In a recent article on reformist education discourse in India, the historian and sociologist Barnita Bagchi states that ‘traditions are often reinvented, and modernities are often rooted in the past, in educational spaces in twentieth-century India’.166 I find this observation also to be true for the topos of the good and self-sufficient village at the heart of Gandhi’s argument for a new social order. He promoted moral self-transformation based on truthfulness, non-violence, simplicity and service for the community, and thereby regarded the rural cooperative communities or ashrams167 he founded as educative spaces where such self-transformation should take place (see also the later references to these ashrams). The ancient ‘ashramic’ system of education called gurukul was thus an important source of inspiration for him.168 According to the historian Mark Thomson, key to this ashramic system
was the pervasive influence of religion upon the total configuration of ideals, practices and conduct. Education was a living expression of Hindu
163 On the complex relationship between Gandhi and Indian business see, for example: Zachariah, Developing India, p. 165.
164 Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashrams, pp. 97–8.
165 Rothermund, An Economic History of India, p. 92.
166 Barnita Bagchi, “Writing Educational Spaces in Twentieth Century Reformist Indian Discourse”, Social and Education History 1 (2013) 1, p. 81.
167 Originally ashram meant monastery or place of spiritual hermitage. Gandhi used the term to denote his settlements or communities in India: Satyagraha Ashram and Sevagram Ashram.
168 M.K. Gandhi, Towards New Education (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1953), p. v.
See also, on the revival of the gurukul idea in the context of Indian nationalism: Harald Fischer-Tiné, Der Gurukul Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya Nation. Kolonialismus, Hindureform und
‘nationale Bildung’ in Britisch-Indien (1897–1922), Beiträge zur Südasienforschung; 194 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003).
religious philosophy, a means of studying the fundamental truths of life, and an aid to detachment from worldly concerns and self-realisation. For Gandhi these were truths which permeated his educational theory.169
Similar to Tolstoy, Ruskin and members of the Progressive Education Movement, Gandhi also constructed an opposition between the ‘bad city’ and the ‘good village’. While the cities ‘rose in answer to the requirements of foreign domination’,170 Gandhi argued that the villages had always been the core of India’s identity and its central economic unit before colonization. He thereby saw the simple cooperative life practised in the villages as an important model for the future:
‘Our ancestors’, as he wrote in Hind Swaraj, ‘have dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as it existed thousands of years ago. (…) our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition.
Each followed his own occupation and trade (…) It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre.
They (…) decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet. They saw that our real happiness and health consisted in a proper use of hands and feet.’171
In this quote, Gandhi gave a taste of his argument regarding the superiority of
‘bread labour’ that he developed on the basis of the ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy, as will be elaborated on in section 2.3. It is thereby interesting to note that Gandhi here employed an idea dating back to early colonial discourse. The supposedly ideal state of Indian pre-colonial village life had been ‘discovered’ by colonial ethnography, and became central in the conceptualization of India’s past.172 Sir Charles Metcalfe, Governor General of Bengal in 1835–36, for example, wrote in 1830: ‘The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything that they want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations.
Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down (…) but the village communities remain the
169 Thomson, Gandhi and His Ashrams, p. 163.
170 This quote by Gandhi is taken from an article written in October 1947. See: CWMG, Vol. 97, p.
155.
171 Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, pp. 55–6.
172 See also: Surinder S. Jodhka, “Nation and Village: Images of Rural India in Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar”, in: Economic and Political Weekly 37 (2002) 32, p. 3343.
same.’173 In a similar vein, Sir Henry Maine concluded, in 1889, that the Indian villages ‘include a nearly complete establishment of occupations and trades for enabling them to continue their collective life without assistance from any person or body external to them’.174 In the hegemonic colonial discourse, such romanticizing representations about Indian village life served multiple purposes.
On the one hand, they were used to legitimate colonial rule on the basis that India was ‘backward’ and stagnant and therefore needed the support of the colonizers.
On the other hand, they became part of a romanticized view of India that was attractive for critics of industrialization. In contrast, however, to these to these romanticized and simplistic representations of Indian villages, historical research has revealed complex power structures and relationships of dependence operating in pre-colonial rural communities.175
Different nationalists followed the ideas that the ‘real India’ was in its villages.
However, there were also important internal differences in interpretation. Thus, Nehru regarded the village primarily as backward, Ambedkar saw it as a space of caste-based oppression and Gandhi hailed the village as authentic.176 All three had their own visions of how the village population needed to be transformed, developed or liberated. As will be further elaborated lateron, Gandhi thereby saw the need of transforming or ‘reconstructing’ the village with helpers coming from outside, working for the ‘village movement’. He believed the problem was that the urban elites had neglected the villages for too long, and saw an urgent need to
‘establish healthy contact with the villages by inducing those who are fired with the spirit of service to settle in them and find self-expression in the service of villagers’.177 However, Gandhi’s attempts at ‘reviving’ the villages were also criticized, for example by Ambedkar, who claimed his approach to caste-based discrimination of the so-called ‘untouchables’ was paternalistic and did not contribute to real social change (see also 2.3.2).
173 Quoted in: Jodhka, “Agrarian Structures and their Transformations”, p. 1217.
174 Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West. Six Lectures Delivered at Oxford (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1889), p. 125. Gandhi refers to this study of Maine in the appendices to his book Hind Swaraj.
175 See overview in: Jodhka, “Agrarian Structures and Their Transformations”.
176 Jodhka, “Nation and Village”, p. 3343.
177 Harijan, 20.2.1937, see: CWMG Vol. 70, p. 427.