice that occurred in a massprotest commonly known as the JP Movement. Impelled by Gandhianprinciples of satyagraha and sarvodaya as enunciated and interpreted byJayaprakash Narayan, the JP Movement in Bihar during 1974-75 evokedthe largest mass protest of any post-Independence political movement.

The JP movement witnessed a strange conjunction of Gandhiansocialism with Hindu nationalism, specifically in the form of significantparticipation by cultural, religious, and political organisations pledged toa strong Hindu identity, such as the RSS, the Jana Sangh, and the AnandMarg. This conjunction is usually written off as opportunistic. Thecommon desire to bring down the Indira Gandhi government subsidisedstrange political alliances, it is said.

I will try to show, however, that there is a real conjunction of GandhianSocialism and Hindu nationalism in the JP Movement: in terms of certaincommon cultural beliefs and also political practice. At this moment theGandhian Utopian programme was in large measure appropriated andturned into ideological justification, as Hindu communal groups tookover the movement's ideas and political practice. This conjunctionstripped the Gandhian Utopia of its revolutionary character and turned itinto a defence of the privileged urban forward-caste lower-middle classHindu against the increasingly vocal demands and political ambitions ofMuslims, Scheduled Castes, and Other Backward Classes and a Congressgovernment that catered to these interests.30

Although I can only briefly indicate this conjunction here, after do-ing so I will then try to suggest (again much too briefly) the peculiarconditions that allowed it to happen.

The connection between Gandhian socialism and JP's call for 'TotalRevolution' and 'partyless democracy' was both purposeful andconscious. Having abandoned the electoral political process a few yearsafter Independence and having thereafter become a dedicated sarvodayaworker, by 1974 JP had become sufficiently disillusioned with Indianparliamentary government and Vinoba's domesticated ConstructiveProgramme that he readily agreed (or volunteered himself) to lead astudent movement in Bihar protesting official corruption.?1 'Totalrevolution', in keeping with the Gandhian Utopia, aimed to changepeople first and then to change society, to substitute people's power forstate power, to start with the village and end with the state rather than thereverse, to create a new public morality in place of contemporaryvenality, and in several other ways to bring on the revolution of spirit,social purpose, and development called for by Gandhian socialism. Inthe event, the only revolution the JP Movement accomplished was to

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precipitate Indira Gandhi's radical suspension of civil liberties during theEmergency of 1975-77.

The JP Movement and its Gandhian principles found strong supportfrom a seemingly unlikely source - groups and parties identified with astrong Hindu consciousness. This unexpected conjunction took threeforms.

First, there was a surprisingly good fit between the Indian culturalvalues and valuation of Indian culture expressed in Gandhian socialismand those enunciated by leaders of Hindu associations like the RSS andpolitical parties like the Jana Sangh, and this similarity seems to havegrown apace from the late 1960s. The similarity depends on variousassertions about the inherent character of India, including greaterspirituality and obligation to duty; on denial of Western values andpractices as unsuited to India; and on prescriptions for a new societybased on supposedly age-old Indian cultural essentials.

I try to show these similarities in the accompanying block quotations inthe Appendix: first, the continuity between Gandhi and JayaprakashNarayan and second, their resemblance to statements made by majorleaders of the RSS and the Jana Sangh.

Looking at the credo of Integral Humanism that DeendayalUpadhyaya developed for the Jana Sangh in the middle 1960s greatlyheightens this sense of similarity to Gandhism. After his death in 1968,many commentators, including Morarji Desai,32 Chandra Shekhar,33 andMadhavrao Muley,34 a leading figure in the RSS compared Deendayal toGandhi. Many of Deendayal's ideas correspond to Gandhian socialistnotions and echo JP's Total Revolution. This continuity, whetherintentional or not, is especially strong in Deendayal's avowal of India's'unity in diversity', of incorporation not conflict as essential to bharatmata(Mother India), of the supremacy of organic relations over individualismin bharatiya ('Hindian')3^ civilisation.

According to Walter Anderson, Deendayal believed India had erred infollowing Western ideas about development rather than its own identityor national culture, which he called chiti and which each nation has. Thestate is an artificial entity, produced by a kind of social contract by peopleof a nation in order to safeguard it and to satisfy their basic needs. Neithercommunism nor capitalism is acceptable because both exacerbate socialconflict, and the same is true of the present-day caste system - as also thecurrent economic system because it allows a great disparity in incomeand wealth. He favoured workers' control over the means of productioneither through individual ownership of small enterprises or collectiveownership of larger ones.36 Deendayal was wary of overmechanisationand the class conflict large industry could sponsor; classes werecomplementary, not contradictory and such mutual accord andassistance was the basis of 'Bharatiya culture'.37 Democracy that hasemerged from class conflict leads to capitalist man, who is 'money-hungry', whereas Marxism, which arose in reaction against exploitation,produces 'blood-thirsty' men. Only the Bharatiya philosophy could

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resolve their contradictions, 'and therefore both democracy and socialismneed to be Indianized', according to Deshmukh.38

The 1965 Jana Sangh Statement of Principles that Deendayal draftedargued that political democracy must be accompanied by economicadvance and social equality to enable the 'realization of National Self.39

When he became head of the Jana Sangh in 1967, Deendayal embracednonviolent popular agitations as 'the media and expressions of socialawakening . . . these agitations should be made instruments of aconstructive revolution. . . '.40 By the late 1960s, then, an ideologicalbase existed within Hindu nationalism for an appropriation of Gandhiansocialism as a belief and in its very practice.

Secondly, Hindu nationalism recognised these shared beliefs by publicendorsement of the JP Movement. Balasaheb Deoras, addressing 10,000RSS members in December 1974, strongly backed the JP Movement andsaid that 'Shri Jayaprakash is fulfilling the mission of noble leaders likeMahatma Gandhi, Acharya Vinoba Bhave and Guruji Golwalkar . . .who seek to serve the people selflessly'.41 Nana Deshmukh, then head ofthe Jana Sangh, argued that India needed leaders dedicated to socialreconstruction, instead of weakening national unity by maintainingspecial privileges for minorities. JP clearly was one such leader in hisview.42

A story existed, whether myth or reality, to charter the affiliation of theGandhian JP with the communal RSS. Balasaheb Deoras related that sixyears before the movement for total revolution, JP saw the relief work theRSS was doing in Bihar, especially that no distinction was made betweenHindus and Muslims. That experience ostensibly changed his impressionof this organisation.43

Reciprocally, JP endorsed the communal groups: He attended the JanaSangh's 20th All-India session held in Delhi in March 1975 and said, 'IfJana Sangh is fascist, then I, too, am a fascist'.44 A month earlier, heopposed the government's purported consideration of a ban on the RSS.In 1977, long after the JP Movement's Utopian message had been shut offby the Emergency, JP exhorted the RSS to 'fulfil my dream':

. . . I have great expectation from this revolutionary organisationwhich has taken up the challenge of creating a new Bharat. I havewelcomed your venture wholeheartedly. Sometimes I have offeredyou my advice and have even criticised you, but it was as a friend.45

Thirdly, the JP Movement greatly depended on the Jana Sangh'sstudent wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, and the shakos ofthe RSS for its effective mass protests in Bihar. Only these Hindunationalist groups had the ground-level cadres to muster out for extensiveand longterm protest action. N.H. Sanghavi46 and Radhakanta Barik,47

from opposite ends of the political spectrum, make this point. JP himselfadmitted that RSS cadres were taking part in the protest, and the role ofthe Jana Sangh was acknowledged publicly:

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To my knowledge, there is no Anand Margi in any of the SangharshaSamities... As for RSS, it too is not formally part of the movement,though I daresay there are many members participating. TheBharatiya Jana Sangh is certainly a constituent . . . the VidyarthiParishad, too . . . If all these add up to the RSS being a part of themovement, I have no quarrel with it.

Some commentators see JP as a puppet of the Jana Sangh and RSS, andothers see him as taking over an existing social movement and harnessingit to the so-called Fascist right - 'the Bonaparte of the RSS'. Perhaps thiscannot be clearly resolved, because the JP Movement represented acontinuing process of appropriation of Gandhian motifs by Hindunationalism. At its end, whether that end be said to occur at thedeclaration of the Emergency or the dismissal of the Janata Party in 1979,the Utopia of Total Revolution has been appropriated in the interests ofparty politics, sectarian appeals, and communal attitudes. In 1980, theHindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, accomplished theultimate appropriation when it adopted Gandhian Socialism as its officialideology. Since then, various political parties have wrestled to controlGandhian ideology and the Hindu nationalist vote at the very time thatthe remaining Gandhian sarvodaya organisations have been put underofficial government scrutiny as possibly subversive.48

No one believed, least of all JP, that his movement accomplishedfundamental changes, except perhaps in the unintended consequencethat it precipitated Indira Gandhi's declaration of Emergency in June1975. But this was hardly a revolution; it was a throwback to the colonialrepression of civil liberties; it showed starkly how much fundamentalalteration a passive revolution defers, and how a Utopian vision thatgrows up under passive revolution can be ultimately falsified in theinterests of the status quo.

THE CONJUNCTION

The combination of Gandhian socialism and Hindu nationalism in the JPMovement ultimately rests on images of India and cultural resistancebased on these images generated in the world system. Yet as late as 1948,they were quite antithetical, as Nandy shows by juxtaposing Gandhi withhis Hindu Nationalist assassins.49 But why did they come into closestconjunction in 1974-75? Another way to phrase this question: whatconditions promoted the appropriation of a Utopian programme in theinterests of ideological justification?

In this article, I can only briefly suggest the four factors that appeardeterminative:

1. Failure of the Utopian programme after Independence: especiallythe failure of Vinbba's bhoodan programme of voluntary land re-

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distribution; the failure of the khadi and village industriesprogramme even with major government subsidy; the reductionof the concept of a nonviolent peace force, the shanti sena, tosocial welfare functions; and the institution of a programme ofpanchayati raj that was based on maximising economicdevelopment rather than village democracy. One outcome ofthis failure was increasing discontent in the Sarva Seva Sanghwith Vinoba's Constructive Programme, which eschewedpolitical action or satyagraha in pursuit of its goals. Ostergaardidentifies the period from 1969 to late 1973 as one during whichthe movement's failures had to be faced.50 This failure wasvirtually preprogrammed by the faulty image of indigenoussociety promoted by Gandhian socialism. However, the otherthree factors behind the conjunction (noted below) werehistorically contingent on political and economic changes inindependent India. But the failure was crucial: without it, therewould have been no JP and other sarvodaya workers who wereso disaffected with the existing Gandhian programme that theylooked for new revolutionary avenues - and in looking, came totravel along with Hindu nationalists, with whom they sharedcertain ideas about the possibilities of Hindian civilisation.

2. Weakening of official government, that is, Congress Partycontrol over the Gandhian movement, specifically the weakeninginfluence of 'institutionalised' Gandhism. Chatterjee argues thatthe Nehru Congress transformed Gandhian resistance into anideological defence of the national state,51 but my reading is thatmost of the ideological elements of Nehru's rule after Independ-ence referred to a Western socialist model, and Gandhism wasmainly given lip-service and subsidies rather than actuallyappropriated. The difference is important: rather than makingfull use of Gandhian beliefs to justify policies, the NehruCongress simply wished to deactivate and pacify Gandhism -making its utopianism a dead letter. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi(Memorial Foundation) was a major vehicle for this institutional-ised or domesticated Gandhism. The foundation was formed andmanaged with major inputs from the Congress, and it providedgrants to most Gandhian undertakings. The split in the Congressin the late 1960s between Indira Gandhi and the old party regularsseems to have been a major factor in this loss of official control.

3. In extension or perhaps as cause of (2), the use of a rhetoric ofclass confrontation and radical social (institutional) alteration byIndira Gandhi and her Congress (R) beginning in the late 1960s.Garibi hatao (end poverty), not sarvodaya (welfare for all)became the ideological ticket for the government.

4. The increasingly defensive posture - expressed in an aggressiveHindu nationalism - taken by urban Hindu lower middle-class/forward-castes: as the Green Revolution made rural middle

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castes (roughly coterminous with Other Backward Classes)more wealthy, politically powerful, and resentful of urbanprivilege; as the government's reservation policy limited theiraccess to education and employment; as bureaucratic corruptionthrough sale of licences, import authorisations, and so forth cutinto their profits; and as the ruling party's anti-poverty campaignthreatened harsher policies against them.

These conditions determined the possibility for the evocation of theGandhian Utopia in the JP Movement, but also its appropriation by aHindu ideology. Both Utopian and ideological currents flowed together in1974 because they were both tributaries of the cultural dominationcarried by the world system.

APPENDIX

A. GANDHIAN SOCIALISM

'I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in theworld. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors. Rome went,Greece shared the same fate . . . Japan has become westernized . . . Inthe midst of all this India remains unmovable and that is her glory . . .Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path ofduty. . . . If this definition be correct, then India, as so many ["British" inoriginal] writers have shown, has nothing to learn from anybody else.'

'The tendency of the Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being,that of the Western civilizations to propagate immortality. The latter isgodless, the former is basd on a belief in God. So understanding and sobelieving, it behoves [sic] every lover of India to cling to the old Indiancivilization. . .'53

'I have pleaded for our present political institutions to be based on theprinciples that had been enunciated and practiced in the ancient Indianpolity. . . . Present Western polity is based upon an atomized society, theState being made up of an inorganic sum of individuals. Ancient IndianPolity was much more consistent with both these.'

'. . . "Community" in ancient India had two forms. The first and basicform was the territorial community, the village or township. . . . Thedemocracy of the village communities was so stable and efficient that itcontinued well into the British period. . . .The other form of communitywas the functional or occupational community, the varna.'

'. . . The concept of dharma was of great importance in ancientIndia. . . This concept. . .is another example of that synthetic, organic,communal organization of Indian society. . . . Dharma has. . . declinedand ceased to exercise any influence . . . upon present polity, which is awholly foreign implantation and has no roots in the Indian soil . . .Unless life in India is again organized on the basis of self-determining and

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mutually co-ordinating and integrating communities, that organicself-regulation of society, which the concept of dharma represents, will notbe possible. . . .The ancient concept of dharma has to be revived and theappropriate dharma for a democracy has to be evolved.'54

B. HINDU COMMUNALISM

"The RSS is not opposed to socialism as an egalitarian philosophy, but tothe materialistic aspect of it which does not accord with our culture or ourethos, or the essential values of life we believe in.'55

'Doctorji [Dr Hedgewar, founder of the RSS] concluded that a totalrevolution in the mental attitude of the people was the vital need of thehour . . . a total transformation in the attitudes and thought-processesand behaviour of the whole people, by taking individual after individualand moulding him for an organised national life . . . Nationalreorganisation means fostering those traits which build up nationalcharacter and cohesion. It is directed towards awakening a passionatedevotion to the motherland, a feeling of fraternity, a sense of sharing innational work, a deeply felt reverence of the nation's ideals, discipline,heroism, manliness, and other noble virtues.'56

According to Golwalkar (Hedgewar's successor), the Hindu solutionto national identity and human welfare could not be based on materialismas all previous 'isms' were. Ancient Hindu philosophers discovered thateach nation had a distinctive character, and that it was only by eachpursuing its particular characteristics and making its special contributionthat a harmonious world society could be accomplished. The RSS hastaken on the mission of reorganising the 'Hindu People' in terms of their'unique national genius' but this will not only help the 'true nationalregeneration of Bharat' but it is the precondition for world unity andsocial welfare. Knowledge of the Inner Spirit will urge humanity to toil forthe common good, and 'this knowledge is in the safe custody of Hindusalone'. This divine trust was given to Hindus by Destiny.57

NOTES

1. A shortened version of this paper was presented at the Conference on India and theWorld System, held at Tufts University 14-16 December 1986. I delivered an earlierversion at the University of Virginia. I want to thank Bryan Pfaffenberger, Steve Sharp,Walter Hauser, and other members of the University of Virginia South Asiasymposium for their helpful comments. I also wish to acknowledge the fundingprovided by the National Science Foundation, which permitted me to undertake thisresearch.

2. M.S. Golwalkar, Spot Lights (Bangalore, 1974) 160.3. Chesterton's remarks appeared in the Illustrated London News 18 September 1909. See

Mahatma Gandhi, Collected Works vol. 9 (Delhi, 1963), 425-6.4. Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the

Later Nineteenth Century (London, 1970).

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5. Lloyd I. and Suzanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: PoliticalDevelopment in India (Chicago, 1967).

6. Strangely - perhaps by way of resistance to academic imperialism? - Nandy does notcite Seal and Chatterjee cites neither Seal nor the Rudolphs.

7. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism(Delhi, 1983), xii.

8. Ashis Nandy, At The Edge of Psychology (Delhi, 1980), 83.9. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. . ., 100.

10. Ibid., 100-06. Nandy prefigured this approach in his At The Edge. . ., 130-31.11. Partha Chatterjee, 'Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society' in R. Guha (ed.)

Subaltern Studies III (Delhi, 1984), 155-6.12. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, A Derivative

Discourse? (London, 1986), 100. Chatterjee thus gives Gandhi less personal credit asthe creator of a novel alternative to Western political and social values than Nandydoes.

13. Ibid., 42.14. Ibid., 132.15. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).16. Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West, Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China

and India (Cambridge, MA., 1970), 4.17. See John Richards, 'Wallerstein and South Asia' (unpublished ms. 1986).18. Sumit Sarkar, 'Popular' Movements and 'Middle Class' Leadership in Late Colonial

India: Perspective and Problems of a 'History From Below' (Calcutta and New Delhi,1983), 5.

19. Gandhian socialism is also indigenously labelled as 'Indian socialism', 'sarvodayasociety and economy', 'sarvodaya', 'Vedic socialism', 'Gandhian economics' or'decentralised economic development' and called 'Indian anarchism' by one Westernscholar. I derive its developing characteristics from the writings of Aurobindo,Vivekananda, Gandhi, Vinoba, and Jayaprakash Narayan, and from secondaryliterature, such as Nitya Narayan Banerjee, Vedic Socialism (New Delhi, n.d.);Amritananda Das, Foundations of Gandhian Economics (Bombay, 1979); T.S.Devadoss, Sarvodaya and the Problem of Political Sovereignty (Madras, 1974);Margaret W. Fisher and Joan V. Bondurant, Indian Approaches to a Socialist Society(Berkeley, 1956); Detleff Kantowsky, Sarvodaya The Other Development (New Delhi,1980); J.S. Mathur, Industrial Civilisation and Gandhian Economics (Allahabad, n.d.);Vaikunth L. Mehta, Decentralised economic Development (Bombay, 1964); GeoffreyN. Ostergaard and Melville Currell, The Gentle Anarchists (Oxford, 1971); V.K.R.V.Rao, Indian Socialism Retrospect and Prospect (New Delhi, 1982); Sampuranand,Indian Socialism (New York, 1961); Vishwanath Tandon, The Social and PoliticalPhilosophy of Sarvodaya after Gandhiji (Varanasi, 1965).

20. Compare Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 72. This appropriation and revalorization ofpejorative Orientalism is different from, but accomplishes the same effective resistanceas, the construction of a 'Protestant Buddhism' in Sri Lanka by incorporating manyProtestant beliefs and methods of organisation. See Gananath Obeyesekere, 'ReligiousSymbolism and Political Change in Ceylon', Modern Ceylon Studies 1 (1970), 45-47.

21. I do not wish to argue that effective cultural resistance within the world system isimpossible. I only mean to say that the complex condition of such resistance - at once acreation of, and a denial of, the world system - puts a heavy burden of struggle on anysuch cultural resistance.

22. Chatterjee is least convincing in treating the complex authorship of Gandhism,especially the role of Western Utopians. Chatterjee necessarily recognises theimportant stimulus such Utopians provided to Gandhi, but he argues that Gandhi wentbeyond the romanticism of these Europeans to develop satyagraha and ahimsa. GeneSharp notes how much Gandhi's satyagraha owed to contemporary instances ofnonviolent resistance and civil disobedience in South Africa, Japan, and India itself andof course there were significant Western models of civil disobedience put in practice byThoreau and in the Irish Home Rule agitation of Parnell, the latter having had much

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influence on Sri Aurobindo's independent (of Gandhi's) proposal of passive resistancein 1907. Aurobindo invested his passive resistance with the same moralism as Gandhidid satyagraha, although he did not see it as the sole revolutionary method. See GeneSharp, Gandhi as a Political Strategist (Boston, 1979) and Aurobindo Ghose,'The Doctrine of Passive Resistance' in Sri Aurobindo Vol. 1 (Pondicherry, 1970),95-128.

Nandy also tries to negotiate the problem of authorship. He argues that Gandhiutilised themes that were marginalised in the West, as, for example, a nonviolentresistance and spiritual critique of modern (capitalist) society. The significant point,however, is that such marginalised resistance within the West still developed themesbased on Orientalist stereotypes of India - which made the concatenation of suchthemes by Gandhi no less a creation of world-system domination. See ArjunAppadurai's review of Nandy's book ('Is Homo Hierarchicus' American Ethnologist,13 [1986], 749) for a similar point about Aurobindo.

23. Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, 159 and 169.24. For fears of the business community that Gandhism could not control worker unrest see

Claude Marcovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931-1939 (Cambridge,1985), 155-75. For failure to discipline no-tax campaigns and urban boycotts, and thefear it inspired in bourgeois interests, see Sumit Sarkar, 'The Logic of GandhianNationalism: Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (1930-1931)' IndianHistorical Review 3 (1976), 114-17. For the role of local subcontractors, see Judith M.Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915-1922 (Cambridge, 1972), andStephen Henningham, 'The Social Setting of the Champaran Satyagraha: TheChallenge to an Alien Elite' Indian Economic and Social History Review 13 (1976),59-73. For the misinterpretation of Gandhi's message by peasants and theirradicalisation of it, see Sumit Sarkar's discussion of the literature in 'Popular'Movements. . ., 43.

25. Chatterjee, 'Gandhi and the Critique . . .', 155.26. Sarkar, 'Popular' Movements . . ., 72.27. My use of the terms 'ideology' and 'utopia' is drawn from Karl Mannheim, Ideology and

Utopia, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, tr. (New York and London, n.d. [1936]),194-200. For a somewhat different usage, see Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought . . .,115.

28. The radical critique of Gandhi usually sees him only as an ideologue, an agent ofindigenous bourgeois interests, and never as a Utopian in the sense I use the concepthere. Gandhi's actions are portrayed as entirely class-motivated, whereas I am arguingthat in pursuit of his Utopian image, Gandhi often believed and acted in ways that couldplay a strong ideological role and could be appropriated by certain class interests andthat certain classes were willing to support financially as well. See Claude Marcovits,Indian Business and Nationalist Politics 1931-1939 (Cambridge, 1985) 70-71; Sarkar,'The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism . . .', 142-5; and Francine R. Frankel, India'sPolitical Economy, 1947-1977 (Princeton, 1978), 28-70. My position also differssomewhat from Bipan Chandra's, whose argument is that Gandhi correctly 'read' andreacted to the dilemmas facing the nationalist movement - a position which effectivelyremoves any possibility of unintended consequences, such as might link Gandhianutopianism with the vested interests of the indigenous lower-middle class or might allowGandhism to be appropriated by Hindu nationalism, as I shall discuss later in thispaper. See Bipan Chandra, The Long-Term Dynamics of the Indian National Congress(Presidential Address, Indian History Congress Forty-Sixth Session, Amritsar 27-9December 1985) 9, 17, 36-9.

29. Degeneration into ideology is always historically contingent, not predetermined, as thefollowing section will show. The failures of Third-World Utopias - ujaama and thevarious African socialisms chief among them - seem to outnumber the successes,however.

30. I explore the class and caste forces behind this conjunction in 'Hindu Nationalism in theMaking, or the Rise of the HUMFY', paper delivered at the American EthnologicalSociety meetings 1987.

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31. Geoffrey Ostergaard, Nonviolent Resistance in India (New Delhi, 1985).32. Sudhakar Raje (ed.) Destination (New Delhi, 1978), 14-16.33. Ibid., 23-4.34. Ibid., 25-30 and 33.35. No adequate English translation of bharatiya, as used by Hindu nationalists, exists. It

refers at once to a geographical region and a cultural realm with deep-rooted traditionsand thus combines what the English terms 'India' and 'Hindu' (as a cultural rather thansectarian label) often imply. This usage is perhaps the strongest link to the Gandhi ofHind Swaraj. I try to translate this usage by the adjective 'Hindian'.

36. Raja (ed.) Destination, 47.37. Ibid., 25-30 and 33.38. Ibid., 36.39. Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Party Documents, vol. I (New Delhi, 1973) 4-5 and 8-9.40. Raje (ed.) Destination, 47.41. 'Balasaheb: J.P. Represents Forces of Good' Organiser (7 December 1974) 1, 2, 16.42. Nana Deshmukh, RSS, Victim of Slander (New Delhi, 1979) 146-8.43. 'Balasaheb asks PM to Shed Bias Against RSS' Organiser (8 March 1975) 7-ff.44. 'Jana Sangh: Old Wine in New Bottle', Mainstream (15 March 1975), 6-ff.45. Jayaprakash Narayan, May You Fulfill My Dream [translation of Hindi speech given at

RSS training camp in Patna, 3 November 1977] (Bangalore, 1979), 5.46. N.H. Sanghavi, 'The Future of the R.S.S.', Janata (11 December 1977), 10.47. Radhakanta Barik, Politics of the JP Movement (New Delhi, 1977), 62-65.48. In 1981 the Lok Sabha appointed a Commission of Inquiry, later known as the Kudal

Commission, to investigate various Gandhian sarvodaya organisations. The commis-sion was to judge whether these organisations were subverting the image of theMahatma, were getting funds from foreign sources with which to subvert the nation,and were misusing government funds. This inquiry reinstated one begun by IndiraGandhi during the Emergency, which had terminated during Janata rule. Althoughoriginally appointed for one year, the Kudal Commission gained annual extensions andonly made its final report in February 1987. The various Gandhian organisations underscrutiny over this six-year period publicly condemned the inquiry as improper.

49. Nandy, At The Edge . . ., 76-93. Nandy also recognises that there were similaritiesbetween the Gandhian approach and Hindu nationalism at this period.

50. Ostergaard, Nonviolent Resistance. . ., 26-27.51. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. . ., 124-25.52. Frankel, India's Political Economy, 433-435 and Roderick Church, 'Conclusion: The

Patternof State Politics in Indira Gandhi's India' in John R. Wood (ed.), State Politics inContemporary India (London and Boulder, 1984), 236.

53. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Mahadev Desai trans.(Ahmedabad, 1982 [1909]) 60-61, 63.

54. Jayaprakash Narayan, 'A Plea for the Reconstruction of the Indian Polity' in BimalPrasad (ed.) A Revolutionary's Quest (Delhi, 1980 [1959]), 216-17.

55. Deshmukh, RSS . . ., 16.56. M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore, 1966) 332-3.57. Ibid., 1-10.D

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