Colin McCormick
ENGL 306
Dr. Brown
December 4, 2016
Final
Draft
Throughout history peace has played a backseat to
violence as a problem solving technique used by human societies when fighting
for a cause. Although this method of conflict resolution may work, the violence
it incites brings into question whether or not other forms of conflict
resolution may be more effective and less harmful. Within this paper I look at
the effectiveness that Mohandas Gandhi had in using peaceful protest as a
conflict resolution rather than violence in the context of overbearing British
Colonial rule.
During British Imperial rule of India Gandhi was a major
influential figure and advocate for the liberation of India from Great Britain.
During this time Great Britain had an “oppressive” rule over India and enforced
heavy tariffs and taxes on the citizens, as well as treating them as second
class citizens unless they were wealthy or nobility. It is due to this type of British
rule that Gandhi became so passionate about liberating India and without this
context it may have never occurred.
The context in which Gandhi performed his acts of
rhetoric was also key in the success of his peaceful movement. Due to their
position in the conflict India was able to utilize the strength of their
peaceful protest by using the advantage of being seen as peaceful victims being
punished by a ‘tyrannical’ British empire. Without this position Gandhi’s
movement may not have succeeded due to his methods relying on the sympathy and
compassion of the people looking towards the actions of India and Great Britain
as well as the feeling that Great Britain did not want to look like merciless,
greedy tyrants. If however British plans were changed and they had instead
decided to wipe out the Indian population, Gandhi’s form of rhetoric would not
have been as effective except to serve as a martyr due to the face that a ‘lay
down and take it’ approach does not really work if the objective of your
opponent is to kill you. Which is why under this context peaceful protest
succeeded, the British wanted to rule over the Indian population therefore any
acts of violence against the peaceful Indian protestors from the British seemed
ruthless on their part.
During the remainder of my paper I will discuss and go
into more detail about the aspects of both the rhetorical and historical
context of my topics as well as provide an analysis of an artifact from this
protest movement.
To fully understand the intricacies of India’s
independence from British rule one must look at the history of the two nations
and their relationship. For over two centuries prior to India’s independence in
1947, they were under imperialistic control of the British Empire starting in
1750 after the success of the East India Trading Company:
The British conquered Bengal in the second
half of the eighteenth century. The East India Company thereby was transformed
from an enterprise primarily serving and protecting the commercial interests of
its presidencies along coastal India and other posts in Asia to a territorial
governor exercising the powers of state in association with its mercantile
responsibilities. This discrete and abrupt change in the fortunes of the
Company marked the start of two hundred years of British imperial rule in
India. It also was the occasion for the reorganization and reform of the
institutions through which the British gradually strengthened the interests of
the home authorities in the administration of Indian affairs. (de Schweinitz
86)
This success along with the division of power
amongst Indian princess at the time created the perfect situation for the
British Empire to take control. Another problem during this time was the
British Empires massive scope of territories to which they had political and
economic influence. During the 19th century other Eastern Asian
countries such as Thailand and China shared in the British Empires disdain and
oppression/opposition of Indian citizens. “The Thai encapsulated their attitude
toward South Asians in a popular saying, still much quoted: ‘On your way, if
you come across a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian first’” (Kratoska 172).
During such an oppressing setting as this the Indian Independence Movement, and
more specifically Mahatma Gandhis’ peaceful outlooks on rhetoric in social
movements took quite some time to develop, however it could be argued that this
oppression also fueled and inspired Gandhi’s teachings.
Mohandas Gandhi born
October 2, 1869 would later become a national figure and leader for the Indian
Independence movement. During his early years Gandhi studied law England and
later practiced this law in South Africa, where he faced prejudice and racism.
The culmination of these events led him back to India in 1915 where “the reins
of the nationalist movement of which he had only been a distant spectator were
to fall into his hands, and were to remain with him until his death” (Nanda
141). Gandhi made his ideals very clear from the beginning, to gain full
independence from the British Empire through peaceful and non-violent acts of
protest and rhetoric. As stated by B.R. Nanda “He was heading a mass struggle,
the avowed purpose of which was to end alien rule. It was an open rebellion,
even though a ‘non-violent’ one” (Nanda 186). During his movement he made it
clear that he was protesting the treatment of British ruled Indians, however he
himself did not hold resentment against the British for driving Indian society
and culture down. Instead he believed that it was the fault of Western culture
carrying on the idea and beliefs of ruling over another people.
Gandhi was not ignorant of the origins and the
basis of the British rule in India. In Hind
Swaraj he had given a merciless analysis of Indian history. The East India
Company’s victories he had attributed to the divisions of the Indian princes.
He had criticized Pax Brittanica; the
peace was in name only, as it had emasculated the Indian nation and made it
cowardly. The railways, the law courts and the educational system had all
served to tighten the stranglehold of the occupying power. This was a scathing
indictment of British rule, but the moral he drew from it was novel: India was
ground down not by the British rule but by Western civilization which had
perpetuated that rule. (Nanda 187-188)
Although Gandhi did
not resent the British for the issues and inequalities they had created, he was
still able to acknowledge that what was happening to India was not in any way
right. These issues included unfair taxes on lower caste Indian citizens, as
well voting rights for only the top wealthiest Indian citizens. This inequality
created the racial resentment held by the British Empire and this is exactly
what Gandhi was fighting against, “As Thomas Munro pointed out, there had been
foreign conquerors who had been more violent and more cruel, but none had
treated Indians with such secret scorn as the British, by stigmatizing ‘the
whole people as unworthy of trust’ (Nanda 141).
Over the course of
this rhetoric movement the protest development occurs over two phases; the inception phase; and the rhetorical crisis phase. Due to the fact
that this protest movement occurred over a span of decades, the events that occurred
can be categorized into these two categories most effectively. Once Gandhi
became involved in the movement in 1915 the phase of inception began as the Mahatma began to share and enact his new
found ideals of peaceful civil disobedience and protest. This alone sparked a
movement for India’s independence one which strove for peaceful resolutions
above all else. As the movement progressed and gained notoriety, Gandhi was
able to successfully draw the eye of the world to the injustices occurring
within India, for example with the Salt March of 19 (Weber), Gandhi
successfully organized a protest march against Britain’s salt taxes, a march in
which Gandhi led followers from Ahmedabad to Dandi on the shore to create their
own salt. After being harassed by British police officers while protesting
peacefully, the British withdrew themselves and called this event a stalemate,
shortly after changing the Salt taxes to prices that are more reasonable.
At the
beginning of the 1900’s a self-aware India began to emerge from the shadow that
was British Imperialism. In 1915 Gandhi returned to India after having spent 21
years in the South African colonies under British rule, these 21 year changed
Gandhi and “his exposure to the injustices experienced by Indian indentured
labour would prove to have a radicalizing effect” (McLaughlan 431). As Robbie
McLaughlan goes onto explain, it was during this time after his return that
Gandhi began to develop his philosophies of passive resistance,
The
philosophy of passive resistance was given the name satyagraha (satya, truth; agraha, insistence) … For Gandhi, satyagraha represents an absolute
refusal to legitimise the presence of Europeans in colonial territories
(McLaughlan 431-432).
As McLaughlan explains,
satyagraha represented everything that the people of India (including Gandhi)
wanted to instill and represent, as well as representing the ideals that they
would never accept. During this time Indian culture was being suffocated by
imperialistic pressure placed on it by the British Empire, their customs,
language, way of life were all dying out to be replaced by Western ideologies
and practices. It is from this problem that Gandhi’s protest started for the
independence of Indian citizens under British Control. As mentioned above
Gandhi’s movement felt no need to accept the presence of Europeans in colonial
territories, and took on the ideals and beliefs to essentially be as polar
opposite as possible to the British and Western Ideals. McLaughlan stipulates
that in Gandhi’s mind violence was a “…European tradition that is fundamentally
alien to indigenous Indian culture. Violence is inherently European, so to
react to violence with yet more violence is an act of legitimizing the logic
and presence of the foreign invader” (McLaughlan 432). Under these ideals,
individuals under this movement believed that any violence used would be a
direct personification of the subjugation they had experienced. Thus the core
ideals and identities of the protest are shown; first, that peaceful civil disobedience
is to always be used in the face of violent oppressors, and two, that the use
of violence to accomplish a goal, stains the credibility by which you have
achieved said goal and furthers the process of colonization through the
assimilation of the oppressor’s culture.
Although there have been many historical accounts of
violent revolts yielding desired outcomes for the parties enacting them, the
identities that Gandhi’s instilled in his teachings attempted to show that a
passive, satyagraha approach to handling a violent adversary can yield the same
if not better results. The argument that McLaughlin makes in his journal is one
to support the idea that as compared to James Connolly’s violent beliefs on how
to gain independence for Ireland from an imperialistic British Empire in the
early 20th century, Gandhi’s methods of civil-disobedience and
non-violence were more effective in disrupting and stopping the Imperial
British Empires reign.
In
refusing to endorse violence, Gandhi establishes a dynamic of conflict between
the colonized and the colonizer that completely disrupts the established order
of being. In doing so, passive resistance ruptures the logic of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British imperialism in a way that is
significantly more traumatic than the militarism adopted by Pearse and
Connolly… Žižek contends that… ‘What Gandhi did, although it was very peaceful
but in a way extremely violent, was to boycott customs, etc. He targeted the
entire structure of the British Colonial State’. The Indian nationalists,
shaped in the image of Gandhi, were successful precisely because they targeted
the basic functions of the British Colonial State as opposed to engaging the
British in an uneven military conflict (McLaughlan 343-434).
During the fight for independence, Gandhi’s movement
clearly voiced their rhetorical goals, which were to fight the injustices that
the British Empire was imposing through the use of non-violent civilly
disobedient acts, such as refusing the payment of taxes, making their own
clothes, and even making their own salt. These acts of civil disobedience were
effective in that because the members of this movement were acting
non-violently, any violence inflicted upon them while peacefully protesting
made the British appear harsh and cruel to the outside world. This concept is
the main idea behind satyagraha and is what makes it effective in resisting
violent colonizers. The notion that using non-violent protest methods actually
works against violent reformation is exactly the end the result that Gandhi’s
movement wanted to shed light upon.
Civil disobedience as an act of protest is the main
rhetorical goal of this movement, however this differs slightly from the
legislative, social, and political goals of Gandhi’s movement. Although these
goals are similar to the rhetorical goal in the sense that all the goals
involve independence from British rule, they differ in the idea that
rhetorically Gandhi wanted his followers to ideologically stay away and
independent from British/Western influence. Whereas the legislative, social,
and political goals of Gandhi’s movement were to become completely independent
from Britain and become their own self governing body so as to create their own
influence. The difference in these goals is ideological, where one is a state
of mind and one is a tangible achievement.
During Gandhi’s independence movement a key factor to the
success of his protests was the context in which each was placed. The reason
context plays such an important role is because within certain contexts,
Gandhi’s non-violent forms of protest would not be affective, for example if
the end goal of a violent entity or country is to eradicate another people, it
would most likely not be in the best interest of those ‘people’ to just
peacefully lay back and allow them to succeed in eradicating them. However,
under the circumstances of a violent oppressive imperialistic force, the
context is perfect for Gandhi’s methodology due the oppressors want to stay and
maintain a presence/ruling over the resources and people within the colonized
nation by using force, and fear. The difference between the two contexts in a
broader scope is that under one context the oppressing force has no remorse for
the actions they inflict upon the oppressed and only care about their end
goals, whereas in the other context the oppressing force must take into
consideration remorse, as well as outside speculation on the actions they
commit as a ‘parent’ nation.
The methodology that Gandhi used, and the movement that
he started was a revolutionary thought at the time and gained publicity
worldwide. This in part helped to support Gandhi’s movement by shedding light
(globally) on the social inequities and injustices occurring to colonialized
Indians. It also brought Gandhi’s followers closer together under the unified
cause of satyagraha when placed under the global spotlight. And ultimately
Gandhi’s teachings inspired individuals to be proud and to be determined in
holding fast to a non-violent form of protest.
From a movement with such an impact it is clear that in
the context that it was placed, Gandhi’s non-violent ideologies and satyagraha
were very effective in enacting change for the colonized Indian people. Due to
this context Gandhi and his followers identities could be fully voiced in a
manner that acted towards a common goal, and thus shows that certain identities
can be articulated better under certain situations that suit the ideologies
being represented. In this case the identity of peaceful protest was
articulated most effectively under the circumstances of an oppressive colonial
rule.
Overall peaceful protest is very effective in performing
acts of civil disobedience geared towards change on a social or political level
when facing violence. Although it may have its exceptions in usage, peaceful
acts of protest can be seen as a very effective at making a point as well as
avoiding (usually) all violence and should be utilized whenever appropriate.
Many would argue that there are times and places where violence is unavoidable,
and I would agree with them, my point is not that non-violent forms of protest
are the only suitable ways to protest. It is that given the option, finding a
non-violent resolution to a conflict seems much more preferable than any option
involving violence or bloodshed.
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