Competitive visions of how to see the soul of India

Indian Critiques of Gandhi Canadian Journal of History, Spring 2006 by Palsetia, Jesse S Indian Critiques of Gandhi, edited by Harold Coward. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003. v, 287 pp.

Chapters four, five, and six analyze the critiques of Gandhi by important Indian religious and cultural leaders. Robert Minor examines Sri Aurobindo Ghose, a leader in the extremist wing of the Indian nationalist movement and a famous yoga teacher. Gandhi and Aurobindo never met each other, and the latter's critique emerges in letters to his disciples. Aurobindo believed in independence, but rejected Gandhian satyagraha or strategy of "truth force" and ahimsa or non-violence (p. 88).

TS. Rukmani addresses the relationship between the "Great Soul" and the "Great Sentinel." Rabindranath Tagore was a poet and Indian Nobel laureate in literature. The two men met once in March 1915. Tagore first applied the appellation "Mahatma" or "Great Soul" to Gandhi, but he disagreed with Gandhi over religion, politics, and personality.

Ronald Neufeldt discusses the Hindu Mahasabha's critique of Gandhi from the writings of V.D. Savarkar, the spiritual father of the group. The ideas of Savarkar, Aurobindo, and Tagore are part of Indian cultural nationalism that called upon politicized Hindu symbols and also adhered to violence as a political tool. Both Aurobindo and Savarkar's antagonism to Gandhi lay in their belief that Gandhi mis-represented and even derided Hindu culture and religion through an emphasis on ahimsa. Gandhi, to some degree, bridged cultural and secular nationalisms, emphasizing cultural and religious aspects of Indian identity while fundamentally adhering to non-violence. Gandhian nationalism earned the ire of the extremist Hindus, and members of the Mahasabha and the RSS ultimately killed Gandhi. All three of the above critiques reflect the competitive visions of how to see the soul of India.