This accompanies Eijiro Hazama’s Modern Intellectual History article Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyāgraha with the “Hindu” Notion of Ahiṃsā?

Since the demise of Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948), known as the “Mahatma” or the Great Soul, numerous studies have unsurprisingly been published about him, particularly concerning his concept of “non-violence,” a central virtue of his anti-colonial satyagraha campaign. It is tempting to think that nothing new can be offered on the subject. However, by reading his writings in Gujarati, his native tongue, it is possible to reveal important and original insights.

Notwithstanding Bhikhu Parekhu’s key suggestion in his article “Gandhi and His Translators” (1986), which highlighted the necessity of using Gandhi’s Gujarati primary texts, almost no scholar until relatively recently had undertaken work on Gandhi from this perspective. Finally, from around the 2010s, Gandhian experts such as Tridip Suhrud, Ajay Skaria, and Anthony Parel embarked upon the task. Gandhi, throughout his lifetime, wrote voluminously. These works (including his dictations and speeches recorded by his secretaries) were posthumously compiled into Collected Works published in Gujarati (82 volumes), Hindi (97 volumes), and English (100 volumes) by the Government of India and the Navajivan Trust.

My article, “Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyagraha with the Hindu Notion of Ahimsa?”, is, as far as I am aware, the first study to use primary materials written by Gandhi in all three languages (Gujarati, Hindi, and English) to chronologically examine the formation of his non-violent principle of satyagraha. A few surprising facts have been discovered in the process. One of these is that only a few references to the Gujarati/Hindi/Sanskrit word ahimsa (non-killing, non-injury) were actually made during Gandhi’s 21-year sojourn in South Africa where he led his first memorial satyagraha campaign (1906-1914). This discovery fundamentally counters the long-established argument that the Hindu/Jain traditional notion of ahimsa was the main source of inspiration for Gandhian non-violence. Gandhi, as a matter of fact, did not utilize the term ahimsa in relation to his philosophy of satyagraha in South Africa. Instead, he primarily used Gujarati terms such as daya (compassion, mercy, pity) and prem (love, affection), as well as the English term “love”. These word choices were most likely the result of his exposure to the early modern nirguna bhakti and Tolstoy. It should also be noted that the word/concept ahimsa had, barring a few exceptions among conservative high-caste Hindus in North India, almost never been commonly referred to in intellectual debates in the subcontinent before the Gandhian era. Even Shrimad Rajcandra, an indigenous Jain philosopher in Gujarat who reportedly religiously influenced Gandhi above all others in the latter’s life, only rarely used the term in his Gujarati writings.

It was from just after 1915 onwards, when Gandhi, now a mature 45-year-old politician with a distinct nationalist agenda, began to use the word ahimsa. The reasons behind this intellectual/terminological shift are somewhat complicated. One that I explore in this article is Gandhi’s moral-strategic concerns in relation to well-to-do Hindu/Jain businessmen (vaniyas) who occupied a dominant socio-economic position in Ahmedabad.

In a nutshell, this article challenges the long-established view that the primary “origin” of Gandhian non-violence can be found in his childhood experiences in Kathiawar Peninsula, imbued with the cultural ethos of the Hindu/Jain traditional doctrine of ahimsa. I argue that it was not ahimsa, but early modern nirguna bhakti and Tolstoyan beliefs that formed the crucial initial ideological basis for Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign. These sources were characterized by their syncretic cosmopolitan nature which transcended religio-cultural categories, particularly the Hindu-Muslim communal boundary. I believe that the discoveries outlined in this article will eventually allow us to answer David Hardiman’s question in his Gandhi in His Time and Ours (2003: 5): “[W]hy [do] Gandhi’s ideas continue to resonate in the world today?”

Unravelling the Myth of Gandhian Non-violence: Why Did Gandhi Connect His Principle of Satyāgraha with the “Hindu” Notion of Ahiṃsā? by Eijiro Hazama