GANDHI IN THE WEST
The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest
by Sean Scalmer
Cambridge University Press. 248pp.
Reviewed: 23 April, 2011
In an era of public communication in Western democracies dominated by news-cycle stunts and media demagogcracy, has radical protest lost its moral and political force? Sean Scalmer casts a historian’s eye over Western protest movements of the 20th Century, from when Gandhi’s techniques first attracted Western attention, to the high point of Western political protest movements against the Vietnam War.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has attracted many biographical and political studies, but this is not one of them. Scalmer’s topic is the way that Western societies responded to Gandhi’s words, actions and image, and how those responses influenced political action in Western democracies.
His primary sources are the words of the activists, officials, journalists and commentators who fed their various impressions of Gandhi, or “Gandhism”, into the making of Western public and political opinion.
Scalmer lectures in history at Melbourne University and acknowledges Australian Research Council funding support for this study. So it was a little disappointing, for this local baby-boomer, to find that the protests, sit-ins and love-ins on Australian campuses and downtown streets of the late 60s and early 70s are not mentioned. In fact, there is not a single reference to Australian experience. Primary sources are exclusively British and American. I have always thought “Western” to include at least Western Europe, as well as we hangers-on in the Pacific.
The study chronologically and falls into two phases: Gandhi’s lifetime until his assassination in 1948, and the echoes of Gandhian influence through three major protest movements thereafter. During his life, Western attitudes to Gandhi reflected people’s support for, or resistance to, Indian independence from the British Empire. There was also spillover into general pacifism, whose legion of supporters in the West 1920-1939 largely abandoned it when faced with the aggression of the Axis powers.
Significant later Western movements that owed some technical credits to Gandhian modes of protest were the nuclear disarmament campaigns beginning in UK in the late 1940s, the US Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and 60s, and finally the protests against Vietnam War.
Gandhi himself objected to the notion of “Gandhism” as any form of ideology or canonical philosophy, but a label of some sort has to be applied to his collected thoughts and the lessons derived from his actions. As with most isms, Gandhism had both a moral component (setting out how and why the individual should act in particular situations) and also a pragmatic component, setting out how people could act together to achieve political objectives in the real world.
Scalmer’s study suggest the moral and spiritual components of Gandhi’s teachings to have been a mixed blessing. A syncretic blend of Jain, Hindu, Christian, Sufi and other moral systems, they gained him a certain mystic authority to mobilize mass protest action in India, and attracted a useful subculture of Western devotees who awarded him the status of spiritual guru. But the personal side of Gandhi’s moral philosophy ultimately was too eccentric for him to be accepted, by Indian elites or by average Westerners, as a political leader for all Indians.
It was the pragmatic effectiveness of his protest techniques that most influenced Western emulators. There had been “passive resistance” protests before (suffragettes, for example), but Gandhi coined the phrase satyagraha from the Sanskrit terms for truth (satyam) and for firmness (agraha). He sometimes translated this as “soul force”. He and his followers believed that mass non-violent resistance against oppression would, eventually, morally convert the oppressors.
This undoubtedly occurred, at some level and to some oppressors, but more realist analysts attribute Gandhi’s political successes to publicity – what today’s skeptical observers recognize as stunt politics.
If conditions are right, then the sympathy generated by public images of demonstrators being treated violently can be potent in mobilizing support for political change. But first, the ruling powers must be accountable, at least to some degree, to those whose sympathies are converted. Second, the balance of other factors has to be in alignment if the moral sympathy factor is to tip that balance.
Scalmer traces how successive Western protest movements gradually watered down the Gandhian moral element of satyagraha, reducing it to lip-service, then to a pragmatic political method, until eventually American protest movements dropped all reference to Gandhi and claimed that passive resistance methods were their own invention.
By the end of the 1960s, Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest movement, based on Gandhian as well as Christian values, had been replaced in the public eye by the conflict-model Black Power movement of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, and by the anti-establishment stunt politics of the psychedelic era. The Anti-Vietnam War protests, it must be said, were about Save Our Sons and Save Our Skins at least as much as they were about saving Indo-Chinese villagers from high-level bombing.
The media wanted then, and want even more in the video era, the gratification of retailing conflict, not resolution. Scalmer’s survey, in the end, is about us in the West, not about Gandhi. Almost every page is weighted with extensive footnotes that will delight a scholar but might put off the general reader. Scalmer writes clearly and concisely, and offers insights that are well worth the read.
Richard Thwaites passively resists taking part in organized protest movements.