|
Magazine
PERSPECTIVE
Ethics, ecology and enlightenment
CHANDAN GOWDA
|
The late Ramachandra Gandhi’s views on philosophy, exclusivist politics and being the Mahatma’s grandson.
|
Gandhi would have tried to convert the adversity of Godhra into spiritual advantage by initiating a wide-ranging enquiry and debate in Gujarat and the rest of India on the question: “Who are we?”
Photo: AP
Interested in the truth: Ramchandra Gandhi.
Distinguished philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi was the author of many books including Sita’s Kitchen, Svaraj, and Muniya’s Light. This interview, though recorded in 2003 soon after he became Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Bangalore University, deals with issues that are still relevant. Excerpts:
What are some of your current intellectual preoccupations?
They are what they have been for many years. The truth of Advaita Vedanta is my chief passion. The formulation of this, as I understand it, in clearer terms, and exploring its relevance to our times is an exciting, endless task.
I have also been looking closely at our epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, some of the Upanishads, and continue to study the teachings of the sages of modern India, their potential to change the course of history.
In an earlier conversation, you said that you were not interested in the Right or the Left but in the truth. “People want the truth,” you said. What did you mean by this?
Ignoring questions about the meaning and purpose of life, politics in our times has merely championed the cause of exclusive identities: caste, religious, socio-economic, nationalist.
Never contemplating the possibility that these identities might be falsehoods, false answers to questions “who am I?” and “who are we?” which concern us most deeply.
Pitting us against one another and all of us against non-human life, nature and nothingness, the politics of exclusive identities has understandably failed to deliver on its promises of justice, freedom, or happiness.
Truth matters. Selfhood might be non-dual, we might be all things and nothingness too. Each one of us. Empowerment and humility can be like gifts only if exclusive identity and its agenda of limitless compassion and love and joy.
Could you illustrate the failure of exclusivist politics with an example?
Let us look at Gujarat. After Godhra, Gujarat was witness to a dance of vengeful destruction. All Muslims were projected as “Other” and hostile to Hinduism. And Hindus sought to be defined exclusively as communally, as a collectivity of believers threatened by all Muslims. Middle class Hindu youths sought empowerment in murder and rape and loot.
If some of them were to ask Hindutva leadership the question: Are we only Hindus? Are we not also trustees of all cultures and faiths? Is the slaughter of innocent men, women and children evidence of power? Is organised, murderous retaliation likely to be a resolution of Hindu-Muslim differences? There would be no answers forthcoming from Hindutva leadership to these fundamental questions.
Imitating Islamic separatism that created Pakistan, Hindutva politics seeks Hindu hegemonism in India forgetting that hegemonism is a form of separation, as all exclusivism is.
You have pointed to the dangers of thinking in narrow terms of “self” and “other.”
Yes. The experience of sympathy is very important in life. In your very mode of thinking, if you have established a strict “self” and “other” distinction, in a moment of crisis you won’t have sympathy, which alone will prevent you from harming others.
What would Gandhi have done in Gujarat?
Gandhi would have tried to convert the adversity of Godhra into spiritual advantage by initiating a wide-ranging enquiry and debate in Gujarat and the rest of India “Who are we?”
What are some of the weaknesses of the secularist imagination?
The implicit anthropocentrism of the secularist imagination, even more than its explicit Eurocentrism, is its chief weakness. Anthropocentrism makes it impossible for secularism to be ecologically sensitive. Licensed to plunder nature, secularism, becomes the ideology of those who are most capable of plundering nature: the industrialised, scientifically and technologically advanced societies of Europe and their imitators and servitors around the world.
Are there corresponding weaknesses of the religious imagination?
In politics, certainly. Politically, religions define themselves demographically and anthropocentrically no less dogmatically than secular collectivities: as collectivities of believers pitted against one another and secular societies.Religious politics, like secularist politics, acquires an annihilationist agenda, a license to hate “others” till doomsday. This is the naked truth underlying the ongoing wars between Islamic militancy and western hegemony, Pakistan and India, Sinhala majoritarianism and Tamil separatism in Sri Lanka for instance.
This is a tragedy especially for Hinduism and Buddhism, both spiritual traditions which do not legitimise anthropocentrism. Political dualism lures even these traditions away from the goals of inclusive life.
You pointed earlier to the dangers of dualist thinking in terms of “self” and “other.” How does one overcome dualist thinking?
Each time we think of apparent others as really only variant images of ourselves and that is what is involved in ethical behaviour, we widen self-awareness. And, when we think of non-human life and non-living matter also as constituting variant images of ourselves, i.e. when we live ecologically sensitively and non-anthropocentrically, self-awareness is further and greatly widened.
However, in the face of death and irretrievable loss and unbearable agony, we confront the spectre of nothingness and our consciousness congeals in fear. Self-awareness stops flowering. Our reality loses its plasticity, vitality. We recover this vitality when we are able to see nothingness also as our own form (symbolising our not being something as opposed to something else, a teaching central to Vedanta and Buddhism).
This revolutionary widening of self-awareness, essential for the practise of non-violence is possible only in individual contemplativeness. In their anthropocentric and collectivist forms, secularism and religion do not encourage such contemplativeness. They deprive us of enlightenment.
Ethics and ecology are insufficiently empowering without enlightenment. The traditional three “Rs” of education (Reading, writing and arithmetic) may widen our knowledge. But self-awareness, our deepest reality, can only be widened and deepened by the three “Es”: ethics, ecology and enlightenment.
What do you think must be done at the site of demolished Babri Masjid?
The status quo should be preserved. The debris, the rubble, representing the hardness of our hearts and the shallowness of our minds, is more sacred as a confession of our unregenerateness than an aggressive, avenging, construction of a Ram temple at the site can ever be. Or a legalistic reconstruction of the demolished mosque.
At the deepest level, no new Rama temple can in all conscience be constructed at the site until the questions of Sita’s banishment and the killing of Shudraka by Rama in the Ramayana are satisfactorily resolved by a more self-questioning Hinduism than Hindutva can ever be.
Without atonement for the miseries heaped upon women and the “lower” castes as a result of an uncritical acceptance of the authenticity of these episodes in the Ramayana, it would be an insult to Sita and Rama to build a new temple at the site of arrogance and vengefulness in Ayodhya whether or not it is the site of Rama’s birth.
In discussions on culture, the market often drops out of view. I know you are not an economist. But, have you thought about what the neo-liberal economic reforms have done to the country?
I don’t grudge the middle-classes the widening of consumerist consciousness, which these reforms have facilitated! But the further impoverishment of the poor, which has occurred, is unforgivable. The gap between rich and poor has widened. The agenda of ethics, ecology and enlightenment has been largely damaged.
What has it meant to be Gandhi’s grandson?
The relationship evokes both kindness and unkindness. One is treated with undeserved special respect and affection. And with undeserved special chastisement if one does anything insufficiently saintly. Beyond both is an urgent invitation to inquire into the meaning of truth and non-violence which the relationship holds out. I cling to that blessing and ignore the discomforts of special attention.
This interview originally appeared in Lankesh Patrike on September 21, 2003.
Chandan Gowda recently completed a dissertation in sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
