Swaraj
Like all other aspects of life, the political and social organisation of society in India is supposed to be governed by sanatana dharma. Society in the Indian conception is an organic formation composed of myriad groupings of people that emerge spontaneously around a locality, a profession, a kinship community, or a religious faith. These groupings work according to dharma that inheres in them. The king or the state in this conception is constituted to protect and preserve the dharma of these diverse groupings, to guarantee the harmonious functioning of these organic groupings of the society according to their own inherent laws. The state does not lay down the law; it only protects the law, the dharma, that is inborn to society, that already exits. It is the understanding of sanatana dharma that all aspects of creation have their inborn dharma, their inherent harmony and balance; the state that preserves this inborn dharma in all organs of society is what in Indian is known as swaraj.
Mahatma Gandhi while leading the struggle of the Indian people for independence from the British rule repeatedly emphasised that his ultimate aim was not merely the overthrow of alien rule, but the establishment of swaraj in India. Even before finally arriving in India in 1915 to plunge into the national struggle for freedom, he wrote a small but seminal book by the name of Hind Swaraj to set down his conception of swaraj and the means he proposed to employ to achieve it. Hind Swaraj was published in 1909 and has been reprinted several times since. Below, we shall have occasion to refer to several of the precepts of this book. But, for giving a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of swaraj, we turn to the beautiful and evocative picture of his dreamed polity of “oceanic circles” that he drew in 1946, when independence for India was just around the corner. Offering a “broad but comprehensive picture of the Independent India of [his] own conception” for the benefit of the Congressmen who “in general certainly [did] not know the kind of independence they want”, he wrote:
Like all other aspects of life, the political and social organisation of society in India is supposed to be governed by sanatana dharma. Society in the Indian conception is an organic formation composed of myriad groupings of people that emerge spontaneously around a locality, a profession, a kinship community, or a religious faith. These groupings work according to dharma that inheres in them. The king or the state in this conception is constituted to protect and preserve the dharma of these diverse groupings, to guarantee the harmonious functioning of these organic groupings of the society according to their own inherent laws. The state does not lay down the law; it only protects the law, the dharma, that is inborn to society, that already exits. It is the understanding of sanatana dharma that all aspects of creation have their inborn dharma, their inherent harmony and balance; the state that preserves this inborn dharma in all organs of society is what in Indian is known as swaraj.
Mahatma Gandhi while leading the struggle of the Indian people for independence from the British rule repeatedly emphasised that his ultimate aim was not merely the overthrow of alien rule, but the establishment of swaraj in India. Even before finally arriving in India in 1915 to plunge into the national struggle for freedom, he wrote a small but seminal book by the name of Hind Swaraj to set down his conception of swaraj and the means he proposed to employ to achieve it. Hind Swaraj was published in 1909 and has been reprinted several times since. Below, we shall have occasion to refer to several of the precepts of this book. But, for giving a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi’s conception of swaraj, we turn to the beautiful and evocative picture of his dreamed polity of “oceanic circles” that he drew in 1946, when independence for India was just around the corner. Offering a “broad but comprehensive picture of the Independent India of [his] own conception” for the benefit of the Congressmen who “in general certainly [did] not know the kind of independence they want”, he wrote:
Independence of India should mean independence of the whole of India... Independence must mean that of the people of India, not of those who are today ruling over them. The rulers should depend on the will of those who are under their heels. Thus, they have to be the servants of the people, ready to do their will.
Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers. It follows, therefore, that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world. It will be trained and prepared to perish in the attempt to defend itself against any onslaught from without. Thus, ultimately individual is the unit. This does not exclude dependence on and willing help from neighbours or from the world. It will be free and voluntary play of forces. Such a society is necessarily highly cultured in which every man and woman knows what he or she wants and, what is more, knows that no one should want anything that others cannot have with equal labour.
This society must naturally be based on truth and non-violence which, in my opinion, are not possible without a living belief in God, meaning a self-existent, all-knowing living Force which inheres every other force known to the world and which depends on none and which will live when all other forces may conceivably perish or cease to act. I am unable to account for my life without belief in this all-embracing living Light.
In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.
Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it. I may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore, not worth a single thought. If Euclid’s point, though incapable of being drawn by human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live. Let India live for this true picture, though never realizable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want, before we can have something approaching it. If there ever is to be a republic of every village in India, then I claim verity for my picture in which the last is equal to the first or, in other words, no one is the first and none the last.
In this picture every religion has its full and equal place. We are all leaves of a majestic tree whose trunk cannot be shaken off its roots which are deep down in the bowels of the earth. The mightiest wind cannot move it.
Mahatma
Gandhi was, as he admits, drawing a deliberately Utopian picture of a
society of selfless men deeply seeped in the sanatana principle of
seeing divine dignity and therefore equality in all creation. He wanted
to place a high ideal before the soon to be independent India. But his
vision of an India composed of “the oceanic circles” consisting of the
individual and his self-sustained locality at the centre and expanding
into ever widening circles to create larger and larger structures that
draw their sustenance and legitimacy from the locality is by no means
Utopian. There is evidence to show that Indian polity before the arrival
of the British was in fact based on locality-republics that coalesced
to create and provide for the regional and larger structures of the
polity.
We happen to know in some detail about the functioning of about 2000 localities in the late eighteenth century in the region around Madras in south India. This region, referred to as the Jaghire in the early British records and later constituted as the Chengalpattu district, was one of the first parts of the country to come under British subjugation. Before setting up new administrative arrangements in the area, the British tried to investigate the structures that already existed there. The investigations involved an intensive survey of all aspects of life covering almost all localities of the region. The records of the survey, conducted between 1767 to 1774, are available both in the original Tamil accounts written on palm-leafs and in the English summaries prepared for the British administrators in India and their principals in London.
The polity described in these records is indeed like the “oceanic circles” polity of Mahatma Gandhi’s conception. The localities of the region functioned like autonomous republics that budgeted and provided for the administrative, military, economic, cultural and educational services for the locality and also for the larger polity of the region around it.
The main instrument of political and economic organisation in these localities comprised of an elaborate system of allocating shares in the produce of the locality for a variety of functions and beneficiaries. The survey records list about a hundred distinct services and institutions for which shares were taken out from the produce of different localities, and on an average, each of the localities took out shares for about thirty of these. The beneficiaries of such shares included cultural institutions and functionaries like temples, mathams and chatrams, scholars and teachers, musicians and dancers; economic services like irrigation and measurement of corn; and administrative services like registry and militia. Some of these institutions and services were entirely local; the village temple, or the barber and washerman, functioned for and received shares from a single locality or at most from a neighbouring group of two or three. Others like the great temples, the high scholars, the regional registrars, and the more important of the militia leaders functioned at a level that extended far beyond the locality. Several of these regional institutions and functionaries received shares from hundreds of localities in the region.
The shares that the various institutions and functionaries received were not merely nominal. On the average about 30 percent of the produce of a locality was taken out through such sharing. The shares of different services and institutions were such as would provide for their proper maintenance and upkeep. The arrangement was in fact akin to the budgeting mechanism of a state; through such sharing the locality allocated resources for different functions essential to it, as well as provided for the larger polity of the region around it. The locality within itself was thus indeed the state that arranged and provided for its internal cultural, political, economic and administrative functions. And, at levels of polity beyond itself, the locality was not only the basic constituent unit, but also the constituting authority. By setting aside shares for the trans-locality institutions and services, the localities together provided for and created the larger levels of polity. Such was the polity that had functioned in India from times immemorial. Mahatma Gandhi while presenting his vision of the “oceanic circles” polity in 1946 on the eve of independence was only reminding India of her own practices before the disruption caused by alien rule.
Besides the allocation of shares from the produce of the land discussed above, the Chengalpattu localities also practised another kind of sharing. This consisted in assignment of revenue from parts of the cultivated lands to essentially the same set of institutions and services that received shares in the produce. Such assignments, called manyams, were very common. Almost a quarter of the cultivated lands in the region was classified as manyam lands. But since about one-third of the produce of a locality was already taken out as shares of different institutions and functionaries, the fraction of the produce that the lands paid as revenue could not have been very significant. And therefore, unlike the share in the produce, this share in the revenue was probably of no great economic value to the recipient.
The manyam arrangements, it seems, were constituted to give effect to another important aspect of the polity. To have a share in the right to receive revenue is to share in sovereignty; and sharing of sovereignty amongst many is a cherished ideal of the classical Indian polity based on sanatana dharma. These arrangements of sharing the produce and the revenue in the Chengalpattu polity covered all institutions and all households, except those of the direct producers of wealth – the cultivators, the traders and the weavers. The producers of wealth, and especially the cultivators, of course, provided for themselves and for all others, and thus were sovereign in their own.
Such wide dispersal of sovereignty is natural and essential in a polity constructed on the principle of organic units and groupings functioning according to their inherent dharma. In such a polity every individual, every household, every locality and every other grouping of the people partakes of the sovereignty; every household and grouping has the sovereign right to decide what is right and what is wrong according to its own inborn laws. From this right to discriminate between right and wrong follows the duty to refuse to obey commands that are perceived to be wrong, are against the dharma of the group or household concerned – a duty from which Mahatma Gandhi derived his concept of satyagraha.
Dharmarjya
In Gandhi Smriti, Birla House, New Delhi and at several other places associated with the memory of Mahatma Gandhi there is displayed a talisman given by Gandhiji to his countrymen. It reads:
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test:
Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it... Will it restore him to control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.
This striving to care for the last one, to create a polity that would take into account and provide for the “the poorest and the weakest”, formed the polestar of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and action. He returned to it again and again, and he was willing to sacrifice almost everything else for this one aim. Swaraj for him meant nothing if it could not ensure that everyone unto the last was fed, clothed and housed in dignity. And, the first task of independent India for him was to quickly provide for the dignified fulfilment of the basic needs of everyone. Speaking to students from Santiniketan in April 7, 1947, barely months before the departure of the British from India, he said:
In the end I would only say that under swarjya efforts should be made for providing everyone at least with a square meal, enough clothing to cover himself and a house to live in. At present while some have utensils of gold and silver, others have not even pots of clay – some have garments of silk and brocade whereas others have not even enough clothing to cover their nakedness.
Mahatma Gandhi at that time was staying in a Bhangi colony, a habitation of scavengers. Towards the latter part of his life he more and more preferred to live amongst the poorest and the lowest. His insistence on caring for the deprived and the depressed was in some ways similar to the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin, and in general to the socialist ideal. But for him such caring was also part of the Indian tradition; it was the essence of Ramarajya, the reign of the ideal king, Sri Rama, which defines the ideal of good times for the Indians. And Ramarajya was, of course, dharmarajya, a reign based securely in the precepts of sanatana dharma.
For Mahatma Gandhi swarajya, dharmarajya and Ramarajya were synonymous. He used the three terms interchangeably, and the essence of all three for him was in securing peace and plenty for all, including the last person. Thus in 1936 we hear him praying that it may be given to the Maharaja of Mysore to approach more and more to Ramarajya in Mysore and emphasising that “in olden days, Ramarajya meant a government in which everyone in the country, including the lowest ryot, had peace and plenty.”
In defining Ramarajya as the era of peace and plenty for all, Mahatma Gandhi was closely following the classical Indian understanding. At the very beginning of Srimad Valmikiyaramayana, the great epic narrating the story of Sri Rama, Ramarajya is described as the age when:
There is happiness and cheer all around. All are contented. All are well-nourished. All follow dharma. All are in good health. All are without disease. And, all are free from fear and hunger.
Satyagraha is an attempt to make the possible real. Truth implies justice. A just administration implies an era of truth or swaraj, dharmaraj, Ramarajya or the people’s raj (democracy). Under such a government the ruler would be the protector and friend of his subjects. Between his way of life and that of the poorest of his subjects, there would not be such a gulf as there is today. There would be an appropriate similarity between the king’s palace and the hut of his subject. The difference between the needs of the two would be slight. Both would enjoy pure air and water. The subjects would get sufficient food. The ruler would give up eating fifty-six different kinds of delicacies and be satisfied with only six. If the poor use utensils made of wood or mud, the ruler may well use utensils made of such metals as brass. For the ruler who wants to use utensils of gold and silver must be robbing his subjects. The poor should be able to obtain sufficient clothing. Let the king have more clothes, but let the difference be not such as to cause envy. The children of both should be studying in the same primary school. The ruler should become a senior member of the family of the poor. If he does anything for the good of the poor, he should not regard it as a favour that he has conferred upon them. Benevolence has no place in dharma. It is the dharma of the ruler to serve his subjects. What has been said in regard to the ruler applies to all wealthy persons; likewise it is the dharma of the poor not to bear malice towards the rich. ...
Early British records indicate that the kings of India indeed followed the ideal desired by Mahatma Gandhi above. They maintained a lifestyle similar to that of their subjects; their personal expenses were often rather frugal, while they spent liberally on feeding and otherwise caring for the needy. However, what is of particular relevance for our present purposes is Gandhiji’s assertion that such caring for the subjects arose not from benevolence, but dharma.
According to the Indian understanding, the universe is a great cycle of give and take between different aspects of creation. Whatever is earned or produced by man is in fact taken from other aspects of creation and it may rightfully be consumed only after returning the shares of all, only after propitiating and fulfilling all other parts of creation. Consuming for oneself without having thus propitiated others is indeed stealing. Brahman, the creator, while initiating this great cycle of the universe enjoins upon human beings to keep it moving through yajna, disciplined action that propitiates and fulfils all aspects of creation. The one who does not keep this cycle of mutual dependence – the dharma chakra, as it is often referred to – moving is a sinner immersed merely in the pleasures of the senses. The living of such a one is a waste.
The imperative of caring and providing for the poor and the weak flows from this essential understanding about the universe. The foregoing paragraph is a free paraphrase of verses 10-16 of the third chapter of Srimadbhagavad Gita, also known simply as the Gita. All classical Indian literature, the vedas, the upanishads, the itihasas and the puranas, present the same understanding of the universe in diverse ways and forms. The Gita’s exposition is however probably the simplest. It is therefore not surprising that Mahatma Gandhi used to persistently refer his listeners, and especially young students, to these verses of the Gita. Particularly during his visit to south India in August-September 1927, he took these verses of the Gita as the text of his speeches. During this visit, he spoke in several cities and towns, and almost everywhere he referred to these verses as forming the core of the Gita. Below, we quote from a speech he gave to the students of the Hindu High School at Madras on September 4, 1927:
Those of you who know Sanskrit should tomorrow, if possible today, buy the Gita – and I understand you can get the book for a very small price – and begin to study the book. Have private Gita classes for yourselves. Those of you who do not know Sanskrit should study Sanskrit only for the sake of the Gita. If you have not got that much facility, then you should read Gita written in English or Tamil, if there is a Tamil translation of it. I tell you that it contains treasures of knowledge of which you have no conception whatsoever. I suggest to you that at first you may begin to read the third chapter of the Gita. You will find there the gospel of selfless work expounded in a most convincing manner. Selfless work there is described characteristically by one beautiful word called yajna. If you will read the book with my eyes you will find charkha also described there. There is one passage which says that “He who eats without serving, without yajna, is a thief (III.12).”
The association of the charkha, the spinning wheel, with the wheel of creation, with the great cycle of mutual give and take described in theses verses of the Gita is indeed interesting. For Gandhiji believed that charkha by empowering the poorest and the weakest of the Indians would restore dharma, would set the cycle of give and take moving again.
It is not a mere coincidence that the Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, whom we have referred to earlier in the first section, reminded the Indians, on the day of Independence, of the same verses of the Gita, the same cycle of creation, that Mahatma Gandhi had made into his mantra for the attainment of swaraj. And the Paramacharya saw the cycle of creation, the Chakra of God, as he called it, reflected in the wheel of Ashoka that is placed in the centre of the Indian flag. In his blessings to the people of India on the 15th August 1947, the Paramacharya said:
Mahatma Gandhi saw in the Indian veneration for the cow a symbolic acceptance of this sanatana imperative to care and provide for all creation. In the article on the discipline of a sanatani Hindu that we have quoted in the first section, he explained the position of the cow in Hinduism thus:
India has not followed the discipline of caring and providing for all that the sanatana dharma teaches her and that Mahatma Gandhi sought to revive. India in fifty years of her independence has not been able to take the first step towards Ramarajya, that of ensuring an abundance of food for all. This aspect of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and work therefore remains urgently relevant.
India needs to recall the Talisman that Mahatma Gandhi gave her, begin thinking once again of the poorest and the weakest, and begin organising her polity and economy so as to fulfil the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter for all. India gave the ideal of Ramarajya to the world. It is primarily her responsibility to begin realising the ideal. But, the ideal is relevant for the whole world. When India reverts to the discipline and begins establishing Ramarajya for her people, she shall once again be able to teach the world that peace and plenty for all is the fundamental condition of existence, that the hunger of even one human being or any other creature destroys dharma, and thus the whole world. Therefore, if the world is to be, it must be a world based on the ideal of Ramarajya. Mahatma Gandhi certainly believed thus.
We happen to know in some detail about the functioning of about 2000 localities in the late eighteenth century in the region around Madras in south India. This region, referred to as the Jaghire in the early British records and later constituted as the Chengalpattu district, was one of the first parts of the country to come under British subjugation. Before setting up new administrative arrangements in the area, the British tried to investigate the structures that already existed there. The investigations involved an intensive survey of all aspects of life covering almost all localities of the region. The records of the survey, conducted between 1767 to 1774, are available both in the original Tamil accounts written on palm-leafs and in the English summaries prepared for the British administrators in India and their principals in London.
The polity described in these records is indeed like the “oceanic circles” polity of Mahatma Gandhi’s conception. The localities of the region functioned like autonomous republics that budgeted and provided for the administrative, military, economic, cultural and educational services for the locality and also for the larger polity of the region around it.
The main instrument of political and economic organisation in these localities comprised of an elaborate system of allocating shares in the produce of the locality for a variety of functions and beneficiaries. The survey records list about a hundred distinct services and institutions for which shares were taken out from the produce of different localities, and on an average, each of the localities took out shares for about thirty of these. The beneficiaries of such shares included cultural institutions and functionaries like temples, mathams and chatrams, scholars and teachers, musicians and dancers; economic services like irrigation and measurement of corn; and administrative services like registry and militia. Some of these institutions and services were entirely local; the village temple, or the barber and washerman, functioned for and received shares from a single locality or at most from a neighbouring group of two or three. Others like the great temples, the high scholars, the regional registrars, and the more important of the militia leaders functioned at a level that extended far beyond the locality. Several of these regional institutions and functionaries received shares from hundreds of localities in the region.
The shares that the various institutions and functionaries received were not merely nominal. On the average about 30 percent of the produce of a locality was taken out through such sharing. The shares of different services and institutions were such as would provide for their proper maintenance and upkeep. The arrangement was in fact akin to the budgeting mechanism of a state; through such sharing the locality allocated resources for different functions essential to it, as well as provided for the larger polity of the region around it. The locality within itself was thus indeed the state that arranged and provided for its internal cultural, political, economic and administrative functions. And, at levels of polity beyond itself, the locality was not only the basic constituent unit, but also the constituting authority. By setting aside shares for the trans-locality institutions and services, the localities together provided for and created the larger levels of polity. Such was the polity that had functioned in India from times immemorial. Mahatma Gandhi while presenting his vision of the “oceanic circles” polity in 1946 on the eve of independence was only reminding India of her own practices before the disruption caused by alien rule.
Besides the allocation of shares from the produce of the land discussed above, the Chengalpattu localities also practised another kind of sharing. This consisted in assignment of revenue from parts of the cultivated lands to essentially the same set of institutions and services that received shares in the produce. Such assignments, called manyams, were very common. Almost a quarter of the cultivated lands in the region was classified as manyam lands. But since about one-third of the produce of a locality was already taken out as shares of different institutions and functionaries, the fraction of the produce that the lands paid as revenue could not have been very significant. And therefore, unlike the share in the produce, this share in the revenue was probably of no great economic value to the recipient.
The manyam arrangements, it seems, were constituted to give effect to another important aspect of the polity. To have a share in the right to receive revenue is to share in sovereignty; and sharing of sovereignty amongst many is a cherished ideal of the classical Indian polity based on sanatana dharma. These arrangements of sharing the produce and the revenue in the Chengalpattu polity covered all institutions and all households, except those of the direct producers of wealth – the cultivators, the traders and the weavers. The producers of wealth, and especially the cultivators, of course, provided for themselves and for all others, and thus were sovereign in their own.
Such wide dispersal of sovereignty is natural and essential in a polity constructed on the principle of organic units and groupings functioning according to their inherent dharma. In such a polity every individual, every household, every locality and every other grouping of the people partakes of the sovereignty; every household and grouping has the sovereign right to decide what is right and what is wrong according to its own inborn laws. From this right to discriminate between right and wrong follows the duty to refuse to obey commands that are perceived to be wrong, are against the dharma of the group or household concerned – a duty from which Mahatma Gandhi derived his concept of satyagraha.
Dharmarjya
In Gandhi Smriti, Birla House, New Delhi and at several other places associated with the memory of Mahatma Gandhi there is displayed a talisman given by Gandhiji to his countrymen. It reads:
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test:
Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it... Will it restore him to control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.
This striving to care for the last one, to create a polity that would take into account and provide for the “the poorest and the weakest”, formed the polestar of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and action. He returned to it again and again, and he was willing to sacrifice almost everything else for this one aim. Swaraj for him meant nothing if it could not ensure that everyone unto the last was fed, clothed and housed in dignity. And, the first task of independent India for him was to quickly provide for the dignified fulfilment of the basic needs of everyone. Speaking to students from Santiniketan in April 7, 1947, barely months before the departure of the British from India, he said:
In the end I would only say that under swarjya efforts should be made for providing everyone at least with a square meal, enough clothing to cover himself and a house to live in. At present while some have utensils of gold and silver, others have not even pots of clay – some have garments of silk and brocade whereas others have not even enough clothing to cover their nakedness.
Mahatma Gandhi at that time was staying in a Bhangi colony, a habitation of scavengers. Towards the latter part of his life he more and more preferred to live amongst the poorest and the lowest. His insistence on caring for the deprived and the depressed was in some ways similar to the ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin, and in general to the socialist ideal. But for him such caring was also part of the Indian tradition; it was the essence of Ramarajya, the reign of the ideal king, Sri Rama, which defines the ideal of good times for the Indians. And Ramarajya was, of course, dharmarajya, a reign based securely in the precepts of sanatana dharma.
For Mahatma Gandhi swarajya, dharmarajya and Ramarajya were synonymous. He used the three terms interchangeably, and the essence of all three for him was in securing peace and plenty for all, including the last person. Thus in 1936 we hear him praying that it may be given to the Maharaja of Mysore to approach more and more to Ramarajya in Mysore and emphasising that “in olden days, Ramarajya meant a government in which everyone in the country, including the lowest ryot, had peace and plenty.”
In defining Ramarajya as the era of peace and plenty for all, Mahatma Gandhi was closely following the classical Indian understanding. At the very beginning of Srimad Valmikiyaramayana, the great epic narrating the story of Sri Rama, Ramarajya is described as the age when:
There is happiness and cheer all around. All are contented. All are well-nourished. All follow dharma. All are in good health. All are without disease. And, all are free from fear and hunger.
Prahrishtamudito lokastushtah pushtah sudharmikahWhile calling upon India to cherish and revive her tradition of caring for all and ensuring dignified plenty and peace for even the poorest and the weakest, Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly emphasised two further aspects of the Indian understanding of Ramarajya. First, that such taking care of the poor and the weak was not the responsibility of the king alone; all resourceful people in the society shared in the responsibility. In the verses quoted above and elsewhere in classical Indian literature, references to the king in such contexts obviously include all grahsthas, all responsible householders. Secondly, such caring for the Indians was not a matter of charity or personal benevolence; it was a matter of dharma, of proper behaviour according to the order of things. In an article in the Navajivan of March 22, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi offered a particularly succinct exposition of these two aspects of his conception of Ramarajya:
niramayo hyarogasca durbhikshabhayavarjitah
And to ensure that all partake of such plenty and peace, the king is enjoined to take special care of the poor and the weak. In this context the Mahabharata advises the king thus:
Always arrange for the welfare and the livelihood of those who have no resources, those who have no one to look after them, those who are afflicted by old age, and those who have lost their husbands.
Wiping away tears from the faces of the destitute, the orphans and the old, and spreading cheer amongst all ...this is known as the dharma of the king.
Taking care of the destitute and the weak, the king in fact becomes the “the strength of the weak and the orphaned, the eyes of those who cannot see and the legs of those who cannot walk.” Such is the Ramarajya that Mahatma Gandhi was trying to revive.
Satyagraha is an attempt to make the possible real. Truth implies justice. A just administration implies an era of truth or swaraj, dharmaraj, Ramarajya or the people’s raj (democracy). Under such a government the ruler would be the protector and friend of his subjects. Between his way of life and that of the poorest of his subjects, there would not be such a gulf as there is today. There would be an appropriate similarity between the king’s palace and the hut of his subject. The difference between the needs of the two would be slight. Both would enjoy pure air and water. The subjects would get sufficient food. The ruler would give up eating fifty-six different kinds of delicacies and be satisfied with only six. If the poor use utensils made of wood or mud, the ruler may well use utensils made of such metals as brass. For the ruler who wants to use utensils of gold and silver must be robbing his subjects. The poor should be able to obtain sufficient clothing. Let the king have more clothes, but let the difference be not such as to cause envy. The children of both should be studying in the same primary school. The ruler should become a senior member of the family of the poor. If he does anything for the good of the poor, he should not regard it as a favour that he has conferred upon them. Benevolence has no place in dharma. It is the dharma of the ruler to serve his subjects. What has been said in regard to the ruler applies to all wealthy persons; likewise it is the dharma of the poor not to bear malice towards the rich. ...
Early British records indicate that the kings of India indeed followed the ideal desired by Mahatma Gandhi above. They maintained a lifestyle similar to that of their subjects; their personal expenses were often rather frugal, while they spent liberally on feeding and otherwise caring for the needy. However, what is of particular relevance for our present purposes is Gandhiji’s assertion that such caring for the subjects arose not from benevolence, but dharma.
According to the Indian understanding, the universe is a great cycle of give and take between different aspects of creation. Whatever is earned or produced by man is in fact taken from other aspects of creation and it may rightfully be consumed only after returning the shares of all, only after propitiating and fulfilling all other parts of creation. Consuming for oneself without having thus propitiated others is indeed stealing. Brahman, the creator, while initiating this great cycle of the universe enjoins upon human beings to keep it moving through yajna, disciplined action that propitiates and fulfils all aspects of creation. The one who does not keep this cycle of mutual dependence – the dharma chakra, as it is often referred to – moving is a sinner immersed merely in the pleasures of the senses. The living of such a one is a waste.
The imperative of caring and providing for the poor and the weak flows from this essential understanding about the universe. The foregoing paragraph is a free paraphrase of verses 10-16 of the third chapter of Srimadbhagavad Gita, also known simply as the Gita. All classical Indian literature, the vedas, the upanishads, the itihasas and the puranas, present the same understanding of the universe in diverse ways and forms. The Gita’s exposition is however probably the simplest. It is therefore not surprising that Mahatma Gandhi used to persistently refer his listeners, and especially young students, to these verses of the Gita. Particularly during his visit to south India in August-September 1927, he took these verses of the Gita as the text of his speeches. During this visit, he spoke in several cities and towns, and almost everywhere he referred to these verses as forming the core of the Gita. Below, we quote from a speech he gave to the students of the Hindu High School at Madras on September 4, 1927:
Those of you who know Sanskrit should tomorrow, if possible today, buy the Gita – and I understand you can get the book for a very small price – and begin to study the book. Have private Gita classes for yourselves. Those of you who do not know Sanskrit should study Sanskrit only for the sake of the Gita. If you have not got that much facility, then you should read Gita written in English or Tamil, if there is a Tamil translation of it. I tell you that it contains treasures of knowledge of which you have no conception whatsoever. I suggest to you that at first you may begin to read the third chapter of the Gita. You will find there the gospel of selfless work expounded in a most convincing manner. Selfless work there is described characteristically by one beautiful word called yajna. If you will read the book with my eyes you will find charkha also described there. There is one passage which says that “He who eats without serving, without yajna, is a thief (III.12).”
The association of the charkha, the spinning wheel, with the wheel of creation, with the great cycle of mutual give and take described in theses verses of the Gita is indeed interesting. For Gandhiji believed that charkha by empowering the poorest and the weakest of the Indians would restore dharma, would set the cycle of give and take moving again.
It is not a mere coincidence that the Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, whom we have referred to earlier in the first section, reminded the Indians, on the day of Independence, of the same verses of the Gita, the same cycle of creation, that Mahatma Gandhi had made into his mantra for the attainment of swaraj. And the Paramacharya saw the cycle of creation, the Chakra of God, as he called it, reflected in the wheel of Ashoka that is placed in the centre of the Indian flag. In his blessings to the people of India on the 15th August 1947, the Paramacharya said:
On the occasion of our Bharath attaining Independence, all the people of this ancient land should pray to God with sincerity. ... It is praiseworthy that by good fortune our flag bears in its centre the Chakra of God who is himself Dharma incarnate. Also, the Chakra connects us with the tenets of emperor Ashoka known as Devanampriya. It also involves us with the spiritual precepts handed down to us by God Himself in the Bhagavad Gita. As Bhagwan has declared in the sixteenth sloka of the third chapter of the Gita, His words, ‘Evam pravarthitham chakram’, aptly shine today in the form of the wheel. ...Our independence which begins with the high ideals of emperor Ashoka, may grant us the rare fruits of dharma, wealth, happiness and salvation. ... Let us pray to God that our country may prosper, that famine is relieved, that the people may live in harmony...The Ramarajya that Mahatma Gandhi struggled for and wanted to re-establish in India was based on such fundamental understanding of the universe and of the relations between its different aspects. In this understanding, which is also the foundation of sanatana dharma, all have a share in the creation, and all have a responsibility to ensure that no part of creation is deprived of its proper share, that ‘no one is forced to suffer from hunger and disease, or from the extremes of heat and cold’, as Apastamba Dharmasutra puts it. The imperative to care and provide for everyone covers within its fold not only all human beings, but also all animals, birds and ants.
Mahatma Gandhi saw in the Indian veneration for the cow a symbolic acceptance of this sanatana imperative to care and provide for all creation. In the article on the discipline of a sanatani Hindu that we have quoted in the first section, he explained the position of the cow in Hinduism thus:
The central fact of Hinduism however is cow-protection. Cow-protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution. It takes the human being beyond his species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the cow was selected for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow was in India the best companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible. The cow is a poem of pity. One reads pity in the gentle animal. She is a mother to millions of Indian mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God. The ancient seer, whoever he was, began with the cow. The appeal of the lower order of creation is all the more forcible because it is speechless. Cow-protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.The establishment of Ramarajya or Dharmarajya, where all – including what Mahatma Gandhi calls the “dumb creation of God” symbolised in the cow – are provided for and all receive their proper share in the universe remains an unfulfilled dream. In the world today, there are large numbers who have to go without sufficient food and clothing, and without a roof over their heads. Even in the materially wealthy parts of the world many are forced to roam the streets, begging for food and shelter and often failing to receive it. According to the Indian understanding such a situation is intolerable. This is the situation of yugakshaya, the end of times. It is only when the current cycle of creation is about to end, when the world has moved far away from the ideal of Ramarajya, that “people are reduced to the selling of food”, and even “those who seek are refused food, water and shelter and are thus seen lying around on the roads”.
The situation of India in this regard is perhaps worse than that of most other countries of the world. A considerable proportion of the Indian people today fail to get two square meals a day, a majority of the Indian children are malnourished, a preponderant majority of the pregnant women are anaemic. The availability of food per capita in India today is such that for many people death from starvation is barely kept off the door. The situation is almost equally bad in the matter of water, clothing and shelter.Where men are barely fed animals can hardly fair better. In the land that proudly made the humble cow the symbol of her civilisation, and serving the cow a fundamental precept of her religion, there is today little food available for animals. As the men and children, so do the cows and calves, roam the streets of India in a state of hunger, thirst and sickness.
India has not followed the discipline of caring and providing for all that the sanatana dharma teaches her and that Mahatma Gandhi sought to revive. India in fifty years of her independence has not been able to take the first step towards Ramarajya, that of ensuring an abundance of food for all. This aspect of Mahatma Gandhi’s thought and work therefore remains urgently relevant.
India needs to recall the Talisman that Mahatma Gandhi gave her, begin thinking once again of the poorest and the weakest, and begin organising her polity and economy so as to fulfil the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter for all. India gave the ideal of Ramarajya to the world. It is primarily her responsibility to begin realising the ideal. But, the ideal is relevant for the whole world. When India reverts to the discipline and begins establishing Ramarajya for her people, she shall once again be able to teach the world that peace and plenty for all is the fundamental condition of existence, that the hunger of even one human being or any other creature destroys dharma, and thus the whole world. Therefore, if the world is to be, it must be a world based on the ideal of Ramarajya. Mahatma Gandhi certainly believed thus.
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