I

Immediately after the Amritsar Congress of December 1919, Gandhi joined issue with the Indian nationalist leader Balagangadhar Tilak, or Tilak Maharaj, or the Lokamanya (as he was popularly called), on the question of the nature of modern politics. He cited Tilak as someone whose understanding of politics was opposed to his:

Opposing the idea that it could be “proper” for leaders of political parties “to use others as tools so long as there are any to be used,” Gandhi recommended that the ‘right course” would lie in taking care to “purify our politics.”

Tilak disagreed with Gandhi's understanding of his—Tilak's—conception of political action. “[Y]ou have represented me as holding that . . . everything [was] fair in politics. I write . . . to say that my view is not correctly represented herein. Politics is a game of worldly people and not of Sadhus [renouncers; holy men].” A “sadhu,” Tilak suggested, using a supposedly Budhhist maxim, was someone who sought to conquer anger. “I prefer,” he said, “to rely on the maxim of [the god] Shri Krishna,” who tailored his responses to particular devotees by keeping them “in perfect harmony with the manner of their own approach.” “Any further explanation of the difference,” said Tilak in conclusion, “will be found in my Gita-Rahasya.” In riposte, Gandhi explained his differences even further.

Gandhi proceeded to explain why in his view sadhus should not keep out of politics. “The epitome of all religions,” he wrote, “is to promote Purushartha [Hindu ideas regarding the ends of life], and [to become] Sadhu, i.e. to become a gentleman in every sense of the term.”Footnote ¹ One did not have to cease to be a truly gentle person simply because one had embraced politics.

Dhananjay Keer, who reports this exchange in his 1959 biography of Tilak, points to the apparent fallacy in Gandhi's logic: “Tilak said: ‘Politics is a game of the worldly people and not sadhus.’ Gandhiji put a wrong interpretation . . . when he said [i.e. quoted Tilak as saying]: ‘Sadhus have no place in the world!’”Footnote ² And Keer then goes on to provide this gloss on the difference between Tilak's and Gandhi's positions. According to Tilak, he says, “sadhus ought not to pollute themselves by contact with the worldly game of politics”;

We can distill from this account two positions as to how the question of being a moral person—the sadhu—in the domain of politics may have been seen in this argument between Gandhi and Tilak. Tilak was not arguing against morality per se. His position, in Keer's interpretation, was that even the most moral of people had to compromise their principles at times—get “polluted,” as Keer put it—in pursuing political objectives. Tilak's one important requirement from the ethical politician, however, was that even such compromise would have to be strictly “selfless,” that is to say, they must not bring any personal benefits to the person who knowingly compromised his morality in the interest of achieving a political gain. The compromise was merely an act of recognition on his part of the intrinsically worldly nature of politics. One could be ethical in the political domain but one could not escape being worldly. A sadhu, on the other hand, would be absolutely uncompromising about his other-worldly values and would thus be unfit to play the political game. He saw Gandhi in the image of this figure of the sadhu. Gandhi would not approve of violating his own values if even such violation were required in some higher, public, and unselfish interest. He would rather change the very nature of politics itself. The task, as he wrote in responding to Tilak, was to “purify politics.”

This exchange took place in 1920. We begin our discussion of how Gandhi read the Gita with this story because many commentators on Gandhi's reading of this text have worked with a stated or unstated assumption that “purifying” or reforming the very nature “politics” was Gandhi's lifelong mission. Many aver that Gandhi was a saint in political garb or vice versa. Note, for instance, an observation by Bradley S. Clough who writes on the authority of the historian Judith Brown that Gandhi's prolific discussions of the Gita in the years from 1920 to 1936 show “that at this point in his life, religion was more important to Gandhi than politics, though she [Judith Brown] is quick to acknowledge that the two would become inseparable for him.”Footnote ⁴ Clough puts Gandhi's reading of the Gita squarely within this interpretive framework: “Further evidence that Gandhi was using the Gita to create the marriage of politics and religion, for which he is so well known, is that he and his fellow satyagrahis carried copies of the Gita with them on his famous ‘salt-satyagraha’ in 1930.”Footnote ⁵ We offer a different argument about the Mahatma's use of the Bhagavad Gita.Footnote ⁶

In parenthesis, we should clarify that whether or not Tilak and Gandhi challeged liberal conceptions of citizenship or politics, whereby politics becomes an area where rules enable groups or individuals to pursue their legitimate interests, is not the principal question animating this essay. It is an important question but it does not interest us here except tangentially. The so-called Extremists such as Tilak and Aurobindo espoused a romantic and moral conception of political action as action in strictly public interest and surely looked down upon action based on self-interest as less moral. In that sense, they would have been opposed to any interest-based idea of politics. Gandhi's personal values also would not have chimed with the liberal talk of pursuit of self-interests. But our point is different. It is to make a distinction in the history of Gandhi's relation to politics before and after, roughly, 1920. Gandhi before the 1920s may have fundamentally agreed with Tilak et al. in finding self-interest-based action morally unappealing. He would have spoken of “reforming politics.” But we argue that Gandhi's discussions of the Gita in the 1920s actually show that he made a twofold move in the later period: he accepted politics for what it actually was—an arena for pursuit of self-interest by groups and individuals, and hence sought in the Gita the means that would protect a satyagrahi like him from the venality of this domain while allowing him to be fully involved in it. Gandhi's use of the Gita thus marks a departure from the age of Tilak and Aurobindo and he may have been the first national politician to accept Indian politics as it actually was (including strands of liberalism), and the Gita was the text that enabled him to do that.

Our approach takes into account the importance of the political context in understanding why Gandhi interpreted the Gita the way he did in the 1920s. We suggest that Gandhi's relation to politics was an evolving one and that his commentaries on the Gita in the 1920s are instructive in this regard. It is a well-known fact that Gandhi's first encounter with the Gita occurred in 1889 when two theosophist brothers invited him to read the text in Sir Edwin Arnold's translation. But, as J. T. F. Jordens has emphasized, Gandhi's “own interpretation of the Gita started only after his return to India in 1919, and was fully and definitively articulated by 1925.”Footnote ⁷ Between 1926 and 1932, writes Clough, Gandhi “devoted three works totaling roughly 360 pages to translating and commenting on the Gita,” mainly “in response to questions from ashramites at his Satyagraha Ashram . . . in Sabarmati”Footnote ⁸ These were the years when Gandhi's involvement in Indian politics was at its most intense. Not only is this political context crucial to any non-theological discussion of Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita—on this many would agree with us; but, in addition, we actually find it intellectually unhelpful to freeze Gandhi into the picture of a man who—as in his moment of conversation with Tilak—could not or would not distinguish between religion and politics by wanting to purify and spiritualize the latter. In what follows, we put forward a different hypothesis. We argue that Gandhi's comments on the Gita, in particular the ones he made in the 1920s, actually suggest that his idea of “purifying politics” underwent a remarkable transformation after the Non-Cooperation movement.Footnote ⁹ Not only did he move away from the idea of purifying politics, he actually found in the Gita a means of protecting himself (and those like him) from the corrupt practices of politics while being immersed in political action. In other words, unlike Tilak and Aurobindo, the Gandhi of the 1920s did not look on political action as such as something capable of being inherently ethical—he did not demand of a Jinnah, Subhas Bose or an Ambedkar, for instance, that they be ethical on his terms; his question rather was: how would someone like him struggle to pursue the highest end of life, moksha, while engaged full-time in political action? The object of his moral exercise was not the political domain as such—which remained an area where worldly interests clashed—but the very self of the “political missionary” (more on this expression later). The aim of reading and discussing the Gita daily was to transform the text into the satyagrahi's talisman. There was no longer a project of “purifiying” politics. Rather, the project was constantly to purify, and thus shield, the self of the satyagrahi who entered the political fray as part of necessary action in life. This, we may say, was Gandhi's way of accepting politics as it actually was.

II

Many a Hindu nationalist in the early decades of the twentieth century had used the Gita as a source text for political philosophy. The text itself was rediscovered, so to speak, in the colonial period, thanks to the interest it had generated among different sections of European and American readership—colonial officials, missionaries, romantics, transcendentalists, and others.Footnote ¹⁰ The text had been interpreted before by “ancient” and “classical” Indian interpreters but, as Eric Sharpe reminds us, before the 1880s it was “the Krishna of the Puranas [who] had the upper hand on the charioteer-god of the Gita in the wider community of Vaisnavism; while in Shaiva and Shakta circles the emphasis lay elsewhere.”Footnote ¹¹

Reading the Gita for ideas about what might constitute proper action in this world was something Gandhi shared with other nationalists of the turn of the century: Tilak, Aurobindo, and the so-called Extremists in India and Europe. As early as 15 June 1897, on the occasion of the Shri Shivaji Coronation Festival, Tilak's journal Kesari discussed the murder of the Mughal general Afzal Khan by the seventeenth-century Maratha king, Shivaji. Justifying the ethics of Shivaji's actions the Kesari raised the question: “Did Shivaji commit a sin in killing Afzal Khan?” “The answer,” it said, “can be found in the Mahabharata itself. Shrimat Krishna's teaching in the Bhagavat Gita is to kill even our teachers and our kinsmen.” And, as if to anticipate what Tilak said to Gandhi in 1920, it added,

It ended with a call: “Get out of the Penal Code, enter into the extremely high atmosphere of the Bhagavat Gita, and then consider the actions of great men.”Footnote ¹² Tilak would, of course, go on to write his magnum opus Gita Rahasya in the Mandalay Jail “in the Winter of 1910–1911,” wherein he would argue, against the venerable Shankaracharya and other ancient and modern commentators, that the Gita is “essentially a treatise on Right or Proper Action (Karma-Yoga).”Footnote ¹³

Sharpe is correct to observe that the “overtly political period in the history of Gita interpretation was not of long duration and its extremist phase was even shorter, lasting no more than half a dozen or so years.”Footnote ¹⁴ The tendency was at its most intense around the period of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal (1905–8) when the Congress split into its so-called Moderate and Extremist wings. For example, Savarkar's introduction to his Marathi biography of Mazzini that was published from Poona in April 2007 “emphasised the importance of elevating politics to the rank of religion.”Footnote ¹⁵ Sharpe is helpful with some of the dates here. Between 1905 and 1910, Aurobindo “wrote and spoke repeatedly about the Gita,” as in the journal Bande Mataram of 26 December 1906: “Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin, and aggression as a lowering of morality.”Footnote ¹⁶ Aurobindo's references to the Gita became more intense in tone after May 1909, when he was acquitted in the Alipore conspiracy case. In his famous Uttarpara speech of 30 May 1909, he spoke of the conversion-like experience he had had on reading the Gita in jail (Sharpe thinks his familiarity with the text was shallow before). Aurobindo spoke of Lord Krishna demanding “of those aspiring to do His work . . . to renounce self-will and become a passive and faithful instrument in His hands . . . I realised what the Hindu religion meant.” Krishna had granted him this vision and said, “I am the nation and its uprising and I am Vasudeva.”Footnote ¹⁷ In this phase of his life, he equated sanatan dharma with nationalism and described the latter as “not a mere political programme [but] . . . a religion that has come from God.”Footnote ¹⁸ Aurobindo would go on later to propound a more philosophical interpretation of the Gita, influenced, it seems, by his reading of Nietzsche, whereby the Gita would be seen as the call to enjoin the strife of life in a determined and practiced “state of inner poise.”Footnote ¹⁹ But that is a different story and a very different chapter in the history of modern Indian interpretations of the Gita.

This much, however, is clear: that in the first decade of the twentieth century, Tilak, Aurobindo, and many other so-called Extremists tended to equate their ideal definition of political action with the karma-yoga which they claimed constituted the core of the spiritual message encoded in the Gita. To act for all, which is what the nationalist aspired to do, was to act in accordance with the Gita. Even violence, when it was strictly unselfish and was in the interest of “all,” could constitute proper action. The ideal political activist had the Gita as his political-philosophic guide. During his “last couple of years of activity in Bengal,” says Sharpe, Aurobindo emphasized the karmoyogin aspect of the Gita. To his brother, Barindrakumar Ghosh, a radical political activist of the Swadeshi years, the Gita was as important as the manufacture of bombs.Footnote ²⁰ This philosophy that equated ideal political action with the conception of action upheld in the Gita finds a sharp expression in what Aurobindo wrote in an article published in the journal Karmayogin shortly before he abandoned his political career:

A similar reading of the Gita inspired those members of the India House in London, Krishnavarma and Savarkar the most noted among them, who, contemporaneously with Tilak, Aurobindo and Bipin Pal in India, sought to liberate the country through violent means. Like Tilak, or perhaps inspired by him, they also used the episode of Shivaji's killing of Afzal Khan as an example of the kind of action they claimed was supported in the Gita. “Every student of Indian history,” noted Krishnavarma, “knows that Shivaji, the founder of the Mahratta Empire, assassinated Afzal Khan and thus winning the practical supremacy in Southern India earned for himself the respect and esteem of all Hindus.” Citing India's “ancient history and literature,” they argued that “political assassinations are not foreign to the religious principles of Indians . . . Rama and Krishna, who are popularly regarded by Hindus throughout India as incarnations of the Deity, are chiefly remembered for killing the tyrants Ravana and Kansa respectively.” The British viceroy had described revolutionary violence as “hideous crimes” which were “contrary” to Indian “precepts and instincts of humanity and . . . loyalty.” This group of activists argued instead that there was a long tradition of rightful violence in India, from the days of the Mahabharata to the 1857 “War of Independence . . . miscalled by the English the Indian Mutiny.” “We know,” wrote Krishnavarma, mixing the Gita with an implicit theory of natural rights,

In conceiving the man of action as envisaged in the Gita, the London group of revolutionaries created the figure of “the political missionary” on which Gandhi may have partially modeled his idea of the satyagrahi (without the Extremists’ emphasis on violence, of course). The May 1907 issue of the Indian Sociologist (a magazine whose debt to Herbert Spencer was announced in its title) published a letter by an anonymous writer who described himself as “one who is prepared to be a political missionary.”Footnote ²³ The editor's note described the author as “a highly distinguished Master of Arts of an Indian University” who was now “fitting himself for the duties of a Political Missionary by studying history and politics and by acquiring collateral culture in Europe, and as a true son of India he is prepared to devote all his time and energies to his country's cause.” A society of “political missionaries,” observed the anonymous writer (we now know that this was Har Dayal), was crucial to the cause of “national unity and independence in India.” Such an individual “must believe in the profound truth that life is a mission.” Recalling the words of Sri Krishna from the Gita, “Karmanyevadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana” (“do your duty regardless of consequences”), the writer of the letter exhorts “zealous nationalists” to fulfill the aspirations of the teeming millions of India by adhering to “the ideal of renunciation” familiar to “every Hindu child.” The political missionary would be ever-ready to “spurn all prospects of worldly advancement,” and dedicate their lives “to the service of the Fatherland with a solemn sense of their responsibility.” They should not be deterred by the “timid prudence” of their “nearest and dearest relatives,” and nothing would be dearer to them than the “cause” which would replace their “father, mother, brother, and friend.” They must go about their task with a “religious earnestness and with a spirit of self-denial.” “They should grieve, like Commander Hirose of Japan, that they have only one life to give to their country.” A political missionary must “renounce all personal property, follow no profession, and devote all his time and energy to the movement.” Second, a political missionary must “study the history of his own country” as well as the history of national movements in Europe, so that his enthusiasm was backed up with a spirit of rational inquiry. He should also “possess adequate knowledge of the economic and political problems that New India is called upon to solve.” Third, the political missionary must embrace celibacy. Like Mazzini he should be “wedded” to the country. His sense of duty to the nation should “cancel all social obligations . . . domestic cares, and anxieties” that might divert the mind from the pursuit of the struggle for national liberation. Finally, such “young men” should not be “too calculating in temperament.” At this hour of national crisis, when the nation's existence as a “social organism” stood threatened, the political missionary should “act in the spirit of heroes, not shopkeepers.”Footnote ²⁴

III

Gandhi would borrow much from Tilak and the India House group in London while remaining implacably opposed to their passion for violence. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he shared their basic premise that political action, in its highest form, ought to be shaped by an ascetic and spiritual impulse. David Hardiman makes the perceptive suggestion that in writing Hind Swaraj (1909) in the form of a dialogue (between the editor and reader) Gandhi probably mirrored—at the same time as he enunciated a critique of them—the political and intellectual concerns of the London group of militants associated with the Indian Sociologist. This group, as Hardiman reminds us, “as a whole advocated the use of terrorism and violence against the British in India. Clearly, Gandhi saw it as his task to refute their belief in this strategy.”Footnote ²⁵ When we analyze Gandhi's ideas about yoga, karma, the ideal individual, and the ends of human life as explained in his comments on the Gita, it becomes clear that the Extremists constituted his purvapaksha. Yet his imagination of the satyagrahi was a foil to the Extremists’ ideal of the “political missionary” and his ashram in many ways was like the “Society” discussed in the pages of the Indian Sociologist.

It is, of course, true that Gandhi retained—at some abstract level—the principles he adumbrated in Hind Swaraj in 1909. As he himself wrote to Nehru in October 1945, “I still stand by the system of government envisaged in Hind Swaraj.”Footnote ²⁶ But a careful reading of his 1920s discourses on the Gita shows a very significant shift in how he situated himself with regard to politics. His practical mission, as we have said, was no longer to “purify” or spiritualize politics as such. He was more concerned with the question of how he and others—such as the individuals in his ashram, for instance—who had vowed to be satyagrahis would protect their own selves from the corruption and venality that were inevitable in the political sphere while being immersed in it. Reading and contemplating the Gita every day was that indispensable inoculation that he thought would immunize the satyagrahi against the virus of moral corruption. Gandhi was thus one of the first nationalists who, while seeking both involvement in and protection from the murky world of politics, accepted that world as it actually was.

There was a big difference, for instance, between 1909 when he wrote Hind Swaraj, a text that articulated his principled opposition to parliamentary democracy, and the 1920s. In the latter period, Gandhi, for all his lack of faith in the parliament as an institution, took leadership of a nationalist movement where he had to negotiate how the Congress would parley for a central place in a quasi-parliamentary politics determined by elections, representation, and the politics of numbers that the British-Indian constitutional reforms had introduced in the years between 1919 and 1937. The stinging criticism that Gandhi penned in Hind Swaraj of the parliamentary form of government is worthy of recall:

Anthony Parel, a recent editor of Hind Swaraj, seeks to save Gandhi from himself, saying that this passage “should not be interpreted to mean that Gandhi was against the institution of parliament.” He mentions Gandhi's 1920 statement that what he wanted for India was “a parliament chosen by the people with the fullest power over the finance, the police, the military, the navy, the courts and the educational institutions,” and that in 1921 he actually advised readers of Hind Swaraj that his corporate activity was devoted to “the attainment of parliamentary swaraj in accordance with the wishes of the people.”Footnote ²⁸ Parel overlooks the letter from 1945 (which he reproduces in his selection) wherein Gandhi affirmed his faith in the “system of governance” envisaged in Hind Swaraj, and that system was not parliamentary democracy. Besides, the phrase “in accordance with the wishes of the people” could very well be read as a statement of his deep acceptance of the reality of colonial constitutional reforms—for it was these reforms rather than Gandhi's own vision that were setting the ground rules of politics in India. This is what we describe here as Gandhi's acceptance of Indian politics as it actually was, and his parting of ways with the imagination that had deeply influenced the Extremists and his own thinking in the period before—politics itself as an ethical or spiritual or religious project.

But this acceptance of politics did not mean that Gandhi, as an individual satyagrahi, would compromise his own values in any way, not even if such compromise could be shown or perceived to be in the interest of “all” and thus scrupulously unselfish. If anything, politics would be the field in which he would practice satyagraha and encourage other satyagrahis to do the same. But he did not, unlike the Extremists of yesteryear, expect to reform the political sphere in its entirety by defining political action as essentially ethical. He would accept that there would always be other legitimate players in politics who would play by rules very different from his. A satyagrahi's duty to himself was therefore to ensure that he remained himself while fully immersed in political work. This protective work of “self on self”—in the same way as a fireman needs to know and wear his protective gear while dealing with fire—was the ever-incomplete exercise for which the Gita was a daily resource.

It is therefore not surprising that the primary and intended audience for Gandhi's daily discourses on the Gita should be his ashramites, potential and actual satyagrahis, and others who wrote to him seeking guidance in conducting their own selves. But the majority of people involved in the political process at any one point in time would not be satyagrahis and would not have constituted his intended audience. It was the satyagrahi who needed, and indeed was committed, to do this work of “self on the self” as an everyday preparatory exercise for surviving in the world of politics.

The distinction we are highlighting here between political action and the techniques of the self that a satyagrahi needed to adopt in order to engage in political action can be tracked in Gandhi's discourses on the Gita. Gandhi sometimes expressed his sense of being an outsider to politics by describing politics as a “botheration.”Footnote ²⁹ As he observed during one of his major political campaigns, “the work of social reform or self purification . . . is a hundred times dearer to me than what is called purely political work.”Footnote ³⁰ Rather, his aim as he discussed it in his reflections on the Gita in hundreds of letters, as well as in the Discourses, was to lay out the methods by which an individual could prepare himself for participation in politics. The ideal satyagrahi would remain unsullied, calm, and controlled—the sthitaprajna described in the Gita—even as he engaged in the strife of politics. Politics could not contaminate his being. To this end, the Gita served Gandhi as his “spiritual dictionary,” “our guru,” “our mother” who would keep her children “safe if we seek shelter in her lap,” and his “kamadhenu” (the cow that grants all wishes).Footnote ³¹

The first strategy in Gandhi's reading of the Gita was to treat the text as an allegory. The move was not new, having been pioneered in the nineteenth century by Indian theosophists.Footnote ³² Following in their footsteps, Gandhi also regarded the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and vices.”Footnote ³³ This strategy enabled him to read the Gita as a text with which to examine one's “inner self.” As he noted in the early chapters of the Discourses, “We shall leave aside the question of violence and non-violence and say that this dharma-grantha was written to explain man's duty in this inner strife.”Footnote ³⁴ Or, as he put it on 9 March 1926,

The move to read the Gita as an allegory was inherently an anti-history move as well. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi's reckoning, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is one which is raging all the time, even today.”Footnote ³⁶ The vivid details of cities, communities, and individual characters might mislead the lay reader into imagining that Vyasa was describing a historical battle. But a closer engagement with the text, argued Gandhi, brought about the realization that “the description of the battle serves only as a pretext.” In reading the Gita in this manner Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly the Extremists. The latter had read in the Gita a spiritual justification for violent political actions of the past (such as Shivaji's against Afzal Khan) or of the future (their own against British rule). “When I was in London, I had talks with many revolutionaries,” recalled Gandhi.

But if the Gita was not a historical text but an allegory of battles eternal in the soul of man, what use was it? The Gita “is very much concerned with practical life,” Gandhi would insist. “A dharma which does not serve practical needs is no dharma, it is adharma.”Footnote ³⁸ But in what way could this poetic and philosophical text be practical? Again, Gandhi's discourses clearly show that the Gita served not only as a tool for examining our “inner strife” but also as a manual for “inner striving” as well. Thus:

One thus always owes a responsibility to oneself that must be the ethical basis of the work of self on self:

Gandhi extracted from the Gita some very particular techniques that the true satyagrahi would have to adopt in order to be protected from politics while being thoroughly political. “In present-day politics,” he wrote,

A most important task was to follow the principle of sticking to one's true dharma or swadharma as the Gita recommended: If we “lose our dharma, we lose our capacity for good works, lose both this world and the other.”Footnote ⁴²

The satyagrahi's ideal dharma was to work ceaselessly towards swaraj. But Gandhi defined swaraj (literally self-rule)—a word he takes from the lexicon of his adversaries, the Extremists—as something that was larger than politics but of which politics remained an integral part.Footnote ⁴³ He includes within the ambit of his understanding of swaraj the mystical ideal of moksha, the liberation of the atman (misleadingly translated as “soul”) from the body and the cycle of births. The path lies through an incessant effort at conquering one's senses. Swaraj was thus, at one level, literally about power and mastery, for it was, as Gandhi put it in the 1920s, to “live without fear of those who hold us down.” But this power could be simultaneously mystical and political. The

Yet the striving for swaraj must not be violent as that would contravene the other principle of the Gita: action with non-attachment. To be overly attached to even the idea of attaining swaraj would prevent it from being rightful action.

The idea of non-attachment was central to his principle of non-violence or ahimsa.

Gandhi exploits to the full the ambiguity of the word swaraj—self-mastery or self-rule?—to ensure that the striving for swaraj is just that, a constant and unending striving. For “it is impossible in this body to follow ahimsa fully.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The Gita, according to Gandhi, makes it clear that “evil is inherent in action . . . Arjuna did not . . . raise the question of violence and non-violence. He simply raised the question of distinction between kinsmen and others, much in the same way that a fond mother would advance arguments favouring her child.”Footnote ⁴⁷ It was imperative for the political missionary or the satyagrahi to struggle ceaselessly to shed his attachment to the ego. “No matter how well one cultivates vairagya [non-attachment] or how diligent one is in performing good actions or what measure of bhakti one practises, one will not shed the sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ till one has attained knowledge.”Footnote ⁴⁸

This end of “attaining knowledge” actually never came in one's lifetime. One could only strive to create the conditions that could make one into a receptacle for this ultimate knowledge. “Call no man good till he is dead,” noted Gandhi, for “[w]e may know that a man has attained moksha only if he died in a brahmi state.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Elsewhere he would put it even more strongly:

Or, “the cravings of the senses die away only when we cease to exist in the body. This is a terrible statement to make, but the Gita does not shrink from stating terrible truths.”Footnote ⁵¹

If the striving was eternal, it called for some techniques, some routines of personhood by which one would make a beginning towards being a satyagrahi. Where would one begin? Here it is interesting to observe that while, like Krishnavarma, Gandhi also valued the practice of brahmacharya or celibacy and non-attachment to material possessions as important routines for the political missionary or the satyagrahi, they were not a sufficient guarantee that the satyagrahi would overcome attachment. Even the sacrifice of life was not enough. “Quite a few persons mount the gallows with perhaps a smile on their face. But they depart from this world and have no future in the other.”Footnote ⁵² For “it is the desires which need to be conquered. Anyone who eats to keep alive his body may certainly eat, but he should stop eating if he finds that eating food rouses his appetite.”Footnote ⁵³ So fasting or celibacy by themselves did not ensure the attainment of the status of the sthitaprajna. “Something more is needed,” said Gandhi. A diseased body, too, turned away from thoughts of food or a good life. The difference between an ailing body and that of a sthitaprajna turned around the question of the destruction of the everyday ego:

But how would the satyagrahi strive to dissolve his ego? The first and perhaps the most difficult step was to learn the art of submission, the submission of man to a higher being. Once again, Gandhi uses the Krishna–Arjuna relationship to note that only from the slough of despondency can there arise a true will to know. “When Arjuna becomes utterly weak, his intellect is awakened. Shri Krishna then tells him, ‘Your intellect by itself will not serve you. You will need to do yoga, karmayoga.’”Footnote ⁵⁵ It is only as a confused and traumatized Arjuna turned to Krishna for guidance in the battlefield of Kurukshetra that he could become the recipient of divine wisdom.

This “confusion” or the “trauma” of Gandhi's reference amounted to a capacity to let go of the sensibility that marked a satyagrahi's everyday phenomenal life. The spinning wheel became Gandhi's symbol of a routine of action that, if undertaken in the right spirit, would enable the satyagrahi to become oblivious of his own everyday self. Gandhi suggested, using no doubt the vocabulary of the bhakti tradition, that the satyagrahi's devotion to the spinning wheel should be like that of a slave. “Your right is to work, and not to expect the fruit,” the slave-owner says to the slave. “Mind your work, but beware lest you pluck a fruit from the garden. Yours is to take what I give.”Footnote ⁵⁶ God, writes Gandhi, “has put us under restriction in the same manner. He tells us that we may work if we wish, but that the reward of the work is entirely for Him to give.”Footnote ⁵⁷ But lest we be misled by the analogy, we should remember the qualification Gandhi adds. “The relationship between the slave-owner and his slave is an unhealthy one. It is based on [the owner's] self-interest.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The satyagrahi was someone who waged an incessant battle against self-interest. Here is Gandhi again, using the image of Arjuna's visvarupdarshan in the Gita: “man is ever rushing into the mouth of God. A wise man does so consciously and deliberately, and tells God that he wishes to be His slave, and not the world's.”Footnote ⁵⁹Swaraj could be achieved when satyagrahis performed their respective labors without any consciousness of laboring.Footnote ⁶⁰ In that state of unselfconsciousness, who would be the colonized and who the colonizer? “If . . . we can have faith in this spinning wheel movement, we can serve the world, be happy ourselves, can live safe from a great danger, that is, we can live without fear of those who would hold us down.”Footnote ⁶¹ The satyagrahi also secured, simultaneously, a means of ensuring human welfare in the other world.Footnote ⁶² But the critical thing was to lose the consciousness supported by the everyday ego. Just as the eyelids protect the eyes by reflex action—that is, without conscious intention—so too the relationship between the satyagrahi and his goal should be spontaneous, without the expectation of any reward.

Spinning also had the advantage of being a technique available to everybody irrespective of his or her social status. Satyagraha was not an activity meant for men or the higher varnas alone. Drawing inspiration from the Gita, Gandhi argued that “women, Vaisyas, and Sudras, all classes of people, can win freedom. In the same way, all of us can do this.” The critical point was not to “let the senses distract the mind.” If such a state could be assured, “we can become fit for satyagraha.”Footnote ⁶³ Gandhi makes it extremely clear that spinning belongs to a set of activities that protected the satyagrahis from “politics” while living within the embrace of the political:

Satyagraha during and after the 1920s meant, above all, a task of vigilance. It was a task that taught satyagrahi political workers to be of the world but not be molded by its compulsions. This is what Gandhi took away from Sri Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Gita:

It can thus be seen how, in the Gita, Gandhi sought a series of routines by which the figure of the satyagrahi, as distinct from the modern political animal, could be both imagined and practiced. This was called for, we have proposed, not by Gandhi's desire to “spiritualize” politics, but more by his acceptance of the fact that in politics the satyagrahi would often have to work alongside the political human being, one who relentlessly and passionately pursued interests, whether of a group or of the individual. That the Gita became something of a fetish in the process—almost a talismanic object, an amulet that would protect the satyagrahi from the venality of politics—is suggested by the little factoid we have mentioned earlier: that Gandhi's followers often carried copies of the Gita with them when involved in nationalist mobilization.