Gandhi's Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power (review)

After a lengthy analysis of the violence embedded in colonialism, Franz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1966) argued that all forms of anticolonial movements must, through necessity, include violence. Mohandas Gandhi, on the other hand, sought to encapsulate Indian nationalism within his doctrine of nonviolence. Using Gandhi’s own writings and an analysis of his actions in Indian nationalist movements, Steger analyzes the degree of success that attended Gandhi’s effort. In doing so, he uses Gandhi’s own definition of nonviolence – the practice of “non injury” to your enemies as well as the extension of love and compassion toward them. Given this somewhat ambitious definition, Steger reaches the inevitable conclusion that Gandhi ultimately failed to achieve his goal both in theory and in practice.

However, this book does make several useful contributions. Firstly, it is a useful and balanced assessment of a vast volume of scholarly writing that touches the subject but more importantly, it includes an incisive examination of the origin and evolution of Gandhi’s ideas on nonviolence. For example, Steger locates Gandhi and his early admiration of things British within the liberal intellectual world of the late nineteenth century. Nineteenth century liberal thinkers argued that all (male) individuals were entitled to representative government and human rights but many liberals also posited that civilizational differences meant that those without the requisite “experience” needed to be “educated,” thus postponing their enjoyment of such rights to the distant future. Steger traces how Gandhi’s disappointment with racism in South Africa as well as information about the Bengali nationalist movement led him to an alternative vision that elevated an idealized vision of life in ancient village India over the corruption of modern representative politics and the alienation which accompanies capitalist development.

Steger also convincingly argues that much of Gandhi’s vision of India as a home of spiritual heritage comes from a British Orientalist interpretation of India. He links such sources to Gandhi’s own assertions in South Africa that Indians and Europeans had much in common as “Indo-Aryans,” in contrast with the “Kaffirs.” Steger follows scholars who have pointed out the close connections between Gandhi’s ideas relating to purifying the self and liberating the nation. For Gandhi, the achievement of a moral national identity depended on the achievement of individual purity and thus his advocacy of sexual abstinence, his admonishments against coffee, tea and cocoa and his ideal diet of fresh fruits and nuts were all part of an effort to decolonize the Indian body and mind. The book also deals briefly with Gandhi’s concept of ideal womanhood and while acknowledging that Gandhi brought many Indian women to the public sphere and valorized many domestic activities such as spinning and cooking, it emphasizes that he also reinforced powerful patriarchal stereotypes.

Steger devotes an entire chapter to examining three cases of how Gandhi’s adherence to nonviolence worked in practice and he uses each to show how nonviolence and nationalist power cannot work together without injury to one or the other. While he is balanced and cautious in his language, Steger’s analysis leaves little doubt that he views Gandhi’s efforts to raise an ambulance brigade in London in 1914 and to recruit Indians for the British army in 1918 were influenced by political motives and involved compromising his ideal of nonviolence. Steger also correctly concludes that the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–2 collapsed because of Gandhi’s failure to realize that tolerance of occasional instances of violence, thus compromising the principle of non-violence, was a prerequisite for its success. As Steger points out, political exigencies made Gandhi accept this very need in the Quit India Movement in 1942.

All works that are even mildly critical of Gandhi become controversial and Steger’s work is unlikely to be an exception. However, the book is well written and sensitive to alternative points of view. Steger documents how Gandhi used Western “counter-cultural” writings to authenticate his own radical ideas. Some...