Nonviolence and the Counter-Society

by Geoffrey Ashe

Editor’s Preface: Gandhi was born in 1869 and as the centennial year of 1969 approached, pacifist and other publications worldwide used it as the occasion to re-evaluate Gandhi’s importance. The British cultural historian Geoffrey Ashe’s biography of Gandhi had been published to acclaim in early 1968 and Peace News published this article in their 16 August 1968 issue. It is the latest in our series of rediscoveries from the archives of the IISG in Amsterdam. Please see the notes at the end for references, acknowledgments, and further biographical information about Ashe. JG

Several months ago, Joan Baez described nonviolence as a flop, although she did qualify that by saying violence was a bigger flop. However, to my mind, we shouldn’t be downcast. By studying Gandhi’s nonviolence a little more carefully we can see what was right and wrong and make a fresh start. I am working on the Gandhi Centenary because I believe that some of the ideas which Gandhi explored in his career are still valuable and exciting, uniquely so; that these ideas can be restated and reapplied in the present context; but – what is perhaps the main thing – that no large-scale movement in this country has yet fully absorbed them or put them into practice.

When I was writing my biography of Gandhi three years ago, [see notes at the end] I soon began to meet with surprises. I went to India twice, and almost the first Indian I spoke to told me that the West always misunderstood Gandhi. I visited villages, talking with ordinary people and asking what the Mahatma meant to them. So far as I can recall, none of them said a word about nonviolence, or civil disobedience, or the famous spinning wheel. 

The message came through something like this: ‘He taught Indians to be patriotic and self-reliant. He taught the importance of everyday concerns as well as high politics. He taught brotherhood and no class distinction. He taught that Indians must stand on their own feet and supply their own needs. That they must hate nobody, not even the British, and be brave and straightforward and grasp that their only enemy was fear.’ 

The Indian masses revere him as a sort of Moses, and moulder of the national moral character. He has the same religious aura and is well on the way to becoming a Hindu God.

Not a Protester

Or consider some of the aspects that have interested Westerners. For instance, he is thought of as a pacifist. Yet almost the last political act of his life was to approve of Indian military action in Kashmir. He is counted as a patron saint of the peace movement. Yet with all his many interests he never founded a peace organisation, nor did he take much interest in the peace movement of his day, although spokesmen for it were always coming to see him. He is supposed to have inspired modern protest activities, and such manoeuvres as mass sit-downs in Trafalgar Square. Yet he never led or took part in a protest movement as we think of them now, and he explicitly condemned the Trafalgar Square type of sit-down action.

I am not saying these things to introduce an essay on what he did or did not teach. Nor am I disparaging all protest parades. The object is just to convey that there is more than meets the eye. After sifting the data I realized that I was dealing with somebody more vivid and thought-provoking than I’d expected.

As you probably know, Gandhi called his theory of action satyagraha. The word means ‘Firmness in Truth,’ or ‘Truth-Force.’ What you are supposed to do first, in essence, is to analyse a wrong state of affairs, probe it to its fundamentals, and define the issues precisely. To Gandhi, this quest for the Truth of the situation was a religious act, but I will pass that by for the moment. The upshot, anyhow, is that some focal point in the situation will very likely thrust itself on you. There will be at least one issue of a make-or-break kind, where the evil of the situation comes to a head, so to speak. Here you must make a stand. Most of Gandhi’s campaigns grew out of crises that were created by particular official acts which Indians found intolerable – edicts about registration, censorship, and so on. Campaigners were expected to know exactly what they were fighting about, to do it openly and honestly, and to be responsible citizens in other respects. Gandhi never preached mere anarchy or indiscriminate lawbreaking. When it began to happen in India, he twice called off an entire campaign.

Satyagraha means grasping Truth with a precise insight, and affirming it through nonviolence. Gandhi called himself a teacher of Truth and Nonviolence, in that order. And the first of the two main points I want to make is that nonviolence has to be seen in relationship to Truth. When he spoke of nonviolence, he didn’t mean primarily what Westerners have tended to think of – nonviolence as a tactic, abstaining from hitting people. The basic thing here is the nonviolence of the mind. In Gandhi’s view, if you don’t start with this and stick to it, you won’t evaluate the situation correctly; you won’t get to Truth, or at any rate you won’t keep your grasp on it. As he said, ‘Anger must be banished, and fear and falsehood.’ This may sound trite, but it isn’t. One of the implications is that it is not enough to be against something, not enough to be simply ‘anti’. If you are, if your thoughts are centred on hate or on opposition, you may or may not achieve some good but you will eventually go off the rails. This is not meant as a doctrine of ethics, but as a plain statement of fact. Purely ‘anti’ action involves a sort of mental violence and will go wrong.

Grasp on Truth

When I grasped this idea I realized that Gandhi had diagnosed, in advance, exactly what had struck me as the fatal flaw in the movements I had observed myself. I won’t discuss CND or the Committee of 100, which do of course raise complex issues. But there were movements alongside them in their heyday where the flaw was perfectly obvious. One was Yellow Star. I don’t know if anybody remembers Yellow Star, but it was launched in 1962 to oppose Colin Jordan and other neo-fascists who were causing trouble. I was on the committee and wrote the report which was published afterwards by the Institute of Race Relations. And this was what I noticed about the Yellow Star crowd – every position they took up was an ‘anti’ position, in some cases a ‘hate’ position (only their hates were different from their opponents’ hates). They bore out Gandhi completely. They became so absurd and contemptible that their movement lost its supporters and fell to pieces.

This conception of keeping your grasp on Truth, keeping your eye on the ball as it were, underlies even the better-known part of Gandhi’s nonviolence – nonviolence in action. When you have grasped the precise nature of the Wrong, you affirm the Right by the appropriate method: non-cooperation, civil disobedience, or setting up counter-institutions. This action must be nonviolent, but not solely for moral reasons. Indeed, nonviolence was by no means an absolute ‘must’ in Gandhi’s ethics. He thought the worst evil was not violence but cowardice – running away from the issue. No, the basic reason for nonviolence in action is that if you allow yourself to become violent, you will lose your hold on Truth and go wrong. As somebody else put it, ‘in war, truth is the first casualty.’ There is much more to it than this, but this is the root of the matter. For Gandhi, violence of mind or body is a sin of falsification. To right somebody’s evils we must overcome the merely ‘anti’ attitude, and the emotions that go with it and let us go astray. 

That, surely, is why Gandhi had so little to do with protest parades and sit-down strikes, although both were known in his India. Even when he lead his greatest protest of al, his campaign in 1930 against the British salt tax, he didn’t tell his followers to march about with placards saying, ‘Down with the Salt Tax.’ He told them to defy the government monopoly by making salt for themselves. The protest took the positive form of setting up a free democratic salt industry.

Let us be quite clear what this is all about. I am not saying that you or I or anybody should do this or that because Gandhi did. I am saying I believe that on this point he was most profoundly right, and experience has proved him so.

The salt business brings me to the second of the two ideas I want to convey now. We all probably have a vague image of Gandhi teaching Indians to use spinning wheels. Hand spinning was part of what he called ‘the constructive programme.’ But not many people realize how closely it was related to civil disobedience, non-cooperation and all the rest. It may come as a surprise (it did to me) to find that Gandhi always insisted, even at the height of civil disobedience, that ‘the constructive programme is the key to success.’ 

What did he mean? Well, the hand spinning was an economic weapon in a fairly obvious way. It gave the peasant a little extra income, and it helped Indians to supply their own needs and squeeze out British textiles. But the constructive programme included a lot more besides. In 1921, when Gandhi made the first attempt to achieve Indian Swaraj or self-rule, he reorganised the Congress Party as a democratic mass movement for building a whole new society in the shell of the old. That was the essence of what was tried in 1921, and in fact there was no civil disobedience that year at all.

Self-reliance

Perhaps I can sketch what he was aiming at by quoting a passage from my own book:

He meant his popularised Congress to be a state within the state, a citadel of dissent against the wrongful regime. Under its aegis, a transformed self-reliant society would take shape. Regenerate Indians would set up their own schools, their own courts, their own cottage industries, their own police. As they became less and less dependent on the regime, they could cut down their co-operation further and further. Also, the existing police and the soldiers could be weaned away from the British service. Gandhi wrote,  “There can be no Swaraj without our feeling and being the equals of Englishmen … Let us not mistake reformed councils, more law courts and even governorships for real freedom or power. They are but subtler methods of emasculation.” What he proposed was the British Establishment in India should be forced to live with a Counter-Establishment, not aggressive, not vengeful, but simply growing… Sooner or later, the beam would tip. The Sahib would recognize that his power had vanished, and make amends.

The key concepts here are the counter-society growing up, and the self-reliance. Gandhi’s revolution was always a bottom-up revolution, a do-it-yourself revolution. The people were to create their own society. Recently I expect you have noted the launching of several educational bodies called anti-universities, including one in London. You may not know that the first anti-universities were founded by Gandhi in 1921 to provide Indians with higher education not angled to the needs of the British Raj.

As time passed, Gandhi’s ideas of the new counter-society that was to grow inside the old developed further and further. He saw himself as laying the foundations for a future Nonviolent Society based on love, on the ‘good of all’ or ‘Sarvodaya’, as some of his followers sum it up today. All his social ‘causes’ fitted into that picture. Nonviolence meant no oppression or conflict – hence, freedom of the worker from exploitation by big business; freedom of women from the tyranny of the male; justice for India’s depressed classes; no religious feuding or persecution; and so forth. On the positive side it meant de-centralisation and cottage industries and village revival and popular culture… and so on. When I understood this, I again saw Gandhi’s relevance to some of our own concerns, however different British society is from Indian. The idea of the free counter-institution is, for example, just what Arnold Wesker tried to develop in Centre 42, to enable artists to control their own media instead of being subject to the coercion of commercial interests.

Gandhi, in fact, taught me an attitude of mind which I believe is the right one for the revolutionary today. Granted, there must be protest, granted there must be dissent. But the people who do the protesting and dissenting must be affirmative and creative themselves. And I don’t mean just that they should cook up political demands and lobby MP’s with them. I mean that they should set to work building a counter-society, a distinct mode of living, on a do-it-yourself basis. Perhaps at first on a small scale, perhaps in a part-time way, but a counter-society. This is the proper context for future activities for peace in the broadest sense.

‘The Underground’

Even five years ago there was not the potential in this country [Britain] for such a movement. Today I think there is. All over the place we do see scattered aspirations after direct action, instead of wire-pulling through established political parties and institutions. We might first consider enterprises such as Voluntary Service Overseas, which are socially more or less neutral. But some are real attempts to by-pass the system, to defy it, or to build outside it. I mentioned the sort of free artistic projects, which Centre 42 pioneered. Besides these we have groups like the Simon Community, groups that try to help problem families and old people, student activists, and even disjointed outbreaks like the five Surbiton typists working an extra half hour.

Alongside the little things like that, we have also a much bigger thing called ‘the Underground,’ with its celebrated fortnightly paper, International Times. I have no intention of debating the ethics of dropping out, of rushing off to form little love-communities. But there is no doubt that the same impulse to break free and create your own small bit of world is present in the Underground, strongly and admirably present. It will become creative when the right lead is given. I believe there are thousands of people prepared to break free at least to some extent, and to do something themselves, if they can be brought together and given the right lead. This implies some sort of organisation and centre, perhaps like Gandhi’s famous ashram near Ahmedabad.

You may say, ‘It’s different for us because Gandhi had a well-defined patriotic cause which many could agree on, and we haven’t.’ However, I feel that we in Britain are still, after a fashion, carrying on the same struggle as Gandhi himself. He worked to shake off the British Empire. Part of our own task, here and now, is to shake off the ghost of the British Empire. That spectre still haunts the established system, and has more influence than we are apt to realise. Because the Empire did once exist, and Britain was (God help us) ‘great,’ it has been possible to smear every step towards justice and peace and British withdrawal from the power race, from the grant of Indian independence onward, as a surrender, a decline, a betrayal. Likewise every protest against a continuing British role in power politics has been denounced as unpatriotic. That is why a paper like the Daily Express can go on viciously undermining the national interest on almost every issue, yet persuade readers that it speaks with the voice of patriotism. Patriotism still means loyalty to the ghost-Empire with all it implies.

I am sometimes amazed at the way this outlook has infected people who are too young to remember the real Empire. They accept that it has vanished, yet they swallow their parents’ myth that its disappearance means Britain is going to the dogs. With some honourable exceptions they don’t see the changes as the hopeful thing it is. My personal view is that the counter-society which we ought to be planning should not be afraid to speak of New Patriotism. After all, Gandhi himself was an Indian patriot. It should embody what is sound and true in this nation, lay the ghost of Imperial sovereignty to rest, and set up its own alternatives to the assorted shams that pretend to express the patriotic spirit.

To come down from the general to the particular, I think any Gandhian project that may be undertaken should follow the suggested pattern. That is, it should be positive, clearly and constructively related to some well-defined issue in existing society. Also it should be a step, however modest, towards the formation of a counter-society, going on and growing in an experimental quest without limit – a community of people practising self-reliance and nonviolence in the fullest sense. I don’t mean all living together weaving their own clothes – no crank stuff – but all working in concert. Of course, this community, when it takes shape, should be equipped to carry out acts of protest and civil disobedience. Of course, it should try to influence the established society all round, and to convert its members. Of course, it should campaign for peace. But it must live by a life of its own, not a life drawn purely from hate of something outside. Any project should be at least a preliminary essay towards this.

Reference: IISG/Brünn-Harris-Watts Archive, Box 730, Folder 1. We are grateful to IISG for their assistance and permission. 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Geoffrey Ashe (b. 1923) is an internationally known historian, author and lecturer whose areas of focus were British history and mythology, and more specifically the Arthurian legends. He held visiting professorships at seven American universities and was the co-founder and secretary of the Camelot Research Committee, the group responsible for the 1966-70 excavation of Cadbury Castle, a strong candidate for the site of King Arthur's Camelot. He was the author of more than twenty works, including the still highly readable, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution, London: Heinemann, 1968. Stein & Day (New York) published the U.S. edition the same year. The article is a shortened version of a speech Ashe gave to the Peace Pledge Union, March 1968.

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Dustwrapper art courtesy Stein & Day Publishing