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Kasturba or Mahadev to sleep. Finally Gandhi shapped himself hard three times. After the second slap, a passenger said to him, 'What will be out plight if you yield to anger?" The mounting pressure made Gandhi devise an alternative strategy of a weekly day of silence which was/is an age-old practive of maun vra i.e., observing a vow of silence for a period of time which might be a day, week or month. He related it to truth, as he observed in Navajivan (December 1920, vol. 22, p. 11, in Gandhi 2006:260), 'Perfect truth is in silence alone." Similarly, Gandhi strategised to counter the acts of injustice, oppression and violence in all forms, Poverty, for instance, was a violence of the worst sort against humanity. For this, Gandhi attacked the human instinct of greed on the one hand, and on the other, he elevated the poor to the staus of god with his concept of daridranaraya - without fetishising poverty but insisting on a life of simlicity and asking those who had money to help those without it. He did not just philosophise but strategised, and translated this into his actions, accordingly making the masses think and act collectively. For a detailed study of Gandhi as strategist, see Krishnalal Shridharani (1939); Gene Sharp (1960); and Bhikhu Parekh (1989). Along with the earlier discussion pertaining to Gandhi as strategist, I would like to mention another study of him by Richard Lannoy in the chapter, 'Gandhi: Strength Made Perfect in Weakness' (1971). His words in the opening paragraph of the book sum up the intensity of Gandhi's experience and contribution at the individual and national levels:
One man, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in the course of one lifetime lived through the experience which elsewhere has usually lasted for many generations. There have been many Indian reformers who have consciously grappled with the issues of secularim, from Ram ઑક્ટોબર- ૨૦૧૮
Mohan (Roy) to Jawaharlal Nehru; but no man has endured the stress of transition form the depths of sacred solidarity to the alienation of the modern world more acutely than Gandhi. He refract the scattered beams of the archaic sacred world through the prism of his magnificently flawed, unique person, and projects them on the dark, predictable future. There is something terrifying about the dimenstionless now which he inhabits. There is no resonance of the past, or, if one likes, no Proustian dimension, to Gandhi's outlook. He is neither an Arcadian nor a Utopian, but a relentless explorer of immediacy - immediate needs, immediate means, immediate ends (Lannoy 1971:373).
In the course of his study, Lannoy, following Joan V. Bondurant (1958), make some perspicuous investigation into Gandhian percepts and practices-particularly by interpreting satyagraha as a modification of the guru-shishya (teacher pupil) relationship of interdependence in which both are in a co-operative inquiry into the truth, thereby rejecting the hierarchy and inequality of the teacher (master) pupil (disciple) relationship. Proceeding further on the principle of psychoanalysis, Lannoy considered the satyagrahi as the analyst. In satyagraha, Gandhi's role was that of a therapist who bared a repressed truth hidden beneath the stratagems of weakness, acquiescence, submission and complicity (ibid:381).
9.
The term 'seed' is a translation of beej in Gujarati and Hindi. The 'seed-text' character of Hind Swaraj can be understood by citing the concluding words of Wilhelm Halbfass (1988:442); 'For Indians as well as Europeans, the "Europeanisation of the Earth" continues to be inescapable and irreversible. For this very reason ancient Indian thought in its unassimilable, non-actualisable, yet intensely meaningful distance and otherness - is not
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