The Gift of India and the Violence of the West: Some Reflections

Ravi Varma, Bharani Thirunal Rani Parvathi Bayi

Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep

Or compass the woe of the watch I keep?

Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair

And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer?

And the far sad glorious vision I see

Of the torn red banners of victory?

when the terror and the tumult of hate shall cease

And life be refashioned on anvils of peace,

And your love shall offer memorial thanks

To the comrades who fought on the dauntless ranks,

And you honour the deeds of the dauntless ones,

Remember the blood of my martyred sons!

—Sarojini Naidu, “The Gift of India” 

India is formerly colonized country which has been attacked since its birth in 1947 by commercial superpowers. For the U.S to claim a “trade deficit” with India or any oppressed country is hypocrisy given that it is the Americans who have systematically destroyed the economy and the possibility of peace in the region in order to secure their extravagant and corrupt lifestyle. W.E.B Du Bois was right when he said in The World and Africa that all of the exploitation of the world is apparent in the face of a young, seemingly innocent white socialite whose household is furnished and powered almost entirely by the labor of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and African-America. 

It is the mounting panic about how whites will continue to sustain this lifestyle in the twenty-first century that is driving the present political drama about impeachment. To do so, they realize that they must scramble anew for the resources of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Once more, the white race seeks to use the darker races as means of neocolonial production but this is proving highly unlikely as from Syria to North Korea to China to Palestine, people are clamoring for peace, truth, and freedom from the violence of the West. 

Diplomatic meetings between world leaders (including corrupt native leaders like Narendra Modi who collude with capital) obscure the grim truth of American-led and Europe-backed wars on Asian and African soil. These are wars aimed at destroying the civilization and industries of these continents so as to keep them utterly dependent on Western markets and Western civilization. Then, capital arrives with friendly trade deals, treaties, and humanitarian aid, claiming to offer an antidote to the very evil it personifies and strives to cultivate in the hearts of humankind.  

Americans sought in-roads into India, a socialist republic,  after its hard won Independence from the British in 1947 because they saw themselves to be next in line after the British Empire, to which white American culture continues to aspire. As a deep alliance flourished between Indians, Latinos, Africans and African-Americans as a result of the Pan-African, socialist, non-violent, and non-aligned alliance against Western imperialism, white Americans, backed by the international bourgeoisie of all colors, united against the freedom of the darker races. NATO, an alliance of Western countries, was specifically aimed at countering the Communism of the East and South.  The so-called War on Terror which is the longest war fought by the American Empire is merely the new face of these unresolved tensions. The American people are now suffering because Western capital has exported the jobs to oppressed nations in order to save on labor costs. And yet, Trump blames China and other countries for the trade deficit instead of accepting responsibility for capital’s failure to meet the needs and interests of world humanity.

Amidst all the hoopla about terror overseas, conveniently labeled “radical Islam,” little is said about the the violence wrought by white Christianity, which entirely distorted the love ethic of Jesus. America is nation that continues to terrorize its own black citizens and it was mass opposition to white terror which propelled Dr. King’s movement. In the background of the Negro spiritual “Were You There?”–one of Gandhi’s favorite hymns most memorably sung by the great Marian Anderson–looms the shadow of the Jim Crow South. As Coretta Scott King notes in her autobiography, white Southerners burned down her family’s home and her father’s business when she was growing. When we consider the aftermath of the cases of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and others, we see that murder of black men, women, children in the United States is sanctioned by the state. This sordid racial reality continues to remain obscured by 9/11 jingoism, which located terror in the so-called “Middle East.” In this relentless milieu of false patriotism cut with bouts of liberal guilt, it’s worth remember that such xenophobic sentiments, based on corrupt economic and political motives, led to the persecution of hundreds of courageous people in the U.S during the McCarthyite era, including Paul Robeson and W.E.B Du Bois, descendants of African slaves held captive by this so-called American democracy. 

In the past twenty years, the U.S. has waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Korea, Syria and Pakistan—Asian countries which were formerly colonized by European powers. In the 1970s, America seduced Maoist China against India and Vietnam while claiming to be their saviors after the horrific invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Japan, and Korea. Now it seeks to use India to “box in” (per Kissinger and Nixon) the threats posed by India, China and Russia to the Western economy.

An attempt was also made by Americans to invade India under Indira Gandhi’s tenure during the liberation of East Pakistan, an effort heroically supported by Mrs. Gandhi, to the great consternation of President Richard Nixon. It is still unclear as to what role the U.S government  played in the assassinations of Indian leaders like Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi, as well as Black American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X, though a great deal of evidence has emerged about the state’s machinations in the assassination and overthrow of colored leaders throughout the world. 

The lies and schemes of American politicians have fueled mounting national paranoia about Russian collusion in U.S elections which has led to the Democratic party’s impeachment of Donald Trump, though the corporate Democrats are equally if not more guilty, for they co-opt the language of social justice and freedom fighters in order to further their own corrupt agenda in the bourgeois public sphere. The Democratic Party simply wants to escalate tensions with Russia and as socialistic as some of the candidates seem, none of them contend with the fundamental problems of Western civilization, which is riven by the inescapable dilemma of the color line. This has rightly caused the masses of Americans to reject the Democratic Party’s veneer of liberalism, which is merely a new iteration of the white man’s burden.

The West relished in the destruction of the Soviet Union, which was their ultimate aim during the Cold War seeing it as a victory for Western civilization and capital. India was one of the most important allies of the Soviet Union and American foreign policy sought to sever this bond in the 1990s and 2000s by infiltrating it’s economy, military, and leadership. The economic liberalization of India, which Americans falsely deem a triumph, led to an increase in trade with U.S during the 1990s. However, it rolled back many of the crucial socialist programs designed by Gandhi, Nehru, and other founding fathers and mothers and replaced them with neocolonial NGO and non-profits which used predatory lending techniques and white authority to forcefully secure native cooperation.

 In the renascence of Cold War sentiments we see today through the paradigm of a white “Atlantic”, which is the organizing political principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) we once again witness efforts to divide India, China, and Russia, in a similar pattern of previous attempts at Balkanization under Kissinger and Nixon. When the crisis in Ukraine is discussed in the U.S by figures like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, little is said about the fact that Ukraine represents a flashpoint in the international struggle between the capitalist and communist mode of production. NATO waged horrific wars against former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in an effort to reclaim Eastern Europe for Western capital. It has continually aggressed upon Russia—and not the other way around, as the powers that be claim. 

Lastly, consider the Western worry about “intellectual property” amidst the panic over trade deficits with countries like China and India. These ruthless American and European business tactics have nothing to do with the integrity of thought; rather, they are thinly veiled gestures once more aimed at the racial subordination, for they seek to keep oppressed people thinking and feeling as though they are worthless and without history, alienating them from their work and well-being. It is yet another way for the West to claim dominance over knowledge production and claim hegemony over science, art, and civilization. Like the British, Americans will claim to have invented everything, though the West in truth has not created much in the past four hundred years of destruction, having derived the majority of its inventions, products, and innovations from the uncompensated yet highly skilled labor of Africa and Asia. 

Ahimsa as a Science Of Love and Social Action

Impure means result in an impure end. Hence, prince and the peasant will not be equaled by cutting off the prince’s head, nor can the process of cutting off equalize the employer and the employed. One cannot reach truth by untruthfulness. Truthful conduct alone can reach truth.

—Gandhiji

The artist of this untitled piece, K.H. Ara, was a satyagrahi who was imprisoned for his participation in the famous Salt Satyagraha. The production of salt, a dietary staple, was heavily taxed by the British colonial administration. Satyagrahis marched for nearly a month on foot to the sea. More than 80, 000 were arrested. Not a single weapon was in their hands. Martin Luther King Jr. would preach about Gandhi’s strategy and leadership of the Salt March upon his return to the United States from his trip to the Land Of Gandhi in a sermon entitled “Palm Sunday Sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi remarking

And you have read of the Salt March, which was a very significant thing in the Indian struggle. And this demonstrates how Gandhi used this method of nonviolence and how he would mobilize his people and galvanize the whole of the nation to bring about victory. In India, the British people had come to the point where they were charging the Indian people a tax on all of the salt, and they would not allow them even to make their own salt from all of the salt seas around the country. They couldn’t touch it; it was against the law. And Gandhi got all of the people of India to see the injustice of this. And he decided one day that they would march from Ahmadabad down to a place called Dandi.

We had the privilege of spending a day or so at Ahmadabad at that Sabarmati ashram, and we stood there at the point where Gandhi started his long walk of two hundred and eighteen miles. And he started there walking with eighty people. And gradually the number grew to a million, and it grew to millions and millions. And finally, they kept walking and walking until they reached the little village of Dandi. And there, Gandhi went on and reached down in the river, or in the sea rather, and brought up a little salt in his hand to demonstrate and dramatize the fact that they were breaking this law in protest against the injustices they had faced all over the years with these salt laws.

Gandhi’s method of protest, it should be remembered, was a scientific method based on sociology, psychology, law, economics, as well as theology. It draws on all these methods of knowing the truth in order to heal the human personality, which he recognized had become inured to the notion that it is human nature to be violent. Like Socrates, who averred that humanity tended towards justice rather than injustice, love rather than hatred, Gandhi too maintained that in the end, any Republic founded on the “interest of the stronger” would not last, for the arc of the moral universe, as Dr. King also said, bends towards justice. Such is the genius of Gandhiji’s science of Ahimsa, which, he insisted, was the science of love. Love strives to rise above nature, to transform nature in its image. Gandhi, it should be noted, took love as a force in the universe, as an animating primum mobile capable of effecting measurable change in the order of universe. In the Salt Satyagraha, we see a concrete social example of human action anchored in the philosophy of Ahimsa; the Indian people transmute the quotient of their moral discipline and physical suffering into energy that is in turn dedicated to the production of a necessity seized by the imperialist. satyagraha is rooted in renunciation and self-sacrifice, which is a philosophical idea integral to the practice of Hinduism. This forceful collective renunciation powered the movement for swaraj because in impelling the masses to forego attachment to their physical reality even unto death, Gandhi emphasized that they would be redeemed in the love of their children for whom they struggled.

The soul-force is infinitely greater than the physical form and the revolutionary, in particular, must learn this truth if he or she is striving to overcome the fear of death, which is really a fear of love because if we love from the soul force we will know that we never truly die. We we will return again and again, like the universe sucking into itself until at last we are at the center of that which is changeless, formless, that which is beyond space, time, and causality, the perfect stillness which the Christians call the peace which passeth understanding and the Hindus call Brahman, which represents the totality of the soul force.

As an energetic force, love represents more than willpower for Gandhi as Schoepenhauer had claimed; rather, love is an acknowledgement of the ephemerality of the physical form itself; it can work as a physical principle because it cuts across time. It is the understanding that desire produces suffering and that we are responsible for our misery because we are too attached to our material life at the grave expense of our spiritual life. Consequently, we are bound to the rigors of mortality, bogged down by the petty crimes and frustrations of everyday life which keep us further distracted from the truth: that all is maya and that in truth, we are energetic forms that are merely taking new shape and new intervals navigating the great force field that is the universe. We depend on light for life but where does it come from and does it come from us, if the kingdom of God is inside us? The search for “scientific truth” has taken modern Western man outward; and yet as our sages and leaders have told us, to seek truth, we must indeed go inward–the inward journey, in the words of the great Howard Thurman. In the form of Hinduism Vivekananda emphasized, when one escapes rebirth, one returns to complete unity with the universal soul or the Atman. In truth, he argues, we are all perfect; it is just that we have become inured to ignorance as a result of our attachment to illusions of reality. To truly achieve the freedom of the soul, both Gandhi and Vivekananda suggest, one must overcome these illusions and confront the truth of one’s soul force. The soul force is ancient as it is new. It represents the embedded unity of past, present, and future because it is time itself. Time would not exist without the soul in this epistemology for it is the karma of the soul which impels causality in time-space.

The Salt Satyagraha reveals that Ahimsa is more than a concept: it is an actual perception capable of being shared by a large mass of people and uniting them in common purpose and action, in karma and dharma. It represents a new epistemology that compels man to overcome the brute in him by recognizing the grand illusions and painful distortions of reality that hold us in bondage to suffering.

Fundamental to the Gandhian epistemology is a rejection of the rigid empiricism characteristic of Western science. Rather, it embraces the central message of peace underlying all of the world’s religions and sees them as temporally dialogical to Science. We might remember here that even Western science began in African and Asian religious and scientific texts, which acknowledged, as it is revealed in the Vedas, the unity in the plurality of forms. The distinction that has arisen between Religion and Science in the West is dispelled in the thought of Vivekananda and Gandhi, revealed as something of a false dichotomy, for the real question is the relation of humanity to nature and this question takes us to both science and religion; this theoretical legacy is indebted to with the teachings of the Vedanta as well as the sacred texts of other religions.However, this idea of non-injury as the highest ideal of civilization is reiterated most impactfully in the modern epoch in the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his greatest disciple Swami Vivekananda, both of whom Gandhiji admired greatly. Again, we are entering a new epistemology here because historically in the West Science has been emptied of moral purpose and Religion has unfortunately been declared, even by great social scientists like Marx, as a deviation from scientific truth. Like Vivekananda, who insisted upon the unity of all of the world’s religions, Gandhi recognizes “a perfect unity in the plurality of designs.” Thus he did not see a contradiction between Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths and science. It is for this reason that he defends his theory of Ahimsa as scientific; as he maintained

Nevertheless, I do feel, as the poor villagers felt about Mysore, that there is orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is not a blind law, for no blind law can govern the conduct of living being and thanks to the marvelous researches of Sir J. C. Bose it can now be proved that even matter is life

Salt of the earth

Letter to Indira Nehru, Gandhiji, October 15, 1939

Mahatma Gandhi on Satanic Civilization

IT IS my firm belief that Europe today represents not the spirit of God or Christianity but the spirit of Satan. And Satan’s successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips. Europe is today only nominally Christian. In reality, it is worshipping Mammon.

Young India, 8-9-1920

Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilization. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral stature of a nation.

Young India, 26-1-1921

I wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of their satisfaction. If modern civilization stands for all this, and I have understood it to do so, I call it satanic…. 

(YI, 17-3-1927, p. 85)

This industrial civilization is a disease because it is all evil. Let us not be deceived by catchwords and phrases. I have no quarrel with steamships or telegraphs. They may stay, if they can, without the support of industrialism and all that it connotes. They are not an end. We must not suffer exploitation for the sake of steamships and telegraphs. They are in no way indispensable for the permanent welfare of the human race. Now that we know the use of steam and electricity, we should be able to use them on due occasion and after we have learnt to avoid industrialism. Our concern is, therefore, to destroy industrialism at any cost. 

(YI, 7-10-1926, p. 348

A time is coming when those, who are in the mad rush today of multiplying their wants, vainly thinking that they add to the real substance, real knowledge of the world, will retrace their steps and say: ‘What have we done?’ Civilizations have come and gone, and in spite of all our vaunted progress, I am tempted to ask again and again, ‘To what purpose?’ Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, has said the same thing. Fifty years of brilliant inventions and discoveries, he has said, have not added one inch to the moral height of mankind. So said a dreamer and visionary if you will–Tolstoy. So said Jesus, and the Buddha, and Mahomed, whose religion is being denied and falsified in my own country today.

By all means drink deep of the fountains that are given to you in the Sermon on the Mount, but then you will have to take sackcloth and ashes. The teaching of the Sermon was meant for each and every one of us. You cannot serve both God and Mammon. God the Compassionate and the Merciful, Tolerance incarnate, allows Mammon to have his nine day’s wonder. But I say to you…fly from that self-destroying but destructive show of Mammon. 

(YI, 8-12-1927, p. 414)

Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now, it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill. This is civilization. Formerly, men worked in open air only as much as they liked. Now thousands of workmen meet together and, for the sake of maintenance, work in factories or mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires….This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. 

HS, pp. 36-37

I would have our leaders teach us to be morally supreme in the world. This land of ours was once, we are told, the abode of the gods. It is not possible to conceive gods inhabiting a land which is made hideous by the smoke and the din of mill chimneys and factories and whose roadways are traversed by rushing engines, dragging numerous cars crowded with men who know not for the most part what they are after, who are often absentminded, and whose tempers do not improve by being uncomfortably packed like sardines in boxes and finding themselves in the midst of utter strangers who would oust them if they could and whom they would, in their turn, oust similarly. I refer to these things because they are held to be symbolical of material progress. But they add not an atom to our happiness. 

(SW, pp. 354-5)

I am humble enough to admit that there is much that we can profitably assimilate from the West. Wisdom is no monopoly of one continent or one race. My resistance to Western civilization is really a resistance to its indiscriminate and thoughtless imitation based on the assumption that Asiatics are fit only to copy everything that comes from the West. I do believe, that if India has patience enough to go through the fire of suffering and to resist any unlawful encroachment upon her own civilization which, imperfect though it undoubtedly is, has hitherto stood the ravages of time, she can make a lasting contribution to the peace and solid progress of the world. 

(YI, 11-8-1927, p. 253)

Mahatma Gandhi, WHY DID I ASSIST IN THE LAST WAR?

Gandhi, 1929

A correspondent asks some pertinent questions in the following pungent fashion:

“When the Zulus broke out for liberty against the British usurpers, you helped the British in suppressing the so-called rebellion. Is it a rebellion to try to shake off the foreign yoke? Was Jean D’arc a rebel? Was George Washington a rebel? Is De Valera one ? You may say that the Zulus had recourse to violence. I then ask, was the end bad or the means? The latter may have been so, but certainly not the former; so you will be kind enough to explain the riddle. In the last war, when the gallant Germans and Austrians were fighting so bravely against a world combination, you raised recruits for the British to fight against the nations that had done India no harm. Whenever there is a war between two races, one has to hear both parties before coming to a decision either for or against any of them. In the last war we had a one-sided version only, and that from a nation certainly not renowned for truthfulness or honesty. You have all along been an advocate of passive resistance and non-violence. Why then did you induce people to take part in a war the merits of which they knew not, and for the aggrandizement of a race so miserably wallowing in the mire of imperialism? You may say you had faith in the British bureaucracy. Is it possible for any person to have faith in an alien people, all whose acts have run so glaringly counter to their promises? It cannot have been so with a person of such high attainments as yourself. So you will please answer the second riddle.

There is another point to which I should like to refer. You are an advocate of non-violence. Under the present circumstances we should be strictly non- violent. But when India will be free, should we strictly eschew arms even if a foreign nation invaded us? Would you also boycott railways and telegraphs and steamers even when they will have ceased to promote exports of the products of our soil?”

I hear and read many charges of inconsistency about myself. But I do not answer them as they do not affect anyone but myself. The questions, however, raised by the correspondent are of general importance and deserve notice. They are by no means new to me. But I do not remember having answered them in the columns of Young India.

Not only did I offer my services at the time of the Zulu Revolt but before that, at the time of the Boer War, and not only did I raise recruits in India during the late war, but I raised an ambulance corps in 1914 in London. If, therefore, I have sinned, the cup of my sins is full to the brim. I lost no occasion of serving the Government at all times. Two questions presented themselves to me during all those crises. What was my duty as a citizen of the empire as I then believed myself to be, and what was my duty as an out-and-out believer in the religion of Ahimsa — non-violence ?

I know now that I was wrong in thinking that I was a citizen of the empire. But on those four occasions I did honestly believe that, in spite of the many disabilities that my country was labouring under, it was making its way towards freedom, and that on the whole the government from the popular standpoint taking particular care in making my choice of such representatives. I know that in no other manner would a democratic government be possible for one single day.

The whole situation is now changed for me. My eyes, I fancy, are opened. Experience has made me wiser. I consider the existing system of government to be wholly bad and requiring special national effort to end or mend it. It does not possess within itself any capacity for self-improvement. That I still believe many English administrators to be honest does not assist me, because I consider them to be as blind and deluded as I was myself. Therefore I can take no pride in calling the empire mine or describing myself as a citizen. On the contrary, I fully realize that I am a pariah — untouchable of the empire. I must, therefore, constantly pray for its radical reconstruction or total destruction, even as a Hindu pariah would be fully justified in so praying about Hinduism or Hindu society.

The next point, that of Ahimsa, is more abstruse. My conception of Ahimsa impels me always to dissociate myself from almost every one of the activities I am engaged in. My soul refuses to be satisfied so long as it is a helpless witness of a single wrong or a single misery. But it is not possible for me — a weak, frail, miserable being —to mend every wrong or to hold myself free of blame for all the wrong I see. The spirit in me pulls one way, the flesh in me pulls in the opposite direction. There is freedom from the action of these two forces, but that freedom is attainable only by slow and painful stages. I can attain freedom not by a mechanical refusal to act, but only by intelligent action in a detached manner. This struggle resolves itself into an incessant crucifixion of the flesh so that the spirit may become entirely free.

I was, again, an ordinary citizen no wiser than my fellows, myself believing in Ahimsa and the rest not believing in it at all but refusing to do their duty of assisting the government because they were actuated by anger and malice. They were refusing out of their ignorance and weakness. As a fellow worker it became my duty to guide them aright. I therefore placed before them their clear duty, explained the doctrine of Ahimsa to them, and let them make their choice, which they did. I do not repent of my action in terms of Ahimsa. For, under Swaraj too I would not hesitate to advise those who would bear arms to do so and fight for the country.

That brings to me the second question. Under Swaraj of my dream there is no necessity for arms at all. But I do not expect that dream to materialize in its fullness as a result of the present effort, first because, the effort is not directed to that end as an immediate goal, and secondly because, I do not consider myself advanced enough to be able to prescribe a detailed course of conduct to the nation for such preparation. I am still myself too full of passion and other frailties of human nature to feel the call or the capacity. All I claim for myself is that I am incessantly trying to overcome every one of my weaknesses. I have attained great capacity, I believe, for suppressing and curbing my senses, but I have not become incapable of sin, i.e. of being acted upon by my senses. I believe it to be possible for every human being to attain that blessed and indescribable sinless state in which he feels within himself the presence of God to the exclusion of everything else. It is, I must confess, as yet a distant scene. And therefore it is not possible for me to show the nation a present way to complete non-violence in practice.

Young India, 17-11-1921

Precious Lord / Om Shanti

Listen here. Music by Ali Richardson and Divya Nair

Precious Lord, take my hand

Lead me on, let me stand

I am tired, I am weak, I am worn

Through the storm, through the night

Lead me on through the light

Take my hand, precious Lord

And lead me home

When my way grows dreary

Precious Lord, lead me near

When my life is almost gone

At the river I will stand

Guide my feet, hold my hand

Take my hand, precious Lord

And lead me home

---

Krishna Krishna Mukunda Janardhana

Krishna Govinda Narayana Hare

Achuthananda Govinda Madhava

Sachitananda Narayana Hare

---

Om Jai Rama

Jai Krishna Hare Om

Om Jai Rama

Jai Krishna Hare Om

An Impression Of Krishna, Divya Nair

At the Train Station

Dandi Satyagraha

In early March of 1930, Gandhiji began his padayatra to mine salt from the brackish waters lapping the coastal village of Dandi in northwestern India. Britishers had declared Indian production of salt illegal and foisted an imperial tax on the necessity, rendering it a commodity and thus alienating the substance from the common Indian laborer, who was starving and physically ill as a result of the abuses inflicted upon him by the white man. Witnessing the suffering of his people, Gandhiji said, “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life” and marched hundreds of miles for twenty-four days to reaffirm his commitment to satyagraha, the law of Love-unto-Truth, and swaraj, the complete independence of India from Europe.

Gandhiji on the Atom Bomb and Nuclear War

Gandhi portrait by Ravi Varma

It has been suggested by American friends that the atom bomb will bring in Ahimsa (non-violence) as nothing else can. It will, if it is meant that its destructive power will so disgust the world that it will turn it away from violence for the time being. This is very like a man glutting himself with dainties to the point of nausea and turning away from them only to return with redoubled zeal after the effect of nausea is well over. Precisely in the same manner will the world return to violence with renewed zeal after the effect of disgust is worn out.

Often does good come out of evil. But that is God’s not man’s plan. Man knows that only evil can come out of evil, as good out of good.

That atomic energy, though harnessed by American scientists and army men for destructive purposes, may be utilized by other scientists for humanitarian purposes, is undoubtedly within the realm of possibility. But that is not what was meant by my American friends. They were not so simple as to put a question which connoted an obvious truth. An incendiary uses fire for his destructive and nefarious purpose, a housewife makes daily use of it in preparing nourishing food for mankind. So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There used to be the so-called laws of war which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atom bomb brought an empty victory to the Allied arms, but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see. Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner. We can but solve the mystery by deducing the unknown result from the known results of similar events. A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage holding the slave. Let no one run away with the idea that I wish to put in a defense of Japanese misdeeds in pursuance of Japan’s unworthy ambition. The difference was only one of degree. I assume that Japan’s greed was more unworthy. But the greater unworthiness conferred no right on the less unworthy of destroying without mercy men, women and children of Japan in a particular area.

The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bomb, even as violence cannot be by counter-violence. Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence. Hatred can be overcome only by love, Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred. I am aware that I am repeating what I have many times stated before and practiced to the best of my ability and capacity. What I first stated was itself nothing new. It is as old as the hills. Only, I recited no copy book maxim, but definitely announced what I believe in every fibre of my being. Sixty years of practice in various walks of life has only enriched the belief which the experience of friends has fortified. It is, however, the central truth by which one can stand alone without flinching. I believe in what Max Muller said years ago, namely, that truth needed to be repeated as long as there were men who disbelieved it.

Message Of Asia

What I want you to understand is the message of Asia. It is not to be learnt through the Western spectacles or by imitating the atom bomb. If you want to give a message to the West, it must be the message of love and the message of truth…. In this age of democracy, in this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor, you can redeliver this message with the greatest emphasis. You will complete the conquest of the West not through vengeance because you have been exploited, but with real understanding. I am sanguine if all of you put your hearts together-not merely heads-to understand the secret of the message these wise men of the East have left to us, and if we really become worthy of that great message, the conquest of the West will be completed. This conquest will be loved by the West itself.

The west today is pining for wisdom. It is despairing of a multiplication of the atom bombs, because atom bomb mean utter destruction not merely of the West but of the whole world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled and there is to be a prefect deluge. It is up to you to tell the world of its wickedness and sin-that is the heritage your teachers and my teachers have taught Asia.

Sarojini Naidu, Eulogy to Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi, whose frail body was committed to the flames yesterday, is not dead. It was right that the cremation took place in the midst of the dead kings who were buried in Delhi, for he was the kingliest of all kings. It is right also that he who was the Apostle of Peace should have been taken to the cremation ground with all the honours of a great warrior. Far greater than all the warriors who led the armies to battle was this little man, the bravest, the most tried friend of all. Delhi has become the centre and sanctuary of the great revolutionary who emancipated his enslave country from foreign bondage and gave it to its freedom and its flag.

Mrs. Sarojini Naidu