ABSTRACT
The following representative excerpts from Harijan are useful in articulating Gandhi’s social and political thoughts during the period of the Indian nationalist movement when he spearheaded the campaign against colonialism. The philosophical foundation of these ideas was not different from that of his earlier conceptualization. The Hind Swaraj continued to remain the primary reference point in the sense that these ideas had their theoretical roots in this seminal text. The ideas in Harijan seem to be different in three ways: first, while the Hind Swaraj was based on his limited experience of satyagraha in South Africa, his responses in Harijan were shaped by the gigantic nationalist struggle that he conceptualized and led in collaboration with those in the Congress holding more or less identical social and political views. Second, the Gandhian ideas in the Harijan were dialectically constituted since they had their roots in constant dialogues with other leading personalities of the era who held views contrary to Gandhi. Although his faith in non-violence remained undiluted, he appears to have adapted his political strategies to accommodate others in the nationalist movement. As shown in Chapter 3, the Mahatma, despite his serious differences with Rabindranath Tagore, M.N. Roy and B.R. Ambedkar, never alienated them by simply dismissing the alternatives they suggested. The 1932 Poona Pact, which was nothing but ‘a trade-off’ between Gandhi and Ambedkar, confirms his unambiguous belief in the national democratic ideology that cemented a bond among classes with contradictory social and economic interests. Similarly, Gandhi’s success in articulating the working-class grievances within the nationalist ideological framework also demonstrates his astute sense of strategy in a context when freedom from colonialism was probably prior to other socio-economic agendas. Third, his writings in Harijan provide explanations for his actions which, to him, were not always goal-oriented, but illustrative of a specific way of life. His life was a series of ‘experiments’ and hence could not be planned in advance. He therefore wrote about his experiments to gain further out of the responses that his experiments usually evoked. It was a dialectical exercise, for the Mahatma always responded to the reactions to his views, published in Harijan. These excerpts are therefore useful in conceptualizing Gandhi, who was not merely
a political activist but a theoretician who evolved his plan of action on the basis of a specific understanding of India as a distinct social, economic and political entity.
