The history of India, and specifically of its nationalism and independence, has been portrayed primarily as a triumphal history of non-violence. The iconic figure of Gandhi has become a proper name, a name that stands for this concept, history and practice. European proper names, Kant, for instance, have long come to stand for and announce epochal change. To that extent Gandhi has seized ownership of non-violence and the annunciation of Indian freedom in the twentieth century.

In her reflections on the question of violence, Hannah Arendt argues that Gandhi and non-violence were possible in India because they had a “different enemy” than either Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany or even pre-war Japan. Had any of these been the enemy, she conjectures that the “outcome would not have been decolonization but massacre and submission”. Even if massacre there was in decolonization, Arendt raises the important question of the relationship between violence and power. Her suggestion is that the British were simply too powerful to mount systemic violence of the kind that Stalin and Hitler had pursued. The rule of and by violence, she claims, becomes possible only where “power is being lost”. Moreover, the available choice for the British Empire between decolonization of India and a massacre for submission exposed but the fragility of imperial power.