Gandhi and the Philosophical Letter

The letter I’ve chosen to present is just one from a vast correspondence. Gandhi was a prolific writer of letters. He wrote dozens of letters by hand almost every day of his adult life. The Sabarmati ashram, which holds the largest collection of his correspondence, has around 35,000 letters.

Gandhi also took correspondence very seriously. In his journalism, he often chided Indians for being casual about it: for failing to read letters carefully, or being slow to reply. He wrote – and was written to by – almost anyone. And he wrote about almost everything: not just politics but almost every aspect of modern life.

The example here was written by Gandhi in 1910 to Maganlal Gandhi, a relative of his, but not a close one. Maganlal (1883-1928) was the grandson of an uncle of the Mahatma, and he was twenty-seven years old in 1910.

The letter was written at a decisive moment in Gandhi’s life. He was forty-one. For the previous four years he had led the passive resistance campaign in South Africa (the Transvaal) against the requirement for Indians to register for special permits for residence and work. He had been imprisoned several times. The previous year he had spent mostly in London unsuccessfully lobbying the British government to over-rule the South African government. On his return voyage to South Africa in November 1909, he had written a book: Hind Swaraj, to which he refers in the letter.

Hind Swaraj sets out, tellingly in the form of a dialogue, Gandhi’s position on Indian freedom. It argues that India has been made unfree not by British occupation, but by Indians’ acquiescence in alien rule. The cause of this acquiescence has been Indian seduction by western modernity. Swaraj – self-rule – meant not only self-government (political independence), but the government of the self, by each individual (self-discipline and autonomy). In terms of political strategy, this meant self-reliance, rather than mendicancy – the tactic of petitioning others that Gandhi had used hitherto. ‘What is secured for us by others’, he wrote, ‘is not swaraj but pararaj, i.e. foreign rule’. Indians should make themselves free by resigning from government jobs, leaving western schools and colleges, boycotting British goods. They should reduce their dependence on, and admiration for, western modernity and rediscover the strengths of their own civilization. Getting the British to leave India might take many generations. But Indians could free themselves now if they wanted. ‘You and I can enjoy it even today,’ he tells Maganlal. ‘Emancipate your own self … Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you yourself are India.’

Gandhi was opposed not only to mendicancy, and also to revolutionary violence, which was the other dominant opinion among Indian anti-colonialists. Violence is mistaken because the enemy lies within and not without, but also because violence claims certainty for itself. Instead, Gandhi advocated ‘truth-force’ – satyagraha – non-violent action which is a courageous insistence on the truth: neither coercing nor begging, but insisting on the truth and being willing to suffer publicly for it.

It’s fair to say, I think, that when Gandhi set out this philosophy, he was not only in the minority, but almost entirely alone. To the mendicants, Gandhi seemed hostile to the most generally accepted boons of colonial influence – western medicine, legal systems, and education, the railways, industrialised cotton-mills. How was India to become a modern, independent state without these things? To the revolutionaries, Gandhi’s non-violence seemed quaint. Wasn’t ‘truth-force’ just the sort of Hindu passivity that had made India easy to conquer in the first place?

To persuade his critics, Gandhi therefore needed to provide answers to the hundreds of questions Indians had for him. Maganlal, as you can see, had asked him some. How was India to become free without modernising itself on western lines? How could non-violent satyagraha work against violent tribes like the Pindaris?

Gandhi did have answers to these questions. Modernity was not the strength of the British, which Indians should emulate, but their weakness which the Indians should reject. Satyagraha is not weakness. It is about not using the strength that you have.

But what is puzzling about the letter – and the reason I chose it for this workshop – is that as well as challenging all these conventional assumptions, Gandhi has some critical things to say about correspondence itself. This is a letter which criticizes letter-writing. The value of correspondence is exaggerated, Gandhi says. ‘When we give up railways and such other means,’ he writes, ‘we shall not bother ourselves about writing letters’. Indeed, so far as possible, we should give these things up now. The isolated Indian village, he tells Maglanlal, will be better off without the post office.

So there is an intriguing performative contradiction here. Gandhi is advocating the restriction of correspondence in a piece of correspondence. Why should Gandhi, knowing that he was almost alone in his views, wish to restrict one of the ways by which they might best be disseminated to others? Considering this puzzle also seems to speak to the central question of our workshop: what can correspondence do, and what can it not do?

What correspondence can do     *

Let’s start by looking at what Gandhi says in the letter about how truth spreads itself. The search for truth is a personal search: you have to pursue it yourself and not receive it from others. You have to be self-reliant. But the truth for Gandhi is also many-sided and inexhaustible. Because it is inexhaustible, no one person, no matter how energetic, could ever find it all. And because it is many-sided, each individual will see a different (and small) part of it. So dialogue between individuals – correspondence, if you like – is necessary if the truth is to be found. Each individual is uniquely constituted and must make his or her own search for truth, but the search necessarily involves seeking unity with the widest number of other human beings.

Because the truth is many-sided and inexhaustible, each searcher for truth needs to be humble and aware of his or her fallibility. Correspondence is valuable to Gandhi as a way to test and correct one’s own view. We’ve been thinking about how correspondence can be dialogic (two-way) or instructional (effectively one-way), and about letters which expect answers and letters which don’t. Gandhi’s conception of correspondence is emphatically dialogic. He asks for consideration and replies. ‘Please ponder over the meaning of this statement’, he writes in this letter. And right at the end: ‘Please ponder over this … If you want to ask anything more, please do’. Think it over. Let me know what you think.

Another of the dimensions of our discussion so far has been the relative merits of the philosophical letter and the philosophical treatise. Gandhi never produced a comprehensive treatise. Instead, he developed a set of approaches which he described somewhat misleadingly as experimental. The title of his autobiography was The story of my experiments with truth. Gandhi thought that India’s long civilization was itself a form of scientific enquiry in which people had worked out, and were still working out, through observation and experiment, which moral and social practices worked and which didn’t. We might well doubt that these were real experiments: they often confirmed as truth the beliefs that middle-aged male Hindus already held. But the point is that experimental testing could not be done alone. The task was too great for any individual, so it had to be pursued by like-minded others, sharing their findings. Some lived alongside each other in ashrams, but others, in India and across the world, would share their findings through correspondence. In other words, Gandhi had what you might call a ‘correspondence theory of truth’.

Gandhi therefore offers a distinctive position on three of the problems we’re considering in this workshop. First (1), he has an answer to the problem of ‘reach’ – that philosophy needs to reach large audiences, but letters only reach one or two. The assumption that (unless it is published) the influence of a letter stops at its immediate recipient is something Gandhi would have denied. He thought in terms of a network of influence, in which experimenters shared their findings through correspondence with each other. He did this himself by reading out letters at public meetings, and also by printing and publishing letters in journals which he also edited, and which in turn were republished as contributions in other journals, elsewhere. Something which started out as an exchange of letters – and which needed to do so: an article would be different in audience and tone (more finished, more authoritative) – later achieved a wider circulation through republication. But it began through private circulation through correspondence.

What Gandhian experimenters were sharing, moreover, were their personal experiments. Their correspondence had impact, therefore, not despite the fact that it was personal, but because it was personal. Perhaps we are mistaken, therefore, if we assume (2) that the personal quality of a letter diminishes its wider effectiveness. For Gandhi the force of a view turned on whether it was practised by the individual who held it. He was very critical of people who espoused but did not live out their ideals. You can see this insistence on the importance of personal example-setting in the letter. We shouldn’t be deterred from giving up modern practices, Gandhi says, just because we can’t end them overnight, nor because some people will never follow us. This doesn’t matter. ‘Even if one man reduces or stops their use’, he writes, ‘others will learn to do so.’ Making ‘only’ a personal connection with a single individual through a letter is therefore not an impediment to spreading the truth. On the contrary: it is the best means – perhaps the only means – by which to do so.

Gandhi also has a distinct position on a third problem we’ve been considering: (3) the fact that letters are private yet often seek to address public matters. Gandhi draws the line between the public and private in an unusual place. In many of his letters there is an odd mix of conventionally public and private topics. Discussions of high political developments rub up against advice on diet, health, hygiene, dress, sexual desire, marriage, child-rearing, and so on. To Gandhi these are not incoherent juxtapositions, because his concept of freedom is one in which these supposedly ‘private’ matters have a profound public importance. To be politically free you have first to free yourself in ordinary life. Gandhi thought that India’s subjection was a consequence of regarding its own social practices as inferior. This was what had made Indians servile and imitative. To become free was not just about political campaigning, but also about freeing oneself, even alone, and today, in matters of everyday life. ‘In your emancipation is the emancipation of India’, Gandhi tells Maganlal. ‘All else is make-believe’.

So letters can have great influence, even if ‘only’ personal, even if ‘only’ addressed to individuals, and even if ‘only’ private.

What correspondence can’t do   +

What, then, can letters not do? What does Gandhi mean when he says that it would be better if the Indian village never got a post office?

Gandhi feared that Indian rural localities would be overwhelmed by western modernity. This was not because he romanticised the condition of the traditional Indian village. Nor was it because he wanted to keep new ideas out. He thought Indian culture had always been open to and influenced by the ideas that came from outside it, which it absorbed, traditionalized and Indianised, so as to remain true to itself. The trouble with western modernity was that, unlike earlier religious incursions like Buddhism and Islam, it was spiritually impoverished. It had made Indians indifferent to the cultural resources they already possessed, and anxious to imitate alien ones. The ironic consequence of greater openness to communication, therefore, was that people became more isolated, and more alienated from their own identities, and hence the world more fragmented.

Letters, therefore, (1) cannot substitute for the local. Correspondence connects people across distance, but in doing so, it also distracts people from what is closest to them. For Gandhi, living under colonialism, the alien had displaced the indigenous, and this had happened not only by invasion and coercion but by the dangerous seductions of western modernity, which had stimulated desire – as he says in the letter, we have to beware of our desires – and pushed aside duties to others. Modernity had alienated Indians from the local, the situated, the familiar, the timely. ‘The English have not taken India’, he wrote in Hind Swaraj. ‘We have given it to them’. ‘They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them.’

The trouble with modern communications was not only that they carried spiritually dead cargo. We also have to remember that Gandhi was trying to reach a largely illiterate society. The Indian literacy rate was about 5% in 1910. There were around 200 languages. So written correspondence in English, or even Hindi, could never have been enough for him. The traditional information order in India relied less on printed or written materials and more on relayed news, story-telling, dramatic production, song. Gandhi was suspicious that the prioritisation of the written form would displace these non-written and even sometimes non-verbal symbolic modes of communication. So there was a second thing that letters could not do. They (2) cannot substitute for non-written and non-verbal communication.

Modern communications also worked too fast. They failed to respect the pace at which human lives could sensibly be lived. Letters, especially pouring in at modern rate, (3) cannot substitute for consideration. While Gandhi rejected the idea of monkish withdrawal from the world, he also thought that everyone should engage in daily meditation, without distraction, to reflect on things and compose their own thoughts. You can have too much correspondence. Enough, as we have already learned from Epicurus, is enough.

There was a fourth objection. Letters (4) cannot substitute for the face-to-face. Gandhi sets great store by the change of heart: the connection that is made when you speak with others directly and without mediation. He thought, for example, that it was harder us to lie face-to-face than it was when we write to each other (the opposite of the view of Goethe, as we heard earlier). He thought too that people were more likely to change when they directly witnessed truth-force, rather than read about it. In India, and especially in the Gandhian ashram, much of ordinary life was carried out in full view of everyone else. So, yes, the fact that letters are private does not preclude their having wider influence, but the most valuable forms of influence are exerted face to face in local communities, like ashrams, and villages.

But Gandhi’s largest objection to mass communication concerned the way that it rendered the individual a passive recipient and echo for others’ ideas. Correspondence (5) cannot substitute for action. From the letter to Maganlal: ‘It is not enough merely to profess [humility]’ … it should stand the test when the occasion comes’. So Gandhi is very critical of the lawyer who writes to boast of his altruism or spirituality. ‘Let him learn his livelihood through physical labour and carry on his legal practice without charging anything for it’, he argues. Action carries meanings that letters can’t. Indeed, it is telling that Gandhi, although a prolific correspondent, did not much value the physical letter – the piece of paper – itself. He takes care with correspondence, but does not take care of his letters. He did not preserve them or refer to them or regard them as in any permanent way defining his view. They were needed only for the moment: for the impact they might have on people’s thinking or action.

The letter as an enabling weakness of empire 

So in colonial conditions, modern correspondence was double-edged. It was both the means by which India might develop an alternative to colonialism, and also the means by which India had come under colonial rule in the first place. Correspondence is an instance of a wider dilemma for Gandhi, which was how to fight a battle against western modernity without relying on the weapons of western modernity.

Like other instances, this expressed itself in terms of opportunities and vulnerabilities. Let me give one example of each. First, the vulnerability. These concerns about the corruptibility of the Indian village cut against the dialogic. One interpretation of what Gandhi is saying to Maganlal is that natural leaders may continue to correspond, provided their heads are not turned by it, but that the Indian villagers will be too easily corrupted, so must not be permitted it. ‘Swaraj is for those who understand it’, Gandhi writes. There’s a double meaning in that. First: anyone can be free: once you have understood, you are free. But also: you need to understand what freedom means before you can use it. ‘You and I can enjoy it today’, Gandhi says to Maganlal. ‘All the others will have to learn to do likewise’. There’s a tension here between autonomy and liberation, on the one hand, and slowly learned self-discipline on the other.

Now, to finish, the opportunity. The British empire, we should not forget, was governed through correspondence. The post is one of its enabling weaknesses. How had Gandhi corresponded with Maganlal? He had bought a stamp with King Edward’s head on it, and used the imperial postal service. In order to govern a far-flung empire, the British had developed a system of postal communication. And in order that it should work cheaply and in depth, the system was not reserved for the governors, but could be used by anyone who could afford a stamp. This meant that it could be exploited by anyone.

Indeed, twenty years after the date of this letter, Gandhi was able to plan a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, which the British struggled to control by censorship because the flow of propaganda and conspiracy through the postal systems they had themselves introduced was so great.

In that campaign, Gandhi wrote another letter, to the Viceroy of India, on the eve of his famous Salt March in 1931. He could have issued a press statement, but he sent a letter. Addressing the Viceroy ‘Dear friend’, rather than the expected ‘Your Excellency’, Gandhi claimed the level status of friendship. He did not beg or make threats: on the contrary, he informed his ‘friend’ of his plans and asked for his views.

Gandhi’s letter to the Viceroy can, I think, usefully be contrasted with the written communicative forms generally used by other Indians when addressing the British. It differed both from the petition, which Gandhi had used himself when a mendicant; and the threat, made by the revolutionaries.

The petition comes from below: it concedes a position of superiority to authority, and defers to the recipient’s conceptions of what is right and just. Threats, on the other hand, are violent. To impose your own view on others is a form of violence, made from above, from omniscience. In Gandhi’s correspondence, by contrast, you can set out your own views, and you can try and persuade, or even educate, your reader. But you cannot compel them. And you must not beg.

This sort of communication-on-the-level was very destabilizing to the British. They knew what to do with petitions from below. They met them not exactly with rejection, but perpetual deferral – always holding out the prospect that they might satisfy them one day. They knew too what to do with threats: they fought back, or they gave in. But the personal letter – Dear Friend – had a strange forcefulness they couldn’t easily reject. Friendship with Indians was, as E. M. Forster saw in A Passage to India (1924), incompatible with imperial relationships, in which ‘the office defined the man’, and the personal and the official were kept firmly apart.

So firm was this separation, indeed, that the British actually separated the correspondence they received into distinct categories – official, demi-official, private – precisely so that they could file letters appropriately, for fear that the private and the personal might corrupt the public and official. But Gandhi’s letter could not be filed properly. He broke the rules of correspondence, and he did so using correspondence as his weapon.

Nick Owen