August 17, 2010

A Leading Indian Poet On Gandhi, Violence And The Struggle There


I wrote an introduction to this very recent and very important poem, but have decided it works better as an afterword.



A Discourse on Non-Violence

by Satchidanandan
(translated from the Malayalam by the poet)

The day was calm.Three of
Gandhi’s visitors stepped forward:
an expecting Mahar woman, almost a girl,
from the Maratha region, a young dumb Bhili youth
from Gandhi’s own place, his body burnt black,
a Korba from mid-India on crutches,
still carrying his bow.

As soon as Gandhi, filling post-cards
with his small hand, gestured to them to talk,
the woman pointed to her belly and said:
“You are responsible for this.”
Gandhi just smiled his Zen smile
as she went on: “ I could have cut him
to pieces, but you taught us to loathe violence.”

Now the Bhil spoke in sounds and gestures:
His landlord who had trapped him in debts
and enslaved him, tied him to a tree,
cut off his tongue and burnt him all over
for having drawn water from his well.
He had endured it all as to resist
would have meant violence.

The Korba lowered his bow: “ With this
bow and arrow I could’ve killed that leopard
that had left me lame; but what do we have
once we give up non-violence?”

Gandhi dropped his pen and told his
faithful disciples: “You have taken me literally.
Here violence was done by that rapist,
the landlord and the leopard. Of these
only the scared leopard was unaware that
he was committing violence. He was
just following his instinct. But the other two
deserved no mercy. Dear child, if teeth and nails
were of no help, you could’ve saved your honour
with your sickle or the kitchen-knife.

Gandhi now turned to the Bhil and spoke in gestures:
“Your axe would’ve helped where words failed you.”
“Then what about non-violence”, asked the Korba.
“Nowhere have I said that it is wrong
to harm the aggressor in order to save
your life or honour; only it should be
the very last resort..”

An onlooker now
posed a question: “Then why did you condemn
Bhagat Singh and his comrades?” “Simple.
I knew who I was fighting and we had
better chances if we abjured violence.”

“Is not fasting violence too?”, asked another,
“you torment your body and blackmail your enemy.”
“Look here: there is no iron-wall between violence
and non-violence, and no value in life is absolute.”

The woman stared at her belly, the Bhil youth
at his near-charred body and the Korba
at his leg-stumps: “ We didn’t understand.”

A tender voice responded from within the
woman’s womb: “ I understood.”


The author, Koyamparambath Satchidanandan, is a leading literary figure in India. Satchidanandan, as he is usually known, is revered as one of the writers who led in the development of modern poetry in the Malayalam language, a major tongue in Southern India, especially Kerala. He is not just a poet but a translator, a critic and a teacher.

When India was shaken in the late 1960s and early '70s by the Naxalite movement of Communist guerrillas based among the poorest section of the peasantry, Satchidanandan turned his attention away from abstract literary questions, to the point where his poetry was censored by the state and he was harassed by the Crime Branch. He, like many other progressive cultural figures, became less overtly concerned with political and social issues as state repression, adventurist errors and infighting drastically weakened the Marxist-Leninist movement by the late 1970s

Thus it is extremely significant that he has written this poem, this year, as well as another (still only in Malayalam) about the stunning military success of resurgent Maoist guerrillas in battle with Indian police at Dantewada. This reflects a revival of interest among Indian intellectuals and cultural figures in the suffering of the rural poor and in their rising resistance. This development has been spearheaded by Arundhati Roy's sympathetic reportage on the guerrillas.

The subject, too, is most timely. It challenges Gandhian non-violence as a useful response to gender, class and caste oppression. This is an important debate to have in today's India, where many dedicated activists among the rural poor, dalits ("outcastes") and adivasis (tribal people, the First Nations of India) see themselves as followers of Gandhi. Here in the US, folks steeped in Gandhian principles and stone revolutionaries have been among the most steadfast forces in the anti-war movement and often developed deep mutual respect, providing a good foundation on which to explore our differences.

13 comments:

Diana said...

I saw a movie about this woman a long time ago. Although the Wikipedia article to which I have attached a link here says that the real Phoolan Devi did not like the movie, "The Bandit Queen," based on her life, it is a devastating movie that shows the brutality of life for women in India. It's worth seeing. Whenever anyone talks about Gandhi I think of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoolan_Devi

Anonymous said...

This is very interesting. This article was crossposted at the Kasama project website by someone signing as jp, who linked to a video of Norman Finkelstein giving a talk on Gandhi at Maastricht University which also challenged received wison about his views. The link--I hope it takes--is:
.

Anonymous said...

trying again:
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/maastricht-university-talk-the-israel-palestine-conflict-what-we-can-learn-from-gandhi/

Jimmy Higgins said...

There was also an alternate history (look it up on wikipedia if you aren't familiar with this sub-genre of science fiction) short story about 20 years ago by Harry Turtledove. In it, India is occupied by Nazi Germany after England is defeated and their empire falls to the conqueror. Gandhi and Nehru launch a civil disobedience campaign with predictable results, and at the end, the implication is, Gandhi rethinks his basic approach...

Rahim on the Docks said...

Though popular wisdom might have us believe that emulation of Gandhi's nonviolent strategies is what drove the US civil rights movement of the King era, any deeper reading of history makes it clear that without the Deacons for Defense (see ) and Robert Williams of the Monroe, NC NAACP (see ) there would have been no success for the civil disobedience of Dr. King.

Rahim on the Docks said...

Sorry for the HTML error. The link for the Deacons for Defense and Justice is:
Deacons for Defense
and Robert F. Williams is:
Monroe, NC NAACP

Bondi said...

Thank you, Diana for reminding us about Phoolan Devi and Shekhar Kapur's flawed film "The Bandit Queen." As Diana comments, it is amazing and heart-rending movie.

Joe Navarro said...

Poetry is creative expression, which sometimes is manifested as an analysis or critique, only done creatively. This poem raises good questions in the readers' minds about how to view civil disobedience and the tactic of non-violence. Over time it has been viewed in the same context as "turn the other cheek." But there is another context, where violence is confronted and resisted actively. The poem takes a stand, by arguing that allowing yourself to be raped, mutilated or other acts of violence is not the correct understanding of civil disobedience.

Anonymous said...

Not having studied Gandhi’s life and writings, I cannot comment on the historical accuracy of the poem. But Gandhi has long been cited as advocating “turning the other cheek” to violence as a way to win the hearts of the oppressors. Winning the hearts of the oppressors is, I think, a harmful illusion. But there is something to be said for employing restraint and non-violent tactics in specific situations in combination with agitation and organization for common needs when trying to win over a somewhat unfriendly section of the working masses. At the same time, judicious use of armed self-defense, also in such a combination, can also affect the hearts of other oppressed and intimidate the real oppressors.

When the black sharecroppers in Fayette County, Tennessee, where I later worked as a civil rights activist, began to register to vote in 1960, the white landowners threw many of off their sharecrop plots and blacklisted them. You couldn’t buy Pampers in the county. Many of these people set up two tent cities on black men’s land and appealed to the labor and civil rights movements for support. Racist night riders came by at night and fired into the tents, wounding a black man, Early B. Wynn, in the shoulder. The next night a number of local black men, many of them veterans, lay up in the ditch and when the Klan car came by they shot up the car. They probably could easily have shot the people in the car but they only shot the car. This was what I call “judicious” use of armed self-defense. The result of this and the continuing presence of black armed defenders throughout the 60s, meant that in Fayette County, on the northern border of Mississippi, there was little violence against civil rights activists. In Haywood County, one county to the north, where there was a much lower level of civil rights organization, racists were still burning churches in 1966, and a four-county-long march that the high school students of
Fayette held in the summer of ‘66 was surrounded by racists in Haywood and only narrowly escaped, partly by threatening to use guns in self-defense.

I believe that not only did the armed threat and actions deter racists in the ‘60s, they also won respect from the less-bigoted whites, especially among the working class , thus influencing their hearts. In my opinion this was true on a grand scale as well. The ‘60s black rebellions drove home the demands of the civil rights movement and also won respect among these whites.

Anonymous said...

Not having studied Gandhi’s life and writings, I cannot comment on the historical accuracy of the poem. But Gandhi has long been cited as advocating “turning the other cheek” to violence as a way to win the hearts of the oppressors. Winning the hearts of the oppressors is, I think, a harmful illusion. But there is something to be said for employing restraint and non-violent tactics in specific situations in combination with agitation and organization for common needs when trying to win over a somewhat unfriendly section of the working masses. At the same time, judicious use of armed self-defense, also in such a combination, can also affect the hearts of other oppressed and intimidate the real oppressors.

When the black sharecroppers in Fayette County, Tennessee, where I later worked as a civil rights activist, began to register to vote in 1960, the white landowners threw many of off their sharecrop plots and blacklisted them. You couldn’t buy Pampers in the county. Many of these people set up two tent cities on black men’s land and appealed to the labor and civil rights movements for support. Racist night riders came by at night and fired into the tents, wounding a black man, Early B. Wynn, in the shoulder. The next night a number of local black men, many of them veterans, lay up in the ditch and when the Klan car came by they shot up the car. They probably could easily have shot the people in the car but they only shot the car. This was what I call “judicious” use of armed self-defense. The result of this and the continuing presence of black armed defenders throughout the 60s, meant that in Fayette County, on the northern border of Mississippi, there was little violence against civil rights activists. In Haywood County, one county to the north, where there was a much lower level of civil rights organization, racists were still burning churches in 1966, and a four-county-long march that the high school students of
Fayette held in the summer of ‘66 was surrounded by racists in Haywood and only narrowly escaped, partly by threatening to use guns in self-defense.

Anonymous said...

I believe that not only did the armed threat and actions deter racists in the ‘60s, they also won respect from the less-bigoted whites, especially among the working class , thus influencing their hearts. In my opinion this was true on a grand scale as well. The ‘60s black rebellions drove home the demands of the civil rights movement and also won respect among these whites.

Parag said...

There were enormous number of people who adopted Gandhian principles. They responded to his of Satyagraha to protest against the Rowlatt Act, Amritsar Massacre and atrocities in Punjab.Under his leadership, the Congress became a mass organization of dedicated full time workers.

Citronella said...

This story from Anonymous sounds accurate to me except "You couldn’t buy Pampers in the county." There were no Pampers in 1960. So why sully the story with a statement like that?