Comment: Gandhi’s concept of Truth and Non-violence. Why was he opposed to modern civilisation? (2003, 20 Marks)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi called his life the story of my experiments with truth, and in politics he treated truth and non-violence as one principle. That same principle explains his rejection of modern civilisation: he judged it untruthful in its goals and violent in its methods.
Part A: Truth and Non-violence
Truth (satya)
- Truth meant more than honest speech: thought, word and deed had to agree. Around 1931 he moved from God is Truth to Truth is God, so that even scripture had to answer to truth.
- No human being holds absolute truth. Drawing on the Jain doctrine of anekantavada, he held that each person sees only a relative truth. The fallibilist conclusion is political: a person who may be wrong has no right to impose his view by force.
Non-violence (ahimsa)
- Ahimsa is the means and truth the end. Since the means determine the end, violence cannot produce a truthful result. In The Doctrine of the Sword (Young India, 1920) he called non-violence the law of our species, as violence is the law of the brute.
- It is active love, not mere abstention: the wrong is resisted while the wrongdoer is respected. Only the non-violence of the brave qualifies; cowardice is worse than violence.
- Satyagraha puts the pair into practice. The resister suffers rather than inflicts harm and aims to convert the opponent, not to defeat him.
Assessment. George Orwell (Reflections on Gandhi, 1949) doubted whether the method could work where opponents simply vanish at night, with no press to record them. Gandhi’s advice to European Jews is the hardest case against him. The UN’s International Day of Non-Violence on 2 October (2007) shows how widely the method has travelled all the same.
Part B: Why He Opposed Modern Civilisation
Hind Swaraj (1909) is his indictment. He called the civilisation satanic and said it was civilisation only in name.
- Wrong measure of progress. Its true test, he wrote, is that people make bodily welfare the object of life. Unending growth in wants leaves no room for self-restraint, and so for swaraj over oneself.
- Violence built into it. The industrial system needs markets and raw materials, so imperialism is its product, not its departure. An industrialised India, he warned in 1928, would strip the world bare like locusts.
- Untruth in its institutions. Lawyers profited from quarrels, doctors from indulgence, and railways spread plague. The modern state rested on organised force.
- Dehumanised labour. Machines that displace labour concentrated wealth and left India’s surplus hands idle. He wanted production by the masses, not mass production.
His opposition was selective: he accepted useful machines such as the sewing machine, and he admired science. Partha Chatterjee places Gandhi at nationalism’s moment of manoeuvre, reading Hind Swaraj as a critique of bourgeois civil society itself.
Limits. Jawaharlal Nehru thought the village backward, and B. R. Ambedkar saw modern law and the city as the Dalit’s escape from caste. Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph showed that Gandhi himself used modern means: the press, mass organisation and publicity.
Relevance. Global Footprint Network put Earth Overshoot Day 2025 at 24 July: humanity now uses nature as if it had 1.8 Earths. This is the arithmetic Gandhi’s locust warning anticipated.
Conclusion
The two parts rest on one argument. Truth needs non-violent means, and modern civilisation fails that test because its ends are material and its methods coercive. Gandhi’s alternative, the self-sufficient village, is weak on scale and caste. His objection is still a strong test for development: its ends must be humane and its means must not rely on violence.