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The IUP Journal of History and Culture :
Gandhi on Nonviolence in the Context of Enlightenment, Rationality and Globalization
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An attempt has been made in this paper to trace Gandhi's principle of `nonviolence' in the context of `Enlightenment Rationality' on the one hand and `Globalization' on the other. The ideas of freedom/independence, autonomy, sovereignty, property (in Gandhi's case Trusteeship), maturity/adulthood, public and private, tolerance, scientific rationality, secularism, humanism, democracy, nation/state, universality of moral actions, humanity as an end in itself, critique of religion, etc., are the most operative terms of European Enlightenment of the 19th century. Though these ideas evolved and developed in Europe, yet they proliferated beyond Europe to other continents and subcontinents. Gandhi appreciated these ideas and like a genius, he interpreted them into indigenous concepts and principles such as truth, simplicity, faith, brahmacharya, purushartha, satyagraha, swaraj, karma, compassion, trusteeship, vegetarianism/fruitarianism and above all nonviolence with the aim of attaining swaraj—victory over one's passions, lusts, greed, etc., and independence and sovereignty of the country. I may point out, though I shall not be in a position to develop it here, that the basic concepts of the Enlightenment were questioned and repudiated by Marx, Engels and Lenin on the one hand and the critical theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas on the other. In the era of globalization, the Enlightenment concepts have become almost obsolete. But Gandhi's principles are still valid. These are the only viable principles to resolve moral dilemmas that everybody faces, being constantly confronted by equally valid alternatives in globalization. Hence I'll propose a modest critique of the Enlightenment and the globalization from Gandhi's perspective of nonviolence.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948), also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was a major political and spiritual leader of India during India's independence movement. He was the pioneer of Satyagraha—a philosophy that is largely concerned with truth and `resistance to evil through active, nonviolent resistance'—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. In India, he is officially accorded the honor of `Father of the Nation'. October 2, his birthday, is commemorated each year as `Gandhi Jayanti', a national holiday. On June 15, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution declaring October 2 to be the `International Day of Nonviolence'.

The range of Gandhiji's political practices and philosophical theorizing is extraordinary. He deals with most of the themes developed by earlier thinkers, including economic critique of British imperialism, the constitutional reforms, nationalist and the religious sentiments. In addition, he has sought to achieve a thoroughgoing synthesis of religion as a mobilizing force, the concept of nation and national movement. It is not easy to assess the contributions of Gandhiji whose professional competence extends from Leo Tolstoy's `War and Peace' to the sociology of knowledge, by way of Rousseau (even Marx), Enlightenment Rationality and the more recondite sources of Indian spiritual heritage. At an age when most of his political colleagues including Nehru had painfully established control over one corner of the field, he has made himself master of the whole, in depth and breadth alike. There is no corner-cutting, no facile evasion of difficulties or enunciation of conclusions unsupported by research: whether he is refuting Marx and Lenin, dissecting the pragmatist approaches, delving into the medieval Bhakti movement, or bringing Hindu sociology up to date, there is always the same uncanny mastery of the sources, joined to an enviable talent for clarifying intricate logical puzzles. He seems to have been born with a faculty for digesting the toughest kind of material and refashioning it into orderly wholes.

 
 
 

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