GANDHI'S AND GHOSE'S GĪTĀ

That the Bhagavadgītā figured prominently in the growing self-consciousness of fin-de-siècle South Asian anticolonial movements is well known. Legendarily, terrorists such as Chapekar carried copies of the Gītā to their executions (Varma Reference Varma1971, 247). Such revolutionaries claimed inspiration from its epic spur to combat. The Gītā, as they understood it, depicted Krishna's counsel that Arjuna not resign himself to inaction out of fearful awe of the imminent battle over the rightful title to his brothers’ kingdom: Indeed Arjuna's sacred duty is to fight even if doing so results in the prodigious slaughter of human life. Although British Orientalists considered it a focal scripture of Hinduism, the Gītā became so strongly associated with violent anticolonial resistance that shortly after Chapekar's hanging “British authorities identified people in possession of more than one copy of the Gita as revolutionaries” (Minor Reference Minor and Minor1986a, 223). To the revolutionaries, the Gītā supported their view that those British occupiers most directly responsible for harm in word or deed must die so that Indians might live and thrive.

Clearly, something significant was at stake in the Gītā: nothing less than devout duty, bound to strategic distributions of life and death. Members of the two generations of Bengal and Indian political thinker-activists before independence understood the Gītā to condone, even command, joining battle straight away with illegitimate British occupiers. Gandhi and Ghose approached the Gītā's presentation of an economy of violence more circumspectly. Gandhi, for one, saw the Bhagavadgītā in allegorical terms as a moral account of one's active duty to combat evil in oneself and to purify others nonviolently by truth. Meanwhile, Ghose's Gītā presented a metaphysical vision of the human's gradual, conscious self-overcoming and consequent advancement of the will of God in nature by serving as a divine instrument, nonegoistically performing violence or nonviolence as bidden. How, from the same text, did each come to radically divergent conclusions about the appropriateness of himsā for fostering life?

Before 1880, the Gītā had been a “scholarly curiosity” to Europeans for about a century (Bayly Reference Bayly2010, 281). After that time, new translations by or for German and British Orientalists had three principal effects, as the Gītā saw more widespread dissemination in India beyond its prior “circulation within an enclaved Brahmanical tradition” (Sinha Reference Sinha2010, 298; see also King Reference King1999; Sharpe Reference Sharpe1985). First, Orientalists highlighted the Gītā's universality rather than its cultural specificity, thus constructing “Hinduism” as a textual, rather than ritual or devotional, religion. Second, their allegorical interpretation dominated the text's South Asian reception. Consequently, third, they emphasized the dialogue's ambiguous placement within, and seeming heterogeneity to, the epic Mahābhārata (c. second century BCE to fourth century CE). Reading the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna as a universal philosophical-spiritual allegory thus disembedded it from the larger narrative context of the imminent war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and their murky intrafamilial dispute over royal succession. Both Ghose's and Gandhi's reception of the Gītā as a transnational text reflect this disembedding approach, though in distinct ways (Chakrabarty and Majumdar Reference Chakrabarty and Majumdar2010; Jordens Reference Jordens and Minor1986; Minor Reference Minor and Minor1986b; Sartori Reference Sartori2010).

Of the two, Gandhi is more vocal about reading the Gītā against the grain. Whereas Orientalists read all mention of battle in the Gītā allegorically by disembedding it from the physical, martial struggle of the Mahābhārata, Gandhi in effect reads an allegory of the inner battle from the Gītā into the entire Mahābhārata: It too is allegorical, he cautions. There may be reference to a physical battle, but that is only a lure to draw one in and not the main thrust, which is to depict an invisible war between good and evil forces (CW 37.82, 88). Gandhi suggests that the distinction between pretext—mere plot—and textual message—divine truth—becomes obvious when one attends not to the letter of the Gītā but to its spirit. It may literally depict martial killing, but the spirit of the text reveals inner conflict (MPW I.80, 93): All humans must struggle mentally so as to strive for noncooperation with the evil and himsā inside, because evil can only endure by drawing parasitically on energies of the good (CW 37.77). Moreover, a reader should in fact, he advises, actively “reject statements in the poem which bear a meaning contrary” to the core teaching of mental self-control and discipline through withdrawal of the bodily senses from objects of affect, stimulation, and consciousness (MPW I.79).

The task of reading for spirit rather than for the lure of narrative plot—which is sensually alluring because it is about bodies—can itself be undertaken properly by one on the way to spiritual discipline: “[Y]ou must approach [the Gītā] with the five necessary equipments, viz., ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truth), brahmacharya (celibacy), aparigraha (non-possession), and asteya (non-stealing). Then and only then will you be able to reach a correct interpretation of it” (MPW I.90). Self-abnegation—negation of the ego and its bodily character—secures the path for accessing the truth of the Gītā. That an already spiritual person will interpret the text in the spiritual manner supposedly proper to it may seem tendentious. For Gandhi, however, no embodied person can achieve perfection in spirit—thus none will have effortlessly interpreted the Gītā properly. If none is perfect in spirit, neither is any embodied person devoid of a spiritual aspect or soul. Consequently, no person embodies pure evil; nor, being embodied, can any soul act only for pure good. The proper interpretation of the Gītā avails itself to all humans, then, to varying degrees of clarity, but requires unremitting discipline.

The slow conversion from literal-bodily to spiritual interpretation indicates both individual and collective progress (cf. Iyer Reference Iyer2000, 181–7). Particular words in a sacred text that may once have had a corporeal referent will in the fullness of time assume an expanded mental or spiritual referent. Hence, as humans progress morally, himsā qua intentional bodily harm extends to harm in speech or thought—which is why Gandhi criticizes those who fetishize bodily harm in their conception of ahimsā. Thus, remarkably, Gandhi recasts disobedience to the letter as the dutiful growth of a spiritual inheritance (i.e. utmost filial piety): “As man's beliefs become more enlightened, the meanings, which people attach to certain words also become more enlightened. . . . We shall do no injustice to Vyasa [traditional author of the Mahābhārata] by expanding the meaning of his words. Sons should enrich the legacy of their fathers” (CW 37.133–4).

The way Gandhi proposes to enrich the Gītā or any sacred text, for that matter, is by distinguishing inevitable or permissible actions from properly soulful or spiritual action. The Gītā may portray two types of war (CW 37.148)—literal and spiritual—but in the final analysis it only does so to show that engaging in physical violence sometimes must be indulged. It is permissible because it is inevitable for embodied souls (MPW I.82). However, indulging in the permissible denies one's humanity and indeed indulges one's beastly self. Sacred texts may condone the beastly, but they enjoin—indeed oblige—the properly human:

In the same way that we ought not indulge a reading of the Gītā that would render central what is minor and external—namely, the martial plot—such that we read the text to enjoin violence, so we cannot indulge the minor and lesser in ourselves. Rather, we must perfect ourselves through restraint and self-sacrifice. Self-restraint by an interpreter will reinforce correct interpretation, which will have revealed progressively perfected self-restraint from, rather than self-indulgence in, permissible retaliation as the true message. Conversely, self-indulgence in our beastly nature misleads us from our human purpose; being misled, we will misinterpret the Gītā as centrally depicting physical violence and thus as advocating harmful retaliation.

Parallel to Gandhi, Ghose too matches interpretive method to the resulting interpretation. Yet, although for Gandhi method and result both must reflect progressive conversion from letter to spirit and from body to soul, for Ghose a comprehensive method and interpretation will integrate both letter and spirit, body and soul. Anything other than dialectical synthesis will produce a one-sided analysis, as Ghose intimates in a letter: “I would prefer to avoid all public controversy especially if it touches in the least on politics. Gandhi's theories are like other mental theories built on a basis of one-sided reasoning and claiming for a limited truth (that of non-violence and passive resistance) a universality which it cannot have” (BCL 22.490–1). From Ghose's point of view, Gandhi took too much the cognitive-moral side by always posing it as an antithesis to the fundamental thesis of beastly, selfish embodiment. By contrast, Ghose strives to achieve a (quasi-Hegelian) grand synthesis that would reach a “supramental” state, beyond mere human reasoning and likewise beyond the human body as well.

Ghose's “integral” view interprets the Gītā as transcending the plane of conflict to “ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness” (BCL 13.32). In the Gītā, both inward and outward aspects of existence are inscribed and duly sublated. This is most evident when the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna is reembedded into the Mahābhārata's imminent battle. For Ghose, the Gītā's closing figuration of Krishna, who reveals himself to be Vishnu the destroyer voraciously devouring all beings, and the prodigious slaughter that will come to pass on Kurukshetra mutually call to each other as dual representations of the total two-sided reality:

Whereas Gandhi thinks destruction by humans pathological but by gods normal (cf. Skaria Reference Skaria and Vinay2009, 192–6), Ghose's vision integrates creation and destruction. Just as Vishnu is “Lord of all existence as Creator but also the universal Destroyer” (BCL 13.37), so too does nature nurture life and threaten death; it preserves but also destroys—destroys in order to nurture, threatens in order to preserve—and humans ought to participate as divinely (thus nonpathologically) bidden.

Ghose applauds Hinduism for confronting and representing this truth:

Criticizing the one-sidedness that cannot envisage God and nature as beneficent and terrible, Ghose's integral interpretation also brings together ahimsā and violence as simultaneous truths: “There is a truth in Ahimsa, there is a truth in destruction also. I do not teach that you should go on killing everybody every day as a spiritual dharma. I say that destruction can be done when it is part of the divine work commanded by the Divine. Non-violence is better than violence as a rule, and still sometimes violence may be the right thing” (BCL 22.491). He explicitly criticizes the Gandhian nonviolent soul-force on three fronts: Refusing to impede an evildoer with physical restraint, even if such restraint does not go so far as killing, may invite the evildoer to continue doing harm; it may in fact even embolden her to undertake greater harm; and it may indirectly cause greater harm to the evildoer herself by provoking greater retaliatory violence from third parties; for example, unrestrained malicious vengeance by a victim's ally (BCL 13.39; Minor Reference Minor and Coward2003). All three courses of action allow the evildoer's egoism to inhibit nature's more direct intention: that reaction not be deferred and that retribution follow promptly, organically, and without impediment.

Ghose offers two conclusions, one more narrowly consequentialist and one attuned to his cosmic vision. First, in the long run “it may even be more merciful to stay in their path, though by force, those who represent evil than to allow them to trample on until they call down on themselves a worse destruction than we would ever think of inflicting” (BCL 13.40). Second, abnegation of the Gandhian type may generate more himsā: In ignoring “this repellent aspect of existence” (38) and thus refusing to participate in short-term destruction even for middle- or long-term good, one-sided ahimsā may not only produce unintended violence; it also refuses to participate in creation, which is always mixed with destruction and not just because we are embodied. Abnegation may actively refuse nature by resisting its apparent goal. Although nature will not ultimately be thwarted, the egoistic human impediments that overthought ahimsā lays in its path will force greater harm and destruction than would have occurred otherwise.

Commentators note a shift in Ghose's thinking correlated to his experience of hearing the voice of the late Swami Vivekananda while in jail during 1908–9, having been accused of participating in a bomb conspiracy (BCL 2.5–8; Dalton Reference Dalton1982, 138–45; Gordon Reference Gordon1974, 130; Nandy Reference Nandy1983, 85–97; Sartori Reference Sartori2010; Singh Reference Singh1963, 145, 152–3). Although Ghose continued to write after his acquittal, the voice of Vivekananda, an influential Hindu thinker who had died a few years earlier, eventually inspired him to quit the nationalist scene altogether in 1910 so he could give priority to spiritual matters. The commentary by Ghose on the Gītā thus far cited belongs to this latter period. Immediately before being jailed, however, Ghose invokes the Gītā with a militancy that courts himsā in less abstract, less sublimated, more visceral terms. In “The Morality of Boycott,” which was seized as an exhibit in his conspiracy trial and thus not immediately published, Ghose resists saintly morality in politics. He asserts that “the Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin, and aggression as a lowering of morality” (BCL 1.124). Hindu morality is distinctively plural on his view, and the morality proper to the brahmin (priest or, as he insists, saint) has no hold on the warrior, for whom expediency is justice and aggression is often expedient.

According to Dennis Dalton, what distinguishes Ghose's writing in the period before his quasi-conversion, then, is an “occupation with political strategy, and the elevation of political success to the exclusion of ethical considerations.” Yet it is also true that the “search for ‘spiritual roots’ had long preoccupied Aurobindo, and . . . represents nothing novel” (1982, 104). So Ghose's spiritual transformation marks both continuity and rupture, a duality reflected in his interpretations of the Gītā. Both before and after his mystical experience in jail, Ghose regards Krishna as enjoining Arjuna to become an impersonal instrument of the Divine and so to repress any egoistic motive. Thus a ksatriya must do neither less nor more than fulfill her role as warrior; he must neither shrink from battle nor hope to gain from his acts. As mentioned earlier the metaphysical approach also obtains in Ghose's pre-arrest writings. As in later Gītā commentary, he invokes the Sankhya doctrine of the three gunas or “essential modes of energy”—tamas, inertia, which Ghose associates with destruction; rajas, active force, associated with creation; and sattwa, intelligence, associated with preservation (BCL 13.65, 1.126). In “The Morality of Boycott,” the warrior's aggressive function is creative: The warrior's creative destruction enables a nation beset by self-destructive tamas to rise to the level of intelligent self-preservation. After his transformation, Ghose sublimates the Gītā's message of impersonal instrumentality further by depersonalizing it, stressing the cosmic effect of the modes of energy—destruction, creation, preservation—more than any person's moral responsibility for being their agent. The result is that Ghose's later commentary interests itself more in attaining spiritual growth by achieving a preservative equilibrium in nature through a balance of creation and destruction. The Gītā, on the later integral view, brings together one's internal spiritual and nature's external material struggles.

Nevertheless, even before Ghose's transformation, the scale at which he envisioned the battle of life differed remarkably from that of Gandhi. Even before he was imprisoned, Ghose highlighted as the moral of the Gītā a mode of action that was cosmic, in sharp contrast to Gandhi's view. Even before he depersonalized it, Ghose conceived of instrumental service to the divine as impersonal. He spoke of himsā and even of “act[s] of hate” (BCL 1.125) in terms that were occasionally visceral but that always implied a certain distance between self and other. By contrast, for Gandhi the play between himsā and ahimsā occurs intimately because the conception of moral action he derives from the Gītā demands that one treat others, including nonhuman beings, personally. This “personal” view of moral action demands that one never treat bodies other than one's own instrumentally, because one must respect the moral personality of all creatures (cf. Skaria Reference Skaria, Pandian and Ali2010a, 164; 2002, 374–6). Hence, Gandhi's personalism is not simply a matter of immediacy. Service to the totality of life does take place by the intimate action of one embodied soul on another, but more pertinently, Gandhi accords moral personality throughout the economy of nature because all creatures partake of soul-force. As we see in the next section, the distinction between Ghose's cosmic and Gandhi's intimate scales of himsā parallels this difference between depersonalized and personalized living beings, between metaphysical and highly moralized conceptions of life.

FOSTERING LIFE: DIVERGENT BIOLOGICAL VIEWS

If himsā necessarily accompanies all action, then even conscientious action in the name of ahimsā will violate life, at least collaterally. If, however, as Gandhi and Ghose accepted, the Gītā enjoined action as a sacred duty, then this economy of himsā poses a dilemma to the conscientious agent: How does one discipline inevitable violence such that a seemingly great harm is produced strategically in one place, for overall less harm elsewhere?

Certainly political actors in fin-de-siècle South Asia were constantly trying strategically to balance short-term pain with longer term gain (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty, Hardiman and Mukharji2012, 47); however, from Ghose's and Gandhi's perspectives, these political actions were not governed by a total perspective on life and harm. British medical interventions may have aimed to prevent bodily destruction, but administrators such as Rand unwittingly magnified himsā spiritually. Conversely, extremists like Chapekar read the message of the Gītā as enjoining them to respond to the colonizers’ polluting acts with militant violence, but their deliberate himsā was short-sighted. As Gandhi put it, “the principle of clinging to life in all circumstances betrays cowardice and is the cause of much of the himsa that goes on around us and blind adherence to this principle is bound to increase instead of reducing himsa” (MPW II.222). Whether expressed by the British or by Chapekar, the egoistic love of survival—life for life's sake—mocks ahimsā and produces greater total harm.

The terrorist Chapekar's assassination of Plague Commissioner Rand drew dramatic attention to the Raj's alien attitude toward Indian life both before and after the British designated a health emergency. At first content to let Indian bodies weaken and die, imperial agents reacted only when the plague risked spreading to the British population (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty, Hardiman and Mukharji2012). Assuming exceptional powers in Pune under the Epidemic Diseases Act, Rand ordered direct medical interventions: Colonial officials were authorized to conduct house-by-house searches for plague suspects, to institute cordons sanitaires that disrupted train and boat travel, and to destroy property and resettle entire neighborhoods and villages suspected of harboring plague. Although Indians regarded such acts as heavy-handed, it was the forcible quarantine of those infected with plague and the mandatory disinfection of others that caused the greatest distress, because these actions entailed callous bodily invasions. Devout Indians of many faiths perceived these acts as personal and domestic violations that abstracted each body “as a secular object, not as sacred territory, as an individual entity, not as an element integral to a wider community. The body, moreover, was exposed not just to the ‘gaze’ of Western medicine but also to its physical touch, an intrusion of the greatest concern to a society in which touch connoted possession or pollution” (Arnold Reference Arnold, Guha and Spivak1988, 414, 396). Although Rand's measures were effective in preserving lives by forcing Indians to conceive daily life in epidemiological and medical terms, they came at a high cost to devout communities—a cost Rand himself was made to bear. Meanwhile, Indian terrorists such as Chapekar upheld spiritual community, but seemed to have no higher pledge than mere Hindu survival. Chapekar, later described as “ultra-orthodox” in an official report on conspiracies against the Raj (Rowlatt et al. Reference Rowlatt1918, 13), seemed to hold that Hindu life would thrive if impediments to orthodoxy were simply removed. He and his brother thus terrorized British adherents of Christianity and middle-class Hindu reformers alike (Heehs Reference Heehs1993, 8–12).

Contra the Raj's initial policy of nonintervention, then, Ghose and Gandhi valued Indian lives; yet, contra Chapekar, they argued that Hindu flourishing required more than eliminating obstacles to Hindus’ physical survival: It would require renewing Hinduism in light of biology so as to nurture a spiritual life force beyond, yet by way of, the material body. It is easy to see that Gandhi would have objected to Chapekar's assassination of Rand as wanton himsā. Ghose would have objected to it too, although not because he barred acts of violence (Heehs Reference Heehs1998). Rather, Chapekar's reactive politics was regrettable because it was driven by disconnected blind strivings for Indian life and Hindu devotion; his politics did not integrate body and spirit.

In this context, then, both Gandhi and Ghose draw on biology to systematize and support the ideals each derived from the Gītā and to attain the enlarged view that British administrators and Hindu extremists lacked. Modern biological ideas allow Gandhi and Ghose to update an “ancient” Hindu reverence for life so that they can determine more precisely the detrimental and beneficial effects of harmful action on other lives. When Gandhi bids, from his reading of the Gītā, that a soul abnegate its body for another, he is making a claim about the preservation of life underwritten by a theory of religious qua biological trusteeship, expressed practically in hygiene, diet, and ecology: In God's economy, the soul, as steward, must conserve its own and others’ bodies (although it may sacrifice its body to convert another soul). For Ghose, all lives are instruments of divine work. On his reading of the Gītā, an agent expresses the divine principle by striving to extirpate egoistic resistance to nature. Doing so, one may destroy, preserve, or create others or be destroyed, preserved, or re-created (as an avatar). Because he values physical bodies as vehicles of a life greater than themselves, Ghose draws not on practical biology but on vitalism, organicism, and evolution, theories that elevate a life principle above material reality and thus allow that wasting some bodies may promote life in an overall economy of nature.

Life, for Gandhi, owes its sanctity to being entrusted by God, and he traces this obligation of trusteeship to the importance that the Gītā, on his reading, places on aparigraha, nonpossession. Humans, he recommends, ought to act with the understanding that they occupy their own bodies as trustees: “If we look upon our body as the property of the world and use it so, we would retain our control over it but always keep it clean . . . in a spirit of dedication to God. It would give us profound happiness if in using it we act as its trustees or guardians” (37.143). All creatures are, on God's sufferance, the stewards of each discrete living body. Humans, as consciously moral, therefore hold greater responsibilities, indeed positive duties that they would realize through conversion to ahimsā: to keep pure the bodies they hold on trust, to improve living conditions for others, to secure the living from death, and also to minimize humans' impacts within the total economy of life.

If one's body belongs to the world, then the soul—as God's agent and the world's steward—must maintain that body and preserve it from impurity. The practical, biological complements to the theory of trusteeship are diet and hygiene. I do not rehearse Gandhi's well-known dietary reforms here (see Alter Reference Alter2000), but two points are worth noting. First, his experiments with fruit-based diets and other regimes were in part intended to cleanse the body entrusted, not belonging, to him. Second, these practical health therapies were biologically informed, although by Gandhi's enthusiasm for popular rather than academic science (L. Gandhi Reference Gandhi2006, ch. 4).

Gandhi's projects for sanitary reform in the shadow of plague expressed this purifying impulse communally. Although he recognized basic tenets of scientific epidemiology (Alter Reference Alter2000, ch. 1), Gandhi interpreted them as an expression of the moral-political self-conduct of Indian communities in the British Empire. Proper disposal of refuse and human waste, especially in close quarters, spared the Indian community from disease while also winning the respect of administrators and settlers. By conforming to British public health standards under Gandhi's leadership, the Indian community in South Africa preempted the brutal medical interventions of colonial administrators that had caused Chapekar and others such violent resentment. Hygienic reform also persuaded “slovenly” Indians to preserve and value their lives (Gandhi Reference Gandhi and Desai1993, 217). By modernizing the spiritual goal of purity through diet and hygiene (cf. Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty, Hardiman and Mukharji2012, 48), Indians would prevent death while also proving their capacity for swaraj, or self-rule, understood as moral self-conduct yet also as political independence: “In a well-ordered society the citizens know and observe the laws of health and hygiene” (CW 81.364).

Although trusteeship entails caring for one's own body, one may not improve it selfishly in a way that taxes the rest of the world, as the British were prone to do. The soul must purify this body yet restrain its action through ahimsā. Yet the Gītā suggested to Gandhi that ahimsā cannot be worldly renunciation. Not mere reduction, nonharm has an activist component, namely, serving other living beings. Gandhian ahimsā thus transforms features of Hindu and Jain tenets into a modern idiom of ecology. Gandhi learned from the poet Rajchandra Ravjibai Mehta the spiritual tenets behind Jains’ elaborate practices in regard to living beings. Though Hindus too strove to practice ahimsā, many included within its purview justifiable or inevitable harm (Parekh Reference Parekh1999, 124–7). Thus ahimsā might include killing a deadly snake that was threatening one's community. Rajchandra instilled Jainism's stricter standard: Ahimsā's significance lay in avoiding harm altogether. Refracted through Gandhi's acceptance of this spiritual goal are two ecological premises (cf. Godrej Reference Godrej2012): first, a conception of the totality of living beings as forming an interdependent economy wherein creatures generate direct or indirect harm to others; and second, a concession that no acting body, without exception, can completely escape destroying other bodies. The practical dilemma for an ecologically-cum-spiritually conscientious agent is to maximize the nurturing of other lives while minimizing the destruction of life in the very act of doing so. Yet how can one minimize himsā while practically serving others via a perishable body that lives on life and crushes or crowds out others in finite inhabited space?

In answer to such a question, Gandhi advocated two ascetic practices, sexual abstinence and fasting, which he framed as simultaneously religious and ecological. Both abstinence and fasting impose austere self-limitation through the strict control of sensuality. Fasting thus complements his vow of brahmacharya, which in a narrow construal denotes sexual chastity but for Gandhi designates “control of the senses in thought, word and deed” (1993, 210). Both brahmacharya and fasting support the struggle to govern fractious senses, but they are not self-directed only. Both contribute to what Gandhi calls “God's economy” in that the soul restrains the body not egoistically but altruistically. Thus Gandhi argues against sexual reproduction primarily out of concern for other creatures. For new life harms existing lives by taxing resources within the scarce economy of nature. Moreover, by circumscribing moral actors’ attention within family units, procreation also actively distracts them from “public service” to other living beings (206).

Fasting, too, would produce beneficial effects both spiritually and ecologically. To indulge sensually, to consume more than the minimum necessary for bodily preservation, and to relish food as pleasure all effectively decrease what remains to other living beings within nature's scarce economy. Humans as moral creatures therefore must always partially fast:

Continuous partial fasts and occasional total fasts chastise the bodily senses while also promoting the providential effects of “God's economy” on other living beings collectively. Such moral action necessarily and sufficiently defines humanness and elevates humans from beasts (1993, 317). Gandhi states programmatically that ecologically pure self-conduct puts one closer to God:

Godly are they who pity even germs, insects, and vegetable life. They would not kill a snake out of fear or neighborly concern; ahimsā lies in fearlessly alerting others of its presence so they can avoid it. At the same time, godly individuals recognize the inevitability of himsā, of harm and violence: They may boil water, delouse themselves, or sustain themselves by austere vegetarianism so long as their confined acts of inevitable himsā benefit not themselves but others (II.266, 268). “Such persons will commit even unavoidable violence most hesitatingly, and limit, not expand, the scope of their activities, so much so that they will not use any of their powers for selfish ends. They will use all their energies for public service, dedicating to God everything they do” (II.347).

As morally progressive trustees of life, humans may approximate godliness qua truth through the abnegation of egoism and service to all creatures. Nearing godliness, however, categorically bars two kinds of acts. First, one can never presumptuously play the divine martyr and seek one's self-destruction thoughtlessly (Gandhi Reference Gandhi and Parel1997, 147). Proper courage in the stewardship of life involves sacrificing one's own life only if the love one displays in risking oneself for another serves to convert him away from brute force to soul-force. The tradeoff of such self-sacrifice is not even but rather produces a net gain: Although a new convert to ahimsā replaces the agent who sacrificed herself, the conversion nonetheless subtracts one agent from the side of brute force. So while the level of ahimsā remains stable, the subtotal of himsā in the world is diminished.

Second, just as truth does not allow foolish self-destruction, it also proscribes destroying others even in the name of strategic stewardship. Deliberate creative destruction of others is God's purview alone: Only “He who creates may destroy, for even through destruction He creates” (MPW II.212, 254–5). Humans can never presume to occupy God's position and claim justifiable himsā for their acts. However, causing utterly nonegoistic pain or death to another—for example, one who is terminally suffering—can be consistent with ahimsā, even its “purest form,” when judged lucidly and soberly “with a view to [the creature's] spiritual or physical benefit” (II.273). Gandhi thus rejects arguments, such as Ghose's, that legitimate—and spiritualize—violence based on animal predation in nature. First, such arguments presume to know God's workings. Beasts may lack restraint, but humans misjudge animal violence from ignorance of “what part the many so-called noxious creatures play in the economy of Nature” (II.268). Humans therefore ought never to kill other creatures, whether for food or politics. Second, arguments from predation forget that humans differ from other creatures. Endowed with morality, humans bear a special burden, then, in that they must consciously advance the workings of God's economy by fostering other beings’ lives through the soul-force's abnegation of brute force (II.268).

Although for Gandhi all life is held as a trust from God, so that moral beings must not destroy what they did not create, Ghose insisted that humans cannot foster a superior level of being unless they become conscious participants in divinity as manifest in the processes of destruction and creation in nature. Against Gandhi's practical-mindedness, Ghose cast his arguments for creative destruction by drawing on biological theory, which gave him a language for arguing that the Indian life that needed to be fostered did not reside in individual bodies at all. Vitalism, organicism, and evolution suggested to him that life exceeds the discrete beings that are its constituents. Vitality is a force more subtle than the gross materiality of bodies.

Although most commentators on Ghose do not engage in sustained analysis of his biological idioms (Singh Reference Singh1963, 83; Varma Reference Varma1960, 298–9), vitalism was central to his thought, though his Hindu metaphysics always pushed him beyond its European frame. Philosophical vitalism came to prominence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe to contradict strict materialist arguments, which reduced life to physicochemical mechanisms. Life, on the vitalist view, did not consist in material quanta in regular Newtonian movement, but was instead an ineffable force (Jones Reference Jones2010). Henri Bergson gave scientific vitalism a philosophical footing by deducing an élan vital, a vital force, continuously driving animate matter yet exceeding its constituents. Whereas Julien Offray de La Mettrie made each individual life the result of physical mechanisms, and Herbert Spencer made the life of the species a result of the survival of the fittest, Ghose adopted vitalism because it imputed a life force that transcended and governed these automatic reflexes of bodies and collectivities.

Moreover, just as élan vital escaped matter, intuition surpassed logical rationalism, Bergson argued, in that the former synthesized into a unitary whole what the latter analyzed into discrete moments. For Ghose, Friedrich Nietzsche, too, presented an important challenge to nineteenth-century materialism as well as to social Darwinism by developing a “novel and profound vitalism” in his “theory of the . . . Will to Power as the root and law of life.” Thus, Ghose notes, “the Age of Reason” is being surpassed by “dynamic ideas such as Nietzsche's Will-to-live, Bergson's exaltation of Intuition above intellect or the latest German philosophical tendency to acknowledge a suprarational faculty and a suprarational order of truths” (BCL 15.26, 18–9). Drawing on vitalism, intuition, and suprarationalism, Ghose recognizes that beyond the “Life-Principle working in and upon the conditions of Matter and applying to it its own laws, impulses, necessities,” there is “a still mightier Mind working in Life and upon it” in its own turn (17.228). Ghose appreciates the novel trends in modern European thought because they parallel the “synthetic character and embracing unity of the Indian religious mind,” which is able to intuit a suprarational divine will transcending and unifying reality from its manifold material forms and mental representations (14.136). By contrast, materialist rationalism eliminates the expression of divine inspiration and creativity from living reality.

In elevating vitalism over materialism, Ghose identifies human aggregates in organic rather than mechanistic terms, which echoes a broader transition in nineteenth-century European political theory (Cheah Reference Cheah2003, 25–34). His adoption of organic thinking assimilates human collectivities to animate organisms by showing how each necessarily obeys nature's principle that life lives on life. “Vital organisms” survive through interchange or by devouring others. However, humans, endowed with mind, can progressively overcome mortal voracity or morbid parasitism because they can thrive by social growth:

By gradual mental refinement, humanity—nature's “thinking instrument”—can master nature rather than reflexively submit to its movements (15.262). Hence, in Ghose's organic vision, aggregations either mindlessly obey nature and survive by dint of voracious or parasitic martial conquest, or they strive to perfect nature, to fulfill a higher purpose by unifying into larger bodies whose very vitality derives from more richly sustaining the organic bodies that constitute them. In effect, the first path (that of Spencerian social Darwinism) would paraphrase Jivo Jivasya Jivanam as “life lives by taking lives,” whereas the latter (Ghose's own innovation) would interpret it as “life lives by fostering lives”—even if some are productively killed.

Fusing organismic to evolutionary theory, Ghose describes a progressive arc to international politics whereby nature trains humanity—by subjecting it to the rise and fall of states and empires—to develop the mental control to overcome political qua natural vicissitudes. This evolution of mind leads a creative political evolution of humanity, expressed as a global unity supported by a religion of humanity. Although a real possibility, not merely a pious wish, human unity is nonetheless a distant goal. In the meantime, the social body that best matches human purposes is the nation. As Ghose conceives it, the nation is the organic aggregate that best balances free individual vitalities with collective goals. Because the “perfection of the individual in a perfected society or eventually in a perfected humanity . . . is the inevitable aim of Nature,” then “[a]t the present stage of human progress the nation is the living collective unit of humanity” (BCL 15.269, 285).

Moving from vitalism to organicism to evolution, Ghose reveals his propensity to let the supreme divine principle escape its nested containers: Life eludes and is greater than the parts of a body or its motions; the creativity of the nation eludes and is greater than its living members; finally, the aim of humanity as a whole eludes and is ultimately greater than the vital nation. Consequently, fostering life may ultimately mean letting lesser parts die. Thus despite Ghose's caution that conscious human unification need not cause the death of lesser aggregates, Ghose's sublation of materiality allows for the sacrifice of discrete physical lives. Dialectically sublating matter and spirit into a larger reality, Ghose's theory permits the conclusion that living matter may be destroyed to release and foster its vital spirit, because matter simply is spirit in its “gross” state, spirit that is only primitively evolved (Singh Reference Singh1963, 68). Waste, as a contributor to growth, is an integral component of nature's system that makes the totality of life more fecund.

In subordinating vitalism, organicism, and evolution to a spiritual motive, Ghose synthesizes a politicized neo-Vedantism with strands of European thought (Varma Reference Varma1971, 227–37). The Hegelian unfolding of history as the progressive actualization of Geist was recast by fin-de-siècle Hindu philosophers, who emphasized not a transcendent rational idea but an immanent divine spirit, thus transmuting Hegel's quasi-secular idealism explicitly into a theistic truth higher than mind. Within this milieu, Ghose conjoins Hegel's vision of Geist's dialectical actualization with the immanentist monism of the Advaita school of Vedanta, which held that the apparent multiplicity of phenomena masked a unified divine reality. This synthesis enables Ghose to argue two further points. First, not only is the godhead progressively unfolding itself as the unity of worldly phenomena (evolution) but, consequently, humanity's advancement will depend on its gradually uniting with immanent divinity through a Tantric striving for higher states of consciousness (involution). Both involution and evolution coincide in the- Gītā at the moment Krishna revealed himself and Arjuna received him as Vishnu, the preserver, creator, and destroyer of worlds. Second, Ghose concludes that, politically, the universal goal of unity in and with the godhead requires the flourishing of Indian nationalism, because its expression of spirit counters and sublates brute European rationalism and materialism (Sartori Reference Sartori2008, 142–52). India's vital spiritualism is already evolutionarily closer to divine purposes (BCL 14.129).

Both Ghose and Gandhi subordinated the life of the material body to something spiritually greater, whether soul-force or a suprarational divine principle. Thus, unlike Rand and his staff, neither considered life qua biomedical datum important in itself. Yet unlike Chapekar, they would do more than remove impediments to Hindu survival. Instead, properly Indian political modernity would turn on scrupulously orienting human actions to a divine order that is progressively better grasped through spiritual practices whose finis ultimus is the flourishing of life. Taking seriously what each believed to be the message of the Gītā, their anticolonial theories, based on refracting biological through Hindu ideas, would thus prove more vigilant than either Rand or Chapekar had been about the himsā inevitably effected by human actions. By assimilating biology to Hindu thought, Gandhi's and Ghose's anticolonial theories would promote strategies for Indian, and ultimately all, life to flourish against imperialism's ongoing himsā. For Gandhi this would mean converting, “Indianising,” the British. For Ghose it might mean joining Kali's dance of destruction, from which the Indian nation would be created anew.

ANTICOLONIAL POLITICAL THEORY

Gandhi's and Ghose's political theories have run parallel yet differ at every point. As I showed in the first section, “Gandhi's and Ghose's Gītā,” although they share inspiration by the Bhagavadgītā, they vary in their resolutions of its central dilemma between the duty to enact ahimsā yet the inevitability that action generates himsā. Gandhi resolves the dilemma by arguing that the Gītā taught the gradual conversion of action from brute force to soul-force, whereas Ghose avers that it transcended body and soul and integrated both himsā and ahimsā into right action. In the previous section, “Fostering Life: Divergent Biological Views,” I argued that the idiom of biology, broadly construed, allows both thinkers to comprehend himsā and ahimsā as a totality in which it was possible to intervene systematically rather than blindly. Whereas Gandhi draws on hygiene, diet, and ecology and concludes that the overall effects of one's actions should contribute to the conservation of as many living beings as possible, Ghose finds in the theories of vitalism, organicism, and evolution a language for thinking of vitality as greater than the sum of discrete lives.

In this last section, I show that, from consonant diagnoses of the ills of British imperialism, the two vary on the appropriate means of political resistance and the ultimate end and scope of self-rule. Gandhi's and Ghose's anticolonial strategies diverge because of their disagreement on what fostering life would entail practically and conceptually. Gandhi's refusal and Ghose's willingness to resort to violence in resisting British colonial rule in India derive from the contradiction between the former's emphasis on the unstinting conservation of life and the latter's affirmation that waste is integral to growth in nature. What drives them apart is how—against whom—a political actor may commit himsā to foster Indian life (see Dalton Reference Dalton2000, 4–8, 40–6).

Each starts from a similar position: significantly, that of England's ill health. For Gandhi and Ghose, India did not submit to British imperialism by force of the latter's physical violence. Rather, Britain was not strong but was sick and diseased, and India succumbed to alien rule because it forgot its own proper source of strength. As Gandhi puts it, Britons “have not taken India; we have given it to them” because of Indians’ desire for modern civilization's accoutrements. In “turning away from God” and permitting themselves to catch the disease of modern civilization, Indians forget the moral law of “true” civilization, “that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.” Gandhi, moreover, is clear that not only is the modernity from which England suffers and with which it infects other peoples a “disease”; it also causes novel physical ailments (1997, 39, 42, 67, 34, 36, 62–5). As with voluntarily undertaken reform of communal sanitation, self-rule will protect Indians against empire's heavy hand and its illnesses. Like Arjuna, Indians must cleave to religion and resist irreligion, which “diseases” them to commit himsā.

Whereas Gandhi's political diagnosis has both medical and metaphorical referents, Ghose's vitalism unbinds his reference to disease from bodies. Morbidity signals deeper limitations: “The peoples of Europe have carried material life to its farthest expression[;] the science of bodily existence has been perfected, but they are suffering from disease which their science is powerless to cure” (BCL 1.842). If, for Gandhi, England owed its ill health to abandoning its own spiritual insights for modernity's bodily indulgences—that is, to regression from the truths set forth in its own scriptures (1997, 33, 115)—then, for Ghose, England succumbed to the one-sidedness of its progress: It owed its illness to the physicalism and scientific materialism that were its moral law (BCL 1.714). Its disease was its perfection of unidimensional being. Consequently, Britain's flat materialism could only express itself in the expansive egoisms of capitalism and imperialism (BCL 2.109), which, far from making the English world-historical agents, rendered them unwitting puppets of a higher will. England did not heroically conquer India: “It was placed in her hands without her realising what was being done” (1.844).

Why was it “God's will” that England “should possess India” (BCL 1.844)? Ghose argues that Mother India no longer shielded her children because they abandoned Shakti, the spiritual energy proper to them (BCL 1.59–74; see Gordon Reference Gordon1974, 113–4). God thus willed that Indians should suffer alien British overrule, which would offer a decisive test for India: Would it respond by recovering its spiritual vitality? The test signaled a critical moment in the medical sense, “a question of national life or death”: “Morally and materially [India] has been brought to the verge of exhaustion and decay by the bureaucratic rule,” yet even at the verge of death life could still reassert itself (BCL 1.99). So long as the foreign, thus “inorganic,” bureaucracy's externally imposed mechanicity did not make Indians forget their inner order—much less suffer “self-sterilisation and death” from adopting an alien moral law—then Indian vitality might still resurge and the Indian community might still live “an organic life” (BCL 1.881; 2.36). More explicitly than Gandhi, Ghose refers to the Gītā in connecting moral law to an assertion of Indian vitality: Previous generations, which “aimed at a successful reproduction of Europe in India,” forgot “the deep saying of the Gita, ‘Better the law of one's own being though it be badly done than an alien dharma well-followed; death in one's own dharma is better, it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature.’ For death in one's own dharma brings new birth, success in an alien path means only successful suicide” (BCL 3.36, quoting Gītā 3.35; see van Buitenen Reference van Buitenen1981, 85).

Both Gandhi and Ghose believe Indians could regain health by reorienting themselves to their proper—spiritual—sources of strength, yet they part ways on the mode of political resistance inherent in such reorientation. The earlier discussion of their interpretations of the Gītā gives clues to their divergence. If, for Gandhi, strength lay in bravery, not brute muscularity, and certainly not “force of arms,” then not mere passive resistance but satyagraha—active “soul-force”—should drive anticolonial strategy. Indeed, in resisting British injustice, spirit took such priority over the body that a true warrior would face a cannon rather than fire it. The struggle for self-rule was not a struggle to expel Britons bodily from India but, if possible, to “Indianise”—to convert—them: As consonant with his later interpretation of the Gītā, the struggle was primarily between good and evil within errant souls. If bodily death meant nothing, however, it was only their own lives that true warriors could risk. Strikingly, Gandhi writes, “What we need to do is to kill ourselves. It is a cowardly thought, that of killing others.” Irreligious modern civilization may teach that assassinating empire's agents paves the way to freedom, but Indian civilization, in instilling soul-force, enjoins holy self-sacrifice (1997, 44–5, 93, 73, 77, 90). The satyagrahi selflessly risks dying bodily that other souls may find truthful living (Skaria Reference Skaria, Pandian and Ali2010a). Though executed with a copy of the Gītā in his hands, the assassin Chapekar acted against what Gandhi considered its message. A votary of ahimsā allows himsā against herself alone.

Ghose, too, diminished the import of bodily death and enjoined self-sacrifice. Yet because the spiritual context of his karmayogin's agency differs so starkly from that of Gandhi's satyagrahi, the karmayogin's selfless action ramified on a vaster spatial and temporal scale. Selflessness in a cosmic context means becoming an impersonal instrument of Kali, who enacts the “Power of the Divine Spirit” by creating, destroying, or preserving as appropriate to the moment (BCL 3.354). Obeying no mechanistic general law, Ghose's anticolonial “mystic militarism” (Boehmer Reference Boehmer2002, chs. 2–3; Varma Reference Varma1960, 126) would assert India's national vitality by all available means for the longest possible term. In a moment of stifling alien overrule, all Indians share a collective dharma that subordinates petty egoisms to the project of Indian self-development (BCL 2.410, 37). The dharma of Indians qua nationals is to develop the vital strength of nationalism, whose “cry” is “life, and still more life” (1.645).

Yet the dharma of national self-assertion has two faces. Affirmative self-development may necessitate other-aggression (BCL 2.37). It is not enough to develop national strength when a strangling “despotic foreign bureaucracy . . . has fastened its grip on every detail of our national life.” Absent direct organized resistance, “subject nations” such as India may die. On the whole, such resistance will be passive, especially because the British Raj's mode of oppression is “legal and subtle,” but anticolonial resistance cannot shrink from active armed revolt as necessary: To insist inflexibly on passiveness in the face of imperial violence is unnatural, inhuman, and therefore disrespects the divinity within us (BCL 1.87, 92, 98, 116, 114). To respond, then, some Indians are called to a more specific dharma: karmayoga, a union of outer bodily discipline and inner spiritual intuition that requires ascetic sacrifice of one's personality, even life, to God via the nation. Her ego thus effaced, the karmayogin may render himsā unto others, indeed cause others’ bodily death, but, because she acts as the impersonal instrument of divine and national vitalities, her mortal deeds are not selfish. Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Gītā would thus pertain to her: “The man who slays is only the occasion” of the divine spirit made historical (BCL 3.354). Thus karmayoga does not deontologically forbid violence as would the barren idealism of a saint's inflexible morality; yet nor does it prevoyantly calculate the precise effects of violence, as though “God's way of working” obeyed superficially knowable consequentialist logics, as the blindered materialism of a politician's immediate practicality would have it (3.367; 1.127–28). Perceiving with an “illuminated eye” the true divine reality, the karmayogin ascertains when to create, destroy, or preserve. His choice of tactics will seem incomprehensible to politicians or priests, for “while they reason, he knows” intuitively (3.367–8).

Above all, the karmayogin knows that nature involves waste. Indeed, “what we call waste is one of the most subtle parts of her economy.” The karmayogin's participation in this economy will strike others as prodigal, as senseless as Krishna's advice that Arjuna impersonally annihilate the kingdom to save it (BCL 1.623). Unlike Gandhi's satyagrahi, then, who resists waste and destruction within God's economy of scarcity, Ghose's karmayogin consciously aids Kali, channels her forces, and never impedes them, even if they seem wasteful. Egoistic resistance to nature only causes divine force to build up and overwhelm at a later time, more devastatingly: “Man may help or man may resist, but [God in Time,] works, shapes, overbears, insists.” Such was, for Ghose, Krishna's revelation to Arjuna at Kurukshetra (3.352). Ultimately, the karmayogin's selflessness is not altruistic, less because it may destroy some lives to preserve and create others, than because it benefits future manifestations of vitality, not presently living beings.

Here the conflict between Gandhi's and Ghose's conceptions of the ultimate end of spiritualized anticolonial resistance reveals itself. For Gandhi swaraj starts at individual self-rule: “such Swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself.” Yet individual increments of swaraj may add up to form small-scale communities of home rule—in ashrams and villages—if soul-force governs interactions with other living beings. On this view, spiritual life is life lived by satyagraha, which joins politics and religion in practice as ethical presentations of morally disciplined self-sacrifice in behalf of another (Gandhi Reference Gandhi and Parel1997, 73, 95–6, 146). Satyagraha would convert fellow moral beings to spiritual living by willing ahimsā toward them at the risk of one's own perishable life. As such, means and end do not differ (Mantena Reference Mantena2012); Satyagraha, practiced by means of soul-force, means to beget more truth by winning over its witnesses to more truthful living. Operating intimately on the souls of its witnesses by the present example of willed suffering, Gandhian resistance achieves its end without deferral.

By contrast, for Ghose the end of resistance arrives dialectically because the scope of spiritual life is cosmic: Localized political actions serve as means to a grander synthetic end only indirectly, via the spatiotemporal detour of the antitheses they provoke. In this vast, unfolding process, the higher purpose of a vitally evolving, thus spiritualizing, humanity can subsume or subordinate discrete, present lives as means. Hence, in contradistinction to Gandhi's rejection of deferred ends, Ghose's interlinked economies of violence and vitality condone enacting localized himsā now if, by metaphysical sublation, its effects on self or others eventually provoke an ahimsā deferred in the divine ideal of human unity. Not swaraj, then, but “a still mightier inspiration, a still more enthusiastic and all-conquering faith” is the real end of anticolonial resistance: Merely instrumental in itself, swaraj's purpose is to reveal “God to his people.” Yet this nationalism, rather than impeding final human unity, advances it by degrees. Hence, Indian swaraj, though particular, serves a universal end. The spiritualization of humanity depends on India's revival, even if its resurgent vitality may demand in the last instance the himsā of armed revolt against the British and their collaborators (BCL 1.837, 699). Indirectly, dialectically, the anticipated universal end—the life divine—will have required that some Indians mete out divine himsā and death, a dharma they can no more evade than could Arjuna at Kurukshetra.

This divergence in the temporality of their conceptions of the ultimate ends of resistance, then, causes Ghose and Gandhi to view differently a final point on which they basically agree: India's therapeutic vocation for the world. Gandhi suggests that Indian civilization may teach Britons to rediscover their own—religious—source of strength, thus “benefit[ting] each other and the world.” Likewise, India's civilizationally rooted swaraj models true freedom to a world where freedom has meant “free to hold in bondage the coloured races of the earth” (1997, 115, 150, 185). If truly pure, the example of selfless suffering would convert and cure soul by soul in the present, and these therapeutic effects would cumulatively erode modernity's empire in the near term. Yet, in a sense, edifying consequences for the rest of the world would be nothing more than side effects of India's fulsome, spiritually self-sufficient swaraj.

For Ghose, by contrast, India's spirituality, the particularity of its lived religion, is not itself the ultimate end, though Vedanta is dialectically closest to the realization of “the ancient ideal of the sanātana dharma,” the divination of humanity and the humanation of God. Rather, the spiritualization of humanity will be India's unique contribution to world history. To materialize sanātana dharma and “save mankind,” India must in turn save and then overcome itself politically (BCL 2.17; 1.837, 799). In this dialectic between spiritual and political revolution (1.801), India elevates democracy by modeling it spiritually. Founded on dharma, which sublates the false Western antinomy of rights to duties, “Asiatic democracy” advances political evolution toward the spiritual ideal of unity (1.837, 801, 759). Rather than fixing the ultimate end of resurgence on its perfected particularity, India, the most advanced moment in a grander dialectic, nevertheless sacrifices itself to the universal human destiny. Indian vitality is destined to be overcome in deferral to the higher purpose of a unified association of humanity.