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Politics, Experience and Cognitive Enslavement: Gandhis Hind Swaraj

Vivek Dhareshwar

Although Gandhi never explicitly addresses modern politics in Hind Swaraj, one can say that it is a legitimate question to ask how he would have viewed it, given what he says about medicine, law, nationalism, and so forth. Rejecting as incoherent the view that sees M K Gandhi as offering a critique of modernity, one can argue that Gandhis critical view of domains such as law and medicine and his understanding of his own political activity emerge out of his deep philosophical concern with both removing or resisting experience-occluding structures and creating sites of ethical learning hospitable to preserving the integrity of experience.

Who can argue us out of our experience?

M K Gandhi1

The author is grateful to Akeel Bilgrami, Indira Chowdhury, Ashok Dhareshwar and S N Balagangadhara for their encouragement and comments. He is aware that he has not been able to do justice to the written comments of both Bilgrami and Balagangadhara on an earlier draft. Since this essay is very much an initial and entirely exploratory statement of how he understands certain Gandhian themes or concerns, he hopes to be able to more fully engage with their comments as well as their insights that inform his thinking here in a separate piece. Vivek Dhareshwar (vivekdhareshwar@gmail.com) is with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.
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here are two parts or aspects to Gandhis understanding and rejection of colonialism and of the civilisation that produced it. Both have to do with the inherent destructiveness of colonialism (and, of course, of the civilisation it represents). But there seem to be two aspects because there are two different sets of questions involved. We get hold of the first with: what does colonialism destroy? And what is involved in the r esistance to this destruction which requires that decolonisation or attaining swaraj is something more or, at any rate, something other than throwing the colonisers out of the country? The other aspect has to do with why western civilisation is inherently d estructive or immoral or violent, even though the men who represent it are not inherently all that. What makes it inherently d estructive? There is a depth and simplicity to Gandhis answer to the first set of questions I will come to it in a moment which is missing or which I cannot find in his answer to the second set. At this point, it is perhaps too easily said, and that is why I do not want to say it, that, indeed, there are no two aspects to Gandhis understanding and that it is my inability to appreciate the true depth of his answer to the first set of questions that makes me look in two different directions. That may well be the case. That perhaps is the case. We can, however, settle that issue later, if the question this paper is straining to get hold of, emerges with any degree of clarity in my exploration of the two aspects of Gandhis understanding. And that question has to do with the deeper integrity of Gandhis thought which, as Akeel Bilgrami (2003) has argued,2 may not be apparent on the surface or in the disparate remarks Gandhi makes on colonialism, experience and culture. Now to the answer which I say is deep and simple: Gandhi was convinced that colonialism is destructive of the very integrity of experience. It is deep because it immediately brings up the question of what constitutes a form of life and what conditions are needed for its continued existence and flourishing. It is simple because anyone faced with the onslaught of colonialism would understand what that means and would have had to find a way of preserving the integrity of his/her way of life in the face of that onslaught. Gandhi himself found that answering the question of how to live necessarily involved driving out western civilisation. Therefore, though he was not interested in politics, he found that he had to practise satyagraha in the domain of politics too. The question of how to live and how to go about in the world in such way that the integrity of experience is preserved is, Gandhi discovered, the central preoccupation that shaped the form of life

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Indian civilisation, to use his terms that was being undermined by colonialism and its civilisation. So the defence of that form of life meant the defence of the integrity of experience itself, for Gandhi clearly saw colonialism as an attempt to argue us out of our experience. But to the extent that colonialism was a cultural phenomenon rooted in the west as a civilisation, he was convinced that swaraj was not only a goal for India but for the west too.

Destructive of Experience
What makes western civilisation destructive of experience? It is certainly not the men who represent that civilisation; that is why Gandhi wanted to say that the British need not leave India as long as they are willing to Indianise (in the civilisational rather than the nationalist sense) themselves. What then enslaves them the B ritish and the westerners to a civilisation that is so destructive? Or, to pick up the same question from the other side, in what way does the form of life that is India get undermined by the presence of western civilisation? Here, unlike in the west, it is Indians some of them, not the villagers who succumb to colonialism; it is no fault of their civilisation. Gandhi insists on this non-symmetry; again, if this non-symmetry has any deep and integrated explanation, it has to be located in some features of the respective civilisations. Gandhi, it seems to me, does have such an explanation but we have to mine his work for it (to use his own phrase for how one should read the Gita). To start with, let me give a very broad outline of it (leaving the elaboration to the rest of the article): e thical learning in the west does not provide the kind of selfknowledge needed to conceptualise and counter the violence the west generates, and hence westerners cannot be blamed for the evils of the civilisation they represent; whereas Indian traditions have structured reflection on experience in such a way that selfknowledge is the ultimate ethical goal and therefore Indian men are to be blamed for betraying their own civilisation. Still, the prior question remains: what makes western civilisation violent or, what comes to the same thing, destructive of experience? Let us begin with some of Gandhis explicit remarks about these matters. For example, we know what he says about lawyers, doctors and railways and how they could be disruptive of the ideal of swaraj. The intuition behind this denunciation of things modern is clarified at a more abstract level when he considers modern civilisation undesirable because of the ceaseless activity it represents and the annihilation of space and time it aims at.3 What has brought about this state of affairs is the wests relentless pursuit of a false ideal conceived as truth.4 Gandhi says that evil has wings, meaning thereby, I take it, that the things or objects such as railways that embody speed or the destruction of time and space undermine or destroy the necessarily slow work of establishing the good or dharma which takes a long time. To build a house takes time. Its destruction takes none (Gandhi 1997:48). Why is this house so fragile? Or, to put it less poetically, why is the bullockcart a better vehicle metaphorically or otherwise for the work of establishing the good, for the building and preserving of the house of dharma than, say, the motor car? In what way is Gandhis b eloved postcard better or good in itself than the electronic mail, whose instantaneity would make it evil itself?5 Does it perhaps have something to do with the nature of techn itself? Is it the case

that the bullock cart is built with skilled hands and I can understand and even learn how to make it, but railways or the internet makes me dependant, v icarious, or ignorant? What is the material out of which the house of dharma is built such that it is more r esponsive to some objects and concepts and not others? If that material is experience itself, how can it be that experience is more responsive to some objects/concepts/practices and not to others? There is something elusive here. Let us try to get hold of it by asking, why are there only lawyers, doctors and railways on Gandhis list? Why not other objects, professions, concepts or practices, and, more importantly, how do we decide? Sympathetic treatment of these remarks, aimed at clarifying and deepening Gandhis intuitions about violence, could perhaps take us some distance, but I think would still fall short of what we are seeking, namely, the source of the kind of violence unleashed by colonialism and the west. The larger problem here lies not with Gandhis remarks, but with the frame that has always been used to understand G andhi. We have for so long persisted in interpreting Gandhi as an antimodern, taking it for granted that we understand what modernity is and what it is to be against it, we have never bothered to even ask what the frame of modernity is all about. There are strands in Gandhis thinking that might seem to suggest that he seeks decolonisation by identifying or equating objects or practices that are disruptive of or inhospitable to the house of dharma with what is modern. Some of his remarks certainly mislead us in this direction. That, however, cannot be what G andhi had in mind. Our life with concepts and objects was a lways complete.6 It was so before railways, relativity, or the i nternet; but it was so before the postcard and the bullock-cart too. New objects or concepts do not themselves disturb or undermine the integrity of experience. So what does? When does a sense of incompleteness enter our life with concepts and objects? I want to explore the idea that what underlies Gandhis rejection of colonialism is the thought that the norms that come through law, medicine, politics or history begin to occlude experience. That is to say, these norms begin to dictate how experience must or ought to stand in relation to facts, concepts, and practices. Because the modernity frame is so deeply entrenched in our minds that we persist in seeing Gandhi as o pposed to industrialisation, to modern medicine or to science in general, without pausing to reflect on Gandhis conception of the integrity of experience that grounds his attitude both to the objectual domain and action domain as such in the most abstract or philosophical sense, and not merely to this or that object, whether modern or traditional. The task is to explicate that grounding or, what amounts to the same thing, that theory of ethical learning with its distinctive conception of truth and knowledge. To bring out the philosophical underpinning of that attitude into sharper relief, I will focus on how we might extend Gandhian insight into the integrity of experience to elaborate a critique of modern politics.

Experience-Occluding Structures
Experience is all there is. This is not an innocuous notion because the next question is: how do structures arise that occlude it? For that is Gandhis concern and his critique is directed not against modernity but against structures that occlude experience. Now here is a test case for deciding or, at any rate, exploring whether the latter
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helps us understand Gandhis philosophical concerns in a deeper and more coherent way than the modernity argument has allowed us to. The way I read Gandhis Hind Swaraj, the philo sophical arguments Gandhi presupposes or the perspective he brings to bear on the following issues are all of a piece or, in Bilgramis terminology, integrated: medicine, technology, on the one hand, and religion, law, history and nationalism, on the o ther.7 Let me just set aside the elaborate stage-setting needed and go directly to the two very obscure but in my view very deep remarks Gandhi makes: one has to do with his claim (or, more accurately, his implied claim) that Hinduism is not a religion like others, that it is a religion that underlies all religion; the other about how no two Indians are one as no two Englishmen are (Gandhi 1997: 43, 49). Both are highly misleading if one does not read Gandhi de re.8 Very quickly, the way my perspective hopes to deliver the i ntegrity involved here is by locating the experience occluding structures involved in all these areas: nationalism, law, history, medicine, and, what we now want to consider, politics. Where does the remark about Hinduism as the religion underlying all religion fit in? He does not quite say that here,9 but I want to take that to be the implication of his claim that India has increasingly become irreligious. He is explicitly contrasting religion as inquiry religion which underlies all religions with religion as identity (Gandhi 1997:42).10 In my reading, he is really saying that what we take to be Hinduism points to traditions of reflecting on experience and it is those traditions that allow Gandhi to diagnose and resist experience occluding structures in different domains. Scientism may not be a bad name for these structures as long as we are clear that it is not only the scientism of the familiar kind that is involved here but also the scientism of the human sciences.11 Pursuing Gandhis intuitions about v iolence and western civilisation has led me into an examination of how Gandhi wants us to think about our life with concepts and o bjects. Before we go any further, let us ask if this perspective also extends to the domain that we familiarly, if rather vaguely call politics. A lthough Gandhi never explicitly addresses modern politics in Hind Swaraj, I think it is a legitimate question to ask how he would have viewed it, given what he says about medicine, law, history, nationalism, and so forth. Let us therefore explore whether the Gandhian consideration that I very briefly sketched above allows us to regard modern politics, the left/liberal conception of p olitics, i tself in a deeper sense as experience-occluding and to argue that the only viable conception of politics is the one that conceives of it, as Gandhi did, as an activity that concerns itself with removing or resisting experience-occluding structures and with creating structures hospitable to preserving the integrity of experience. Gandhis satyagraha was an attempt to set up sites of ethical learning that would again make possible reflection on experience. Although we familiarly talk about the left and the right, a m oments reflection will make clear that whatever differences those terms are meant to capture, they do not bear upon the conception of politics itself. The historical component of this proposition would involve showing how reform and representation, the two pedagogic projects of colonialism, structured Indian politics (but not only politics) in such a way that it continues to reproduce the colonial framework long after the colonisers have departed. While it is out of the question to even briefly reconstruct the late 19th and early 20th
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c entury processes that set up these structures, I will be touching upon the slightly more abstract or philosophical question of what these structures do to the transmission of what I have been calling ethical learning. There are several reasons why it would be important to have a characterisation of left/liberal politics. Although my focus for the moment will be on the conception of politics as the left conceives of it or practises it, I will also have something to say about the larger question of g enealogically tracing the emergence of the domain called p olitics, with its characteristic concern with using the state to a ddress social problems. This conception, which has b ecome a given, especially in the 20th century, rests on assumptions and practices that are both deeply problematic and conceptually e lusive. Gandhi had a very subtle sense of the violence underlying politics. But the considerations that led Gandhi to be sceptical about politics need careful explication since his scepticism does not lead to antipolitics of a kind that is itself dialectically conditioned by modern politics. The major difficulty here is that in o rder to articulate the ground for Gandhis scepticism one tends to fall back on western political theories which do not have the resource to even recognise the Gandhian insight into the relationship between non-violence and experience. Gandhian considerations about experience becoming occluded or inaccessible and the way to remove it or resist it or reflect on the reasons for that inaccessibility calls for nothing less than a large conceptual story about the very different ways in which experiences are o ccluded or concealed in the west and in India, e specially since the argument that experience is becoming inaccessible clearly wants to hold on to the idea that experience and reflection on it are still possible.

Left Politics
To begin with the present, then, I would like to argue that politics (for the left/liberal) has consisted in placing items from the s ocial in a normative zone. An example will make clear what I have in mind. As we know, for a long time in the 20th century left politics, such as it was, was organised around an entity called the proletariat. The task of the Marxian social and political theory then became one of deciphering how this entity could be related to the collection in the empirical world called the workers (and to various others strata who could be placed in some sort scale first to the workers and then to the proletariat). One way of quickly getting a grip on the nature of left politics (in India, but elsewhere too) is to plot the story of how the proletariat came to o ccupy the normative zone and how many other entities have, either simultaneously or successively, occupied that zone, especially after the proletariat seems to have soundlessly vacated that place. These entities have been various kinds, in fact not only agencies like proletariat, women, dalit, and their corresponding properties, class, gender and caste, respectively, but also attitudes, policies and objects, for example, secularism, toleration, reservation, human rights, and now perhaps the Constitution. I am merely registering a superficial description of the process, but what needs to be probed is not these items themselves so much as the zone. What is it about this zone that creates this magical, or opaque, relationship between the entities in it and, as it were, their empirical or factual counterpart? Some characteristics are readily noticeable:12 politics of fear or prohibition against

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any kind of inquiry about the items or the logic behind placing them in the zone, the kind of history that the items require or call for, the insulation from experience; the peculiar and spectacular weddedness to concepts in the human sciences, whose task it is to ensure the passage of entities into the normative zone.13 Thus theories die, but concepts produced by them live on! But quite clearly if we have to speak of, let us say, democracy differently, we need to begin by removing it from that zone, where of late leftist/liberals/subalterns have tended to place it. But the question of the zone is really about why in particular politics as we now know it cannot really be understood without a conceptual history of secularisation as a specifically western c ultural experience. Secularisation involves the normativisation of domains of practical life (ethics, erotics, politics), which gives rise to what I have been calling experience-occluding structures. Gandhi, in my view, was trying to get hold of these structures when he comments on western civilisations violent and enslaving effect on its own people and on Indian culture. It is worth noting here that the reluctance or even the fear to talk about c ultural difference has a lot to do with the normative zone and the prohibition it places. Gandhi was unafraid to talk about c ultural difference. For example, Gandhi says that the civilisation of the west is based on self-indulgence, whereas the Indian one is based on self-control or self-restraint.14 We have so far tried to reflect on and characterise what the left took to be politics in India. Although we have taken the example of Marxism since it is more familiar to us, the underlying abstract point is true of classical liberalism as well the individual with his autonomous self. More generally, we can characterise the left/liberal conception of politics as an activity that uses the state to advance its objectives, be it solving social problems or legislating new laws or redesigning institutions. Implicit in that characterisation is an attempt to evolve a critique of left/liberal conception of politics. In a way, that task will involve specifying the senses in which the framework of Indian politics shared by both the left and the right is still colonial. Is it possible that politics itself the conception, the domain of institutions and activities that we call politics has contributed to the perpetuation of the colonial framework? If the answer were to be in the affirmative, as I am inclined to think it is, what are the implications for c onceptualising the link between secularisation and politics in the west? How do we interrogate the philosophical concepts that are central to modern politics and that we in India take to be c entral to the way we organise our institutions?

Foucaults Thoughts
There is both an echo of Gandhis thought and the kind of conceptual story of western experience we are looking for in Foucaults last lectures on the different models of the cultures of the self in the west (Foucault 2005). Noting how certain e xpressions that permeate the contemporary discourse getting back to oneself, freeing oneself, being authentic, and so on how these expressions have become hollow and the attempts made to reconstitute an ethics of the self have remained blocked, ossified or without any content, Foucault explicitly entertains the possibility that the contemporary may simply find it impossible to

constitute an ethic of the self (Foucault 2005:251).15 This d espair is, if you like, historically grounded, for this reflection occurs in the course of an investigation that uncovers and reconstructs a model of the culture of the self, or care of the self, or self- knowledge, that had stretched from 4th century BC to 4th c entury CE, which Foucault calls the Hellenistic-Roman (HR) model, to contrast it with the more familiar Platonic and the Christian model. This model had disappeared from European scholarship and memory. The care of the self that this HR model articulated through its long summer (as Foucault puts it) had an ethics of the self, a conception of truth, practices, and a way of organising domains of experience such as dietetics, erotics, eco nomy, which were all radically different from what we find in the Christian or Platonic models (this last largely absorbed by the former). In giving us a genealogical reconstruction this model of the care of the self and its salient diversities, Foucault also a ttempts something novel and audacious: to show how the culture of the self per meates and even begins to elaborate the social. Normally, we a ttach very little epistemic significance to social structures (think of its use in Marxism and in social theory generally). The social, however, is not dumb, though it may be mute because of the kind of knowledge it embodies. Now Foucault shows how the knowledge transmitted by the HR culture of the self, what he e xplicitly terms spiritual knowledge (and what I prefer to call experiential knowledge), begins to be attacked, undermined by the Christian model. The opposition is between religion and spiritual knowledge and not between science and spiritual knowledge. The disappearance of HR model and with it spiritual knowledge coincides with the emergence of intellectual knowledge (connaissance), knowledge of objects and elaboration of a different configuration of truth and subjectivity. ( Descartes being an illustrious instance of this transformation which continues in the rationalist tradition. Foucault I think wants to argue that the other model, distorted and rendered o blique, continues in Hegel and Marx in one way and in the 19th century revolutionary t radition in another way.) For Foucault it is clear that spiritual knowledge or, in my terms, experiential knowledge disappears in the west, and I think there is a way in which one can productively reconstruct Foucaults own research to pose clear questions about how that came about in Europe and what light it throws on politics and what he calls the juridification of European culture. This is conjectural but r eceives some support from and converges on Foucaults exploration of the emergence of what he calls political rationality precisely during the period in question (by rationality Foucault u nderstands the norm-generated/norm-generating practices). His concern is to show how Machiavellis advice to the Prince, and the conception of the state and politics that figures there, is radically different from what begins to emerge in the police l iterature. A new relation begins to develop between politics as a practice and as knowledge. He explicitly marks out the difference between how, say, St Thomas would conceptualise the state or kings duty and how the police literature talks about the state. The state that begins to be conceptualised is an entirely new entity and the rationality that develops around that time is what grounds modern political concepts and theories. Now, it
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seems to me that the changes in history too is grounded in this rationality: politics and history once grounded in this rationality are no longer what they were in the medieval period, and c ertainly even more different than what they were in Antiquity. The link between happiness, virtue and politics in Aristotle, for example, still present in Christianised form in medieval d iscourse, would be no longer even comprehensible from the police d is course on states concern with societys happiness (Foucault 2000). But as Foucault keeps insisting in his reconstruction of the emergence of what we recognise as politics, the changes cannot be registered or located at the level of political theories or concepts:
First, it is possible to analyse political rationality, as it is possible to analyse any scientific rationality. Of course, this political rationality is linked with other forms of rationalitySince political rationality is the root of a great number of postulates, my italics evidences of all sorts, institutions and ideas we take for granted it is both theoretically and practically important to go on with this historical criticism, the historical analysis of our political rationality, which is something different from the discussion about political theories and which is different also from divergences between different political choices. The failure of the major political theories nowadays must lead not to a nonpolitical way of thinking but to an investigation of what has been our political way of thinking during this century.the failure of political theories is probably due neither to politics nor to theories but to the type of rationality in which they are rooted (Foucault 2000: 416 emphasis added).

grounded his abstract identity, how can empirical history ground or give a new identity? What opens up here is what I have been calling the normative zone. In order to understand how this normative zone comes about and how the human sciences contribute to installing new entities in that zone, we urgently need a theory of secularisation of Europe. In fact, Foucault attempt to genealogically unravel what he calls the permanent anthropolo gism of the west already contains rich material for such a theory:
I think that one of the great problems of western culture has been to find the possibility of founding the hermeneutics of the self not, as was in early Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the contrary, on a positive, on the theoretical and practical emergence of the self. That was the aim of judicial institutions, that was the aim also of medical and psychiatric practices, that was the aim of political and philosophical theory to constitute the ground of the subjectivity as the root of a positive self, what we could call the permanent anthropologism of Western thought (Foucault 1999:180).17

Something similar or related needs to be said about history, its dynamic emergence and laying claim to the past. Its rootedness in this rationality is what makes a theoretical discussion of historys relationship with politics so unsatisfactory; at the level where Foucault locates the question, modern history and politics can only be seen as twins produced by a particular rationality. It is not a question of the political uses of history; history and politics are the normed and norming products of each other. Thus the most significant development for understanding the entanglement of politics and history is the emergence, between the late 16th and early 17th century, of the historico-political discourse as a model distinct from the juridico-philosophical model of politics (Foucault 2003). The two consequences of this development that Foucault notes are important:
So we have on the one hand a knowledge that has effectively been disciplinarised to form a historical discipline, and on the other hand, a historical consciousness that is polymorphous, divided and combative. It is simply the other side, the other face of a political consciousness (Foucault 2003: 186).16

What I have been trying to suggest is that the secularisation process that lays the foundation for the positive self to emerge does so by destroying the practices that had sustained what Foucault calls spiritual knowledge. In this process, what we call theories of politics or history emerge as normed reflections, only opaquely related to what they claim to understand. It is possible to enumerate the identical features of theories in such normed domains as sexuality and caste-system, to which we can now add politics. I suppose we can now appreciate the full force of the colonial charge that Indian culture lacks history: it lacks politics too, they cannot govern themselves. Politics then needs history in this precise sense, and vice versa. How was the charge met and what did it mean to give oneself politics or history?

The Bedrock of Experiential Knowledge

What I have done so far is to sketch the merest outline of the conceptual story we need to understand the sense in which one can talk about different cultures accessing experience differently and to grasp the different ways in which experience is destroyed, driven underground or rendered inaccessible. But even this outline, potted as it is, is enough to appreciate the significance of the Gandhian question about the experience-occluding structures that begin to disrupt the transmission of ethical leaning in a culture whose bedrock is constituted by experiential knowledge. The questions in this genealogical territory are likely to be formidable conceptually even as they promise new intellectual horizons. For example, because in this culture experiential knowledge quite clearly occupied a far more significant position in s ocial life than in Greco-Roman culture, we need to ask how other modes of knowledge were related to or formed by e xperiential knowledge. With appropriate philosophical and conceptual equipment such questions can be pursued, but the more urgent question is what has happened to experiential knowledge in this c ulture quite clearly it has not disappeared but equally clearly it is not accessible. Our self-understanding (and not only as a cademics, needless to say) too crucially depends on completing the conceptual story about the transformation or destruction of experiential know ledge in the west and its underground e xistence in India. Gandhi clearly saw that without re-articulating the objective of swaraj, which is impossible to achieve without experiential knowledge, Indians are condemned to cognitive enslavement.

Foucaults genealogy of the domain of history and politics is trying to say something radically different from the point most intellectual historians would readily concede, namely, the philosophical underpinnings of the two concepts. He is arguing that the emergence of both political and historical consciousnesses was the result, if you like, of a self-dialecticisation of historical discourse, and it occurred independently of any explicit t ransposition or any explicit utilisation of a dialectical philosophy into a historical discourse (Foucault 2003: 237). So when in the name of empirical history one criticises or rejects teleological or dialectical history, the effect is indeed paradoxical; the standpoint of empirical history cannot quite realise that its own intelligibility is being rejected. If the modern citizen cannot anymore understand his own historical consciousness or see how the latter
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Gandhi achieved this insight by accessing what the Indian traditions transmitted as ethical learning or experiential knowledge. It may appear that certain facts and objects bullock carts, villages, etc were fused into the language-games of these traditions but only contingently. Gandhi was profoundly right to see colonialism as an onslaught on the integrity of experience itself since the integrity of this language-game was sought to be destroyed. But it seems to me that it is a profound mistake to read him as claiming that those contingent facts or objects are necessary for sustaining ethical learning. To think that is to think that there are objects and practices that are, as it were, peculiarly suited to our interests; that is, to believe that knowledge about the world or propositional knowledge about objects gives us selfknowledge. It is to be ignorant of the nature of intentionality itself. This is not to deny that there is a difficult question here about hospitable structures needed to conceive of living itself as a form of inquiry (as, in fact, the prototype of all inquiry). But that question is not a normative question; it would indeed be reassuring if there were norms or truths that made that inquiry unnecessary. What religion and its secularised counter-parts attempt to do is to instil the belief that there are such norms and truths.18 The original sin of original sin is to see experience as defective. In fashioning his resistance to colonialism, Gandhi realised that the traditions of experiential knowledge itself have been damaged or hollowed out. That is to say, he clearly realised that the transmission of ethical learning has been obstructed, driven underground, and distorted. He was expressing this realisation when he argued in Hind Swaraj that India has become irreligious. In recovering its original problematic and in restoring its integrity, he used terminologies and strategies that can often be an obstacle to understanding his insight I have in mind his use of terms such as religion, Hinduism, morality, or his particular practices. Studies of G andhi often get caught in shuffling around these terminologies or in speculating on his particular strategies, as though what is important is what Gandhi thought about the world. I have not attempted any terminological reform; it can be undertaken after we get hold of his problematic. In suggesting that what is important is how Gandhi went about reflecting on his experience in a way that enabled him to perform action w ithout conception, I am of course implying that his particular conceptions about villages or spinning or even the caste system do not matter all that much. For after all what does the Gita or the tradition of experiential knowledge from which Gandhi drew his strength teach: how to think about experience and action and not what to think about.19 The Gita is not a description of the world; it does not contain propositional knowledge about the world or beliefs about the world. No knowledge of the world or the truths about the world helps in the performance of right action. Dharma can only be set by examples; but exemplary action is precisely the one that does not exemplify anything. Exemplary action is action without c onception. The sthithaprajna or satyagrahi is the one who knows how to perform action without conception. He needs self- knowledge, which is not knowledge about the world and cannot be construed on the model of propositional or factual knowledge. Self-knowledge, however, cannot be taught by examples; only dharma can be set by examples or by exemplary actions.

Truth
Experience or truth (sat ) is not an object. Objectual thinking brings in predication to bear on experience too, thus making the problem of truth in relation to experience impossible to handle. Truth in experience is attainable precisely because experience is not an object. It is the association of truth with objectual thinking that has made truth an intractable concept. Truth, in the G andhian sense, is neither a property of sentences nor of propositions; truth-bearers are neither sentences, nor propositions. L iterally truth-bearers are persons; more accurately, experience is the only truth-bearer. If there is experiential knowledge as a distinct species of knowledge and it involves overcoming ignorance (avidya), how to think of ignorance? In objectual thinking, ignorance is absence of information. If experience is not an o bject, what possible sense can there be to the idea that experiential knowledge overcomes ignorance? The answer, I think, is s imple: the ignorance here is ignorance about the non-objectual nature of experience. Self-knowledge then has priority, as it were, over propositional knowledge about the world, but self- k nowledge is not knowledge about a domain, the psychologised interiority, for example, that the human sciences have brought forth. Again his concept of swaraj how one learns to rule oneself too draws from or re-articulates what he regards as the ethical ideas and practices that structure the tradition of learning. For as he says, learning is first of all learning what is worth knowing:
A student means one who is hungry for learning. Learning is knowledge of what is worth knowing about. The only things worth knowing about is the atman. True knowledge is thus knowledge of the self. But in order to attain this knowledge, one has to know literature, history, geography, mathematics etc. All these are by way of meansIt is not as if men of knowledge without this equipment do not exist within our experience. One who knows this would not go mad after knowledge of letters or of literature and other subjects; he would become mad only after knowledge of the self. He will give up anything which proves an obstacle in the pursuit of this knowledge and dedicate himself only to that which helps him in that pursuit. The student life of one who realises this never ends and, whether eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, digging, weaving, spinning or doing any other work, he is all the time growing in this knowledge. For this purpose, one has to develop ones faculty of observation. One would not then always need a multitude of teachers or, rather, would look upon the whole world as ones teacher and accept everything in it which is good.20

From his reading of the Gita, Gandhi formulates an extremely subtle conception of the relationship between, to use contemporary terminology, commitment,21 action and knowledge. Inquiry is central to each of them, though the modality of engaging in i nquiry is different in each. And each one is a moment in the other: thus commitment is the reiteration of the realisation that self-knowledge has no objectual or informational dimension, which allows one to use objects in the most general sense as sites for executing actions (action without conception) and both the realisation and the performance of the action is an inquiry into how sites can be set up or transformed into sites of learning (the whole world as teacher).22 The integration that Gandhi brings to a whole range of d omains family, economy, politics, the natural world flows from such a conception of reflection and experience. The social for Gandhi is imbued with knowledge in this sense. He could therefore declare: What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience,
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we dare not change (Gandhi 1997: 66). His thinking then has to confront (a) whether the social structures that enabled such an ethical stance of learning is still intact, and (b) if it is not, how to refashion it, especially in the face of the colonial onslaught, such that the ethical stance and learning can flourish again. It is important to recognise that there is a genuine area of inquiry here that Gandhi was pursuing. Therefore, even if we, as I said before, find Gandhis particular conceptions unsatisfactory, it would be both a cognitive and ethical mistake not to pursue that inquiry further. What prevents us from seeing that there is a genuine area of inquiry here is our cognitive enslavement; it even blocks out not only areas to be cognised but, tragically, areas that are knowledge or participate in the knowledge element. Philosophers often speak of the scientific picture of the world there is no such thing. Therefore the question entirely rhetorical how can one live with false theories, has no bite in the practice of natural sciences.23 But it has a bite, surprising though it may seem, in the human sciences. More carefully put, at some point in the history of the west perhaps this is the beginning of secularisation what matters is not the truth or falsity of theories, but the ability of theories to authorise statements as true and false (this is the importance of Foucaults insistence on tracking not true utterances as he puts it but the authorisation of statements as true and false). This is what he means by the emergence of rationalities: norm generated/norm generating practices (more accurately, structures or activities); the drive, the theoretical drive to interpret practices as embodying or violating norms. And this moment (to speak in fictitious terms) undoubtedly coincides in the west with the disappearance or destruction of s piritual/experiential knowledge. For scientism, as I have tried to suggest, is the result of the process of secularisation which i nvolves transforming the practical domain by finding truths and truth makers (domains such as sexuality) to interchange with norms. In this sense, at the deepest level we should be able to see truth and norm as one. It is not the case that the more explicit moral norms transmitted by religion simply disappear; they too exist, but their function and scope change. The human sciences emerge as instruments of and oblique reflections on the process of secularisation. History and politics, to take the two domains that I briefly discussed, present examples of both truth substituting for norms and truth entwining with norms. In fact, the changing relationship between history and politics is itself instructive in this regard. If during and after the enlightenment, history began to substitute for politics (Arendt 2005; K oselleck 1988; Foucault 2003), for much of the last century p olitics has tried to institute the past through history. The question of what space western concepts of politics and history occupy in India become inescapable once we realise that in India it is the scientism of the human sciences that we suffer from. Since they cannot quite have the normativity they do in the west, in what way do they reproduce cognitive enslavement (or what Balagangadhara calls colonial consciousness)? Or is it just the case that the domain of politics, like that of education, has the role functionally to distort or disrupt the reproduction of the sites of ethical transmission? Cognitive enslavement manifests first of all in the way Indians begin to regard concepts as objects, actions and practices as embodiment of beliefs, norms as a necessary horizon
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of self-understanding. What in it reinforces avidya/ignorance? What in it insulates reflection from experience? Perhaps one area where we might find some kind of answer is in the domain of r epresentation, understood both politically and theoretically. Representation was indeed a novelty for Indians; and it perhaps still is. Indian intellectuals have thought that completing the representations they inherit is the way to understand the west, hence themselves, without realising that that process has covered over or rendered mute their own self-understanding. This is a fraught task: completing that representation without the support or r ationality that had driven the western attempt at r e presentation the result is that they have neither understood the west nor have they r ealised what they have lost; the insulation of reflection from e xperience is near complete. As a consequence, the endless repetition of western theories without any development no development because the norm-driven character of western reflection is absent here or an eclectic borrowing of models or values from western history/intellectual tradition. What do you do with the representation when you do not u nderstand it? When you cannot understand what drives it, what understanding i nforms it? Imitate the action of the colonisers and/or recycle the representations. That there is no understanding of the west is evident from their refusal to see that concepts are not objects; and that their a ccess to tradition is blocked because they refuse to see that what they take to be tradition is their attempt to complete the western representation of Indian tradition. They want to set up the castesystem so that they can a bolish it; they want to continue to reform Indian traditions so that fully modern state and institutions can be realised or, in the critique of modernity version, democracy can be fully realised. It is through this cognitive attitude, or so it seems to me, that colonialism as action endures and reproduces itself. The interesting question is why did not they take the route of showing what was the wests understanding, such as it was, in its representations, what, if any, was the epistemic and pragmatic value of representation (in history, politics, etc)? I can now return to the question I posed at the beginning. There is indeed a deep integrity to Gandhis thought which d erives from his attempt to preserve the integrity of experience. His answer to why colonialism is unethical and his diagnosis of why the west is violent or unethical too flows from the same source, except that in the case of his remarks about why western civilisation is violent and how its presence in India is destructive of the transmission of ethical learning, we need to flesh out his intuitions with an account of the secularisation process in the west. I have merely given a crude sketch of what we will need to develop. Such concerns are doubtless alien to our social and p olitical theories, given their entrapment in normed domains. Hind Swaraj teaches us why these theories have been inhospitable to inquiry. The hope is that by having access to a thinking that recognised, and then found ways to remove, the insulation b etween reflection and experience, we can begin fresh inquiries into what we have made of our life with concepts. Such inquiries would delve into the kind of learning processes that reproduce themselves in the social and cognitive surrounds obtaining today and investigate whether or not these learning processes have the potential to create the conditions for the pursuit of ethical l earning and self-knowledge swaraj to flourish unhindered.

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Notes
1 Letter to Esther Menon, 13-4-1932, The Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi CD-Rom (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 2001), Vol 55, p 233. Henceforth all references to this work will be given as CW followed by date, volume and page numbers. For references to Hind Swaraj, I have used the now standard (Gandhi 1997). 2 The phrases in my title, though I develop them in my own way, are either taken from Bilgramis inspiring essay or are meant to resonate with the concepts discussed in it. 3 Report of Speech at Socialist Hall, 26-6-1910, CW, 11, p 74. 4 Letter to Mrs Maddock, 14-3-1924, CW, 27, pp 5356. This letter explicitly contrasts the ancient culture of India based on non-violence, which Gandhi says he is trying to save from its impending destruction by modern, that is, western culture, which he says is based upon violence. 5 Or, maybe not; the very instantaneity might re- establish the space-time configuration. The discussion below should, I hope, make clear these are not facetious questions. 6 Jonathan Lear (2000) explores this issue in a subtle way. However, Lear thinks that Aristotles conception of happiness is an enigmatic signifier, the introduction of which brings incompleteness and anxiety into peoples lives. As we shall see later, if this were true, it would mean that intellectual traditions of India and of ancient Greece and Rome were pursuing something chimerical. 7 His remark on history is especially illuminating in this regard: History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul (Gandhi 1997:56). In a way, this can be taken as a gloss on what a genealogical inquiry can do to history. 8 Again we should not be misled by Gandhis use of the word religion. I am greatly indebted to the work of Balagangadhara (1994, 2005a, 2005b) for my understanding of religion and tradition, which I have elaborated elsewhere (Dhareshwar 1998). Balagangadhara introduced the term experience-occlusion in a slightly different, but related, context, to theorise the notion of avidya/ignorance (Balagangadhara 2005a). I have deliberately refrained from defining experience, letting the concept acquire its range as the argument unfolds. It would not in any case help matter if I were to say that I am using it to explicate Gandhis remarks, almost always left unelaborated, on atman, sat and satyagraha. The really challenging task, for which this essay can be seen as a prelude, is to develop the form of knowledge that can provide the critical conceptual and practitional content for these terms. Let me, however, note here that I use the word as a translation of anubhava which literally means in accord with or after (anu-) happening (bhava). In many of the intellectual traditions in India, selfknowledge is passage from anu-bhava to anu-bhaava, achieved through reflection/action/commitment. 9 For an emphatic statement, see his important article Neither a Saint nor a Politician in Young India, 12-5-1920, CW, 20, p 304. 10 Hence his remark: Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal? Wherein is the cause for quarelling? (ibid 53). 11 We are familiar with one kind of scientism, the one which draws on the natural sciences to offer a picture, a description or even a theory of problems and phenomena that the natural sciences themselves would not think of as falling within their ambit (e g, the problem of consciousness and of intentionality). There is another kind of scientism which has not been recognised, namely, scientism of the human sciences. Why has this gone unrecognised? Among the many reasons that we will explore in some detail elsewhere, one has to do with the peculiarity or more precisely the asymmetry between the two scientisms. Unlike in the case of the familiar kind of scientism, this scientism is not an illegitimate extension from a legitimate field of inquiry; the so-called human sciences are themselves creators and carriers of scientism. It is the scientism of the human sciences that, in my reading, Foucault was struggling to bring to light. Once we begin to see the conceptual and historical connection b etween scientism and secularisation process, the vacuity of the modernity frame will become evident. Bilgramis distinction between first person and third person perspective offers a philosophically novel way of understanding the first kind of scientism (Bilgrami 2006). In his forthcoming book on Gandhi, Bilgrami employs this distinction to philosophically explicate Gandhian understanding of nature and democracy. It is an intriguing q uestion how my discussion of experience and e xperience-excluding structures matches up with Bilgramis perspectival dualism. I discuss many of these issues in greater detail in my Two S cientisms (forthoming). 12 Some of these characteristics are noticeable on what Richard Rorty called, not without irony, the cultural left, and they perhaps also explain why people located in it often tend to behave like militants in an imaginary party (to borrow Sartres vivid description of Camus). 13 One of the reasons it is appropriate to talk of the scientism of the human sciences. 14 Letter to Maganlal Gandhi, 25-7-1918. CW, 17, p 150. We could multiply references to such remarks. In reading such remarks it is too easy to dismiss them as part of what Bilgrami rightly terms the porridge of saintly rhetoric in Gandhis writing (Bilgrami 2003: 4161). But that would be a great error, since invariably there is a startling perception clothed in terms and metaphors that often mislead. 15 Foucault very perspicuously notes that in European history, the opposition is not between and science and spirituality but between religion and spiritua lity. As we will see later, it is not surprising then that the secularisation of religious structures become hostile to spiritual knowledge. For an insightful theorisation of why religion and tradition are distinct kinds, see Balagangadhara (2005a). 16 Although I cannot discuss it here, the most startling claim Foucault makes is that the concept of the nation, created by the nobility deploying the historico political discourse against the monarchy, gives rise to both the notion of race and class (Foucault 2003: 134). 17 Foucault himself never uses the term secularisation, but it has been my contention for a while that we see Foucaults later work as tracking the effects of secularisation in very different domains of European culture. Foucault himself never uses the term secularization, but it has been my contention for a while that we see Foucaults later work as tracking the e ffects of secularisation in very different domains of European culture. Although Foucaults work gets hold of the strange creature normativity, he is unable to see its relationship to religion, essentially because he has no theory of religion. Charles Taylors mammoth work on secularisation (Taylor 2007) becomes a tedious retelling of familiar intellectual history of Europe, because of his minimalist attempt to understand religion in terms of the hackneyed transcendent/immanent distinction. This minimalist a ttempt, which he calls prudent (cowardly) (ibid, p 15) strange choice of adverbs for a cognitive e nterprise! is both vacuous and obfuscatory since it gives no grip on what phenomena or process count as either religious or secular, making the whole reconstruction arbitrary and unprincipled. 18 Indeed the bullshitter, who has figured prominently in Bilgramis essay cited in note 2, is precisely the one who believes in and seeks such norms and truths. The politically correct person is a bullshitter in this sense. He is a collection of truths/norms; what he avoids is inquiry. One can see why Gandhi emphasised the vrat of aparigrha or non- possession: collection of truths as much as collection of things is a form of avidya or ignorance. See his discussion of Ashram Observances, especially aparigraha or non-possession, CW, 56, pp 142ff. 19 At the present moment, though I am reading many things, Bhagavad Gita is becoming more and more the only infallible guide, the only dictionary of reference, in which I find all the sorrows, all the troubles, all the trials arranged in the alphabetical order with exquisite solutions.That book is not a historical record, but it is the record of the concrete experience of its author, whether it was really Vyas or not I am not concerned. And if it is a record of anybodys experience, it must not be beyond us to be able to test the truth of it by repeating the experience. I am testing the truth almost everyday in my life and find it never failing. This of course does not mean that I have reached the state described, for instance, at the end of the Second Chapter. But I know that the more we carry out the prescription given to it, the nearer do we answer the description given of the perfect state, CW, 39, p 450. Letter to Students, CW, 19, pp 199-200. Also see CW, 55, pp 310-11, pp 333-34 for illuminating r emarks about non-objectual nature of self- knowledge. The meaning of the root bhaj is appropriately c aptured as to commit. The true meaning of bhakti is search for the a tman. When the atman realises itself, bhakti is transformed into jnana. Letter to Jamnadas Gandhi, 2-2-1913, CW, 13, p 191. For a useful discussion of this point, see (Van Fraassen 2002: 63). In the human sciences, concepts refuse to go away even when the theories that developed them die out, testifying thereby to the scientistic character of the humans sciences.

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References
Arendt, Hannah (2005): The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books). Balagangadhara, S N (1994): The Heathen in Blindness Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: EJ Brill). (2005a): How to Speak for the Indian Traditions: An Agenda for the Future, Journal of American Aca demy of Religion, 73:4 (December 2005), 987-1013. (2005b): On Ignorance or Avidya, viewed on 29 September 2009. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ TheHeathenInHisBlindness/files/) Bilgrami, Akeel (2003): Gandhi, the Philosopher, Economic & Political Weekly (27 September), 4159-65. (2006): Self-knowledge and Resentment (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). Dhareshwar, Vivek (1998): Valorising the Present: Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences, Cultural Dynamics, 10:2 (July 1998), 211-31. (2009): Two Scientisms (forthcoming). Foucault, Michel (1999): About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self in Jeremy R Carrette (ed.), Religion and Cutlure, (Manchester: Manchester University Press). (2000): The Political Technology of Individuals in James D Faubion (ed.), Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol 3 (London: Penguin Books). (2003): Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, trans David Macey (New York: Picador). (2005): The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1982, trans Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Gandhi, M K (1997): Hind Swaraj, ed. Anthony J Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (2001): The Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi CD-Rom (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India). Koselleck, Reinhart (1988): Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). Lear, Jonathan (2000): Happiness, Death, and the R emainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U niversity Press). Taylor, Charles (2007): A Secular Age (Cambrdige, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Van Fraassen, Bas C (2002): The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale University Press).

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