"Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship," Political Theory 40 (4), 2012

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2012 40: 437 originally published online 14 June 2012Political TheoryFarah Godrej

Ascetics, Warriors, and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship

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Political Theory40(4) 437 –465

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1University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:Farah Godrej, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2213 Watkins Hall, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521 Email: [email protected]

Ascetics, Warriors, and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship

Farah Godrej1

Abstract

I argue here that a clearer conception of Gandhi’s nonviolence is required in order to understand his resonance for contemporary environmentalism. Gandhi’s nonviolence incorporates elements of both the brahmin or ascetic, as well as the ksatriya or warrior. Contemporary environmental movements by and large over-emphasize the self-abnegating, self-denying and self-scrutinizing ascetic components of Gandhi’s thought, to the neglect of the confrontational and warrior-like ones. In so doing, they often also over-emphasize the ethical dimension of Gandhi’s thought, missing the discursive political dimension with which this Gandhian ethics is interwoven. I will argue here that the warrior-like and confrontational political aspect of Gandhi’s nonviolence must be brought to the fore in discussions of environmentalism. In so doing, Gandhi can be read as an advocate of a certain form of “ecological” citizenship, requiring both the scrutiny of one’s bodily consumptive behaviours, as well as the placement of one’s body on the frontlines of aggressive political contestation.

In this essay, I argue that a clearer conception of Gandhi’s nonviolence is required in order to understand his resonance for contemporary environmentalism. Invok-ing a characteristically Indic binary, I will show how Gandhi’s nonviolence incor-porates elements of both the brahmin or ascetic, as well as the kshatriya or warrior. Many environmentalists rightly take inspiration from the ascetic compo-nents of Gandhi’s project, which involves living simply and minimizing material



438 Political Theory 40(4)

consumption through an ethics of self-denial and self-scrutiny. But in so doing, they also tend often to neglect the warrior-like political nonviolence that Gandhi fused with this ethical asceticism. Gandhi’s interlacing of an ethical position involving asceticism and a strategic, political position involving confrontation makes it possible for his nonviolence to be thoughtfully and successfully asser-tive, even combative or disruptive, while remaining peaceful in its disavowal of violence. Gandhi can thus be read as an advocate of a certain form of “ecologi-cal” citizenship, focused on the fulfillment of obligations to the political com-munity, which requires both the scrutiny of one’s bodily consumptive behaviours, as well as the necessary and literal placement of one’s body on the frontlines of aggressive political contestation.

Yet, many who perhaps see themselves as acting within Gandhi’s legacy often miss the point of this political assertiveness expressed through the bodily dimension of political action. Contemporary environmental move-ments by and large over-emphasize the self-abnegating, self-denying, and self-scrutinizing ascetic components of Gandhi’s thought, to the neglect of the confrontational and warrior-like ones. In so doing, they often also over-emphasize the ethical dimension of Gandhi’s thought, missing the discur-sive political dimension with which this Gandhian ethics is interwoven. I will argue here that the warrior-like and confrontational political aspect of Gandhi’s nonviolence must be brought to the fore in discussions of environmentalism.

I begin, however, by highlighting how my reading challenges rather than confirms many existing readings of Gandhi which see him as a resource for environmentalism. While Gandhi’s life and writings have clearly served as inspiration for many environmentalists, some scholars assume that Gandhi was therefore naturally concerned with environmental preservation. In fact, Gandhi was remarkably silent on the question of the inherent value of nature, or of human beings’ relationship to their external environment.1 It is impor-tant, therefore, to identify Gandhi’s position (if any) on the environment, in contrast to the assumptions often attributed to him, but seldom supported by textual evidence.

Some scholars attempt to find in Gandhi’s thought a belief in the inherent value of all living things, a continuity between human and non-human forms of life, and thus a prohibition on violence toward all living beings. South Asian philosophical traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism—by which Gandhi was inspired, are routinely characterized as less violent and anthropocentric, more holistic in their cosmologies, and more sensitive to the continuities between the human and non-human worlds than the Judeo-Christian traditions. For instance, the Abrahamic faiths are said to be God-centric, in that the divine Creator is above all else, including nature, and the



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worship of anything in nature is considered sacrilegious. Meanwhile, no such prohibition is found in Hinduism, for example, where divinity is mani-fested in the form of the natural elements and non-human life, and thus sacralized.2 Other scholars turn to the importance of karmic theory within these traditions. Any living being could be a relative, a loved one or great sage in another life, and this sense of mutual interdependence gives rise to nonviolence toward all living beings.3 Because all life is sacred, and all forms of life are continuous with the human, injury to any form of life is a violation of that continuity.4

Steeped as he was in both the Hindu and Jain traditions, Gandhi is often said to demonstrate this reverence for the interconnectedness of all life, and from these assumptions, some scholars expect to find in his thought a logical foundation for an ethic of sustainability.5 But while Gandhi may have occa-sionally stated that the non-human world was of some inherent value, or that animals have the same moral worth as human beings,6 the few statements found in his writings on these questions are randomly scattered, and scarcely amount to a reflective ontological position. Hermeneutically speaking, one cannot assume that these rare references constitute a discernible foundation for environmental concerns.7 A thorough examination of Gandhi’s thought reveals that he makes little reference to ecology, nor does he echo the Vedic tradition’s emphasis on the divine manifesting itself in the form of nature. What is overwhelmingly evident instead is a persistent concern with the very human goal of truth-seeking. It is in this sense that we may call Gandhi’s thinking anthropocentric: it is squarely focused on the requirements of human life, and despite his emphasis on ahimsa or nonviolence toward all beings, what is of ultimate importance is the human goal of truth-seeking.8

A second common way to read Gandhi as a resource for environmental-ism is by turning to the kind of asceticism alluded to earlier. Adherence to the sramanic or renunciatory versions of Hinduism and Jainism ostensibly leads to practices such as austerity and non-possession (aparigraha).9 Gandhi’s frugality with respect to natural resources and his mania for what would today be called recycling are legendary.10 This impetus toward auster-ity is seen as connected to his concern for nature, because consumptive pat-terns and behaviours are seen as central to our ability to conserve resources.11 But Vinay Lal also reminds us rightly that it is Gandhi’s practices and con-duct, rather than his writings, which suggest “an ecological vision of life.”12 This is very different from claiming that Gandhi’s asceticism emerged from any philosophical commitment to the preservation of natural resources. Rather, his primary philosophical commitment was to truth-seeking, of which asceticism was an important component, as we shall soon see.




A third presumption is that Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization, and its accompanying prescriptions for the revival of rural, non-industrial life, are evidence of his environmental concerns. Heavily influenced by Ruskin and Thoreau, Gandhi was fiercely critical of modern industrial development in Hind Swaraj, and recommended the village as the ideal form of economic and social organization. His writings make some reference to man’s exploi-tation of nature, and we have his famous pronouncement that the earth has enough to satisfy everyone’s needs but not everyone’s greed. As we shall also see, however, Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization was precisely that it violated conditions for human flourishing, rather than the fact that it was destructive of nature. While Ramachandra Guha is right to suggest that there are “ecological undertones to his moral critique of western industrial-ization and urban-industrial development,”13 it should be recalled that Gandhi’s concerns about modern industrial civilization are also, in a sense, anthropocentric: modern industrial civilization is problematic for him because it violates conditions for the ideal forms of human life.

My argument, then, will not be that we cannot read environmental con-cerns into Gandhi’s thought. Rather, it will be that some components of the contemporary green movement, because they rely on mistaken understand-ings of Gandhi’s ostensible environmental commitments, miss the most important ways in which his thought could be a resource for them. Gandhi would certainly have found environmentalism worthy of consideration, and many of his prescriptions regarding the ideal forms of social and political organization lend themselves to insights about sustainability. But Gandhi is not a resource for environmentalism because he found nature to be of intrin-sic value, or because the purpose of the ascetic life is to conserve natural resources, or because modern industrial civilization is destructive of nature. Rather, his resonance for environmental questions emerges most clearly when we remind ourselves of the duties of active, disruptive citizenship that characterize his theory of nonviolence.

In what follows, I will demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence has two main elements: nonviolence as the primary mode of truth-seeking, and non-violence as the primary instrument of political action and change. The first is an ethical position while the second is a strategic political position, and the two are inextricably interwoven. What I will call a Gandhian “ecological citizenship” cannot be understood as solely ethical, because much of the ethical component of his nonviolence is set into motion by the bodily expres-sion of confrontation in political action. My argument will ultimately point to the dangers of allowing green activism to rely solely on the ascetic, self-abnegating ethical component of Gandhian nonviolence, thereby missing



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the opportunity for such “ecological” citizenship: an active, participatory, and warrior-like form of citizenship in which the physicality of the body allows for an aggressive, combative, and even disruptive form of nonviolent political action.

Nonviolence as a Mode of Truth-Seeking: The Brahmin or AsceticGandhi’s nonviolence is connected to the most fundamental human task which, for him, is truth-seeking. For Gandhi, the spiritual quest for truth served as the driving purpose for all other realms of life, especially for the political.14 Moreover, the pursuit of ahimsa or nonviolence was crucially connected to this quest for truth, and Gandhi repeatedly suggests that while truth is the end, ahimsa or nonviolence is the means. Truth and nonviolence are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle them.15 Broadly speaking, ahimsa means the complete absence of violence and ill will toward all forms of life. Minimally, ahimsa means a refusal to do harm: “in its negative form,” Gandhi claims, “it means not injuring any living being, whether by body or mind.”16 But for Gandhi, nonviolence was under-stood in a broader sense, as more than simply non-injury. Beyond the nega-tive constraint, nonviolence was for him also a total ethical system that referred to the cultivation of certain virtues. Ahimsa, in the most expansive sense, means the willingness to treat all beings as one’s very self, a complete absence of ill will, and goodwill toward all life.17 For Gandhi, the pursuit of this ahimsa was an entire way of life wherein constant self-examination and rigorous discipline are combined with virtues such as humility, sincerity, and selfless service to others. Ahimsa, Gandhi claims, “is a great vow . . . severe penance is required for its practice.”18

Asceticism in the form of bodily self-denial and renunciation of worldly pleasures plays a crucial role within this pursuit of total ahimsa.19 The monastic virtue of renunciation allowed the truth-seeker to withdraw atten-tion from the senses and thus focus her mind and moral vision on the all-important goal of truth. The more consciously one chose to experience the self-suffering induced by such withdrawals, the more clarifying insights and spiritual alertness would be produced.20 Thus, Gandhi was known for his adherence to a strict form of asceticism he called brahmacharya: control over all the senses in thought, word, and deed.21 His lifelong struggle to gain control over his senses and over his sensual desires through a variety of self-disciplinary strategies is nothing if not well chronicled.22 He conducted these ascetic struggles publicly, wrote extensively about them, and often




urged others to engage in similar struggles. He took a vow of celibacy in his forties and renounced all sexual activity. He fasted extensively and struggled with his diet, aiming eventually to subsist on as little—and as unprocessed—food as possible. He was keenly interested in nature cures, and was con-vinced that most ailments could be cured by the ingestion of fewer, rather than greater, quantities of food and medicines. He wrote about personal hygiene and sanitation (tooth-brushing, bathing, bodily waste disposal), and was actively opposed to waste of all kinds. His insistence on reducing sarto-rial needs to the bare minimum—exemplified by his loincloth which he had spun himself—is well known. All of these struggles, he repeatedly empha-sized, were related to nonviolence understood in the broadest sense, as a method of seeking truth through asceticism.

But in what sense might this have been true? Here, we may turn to Gandhi’s habit of publicizing every minute (and potentially distasteful) detail about his bodily self-discipline.23 He seemed to suggest that it was only in discussing the most primordial aspects of his bodily life that he could appropriately pursue ahimsa. Most of his confessional writings pertain to the experiments he conducts in pursuit of such self-discipline. His struggles with celibacy over the years—both within the context of his marriage and the notorious experiments involving sleeping naked with his young nieces to test his self-restraint—were infamously public. Equally confessional and detailed are his writings on topics such as nutrition, health, diet, and even masturbation and excretion. Two writings by Gandhi that receive little atten-tion in discussions of Gandhi’s thought are Key to Health and Self-Restraint vs. Self-Indulgence. Both contain detailed musings on largely private ques-tions such as hygiene, nutrition, and sexuality.24 Elsewhere, Gandhi wrote extensively on the health value of goat milk, the use of earth poultice to cure constipation, the relationship between breathing exercises and “self-abuse,” and the importance of proper mastication.25

This publicizing of intensely private acts was, I submit, more than the quirk of an eccentric personality. Indeed, Gandhi does seem to have been perform-ing an outrage as part of his radicalism. But I submit that he was also involved in a larger campaign that connected the ethics of asceticism with the conscious public expression, monitoring, and self-surveillance of visceral needs and pri-mordial urges. His advocacy of bodily self-control, through intricate discus-sions of nature cures, mud packs, hip baths, breathing exercises, and recipes for encouraging celibacy, suggests an intimate relationship between bodily functions and the pursuit of nonviolence.26 Those who wish to pursue nonvio-lence must pay careful attention to and publicly struggle with their diets, their sexual habits, their health and their excretion, so as to develop both the physi-cal and moral strength to pursue the truth.27



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Why should this be so? Of course, by publicly revealing one’s struggle with one’s innermost desires, one demonstrates the will to acknowledge (rather than conceal) one’s flaws and improve oneself in accordance with the search for truth. But I want to suggest that Gandhi’s insistence on brahm-acharya as a key component of truth-seeking must also be read in conjunc-tion with his views on modern civilization and the structuring of bodily desire. Gandhi asks for not only a struggle with bodily needs and desires, but a willingness to understand these desires as public in a certain sense, as prone to distortion and manipulation, and ultimately, as amenable to conscious scrutiny and re-cultivation. Gandhi’s refusal to relegate certain aspects of bodily life to the private sphere, through his insistence on publicizing private details of bodily life, obscures the distinction between public and private. The separation of public from private—or politea from oikos—goes back to Greek life. Modern political thinkers like Hegel, and later Hannah Arendt, in different ways solidified the idea that the private domain was defined by the bodily and the biological, by such things as ties of blood, sexual needs and desires, reproduction, and gendered division of labour among the sexes. “Biological ties, particularly those of the sexes,” were “relegated to family.” They were not only “non-political, they are also protected against the intru-sion of politics.”28 But Gandhi challenges this distinction by suggesting that bodily life—bodily functions, dietary habits, waste disposal—is laden with public, collective implications.29 Truth-seeking, on this view, involves our ability to struggle with what are often considered private needs and desires, precisely because of how these are often publicly manipulated.30

If we take a brief detour through Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization, it becomes clear that he is keenly attentive not only to the ways in which desires can be artificially constructed, but also to the ethical impact that this construction of desire may have on human life. In his seminal text, Hind Swaraj, Gandhi articulates an extensive critique of modern civilization, and provides an alternative vision of conditions under which human life can flourish. The problem with modern civilization for Gandhi was threefold. First, it made bodily and material welfare the object of life,31 elevating the pursuit of material wealth and making available newer and more complex forms of such pursuits. It thus prevents human beings from pursuing the truth, by unbridling the passions and increasing the potential indulgences available to humankind.32 Second, the proliferation of machinery, modern technology and mass production restricts the human capacity for manual labour, artificially increasing human needs and taking away human self-sufficiency by enslaving human beings to one another and to the control of the producer.33 Third, the urbanization of modern civilization destroys the simplicity and self-sufficiency of human life. Gandhi idealized the village as




the most basic unit of social, political and economic organization, where people could lead simple lives in which they provided for themselves through their own labour.34 Restricting material needs to the level of what could be manually produced would ensure such self-reliance.

Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization suggests that bodily desires are subject to construction and inflation by a variety of forces, and that this dis-tortion can have ethical implications for the world around us. It enables and re-inscribes forms of social and economic organization in which we are lazy, physically atrophied, overly dependent on others for the sustenance of our proliferating needs and desires, and thus vulnerable to exploitation by those who control our material well-being.35 Gandhi’s asceticism is therefore not only linked to the search for truth in a spiritual sense, it also suggests that the scrutiny and reform of the mundane patterns of bodily need and desire is a collective moral responsibility. The awareness of the elasticity and manipu-lability of these needs should provoke a kind of discursive self-scrutiny, an ability to conduct a publicized dialogue with the self about which needs or desires are legitimate, and which can be simplified or even eliminated. This self-surveillance and public self-scrutiny not only further the individual spiritual project of truth-seeking, they foster more ideal forms of social and economic organization in which human beings can flourish. We might call this Gandhi’s ethical position of asceticism, a position that is linked to his critique of modern civilization and its manipulation of bodily needs and desires, and which sees all such needs and desires as ultimately re-educable through the effort of truth-seeking. The self-abnegation of Gandhi’s ascetic is in service of this ethical position, and of the ideal forms of social organiza-tion consonant with the truth-seeking that drives this position.

In this ethical position, highlighting particular elements of bodily experience—such as material needs and desires—plays a central role in nonviolence. But Gandhi’s asceticism regards the body not as a kind of instrument or means to an end, but rather as a crucial component of one’s lived experience in the world, a lived experience that is continuously morally engaged in a holistic way. The focus on bodily self-scrutiny occurs in conjunction with speech, discourse, gesture, communicative capacities, psychic self-control, and self-presentation, such that Gandhi’s asceticism is, in Bourdieu’s terms, a particular kind of habitus or disposition in and toward the world. This dis-position incorporates the verbal and non-verbal, material and discursive, corporeal and cognitive, physiological and psychological aspects of exis-tence into both ethics and politics. Rather than isolating “the body” as an independent object of scrutiny, Gandhi’s thought recognizes its placement in a complex nexus of elements, and calls upon those other elements of



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human experience in its ethical and political engagement.36 We shall now see how this holistic approach is further evidenced in the warrior-like com-ponent of Gandhi’s nonviolence, in which the physicality and materiality of the body are understood as inseparable from speech and discourse, while ethical action is interwoven with political action.

Nonviolence as the Primary Mode of Political Exchange: The Kshatriya or WarriorDespite its ascetic and otherworldly moments, Gandhi’s nonviolence has an activist, confrontational, and warrior-like quality that belies the stillness or even passivity that is sometimes thought to characterize the peaceful methodology of nonviolence. A crucial component of Gandhi’s nonviolent method is the practice of satyagraha, which literally means “holding firm to the truth,” or “truth-force.” As the practical accompaniment to ahimsa, satyagraha includes the political tactics of resistance, such as civil disobe-dience and active non-cooperation in the form of strikes, fasts, sit-ins, and deliberate law-breaking. Even though Gandhi insists that nonviolence is neither aggressive nor offensive in the purely physical sense, he also relies explicitly on the language of assertiveness, force, strength, battle, defiance, and fighting. In the classical Hindu tradition, the ascetic figure of the brahmin, characterized as contemplative, withdrawn from the world, pas-sive, and focused on overcoming sensual pleasures, is often contrasted with the kshatriya or warrior, who is martial, aggressive, passionate, active, and in touch with the world of sensuality.37 The politics Gandhi advocates may certainly be ascetic in that it ultimately focuses on the conquest of desire and unconditional acceptance of violence, but we find also that Gandhi repeatedly uses the term kshatriya or warrior to describe the satyagrahi (one who engages in satyagraha), while using the language of battle, force-fulness, and fighting to describe satyagraha itself.

“As long as we have not developed the virtue of the kshatriya” Gandhi claims, “it is difficult for us to win swaraj [independence].”38 A body of civil resisters is, he insists, “like an army subject to all the discipline of a soldier.”39 Indeed, the references in his writings to “fighting” the nonvio-lent “battle,” a nonviolent “army,” “soldiers” of nonviolence, the satya-grahi as kshatriya, and satyagraha as a “weapon” are almost too numerous to list fully.40 In fact, the very word satyagraha was coined to evoke notions of forcefulness, intense activity, power, and strength, precisely because Gandhi wanted to reject the passivity or weakness that might have been implied by nonviolent action.




Although Gandhi initially referred to nonviolent resistance as “passive resistance” or nishkriya pratirodha, he later became increasingly uneasy with this, calling it a misnomer and claiming that it was not an accurate description of “the force denoted by the term.”41 He began to insist that such resistance was not a “weapon of the weak,” but rather an “intensely active state.”42 He then became so dissatisfied with the term that he held a competi-tion in which he called for the submission of more suitable words to describe it. The term satyagraha was coined as a slightly revised form of the submis-sion Gandhi liked best. In explaining this decision, Gandhi emphasized his attraction to the term agraha which meant firmness or forcefulness, and combined this with satya or truth. Thus, satyagraha, Gandhi claimed, was to be understood as firmness in truth, or truth-force.43 Elsewhere, he referred to satyagraha as “soul-force” or “truth-force,” deliberately juxtaposing these terms in contrast to physical force, brute force, or the force of arms, thus ensuring that satyagraha was to be understood in forceful terms.44

In so doing, Gandhi also inverted traditional definitions of strength, cour-age, and warriorhood. “I have given a new definition of the word kshatriya,” he writes.45 Rather than allowing warriorhood to maintain its traditional associations with brute physical force, he insisted that it required the accep-tance of suffering and of the physical consequences of one’s defiance, meet-ing these with a strength borne of resoluteness. “What do you think?” he asks in Hind Swaraj: “Wherein is courage required—in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and to be blown to pieces? Who is the true warrior—he who keeps death always as a bosom-friend or he who controls the death of others?” Thus, he claims, the kshatriya “is not a person who knows how to kill others but rather one who acquires the art of sacrificing his own life . . . never retreating in the battle between gods and demons.”46

Satyagraha in its ideal form is to be assertive, Gandhi claims.47 “Aggressive, assertive, or offensive civil disobedience is non-violent, wilful disobedience of laws of the State whose breach does not involve moral tur-pitude and which is undertaken as a symbol of revolt against the State.”48 Moreover, the intense activity that constitutes this satyagraha is clearly cast as “a fierce defiance”49 and thus a disruptive challenge to existing power structures: “Society bids fair to be disrupted if much-needed and overdue reform had to be indefinitely delayed.”50 Our non-co-operation, Gandhi asserts, is “a defiantly open protest against that system,”51 in which “we have to act boldly.”52 “Observe non-violence and with God as your witness defy the whole world,”53 Gandhi says, in congratulating a group of nonvio-lent protesters who had recently been jailed.



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Gandhi’s re-definition of warriorhood emphasizes not only the purpose-ful defiance of laws but also inviting and suffering the punishments that follow. “A satyagrahi does not sit still. He suffers. He disobeys the ruler’s orders and his laws in a civil manner, and willingly submits to the penalties of such disobedience, for instance, imprisonment and gallows.”54 This defi-ance expresses the warrior’s refusal to recognize the authority of the state he opposes, indeed to subdue the adversary through repeated acts of provo-cation that challenge its legitimacy and moral authority: “In aggressive civil disobedience, an individual or a group respectfully disobeys man-made laws on purpose to defy authority. . . . He then openly and civilly breaks them and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach. And in order to register his protest against the action of the law-givers, it is open to him to withdraw his co-operation from the State by disobeying such other laws.”55 The adversaries thus “discover that they cannot command the satyagrahi’s obedience. They cannot make him do anything against his will. And this is the consummation of swaraj, because it means complete independence.”56 Through such defiance, Gandhi asserts, the adversaries “will at once be subdued to our will.”57 Indeed, the very language of civil “disobedience” suggests that it relies on disrupting the legal and conventional structures that uphold an existing social or political order. Moreover, it is precisely because of the injustices represented by this order that such defiance is to be considered a weapon of the courageous truth-seeker: “it was right for us to defy these laws and show that we were brave,”58 Gandhi claims in describing nonviolent action.

This warrior-like concept of truth-seeking in politics, like its ascetic coun-terpart, also highlights the physicality and materiality of the body as an impor-tant locus of moral–political exchange and action. While the ascetic conception centres the body through scrutinizing its needs as an act of truth-seeking, the warrior-like conception reminds us that the body’s physical vulnerability is central to its capacity for a defiant and disruptive political strategy. Recall that in undertaking satyagraha, the activist must be willing to suffer nonviolently, undergo punishment, and invite legal sanction if necessary. Crucial to the practice of satyagraha, then, is conscious, disciplined, and public self-suffering in service of a particular political position, deliberately provoked through pub-lic acts of opposition to a particular regime of untruth. Suffering allows the activist to demonstrate the strength of her conviction, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential fallibility of her moral position.59 Nonviolent political action has meaning primarily because of the possibility that the politi-cal actor may eventually have to undergo physical pain as a demonstration of her moral authority on the matter.




But self-suffering in satyagraha is both a physical and discursive act, in that its goal is always some form of moral conversion. It always carries along with it a truth claim, which is placed into the public arena through an act of civil disobedience, which in turn forces one’s adversary to confront the truth claims underlying this action. It is a call for the adversary to recog-nize that the act of bodily defiance—disruptive breaking of laws, occupying certain areas, striking, marching, or fasting—is a declaration of one’s truth claim. At the same time, it also serves as a call to engage in both persuading and being persuaded by such truth claims.

If one believes so strongly in the validity of one’s ethical position, and wishes to persuade others of it, then one should be willing to suffer for it, in a way that harms only oneself.60 In so doing, one has engaged in a power-fully persuasive form of discourse about the strength of one’s beliefs, for an act of self-suffering sends the following message: “This is how strongly I feel about this. I am willing to suffer for it, not only to show you the strength of my conviction, but also because I respect you as a fellow truth-seeker, and would like to try and persuade you of the truth as I see it. I don’t intend to harm or to humiliate you.” So on the one hand, the persuasion involved in the bodily act of satyagraha is a call to reach the empathetic core of the other, a hope that one’s willingness to suffer can show the adversary how strong one’s conviction is, and thereby perhaps bring about a joint examina-tion of truth claims.61 But there is also another discursive message embed-ded in the act of bodily defiance: a satyagrahi, Gandhi says, should always remain willing to be persuaded, and hold open the possibility that her truth claim could have been mistaken.62 It is for this reason that all disruptive, defiant, and disobedient acts must remain nonviolent: if it turns out we were mistaken, no one suffers except us, and we have not imposed any suffering on others as a result of our mistaken truth claim.

In the very moment of defiance, the satyagrahi declares her intention to subvert the truth claims that underlie her adversaries’ actions. But precisely because Gandhi believes in the contingency of such claims and in the pos-sibility for moral conversion, such defiance is the beginning, rather than the end, of dialogue and persuasion. Satyagraha is therefore a discursive act conducted with and through the body, in addition to speech and discourse. Of course, the experience of being embodied—that is, living in and experi-encing the world through the body—is a crucial condition allowing human beings to act with conviction in the political arena, while speaking volumes about their conviction. But more importantly, the body is bound to the ethi-cal thought, both completing the ethics and forcing that ethics into a par-ticular kind of political action. The asceticism of the body (including



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self-scrutiny and self-surveillance) is an integral part of the ethical position of truth-seeking, while the centrality of the body in satyagraha forces the ethical, ascetic aspect of Gandhi’s political actor into a confrontational yet discursive political action that puts the body at risk to the violations of others as a form of persuasion.

In fact, an aggressive, warrior-like disposition toward political action, rather than standing in contrast to an austere, self-abnegating asceticism, requires the latter as a prerequisite. The endless pages that Gandhi devotes to detailing lists, instructions, and rules for the strategic behaviour of satyagrahis attest to this, for they reveal a rigorous training, a martial or military discipline that rests on the foundations of austerity and self-sacrifice.63 It is only because the satyagrahi remains detached from worldly needs, desires, and bonds that she has little left to lose, and can therefore make the sacrifice of the physical and mental deprivations that will inevitably follow her disruptive and defiant behaviour.64 Only those who have completed the requirements of asceticism can engage fully in political action,65 while the political/strategic actions of satyagraha emerge always from this ethical foundation.

In much of the scholarly literature, the ascetic elements of Gandhi’s ahimsa tend to receive far more attention than the warrior-like ones.66 But this reading of Gandhi’s nonviolence reminds us that meaningful political exchange for Gandhi requires a stitching-together of the ethical position with the discursiveness of satyagraha. To act politically in service of truth or justice is ascetic in its austerity and renunciation, but it is also warrior-like in its aggressive, active confrontation with injustice. This confrontation requires a literal placement of the body on the frontlines of contestation, as a persuasive act designed to convince one’s adversary (or at least initiate a dialogue) regarding the truth claims involved in this contestation. Moreover, such confrontational bodily persuasion is possible precisely because one has undertaken the bodily self-discipline required in order to arrive at these truth claims through a rigorously ascetic process of truth-seeking.

Contemporary Environmentalism and Gandhian Ecological CitizenshipWhat, if anything, can this reading of Gandhi’s ethical and political position—its interweaving of the brahmin and the kshatriya—contribute to contempo-rary environmentalism? Contemporary advocates of conscious consumption may perhaps imagine that they are being Gandhian when they focus on the structuring of corporeal desire, thus connecting to Gandhi’s ethical, ascetic position. They may imagine that the self-scrutiny of their physical desires,




combined with a discursive self-surveillance in which they publicly acknowledge their own struggles with the fulfilling of such desires, is Gandhian. The conscious consumption component of the environmental movement mimics Gandhi’s blurring of lines between the public and the private. For many environmentalists, decisions once considered strictly private rather than public—what to eat, where to obtain food from, how to dispose of bodily waste, what sorts of clothes to wear—are now seen as necessarily political, because they ultimately bear on the (mis)management of steadily dwindling collective resources, and on the structure of commu-nal life. Environmental activists blog endlessly about their personal strug-gles with the following issues: Does consuming this particular kind of food, giving money to this particular commercial entity for the pursuit of this particular material pleasure, or disposing of this waste in one way or another have any negative implications for the world I live in? Certainly, Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization and its structuring of desire appears to reso-nate deeply within the realm of environmental ethical practice, as does his suggestion that the capacity for self-surveillance can be empowering, if it calls attention to the manipulation of desire. Contemporary environmental-ists perhaps turn here to Gandhi’s asceticism, precisely because he recog-nized the connection between bodily needs and collective ethical impact, while offering a model of how to live in a way that turns the scrutiny of such needs into an instinctive and regular ethical practice.

But in remaining focused only on the self-scrutiny of asceticism, many environmentalists miss the crucial insight that this ethical position is necessar-ily intertwined with the discursive disruptiveness of a warrior-like position. Conscious consumers can easily miss out on the fact that Gandhi’s ethical position always reminds us of the warrior’s duties to which it is constantly attached; neither of these parts can be extracted from the whole. In contempo-rary terms, no response to the problem of sustainability can ignore the need for the active, disruptive, political opposition of injustice, and for such opposition to take on the role of citizen rather than of consumer (or non-consumer, as it were).67 Forms of nonviolent resistance must therefore extend beyond con-sumption or non-consumption patterns, to include boycotting, striking, march-ing, protesting, and actively working to abolish any system of governance damaging to just forms of life. Yet, many contemporary green activists seem content merely to appropriate a watered-down version of Gandhi’s ethical and political claim, as though their conscious consumption were an adequate expression of nonviolence.

Take for instance the experiment now known as No Impact Man, in which a journalist and his family attempt to live with zero environmental impact for one



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year.68 Described in both a book and a film, Colin Beavan’s project generated both deep admiration and contempt for what was seen as either a self-promoting publicity stunt or an absurd attempt at living simply. Beavan and his family strive zealously to reduce their environmental impact, creating no trash, forgo-ing takeout food, toilet paper, most modes of transportation including an eleva-tor, and eventually eschewing electricity altogether. Beavan’s experiment seems akin to the kind of sacrificial, self-inflicted suffering that Gandhi engaged in, for the purposes of finding the limits of human experience. He appears to make use of bodily self-suffering as an expression of political commitment, inviting delib-erate pain inflicted by public bodily sacrifices. Meanwhile, he appears to have accepted not only the need for an asceticism driven by publicized self-surveillance but also Gandhi’s invitation to bear physical pain courageously.

But this form of public sacrifice alone, committed as it may seem, cannot be cast as a Gandhian satyagraha, precisely because it misses the most important point of warrior-like nonviolence. It may invoke the Gandhian language of suffering (paying higher prices, going “without” many basic bodily desires, climbing stairs instead of taking elevators), but it disrupts nothing and engages no adversary in a discursive examination of truth claims through the challenges articulated in the act of satyagraha. It makes no one uncomfortable, and declares no truth claims through nonviolent physical confrontation. It may resist certain mainstream consumption patterns, but unless it is accompanied by the disruptive confrontations that result in explicitly political sacrifice of physical punishment, the challenge remains contained to the realm of the ethical alone. Thus, it allows the consumer to imagine that the good deed of consuming consciously suffices in lieu of the necessity of disruptively declaring one’s truth claim through the bodily mechanisms of satyagraha.

In so doing, it ignores the need to place the body at the centre of political contestation by inviting punishment through civil disobedience, and the experience of bodily pain that often follows. In focusing so thoroughly on conscious consumption, projects like Beavan’s are therefore Gandhian in only a partial, and crucially incomplete, way. A fully Gandhian environmen-talism would require ascetic self-scrutiny, but it would also ask activists to fast unto death, go on strike, place their bodies at the frontlines of breaking unjust laws or defying unjust phenomena, and pay the price in terms of embodied pain: police action, arrests, incarceration, or even harsher vio-lence. Gandhi’s interweaving of the ascetic and the warrior might be seen as a form of what Andrew Dobson, among others, calls “ecological citizen-ship”: an active, participatory form of citizenship that deals with non-contractual responsibility, inhabits the private as well as the public sphere,




and emphasizes the language of virtue.69 Ecological citizenship focuses on duties, obligations, and responsibilities of citizens toward one another, and toward the collective. Many commentators, Dobson points out, seek intel-lectual resources for the idea of such citizenship within civic republican discourse, which includes the idea of striving toward the common good through the cultivation of virtues such as courage, discipline, and service, sacrificing personal inclinations and preferences.70 John Barry points out that this reliance on the civic republican tradition by some “green” political theorists centralizes the concepts of active citizenship and virtue-based moral perspectives, along with notions of obligation and duty.

Similarly, Gandhi asks citizens to cultivate virtues based on self-discipline, courage, and sacrifice for the greater good, emphasizing their duties and obligations to one another. But his notion of duty is rather specific: it requires confronting and eventually transforming injustice. The individual is obliged to seek truth as a matter of internal spiritual transformation, but also to engage actively in the world of political and social justice, thereby trans-forming society in accordance with truth. “Service of the people,” Gandhi writes, “is impossible without taking part in politics,” which is why “no Indian who aspires to follow the way of true religion can afford to remain aloof from politics,” and “must undertake public service as his mission71 “It becomes one’s duty then to use satyagraha against society,” Gandhi writes.72 Elsewhere, he claims, “It is our duty . . . firmly to resolve to defy the law and go to gaol”73 and to “disobey orders which, on mature consideration, [we] regard as unjust or oppressive.”74 For Gandhi, as T. N. Madan reminds us, political involvement is sacralized in that it becomes the dharma or spiritual duty of the age.75 In other words, “troublemaking” is the natural accompani-ment to truth-seeking.

A Gandhian form of ecological citizenship would not only be active and participatory, it would call upon ecological citizens to disrupt the flow of conventional political arrangements through publicly articulated bodily challenges to injustice, while suffering the physical consequences of their disruptions and provocations. Conscious consumption alone does not satisfy the requirements of a Gandhian ecological citizenship, not because its thoughtful consumerism does not suffer enough or does not engage the body enough. Rather, it is because Gandhi’s overall project is to change the world through an ethical nonviolence centred on the search for truth, but interwo-ven with a persistent, disruptive and indeed dangerous troublemaking. Conscious consumption appears to satisfy the requirement of ascetic self-scrutiny and conscientiousness, but only does so by sometimes substituting the suffering of paying higher prices and self-denial for a disruptive



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warrior-like defiance that risks a much deeper and more political kind of bodily suffering. Indeed, we might even say that the over-emphasis on con-scious consumption could contribute to a casual, apolitical inclination among greens who are looking simply to assuage their own guilt about con-sumption, in a way that is, from a Gandhian perspective, ultimately politi-cally passive, in that it ignores the warrior’s duty to confront injustice.

Of course, it would be inaccurate and unfair to paint all green activism in such a light. While Beavan alludes only briefly to the need for confronting injustice through political confrontation,76 other green activists have con-ducted public, sacrificial acts of physically painful political disruption. Well-known examples are India’s Chipko Andolan (“Hug the Tree Movement”), and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (“Save the Narmada Valley Movement”) led by the indefatigable Gandhian warrior Medha Patkar. In these and other Indian instances, Indian environmental activists have acted to protect trees in the Himalayas against industrial exploitation, or to demand justice for the citi-zens of the Narmada River Valley, through nonviolent physical confrontations such as tree-hugging, sit-ins, protest marches, and hunger strikes.77 Elsewhere, private citizens have sometimes demonstrated the rare courage to confront building contractors intent on carrying out environmentally destructive road building or uproot genetically modified crops in government-designated test fields.78 More recently, more than a thousand activists from a broad coalition of environmental movements were arrested outside the White House in a civil disobedience action opposing a controversial pipeline that would carry oil from Canada to Texas.79 I neither wish to underplay the Gandhian warrior-like behaviour exhibited in such movements, nor to deny the importance of ethical self-scrutiny within environmentalism. My goal is simply to point out the subtle dangers involved, from a Gandhian point of view, in associating green activism primarily or solely with the self-scrutiny of thoughtful consumption. While Gandhi might have appreciated such conscientiousness among contem-porary green activists, he might also have been uneasy with a project of self-scrutiny that lapses into apolitical passivity, keeping bodies neatly shielded from the discomfort of actual, political confrontations with injustice, and the subsequent pain they bring forth.

ConclusionsI have argued here that Gandhi’s nonviolence speaks with urgency to envi-ronmental debates when it is understood in both ascetic and warrior-like terms. In concluding, I wish to point out that it also does so in a way that challenges many familiar binaries. Indeed, as we have seen, Gandhi calls




into question the traditional Indian dichotomy which contrasts the brah-min’s capacities to those of the kshatriya, suggesting instead that these must be complementary. Meanwhile, traditional usage of war and warrior imag-ery (both Western and non-Western) has often focused on violence, and on the death and destruction wrought by bodies upon one another (and now, increasingly by technology upon bodies). Such warrior-like imagery often assumes that the only condition under which bodies can be engaged in political action are those of the brute physicality of war and violence: bodies perpetrating destruction upon another, or being subject to destructive attacks by technology. Indeed, the dichotomy sometimes offered to us in Western thought is that of embodied engagement understood as war, vio-lence, or brute strength, versus a disembodied politics characterized by nonviolent reason, discourse, and speech. Certainly, much of post-Enlightenment liberalism seeks to minimize physical vulnerability by protecting the body as an inviolable sphere and grounding political exchange in the “higher” human capacities of intellect, speech, and discourse. Gandhi offers us a way beyond this dichotomy, to understand political action as embodied and warrior-like, yet neither violent nor centred around the martial character of brute strength. Gandhi reminds us that there is a new—and nonviolent—way in which political action can be centred around warrior-like exchange involving the body.

Gandhi’s warrior-like nonviolence also challenges the traditional linkage of discourse with reason, and of the body with the passions or emotions. He is keenly aware of the need for reasoned speech and discourse as central political actions, and repeatedly focuses on the importance of persuading or converting one’s opponent. But crucially, he sees bodily satyagraha itself as a form of deliberation, in which both reason and emotion serve as equally persuasive forms of discourse:

The satyagrahi strives to reach the reason through the heart . . . things of fundamental importance . . . are not secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with suffering. . . . If you want something really important to be done, you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.80

Nonviolent, bodily self-suffering appeals simultaneously to both reason and emotion, breaking through the rational defenses of the opponent to sup-plement the appeal of reason. Reasoned discourse and non-rational, emotive persuasion are thus complementary.81 So too, as we have seen, are the physical and discursive means of persuasion: the discursive claim is articulated in the



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form of a physical confrontation, such that bodily defiance is itself the declara-tion of an ethical claim then subject to dialogue and persuasion. Thus, a Gandhian politics is both embodied yet discursive, rational and emotive, warrior-like yet nonviolent. Moreover, it also offers us the insight that while the human body may need to be protected from suffering inflicted by others, conscious, deliberate, and disciplined self-inflicted suffering can be a positive, produc-tive, and perhaps necessary moment in political exchange.

In these and other formulations, Gandhi offers us an understanding of “embodiment”—that is, the condition of having a body and experiencing the world through it—that is not Cartesian, instrumentalist, or dualistic. The con-crete materiality and physicality of the body are not somehow contrasted with their opposites, such as culture, language, discourse, or social construction of behaviour.82 Rather, as we have seen, the body, through various modes of lived experience—desire, need, speech, discourse, self-presentation, psychic self-examination, self-suffering, and self-discipline—remains holistically engaged in ethical and political action at all times.83

Finally, warrior-like ecological citizenship requires that this holistic involvement of the body in political and ethical action happen in a neces-sarily collective way. Such citizenship relies not merely on individual actions, but also on the collective organization of bodies with relation to one another. As Dustin Howes points out, recalling Arendt, power involves people acting in concert with one another. Thus, when coordinated with many others, discursive satyagraha becomes politically powerful, for it involves collective participation in physically confrontational political actions that express ethical claims.84 In other words, Gandhian ecological citizenship must be collectively ethical, discursive, and disruptive: not only are people collectively organizing themselves in acts of ethical scrutiny and political contestation, they are declaring their shared truth claims and plac-ing these in the political arena together.

A Gandhian ecological citizenship of course raises more questions than can be addressed fully here, but let me briefly point toward a few such implica-tions for further research. The ethical commitment to asceticism may provoke discomfort among those who would contend that its blurring of the distinction between public and private can appear problematic from a modern, liberal, and perhaps democratic perspective. Would a Gandhian ethic of self-scrutiny insist that private behaviours and choices pertaining to bodily consumption be brought under public scrutiny, or subject to legal sanction? Would this lead to anti-democratic or authoritarian political formations, with society given the right to curb, correct, and punish individual choices? Recent attention in envi-ronmental political thought has turned precisely to this potential tension




between green objectives and liberal democratic regimes.85 Either because of the anthropocentrism of liberalism, the inevitable stressing of “limits” to pref-erences in ecological commitments, or the incompatibility of liberalism with the curtailing of tastes and preferences, liberalism is seen as greatly suspicious of environmental political thought.86 Yet, the private realm is important to eco-logical citizenship, because the sphere of bodily necessity where the produc-tion and reproduction of human life takes place, rather than removing us from the realm of citizenship, actually generates the kind of obligations peculiar to it.87 But contemporary environmental thinkers also suggest that challenging liberal presumptions should not be confused with challenging democratic ones. Public limits to private consumption choices may impinge upon the lib-eral notion of autonomy, but need not do so in a way that is remote, capricious, or arbitrary. Rather, such limits can be posited within the very context of dem-ocratic decision making.88 We may want to explore, therefore, whether and to what extent a commitment to Gandhian ecological citizenship will find us running up against the limits of liberal democratic theorizing.

Meanwhile, undertaking collective, disruptive, bodily satyagraha spe-cifically in the service of environmental change also presents unique obstacles. Unlike in the nationalist fight for Indian independence, there is a diffusion of targets and goals which may obscure the true nature of the problem. Who is most responsible for environmental degradation: Governments? Corporations? Individual citizens? Moreover, corporate entities are different kinds of entities than unjust governments against which to conduct satyagraha, especially because there are fewer nonvio-lent political actions that can legitimately provoke a violent response from such an adversary. There is a need to act publicly and dramatically with defiant, disruptive conviction, but sometimes without a clear sense of who precisely one’s adversaries (or even allies) are at any given moment, which specific adversary to target, and how precisely to provoke responses that highlight one’s bodily suffering.

Despite these challenges, nowhere does the need for a Gandhian ethical and political response seem more urgent than in the arena of environmental change. I have sought to argue here, however, that many who currently seem to appropriate Gandhi for the purposes of environmentalism miss something central about his nonviolent politics. Many contemporary environmental movements appear to gravitate toward the ethical, self-denying, truth-seeking claims of the brahmin or ascetic embedded in Gandhi’s thought. Yet, a fuller and more completely Gandhian environmental politics must recognize that such claims are necessarily interwoven with the combative political strategy of the kshatriya or warrior. In other words, if we wish to adopt Gandhi’s ethical stance in environmentalism, this requires adopting his warrior-like



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position, which engages in a disruptive, defiant, yet nonviolent politics that never rests easy, continually challenging the injustice of existing socio-polit-ical structures.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Dustin Howes, Ronald C. Den Otter, Matthew Moore, Wendy Brown, Ronald Terchek, Mary Dietz, and the anonymous reviewers for Political Theory, all of whom generously read previous drafts of this essay, and sug-gested important revisions. Previous drafts were also presented at the University of California, Irvine, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Graduate students in a University of California-Riverside seminar on environmental political thought also provided insightful commentary on the essay.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this article.

Notes

1. Vinay Lal, “Too Deep for Deep Ecology: Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life,” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water, ed. Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 183.

2. See Christopher Key Chapple, “Hinduism and Deep Ecology,” in Deep Ecol-ogy and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Ground, ed. David Landis Barnhill and Roger S. Gottlieb (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Harold Cow-ard, “Hindu Views of Nature and the Environment,” and D. P. Chattopadhy-aya, “Indian Perspectives on Naturalism,” in Nature across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dor-drecht: Kluwer, 2003). Bhikhu Parekh explicitly attributes this “cosmocentric” Hindu philosophical anthropology to Gandhi, in which there is a pronounced ontological continuity between divine and particular living beings, as well as between human and non-human life. Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 196-97. Parekh’s support for this particular interpretation of Gandhi’s philo-sophical anthropology is slim at best. He cites From Yeravda Mandir (Ahmed-abad, India: Navajivan, 1932) and Discourses on the Gita (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1960), but a discussion of philosophical anthropology is virtually




non-existent in these texts. Finally, it should also be noted that the reduction-ist contrast of Abrahamic faiths as anthropocentric, and non-Abrahamic ones as more holistic, requires critique as something of a caricature. In addition to romanticizing the “noble savage” or “noble oriental,” such a view also does not do justice to the complexity of Abrahamic faith traditions which enjoin an ethic of “stewardship of nature.” See, for instance, Patrick Dobel, “The Judeo-Christian Stewardship Attitude to Nature,” in Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, ed. Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2008); and Arne Kalland, “Environmentalism and Images of the Other,” in Nature across Cultures.

3. See Pragati Sahni, Environmental Ethics in Buddhism: A Virtues Approach (Lon-don: Routledge, 2008); Christopher Key Chapple, ed., Jainism and Ecology Non-violence in the Web of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Chattopadhyaya, “Indian Perspectives on Naturalism”; Leslie Sponsel and Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel, “Buddhist Views of Nature and the Environment,” in Nature across Cultures.

4. Arne Naess, who coined the term “deep ecology” and readily admits his debt to Gandhi, takes this a step further: since the goal of self-realization means real-izing your identity as one with all living beings, violence against any living being is violence against the self. Arne Naess, Self-Realisation: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World (Perth: Murdoch University Press, 1986), and “Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes,” in Deep Ecology, ed. Michael Tobias (San Diego: Avant Books, 1984); Knut A. Jacobsen, “Bhaga-vadgita, Ecosophy T, and Deep Ecology,” Inquiry 39, no. 2 (1996): 219-38.

5. Nathmal Tatia, “The Jain Worldview and Ecology,” and Padmanabh S. Jaini, “Ecology, Economics and Development in Jainism,” in Chapple, Jainism and Ecology. See also John S. Moolakkattu, “Gandhi as a Human Ecologist,” Jour-nal of Human Ecology 29, no. 3 (2010): 151-58; Thomas Weber, “Gandhi, Deep Ecology, Peace Research, and Buddhist Economics,” Journal of Peace Research 36, no. 3 (1999): 349-61; T. N. Khoshoo, Mahatma Gandhi: An Apostle of Applied Human Ecology (New Delhi: Tata Energy Research Institute, 1995); T. N. Khoshoo and John S. Moollakkattu, Mahatma Gandhi and the Environ-ment: Analysing Gandhian Environmental Thought (New Delhi: The Energy Research Institute, 2009).

6. “We cannot have ecological movement designed to prevent violence against Nature, unless the principle of non-violence becomes central to the ethics of human culture.” This statement is attributed to Gandhi in T. N. Khoshoo, Mahatma Gandhi: An Apostle of Applied Human Ecology, pp. 3, 17, and subsequently cited elsewhere, but mysteriously, no reference is provided for this. So too for the fol-lowing: “I need no inspiration other than Nature’s. She has never failed me as yet.



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She mystifies me, bewilders me, sends me to ecstasies. . . . Have I not gazed at the marvelous mystery of the starry vault, hardly ever tiring of the great panorama? . . . When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.” See Khoshoo, Mahatma Gandhi: An Apos-tle of Applied Human Ecology, p. 31, cited in Moolakattu, pp. 152-53. Gandhi’s profound attachment to what he termed “dumb creation,” his passion for cow-protection, and the strong prohibitions he subsequently posited on meat-eating, are also often cited: see Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [hereafter CWMG], 100 vols. (Delhi: Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958-1994), 24: 373.

7. It should be noted here, of course, that an “inherent value” position is scarcely the only source from which an environmental ethic may emerge. While thinkers like Aldo Leopold and Arne Naess espousing the “deep ecology” perspective may have seen environmental ethics as the search for the inherent value of nature, such a view of environmental ethics has been roundly criticized for its narrowness. Approaches such as ecofeminism and ecological pragmatism have sought to pluralize the very project of environmental ethics, broadening it to include questions of culture and gender that were often obscured by deep ecology’s emphasis on the question of inherent value. See, for instance, Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg, eds., Beneath the Surface: Criti-cal Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilder-ness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1 (1989): 71-83; Dean Curtin, “Dogen, Deep Ecology, and the Ecological Self,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 2 (1994): 195-213; and “Women’s Knowledge as Expert Knowledge: Indian Women and Ecodevelopment,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture and Nature, ed. Karren Warren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

8. “The emphasis laid on the sacredness of subhuman life in Jainism is understand-able. But that can never mean that one is to be kind to this life in preference to human life. . . . The former has been over-emphasized.” CWMG 91: 61.

9. Satish Kumar, “Jain Ecology,” and Kristi L. Wiley, “The Nature of Nature: Jain Perspectives on the Natural World,” in Chapple, Jainism and Ecology.

10. This is evidenced by some of the rules of his ashram: “The split twigs used for toothbrushing should be washed well, and collected in a pot. When they dry up, they should be used for starting a fire, the idea being that nothing which can be used should be thrown away.” See M.K. Gandhi, Ashram Observances in Action (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1955), 151. Gandhi had strict instructions to his




ashram staff to re-use all the envelopes in which mail was received, see CWMG 49: 407. See also Rudolph and Rudolph, “This-Worldly Asceticism and Political Modernization,” in The Modernity of Tradition, 216-39.

11. Bart Gruzalski, “Gandhi’s Contributions to Environmental Thought and Action,” Environmental Ethics 24, no. 3 (2002): 227-42.

12. Lal, “Too Deep for Deep Ecology,” 201.13. Ramachandra Guha, “Mahatma Gandhi and the Environmental Movement in

India,” in Environmental Movements in Asia, ed. Arne Kalland and Gerard Per-soon (Padstow, UK: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1998), 69.

14. CWMG 57: 74, 57: 205, 15: 174, 14: 425, 53: 396, 18: 255, See also Farah Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi’s Truth: A Method for Moral and Political Arbitration,” Review of Politics 68 (2006).

15. Ahimsa and truth, Gandhi claims, “[are] the obverse and reverse of the same coin.” CWMG 31: 381.

16. CWMG 15: 252.17. CWMG 15: 251-54.18. CWMG 32: 273-74.19. Gandhi seems to rely on the classical Hindu understanding of suffering or tapas

as a tool of connection with the truth, which purifies consciousness and moral vision. See Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yogasutras of Patanjali (Bucking-ham, VA: Integral Yoga Publications, 1990), chap. 2.1, 79.

20. Through this conscious suffering, Gandhi claims, “we understand more clearly the difference between what is everlasting and what is not; we learn to distin-guish between what is our duty and what is not . . . the evil within us diminishes from day to day.” CWMG 49: 408.

21. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 210.

22. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part III: chaps. vii, viii, ix; Part IV: chaps. iv, v, vii, xxiii, xxvii, xxiii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvi; Bhikhu Parekh, “Sex, Energy and Politics,” in Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003); Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), part II; Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Alter, “Nonviolence, Brahmacharya and Goat’s Milk,” in Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

23. CWMG 1: 82-86, 166; 11: 494, 501-10; 12; 79-80, 97. Perhaps no text documents as extensively Gandhi’s preoccupation with these matters as Joseph Alter’s Gan-dhi’s Body.



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24. M. K. Gandhi, Key to Health (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1948); and Self-Restraint vs. Self-Indulgence (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1927).

25. For instance, Gandhi writes: “I had involuntary discharge twice during the last two weeks. I cannot recall any dream. I never practiced masturbation. . . . I also know that there are impure desires deep down in me . . . I feel unhappy about this, but I am not nervously afraid.” CWMG, 40: 312, as cited in Alter, Gandhi’s Body, 7.

26. CWMG 32: 444, 36: 182.27. Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, 139-40.28. Agnes Heller, “Has Biopolitics Changed the Concept of the Political?” in Bio-

politics: The Politics of the Body, Race and Nature, ed. Agnes Heller and Sonja Puntscher Riekmann (Vienna: Avebury Press, 1996), 4.

29. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph point out that the sharp distinction between pub-lic and private so essential to much of liberal thought was untenable in Gan-dhi’s India. See Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Coffee House and the Ashram Revisited: How Gandhi Democratized Habermas’ Public Sphere,” in Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home, ed. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

30. I should acknowledge here that I have not distinguished in much detail between “necessity” and “desire,” concepts that are perhaps sufficiently different to war-rant further exploration. Yet, Gandhi’s point is perhaps that modern civilization is pernicious precisely because it elides the distinction between the two, allowing us to conflate “need” with “desire” in our consumption.

31. Anthony Parel, ed., M. K. Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), [hereafter HS], 35.

32. HS, 158-64.33. HS, 107-11, 164-70, and 150.34. HS, 150-51.35. HS, 164-70.36. John Tambornino reminds us that the body is itself “defined in relation to notions

such as consciousness, language and culture, whose construal affects that of the body.” Tambornino, The Corporeal Turn: Passion, Necessity, Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 10.

37. Ashis Nandy, “Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi,” and “The Psychology of Colonialism,” in Exiled at Home (Delhi: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1998).

38. CWMG 22: 23439. CWMG 25: 77-78.




40. “Passive resistance is an all-sided sword,” HS, 94; Satyagraha is the “greatest of weapons at the disposal of mankind,” CWMG 63: 348; “We are all soldiers of God to fight the battle of right against wrong,” CWMG 96: 276; “A non-violent army would fight against all injustice,” CWMG 98: 311; “Oppose with ahimsa if you can, but go down fighting by all means,” CWMG 94: 230; “One should, if need be, die fighting,” CWMG 92: 458; “An army of satyagrahis has been orga-nized . . . everyone is eligible for enlistment in this army. . . . The only qualifica-tion needed for a soldier of this army is fearlessness,” CWMG 25: 134-36. See also CWMG 9: 339-41, 16: 6-9, 25: 315, 25: 483, 75: 186-87, 96: 151, 96: 301, 96: 50, 96: 179, 94: 215, 97: 237.

41. CWMG 16: 9, 22: 221. See also CWMG 14: 216-18.42. HS, p. 93; CWMG 21: 200.43. CWMG 16: 10.44. HS, 88-95. See also CWMG 9: 340: “Satyagraha is more potent than physical

strength.”45. CWMG 47: 1.46. CWMG 47: 1.47. CWMG 26:120-21.48. CWMG 26: 122-23.49. CWMG 25: 261.50. CWMG 45: 26.51. CWMG 25: 12.52. CWMG 5: 339.53. CWMG 23:9. In another speech, Gandhi congratulated his compatriots: “You

did wonderful things; you defied the ordinances, you defied lathi [baton]-charges and ‘firing’ orders, because you were conscious of your strength.” (CWMG 51: 227).

54. CWMG 16: 127.55. CWMG 26: 90, 19: 20756. CWMG 16: 127 [emphasis in original].57. CWMG 10: 12.58. CWMG 15: 238.59. See Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi’s Truth”; and Margaret Chatterjee, Gan-

dhi’s Religious Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), chap. 5.

60. Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 11, 36-41.

61. On the concept of satyagraha as a joint examination of respective truth-claims, see Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi’s Truth,” and “Gandhi’s Civic Ahimsa: A Standard for Public Justification in Multicultural Democracies,” International Journal of Gandhi Studies 1 (2011): 75-106.



Godrej 463

62. Gandhi’s secretary Pyarelal writes of Gandhi’s “wholehearted acceptance on his part of [his opponents’] standpoint as their truth, which might one day become also his truth.” N. Pyarelal, Gandhi: The Last Phase (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan, 1956), vol. I, 10. Thus, Joan Bondurant writes, the satyagrahi “allows the oppo-nent every opportunity and indeed invites him to demonstrate the correctness of his . . . position, and to dissuade him of his own position.” Bondurant, 196.

63. See, among many others, CWMG 16: 436-38, 48: 340-42.64. See CWMG 9: 340-42: “[The satyagrahi] gives no thought whatever to his body.

. . . He must be indifferent to wealth . . . one must not hesitate even for a moment to sacrifice it. . . . No one who has not cultivated such an attitude can practise satyagraha . . . [the rulers] can play on his fear of losing it. . . . A satyagrahi is obliged to break away from family attachments. . . . When faced with suffering of any kind—loss of wealth or imprisonment—one need not be concerned about the future of one’s family. . . . One is obliged to suffer hunger and thirst, to bear heat and cold, to sacrifice family bonds, to put up with pecuniary loss.”

65. Asking who can have soul-force, Gandhi replies, “One who is a brahmachari [ascetic], who has conquered sleep and eats little, one who is free from vices and is truthful, one who speaks little . . . refuses to keep with himself anything beyond his immediate needs since he would not have what is denied to others.” (CWMG 25: 28).

66. See Parekh, “Sex, Energy and Politics”; Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, part 2; Alter, Gandhi’s Body; and Ved Mehta, “Nonviolence, Brahmach-arya and Goat’s Milk.” Two notable exceptions are Sudhir Kakar and Joseph Alter, who point to the language of militancy and aggression that underlies much of Gan-dhi’s writing about the body. Alter, Gandhi’s Body, 51; Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 99.

67. See Mark Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1988), 7-8; Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2007), 115-32; Derrick Jensen, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Per-sonal Change Does Not Equal Political Change,” Orion (July/August 2009).

68. Colin Beavan, No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2009).

69. Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2003), 89.

70. A. Light, “Restoring Ecological Citizenship,” in Democracy and the Claims of Nature, ed. B. Minteer and Pepperman B. Taylor (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); John Barry, Rethinking Green Politics (London: Sage, 1999); Barry, “Vulnerability and Virtue: Democracy, Dependency, and Ecologi-cal Stewardship,” in Democracy and the Claims of Nature; and “Resistance Is




Fertile: From Environmental to Sustainability Citizenship,” in Environmental Citizenship, ed. Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (Harvard, MA: MIT Press, 2005); James Connelly, “The Virtues of Environmental Citizenship,” in Envi-ronmental Citizenship; Peter Christoff, “Ecological Citizens and Ecologically-Guided Democracy,” in Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, ed. B. Doherty and M. De Geus (London: Routledge, 1996); Patrick Curry, “Redefining Community: Towards an Ecological Republi-canism,” Biodiversity and Conservation 9 (2000): 1059-71.

71. CWMG 16: 269.72. CWMG 8: 151-15.73. CWMG 5: 339.74. CWMG 16: 433.75. T.N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds (New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1997), 236. This interpretation of Gandhi’s duty of active citizenship in confronting injustice is also further elaborated by Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, 100-103; and Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, 193.

76. Beavan, No Impact Man, 205.77. Anupam Mishra and Satyendra Tripathi, Chipko Movement: Uttarakhand Wom-

en’s Bid to Save Forest Wealth (New Delhi: People’s Action for Development with Justice, 1978).

78. Dobson, Green Political Thought, 129; B. Seel, “Strategies of resistance at the Pollock Free State Road Protest,” Environmental Politics 6, no. 4 (1997); P. North, “‘Save our Solsbury!’: The Anatomy of an Anti-Roads Protestor,” Environmental Politics 7, no. 3 (1998); Robert Young, “‘Monkeywrenching’ and the Process of Democracy,” in Ecology and Democracy, ed. Freya Mathews (London: Frank Cass, 1996).

79. Mark Guarino, “Hundreds Arrested Protesting Keystone XL Oil Pipeline,” Christian Science Monitor, September 3, 2011.

80. CWMG 30: 437, 54: 48.81. See Godrej, “Nonviolence and Gandhi’s Truth,” 304.82. In fact, Gandhi shows a keen appreciation of the interplay between the material-

ity of bodily experience and its larger cultural and social structural determinants, when he suggests that the very concept of bodily necessity is vulnerable to dis-tortion. See HS, 68, 167, 150.

83. In so doing, Gandhi is able to, in Tambornino’s terms, “foreground the body without relegating language, culture, and consciousness to the background,” and thus “explore the intersections between the body, language, culture, and con-sciousness” (Tambornino, The Corporeal Turn, 3).



Godrej 465

84. Satyagraha “wins concessions by rearranging bodies, claiming and creating public spaces.” See Dustin Howes, Toward a Credible Pacifism: Violence and the Pos-sibilities of Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 139.

85. See Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2007), 10; Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect (New York: Harper Row, 1974); and W. Ophuls, “The Politics of a Sustainable Society,” in The Sustain-able Society , ed. D. Pirages (New York: Praeger, 1977); Sagoff, The Economy of the Earth, 146-70; Freya Matthews, “Ecology and Democracy,” Environmental Politics 4, no. 4 (1995); G. Smith, Deliberative Democracy and the Environment (London: Routledge, 2003); M. Mason, Environmental Democracy (London: Earthscan, 1999); B. Doherty and M. De Geus, Democracy and Green Politi-cal Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship (London: Routledge, 1996); M. Wissenburg, Green Liberalism: The Free and Green Society (London: UCL Press, 1998); and Wissenburg, “Liberalism,” in Political Theory and the Eco-logical Challenge, ed. Andrew Dobson and Robin Eckersley (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2006).

86. See Dobson, Green Political Thought, 149-58.87. Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment, 138-39.88. See Ophuls, “The Politics of a Sustainable Society,” and Dobson, Green Politi-

cal Thought, 106.

About the Author

Farah Godrej is associate professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. Her areas of research include Indian political thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization, comparative political theory, and environmental political thought. Her research has appeared in The Review of Politics and Polity, and she is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011).



"Ascetics, Warriors and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship," Political Theory 40 (4), 2012

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