Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram

I am not ashamed to repeat before you that this is a religious battle. . . to revolutionize the political outlook . . . to spiritualize our politics.

—M. K. Gandhi, "Speech at Mirzapur Park, Calcutta, January 23, 1921"

A curious category in Indian nationalist thought is the ashram. Among nationalist ashrams were the poet Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan, and the gurukuls (school-ashrams) set up by the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist organization. Most famous were the Gandhian ashrams. In South Africa, Gandhi set up the Phoenix settlement and the Tolstoy farm. On his return to India in 1914, he set up the Satyagraha ashram in Ahmedabad, and made that his base. Later, he was involved in and often based at the ashrams at Wardha and Sevagram. ¹

My question here is a simple one: What was the politics of the Gandhian ashram?

Mainstream nationalists such as Nehru, frustrated about the amount of time that the principal leader of the nationalist movement spent on the tiny ashrams, had a simple answer: eccentricity. Gandhi, obviously, did not feel this way. He said of the Satyagraha ashram that it "set out to eliminate what it thought were defects in our national life." He even devoted a book, and another in manuscript, to discussing the vows (vrat) involved in ashram life—Mangalprabhat [Tuesday dawn/auspicious dawn, published in English as From Yeravda Mandir], and the posthumously published Satyagraha-ashramno itihas [A history of the Satyagraha ashram, published in English as Ashram Observances in Action]. His arguments here suggest the inadequacy of understanding these ashrams in terms of the two major conventionally understood meanings: as a place where Hindu religious austerities are performed, and as a Hindu philosophy that organized individual life as a series of four stages or ashrams—those of the student (brahmacharya), the householder (grahastya), the renouncer (vanaprasthaya), and hermit (sanyas).

In the larger project of which this essay is part, I explore, through the ashram, Gandhi's critique of liberal modernity, and his alternative politics. ² I argue that the former constituted the nation through a logic of secular transcendence, where the locality was transcended to arrive at the generality of the nation. The nation, constituted by a shared history or culture, required and demanded the loyalty of its inhabitants. The liberal nation could not allow for absolute difference or antagonism within it; antagonists were always outside it. This logic is more broadly constitutive of liberal thought itself. When faced with difference, liberal thought has, at its finest, responded by producing a neutral shared space—civil society, the public sphere, or secularism—where differences can be transcended. But, as we have become increasingly aware during the last two decades, there is an abiding paradox to this process. Briefly put, such transcendence operates by a process of partition that separates the particular from the general. The former—religious faith, for example—has to be confined to the private sphere. As such, liberal thought tolerates the particular only by denying it any political salience and rendering it subordinate. At its most tolerant, liberal thought converts this particular into an object of knowledge (as in anthropology). But there can be no serious conversation with it. There can only be knowledge of it. And when, as is necessarily the case, this particular refuses to accept its subordination and seriously threatens civil society, it is recast as an Other that needs to be violently suppressed. In this sense, the Other is an unavoidable and even constitutive figure of liberal thought.

In the Gandhian vows of the ashram—which constituted it as a set of political practices, not simply a place—we can read an opposition to this logic of transcendence, a constituting of the nation through a politics of ahimsa (literally, "nonviolence"; better understood as "neighborliness"). Neighborliness was not a practice that could be arrived at simply by rejecting colonial power, liberalism, or the transcendent nation; the neighbor was not...