Kama Maclean and Benjamin Zachariah write that the humiliation of colonial rule necessitates violence, citing Fanon’s assertion that violence “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (80). Maclean and Zachariah propose that M. K. Gandhi’s path of nonviolent civil disobedience and refusal to resort to violent means of rebellion lead to communal violence. They cite Fanon again, drawing upon his contention that the apparent invincibility of the colonial power promotes a redirection of violence inward within the colonized society, leading the colonized to turn on one another.

In what follows, I seek to reflect on the relationship between the ideas of Gandhi and Fanon. I argue that attention to the nature of Gandhi’s anticolonialism prompts a different conceptualization of his position on violence than is generally accepted, one that in turn renders the juxtaposition of Gandhi and Fanon both more nuanced and more relevant in considering the enduring question of colonialism in India.

Gandhi, Anticolonialism, and Violence

To make sense of Gandhi’s view on violence in the anticolonial struggle, I contend it is essential to understand his relation to the Swadeshi movement. Kris Manjapra, in his book M. N. Roy Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, writes that figures like Rammohan Roy and Vivekananda started the Bengali Swadeshi movement with a search for a universal time frame that could accommodate the Hindus into the schema of monotheistic religions. It evolved into the radical thought of Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal, who, deriving from Vivekananda, went on to look at the nation as the Mother Goddess (22). Even Rabindranath Tagore was not immune to this tendency, though he interpreted the Mother Goddess not as being confined to the subcontinent but moving through nations (23). Gandhi, in Hind Swaraj, provides a critique of the Swadeshi movement on several fronts: for what he saw as its heteronomy, its recourse to violence, which was an evil of Western civilization, according to him, and its tendency to posit the equivalence of the Indian freedom struggle with that of the Irish, Italian, and French revolutionaries (54).

Gandhi’s critique exposes an innate similarity between Gandhian and Fanonian thoughts: at the heart of their anticolonialism lies a rejection of adopting the values of the colonizer. Their major point of difference addressed here, the question of violence, arises from Gandhi’s religious values, which shaped his politics. Here, Gandhian thought and the Swadeshi ethos are representatives of the amalgamation of religion with politics which emerges as a recurring theme of the Indian struggle for independence.

A crucial text here is Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which reads as a conversation between the Reader and the Editor. Gandhi generally speaks his thoughts in the voice of the “Editor,” while the Reader poses challenges to the Editor’s perspective. Sometimes the role is reversed, reminding one of Socrates’ method of establishing his argument in Platonic dialogues (a possible conscious or subconscious influence, given Gandhi’s interest in Plato and Socrates) by exposing the flaws in the arguments to the contrary through extensive questioning, an ironic connection given Gandhi’s rejection of all things Western in Hind Swaraj. The tie between anticolonialism and Gandhi’s nonviolence is made particularly clear in a section of the text’s discussion on “What is Swaraj?”:

Gandhi sees weakness in Western civilization due to its “irreligion” (34). To Gandhi, strength lies in Satyagraha or Passive Resistance. A passive resister must, according to Gandhi, live a life dedicated to truth, chastity, fearlessness, and poverty. Fearlessness, in the Gandhian schema, is not derived from physical strength but from the ability to stick to one’s code of conduct in the face of adverse conditions.

Fanon and Gandhi: A Comparison

Similar to Gandhi’s rejection of a project for building “Englistan,” Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, too, asks the colonized to develop a psychological distancing and a physiological rejection of the colonizer. The colonized subject is a creation of the colonizer, Fanon argues, and decolonization must dismantle the entire process of this creation. Fanon wants the colonized subject to break free violently from the bondage of colonialism imposed upon them by violence. Gandhi would possibly say that such a reaction was inherently Western, but this is not necessarily true. Violence itself cannot be rejected as alien by any human being, nor can a country plead a complete subscription to its opposite. However, before considering the interdependence of violence and nonviolence, a subtle resemblance between two radically different approaches to the awakening of the strength within the colonized must be taken into account.

One can see Fanon’s vision of anticolonial resistance condensed in the following lines:

[I]t so happens that when the native hears a speech about Western culture, he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up. (43)

Gandhi, describing the fearlessness which is a necessary condition for passive resistance, writes:

It may be as well here to note that a physical-force man has to have many other useless qualities which a passive resister never needs. And you will find that whatever extra effort a swordsman needs is due to lack of fearlessness. If he is an embodiment of the latter, the sword will drop from his hand that very moment. He does not need its support. One who is free from hatred requires no sword. A man with a stick suddenly came face to face with a lion and instinctively raised his weapon in self-defence. The man saw that he had only prated about fearlessness when there was none in him. That moment he dropped the stick and found himself free from all fear. (75)

In effect, the individual continuously has to wield their weapon in both instances to combat the enemy; the question, though, is which weapon best combats the enemy? Fanon and Gandhi, in this instant, are both asking for a radical rejection of the enemy. While for Fanon, the sword gives the colonized the ability to mock the colonizer, for Gandhi, it is the dropping of the stick that enables fearlessness. There is no element of mockery in Gandhi’s conception of resistance; there is, however, an almost obsessive need for introspection and self-scrutiny. This is the personal and spiritual mission that dominates Gandhian anticolonialism.

The understanding of this complexity requires an examination of Gandhi’s relationship with violence. The Bhagavadgītā can be examined to look into the intricate interconnectedness of violence with Gandhi’s philosophy. The Bhagavadgītā, a discourse between the warrior Arjuna and his confidant and counsellor Krishna, is set against the backdrop of the Mahabharata war, but it also preaches the superiority of nonviolence. Gandhi interprets this war to be an allegory. Nonviolence, to Gandhi, is the only way to passive resistance, which is truth force, and this truth force alone can lead to real Swaraj.

The disparity between these two facts is paralleled in the Bhagavadgītā. Vrinda Dalmiya and Gangeya Mukherji write: “The Bhagavadgītā celebrates action but strangely undercuts any sense of the action as ‘mine’. In fact, it goes further to destabilize the very notion of a doer since it is only when befuddled by the ego maker (ahaṃkāra) that we think of ourselves as agents. But without the concept of an ‘agent’, do we have a denial of ‘agency’ altogether or a different conception of it?” (4). Dalmiya and Mukherji conclude that it is not an elimination of the agent and agency, but a refusal to infuse one’s desires and intentions into a consciously endorsed self-identity, which is preached in the Bhagavadgītā. Gandhi made this a touchstone for political agency, with successful political action becoming contingent upon an interiority that includes abstinence and non-violence.

Religion, Caste, and the Anti-colonial Future

If the Bhagavadgītā helps us understand Gandhi’s nonviolence in its anticolonial context, it nonetheless raises other issues calling for further interrogation in assessing Gandhi’s ideas. Crucially, among other things, the Bhagavadgītā also delineates the Caste system, a tenet of the Hindu social makeup with which Gandhi had an intricate, if ambivalent, relationship. Gandhi, in his response to Ambedkar’s critique of the caste system as an innate part of Hinduism, refused to equate caste with the Varna system outlined in scriptures like the Bhagavadgītā.

There seems to be a point of evasion, a moment of elision, in Gandhian thought, something Ambedkar and Sant Ram point out. In practice, at least, Varna and Caste are the same. For Gandhi, it appears, a conclusion can be reached by disregarding certain parts, sweeping the uncomfortable bits under the proverbial rug. The deontological reasoning in the Bhagavadgītā, which focuses on the code of conduct appropriate to the dutiful Kshatriya, urges the reader to fulfil their duty without questioning or inquiring into the consequences of their actions. Gandhi’s selective usage of the Bhagavadgītā for the consolidation of his own thoughts is quite in alignment with the logic of deontology.

Yet it must likewise be noted that the Swadeshi movement looked to the Bhagavadgītā to substantiate their stance on violent protest against the British colonizers, as Haridas and Uma Mukhopadhyay note. Zachariah and MacLean read communal violence as the effect of Gandhian non-violence, but there can be a different conclusion. Nationalist thought in India, through its constant foregrounding of the Hindu upper-caste male ethos, generally adopts a violent attitude toward the marginalized, both in terms of marginalized people and marginalized ideas. It can be argued that this culminates in the communal violence that led to the Partition, rather than the lack of a violent independence struggle.

Fanon’s account of colonized people’s resistance against the colonizers skips no steps; it has a straightforwardness that tackles the reality of decolonization head-on. Yet this was perhaps a far easier task for Fanon’s account to achieve than for Gandhi’s because, in the Algerian context, a palpable tension between multiple religions established prior to colonization was not as dominant a social factor as it was in India. The anticolonial struggle theorized by Gandhi, by contrast, was one in which complex questions of religion proved inescapable. Gandhi was famously assassinated by Nathuram Godse, the rightist extremist, for being allegedly biased toward the Muslims of India. Of course, it cannot be denied that Gandhi’s philosophy is no less a product of Hindu scriptures than that of the Swadeshi movement, although he interprets these differently. 

As such, it is not hard to see why the marginalized communities in colonial India feared majoritarian rule, as majoritarian thought never accommodated the minorities into their grand scheme except as marginal figures. Gandhian thought enables the process of majoritarianism in Indian politics with concepts like the “Harijan,” which literally means “people of God,” for, as Ambedkar points out, it is one thing to say that all human beings are equal before god, but declaring that all humans are equal, is an entirely different proposition that is not part of the Hindu social schema. Fanon provides a perspective that is applicable to Indian anticolonial thought:

All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to them, and which consisted of bringing their whole weight violently to bear upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and finally of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane. (314)

Replacing “European thought” with Indian anticolonial thought and “the great problems of humanity” with the problem of colonialism, one can say the same of the majority of the Indian nationalists. There is a clear recognition of the need for a radical rejection of the colonizer, but there is an absence of the ability to arrive at any conclusive method. This might be because Brahminical Hinduism pervades the anticolonial rhetoric to such an extent that it becomes difficult to separate the two. The crisis of the Indian freedom struggle lies in its failure to negotiate a space for the marginalized sections within the subcontinent. The Partition and the violence born of communal hatred are symptoms of an abiding illness that, far from being cured, is never acknowledged in the first place.

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