Departments
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Week of 29 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 12 |
Feature
Article
Advocating idealism and nonviolence
Current Indian and Pakistani tensions subject of address by Gandhi's grandson
By David J. Craig
The descendent of one of this century's most influential spiritual leaders will bear lessons of peace and tolerance when Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, comes to BU to speak about Indian politics and ethnic conflict in South Asia.
Gandhi, a journalist, author, and former member of the Indian parliament, will address the public at Sargent College, Room 101, at noon on Wednesday, November 3. He was invited by the CAS department of international relations and will also visit UCLA during his trip to the United States.
Like his grandfather, Rajmohan Gandhi is known for his dedication to peaceful conflict resolution. The research professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, regularly travels around the world to speak about the tense relations between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims and to share his message of tolerance.
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BU's Howard Thurman brought MLK to Gandhi It's common knowledge that Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent protests in British-occupied India inspired Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s own acts of peaceful resistance. A less well-known fact is that it was the late Howard Thurman, a Baptist minister and dean of Marsh Chapel from 1953 to 1965, who helped turn King (GRS'55) to Gandhi's teachings. In 1935, when Thurman was a tenured professor of religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C., he visited India with his wife. There they met Gandhi, who questioned Thurman about his participation in American Christian churches, some of which segregated congregations. Thurman didn't forget Gandhi's words. Upon his return, he wrote Jesus and the Disinherited, which defends Jesus' teachings but was inspired by Gandhi's doctrine of passive resistance. In 1940, he quit his job at Howard University to lead a new church in San Francisco, the independent Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples, an interracial congregation of about 100 people. The job paid Thurman $200 a month. "The trip to India and South Asia was the turning point in Thurman's life," says George Makechnie, dean emeritus and chairman of the Howard Thurman Center. "When he came back, he was determined to do something different. While he ran his own church, he lived in a rat-infested apartment to fulfill his vision." And when former BU President Harold Case brought Thurman to BU in 1953, King, who then was studying for a doctorate here, listened to Thurman preach at Marsh Chapel regularly. It has also been widely reported -- including in an MLK biography by Ebony executive editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. -- that King was often seen holding a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited during the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts. "'[King] always listened carefully when Thurman was speaking and often shook his head in amazement at Thurman's deep wisdom," writes Lewis V. Baldwin, quoting Philip Lenud, King's former roommate, in a book about King entitled There Is a Balm in Gilead (Fortress Press, 1991). "Thurman had a personal and spiritual influence on Martin." |
"I think we're going to get a view of South Asia that's different from what we're accustomed to hearing and seeing," says Adil Najam, a CAS assistant professor of international relations and a native of Pakistan. "The images you get of that region now are all negative ones. It's true that times are hard there, but it is also the part of the world that gave us Gandhi, who represents a rare element of hope."
The younger Gandhi is a force in Indian politics not only because of his lineage, however. In an area known for its nationalistic fervor and border squabbles, he is unflinchingly independent. He began his career as a political reporter, and his views reportedly got him harassed, and at least once, arrested by the government of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation). In 1997, he criticized both India and Pakistan for testing nuclear weapons, and after Pakistan attacked Indian forces in Kashmir, he suggested that India should hold a vote to decide if Indian citizens wanted their government to retain the land.
Erik Goldstein, a CAS professor of international relations and the chairman of the department, hopes that Gandhi's firsthand account of tension in South Asia will be an important supplement to the stories conveyed by the Western media.
"I want to ask him what he thinks the impact of the developments in the governments of Pakistan and India will be," says Goldstein, "and if anything will ever really change there."
Gandhi held a seat in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament, from 1990 to 1992. He has written four books, including a biography of his grandfather, who was killed when Rajmohan was 12 years old, entitled The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (Viking, 1995).
The book was praised for its candor: it includes, for instance, a frank discussion about Mohandas' struggle to remain celibate near the end of his life. In a column published in the Washington Post in 1995, Rajmohan Gandhi said that his goal in writing the book was to explore the continued relevance of his grandfather's teachings and to better understand his own connection to his family's patriarch.
"Modern India does not know what to accept or reject in Gandhi, who looms large in the Indian psyche, and in non-Indian minds as well, attracting curiosity, admiration, puzzlement and disbelief, but not, it seems, understanding," he wrote in the column. "While ready to concede that under Gandhi India won freedom from the British half a century ago, the modern Indian or Westerner is not entirely sure that Gandhi's life continues to be a beacon.
"To many, Gandhi might even symbolize ineffective and impractical idealism," he continued. "To some he stands for an acceptance of poverty, asceticism and a rejection of human sexuality. Yet for all this, he refuses to be forgotten. We sense that there was something special about him that might help us in these times, but we are not quite sure what it was, or whether we even want it for ourselves. But we need to come to terms with him."
Leroy Rouner, a CAS professor of philosophy, religion, and philosophical theology, who taught in India for five years in the early 1960s -- and now is studying what he believes is a resurgence in nationalism and ethnic cleansing around the world -- says that the idealism Mohandas Gandhi embodied and that his grandson continues to espouse is important because of how rarely it is voiced in politics.
"India has prided itself on its tolerance of different points of view since way before Gandhi, and Rajmohan shares with his grandfather this Indian view of the universality of humankind, that we all are one," says Rouner. "The truth is that that's never been very useful in sorting out ethnic conflicts. In fact, India is somewhat deceived by its tradition of tolerance." For instance, Rouner says, leaders in South Asia were unprepared to deal with the bloodbath that occurred during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.
"But I consider Rajmohan Gandhi and these other dreamers of world peace as keepers of the flame," Rouner continues. "Mahatma Gandhi really thought that there was an inner spiritual power through which he could transform the world. His grandson, too, is an idealist and a holdout of a kind of hope that people need to be reminded of."