by Winin Pereira and Jeremy Seabrook

Most people connect violence solely with a physical action against other human beings, but ancient Indian sages perceived it in a much wider sense. They considered all life sacred, and in their concern for self-perfection, the killing of any living being, human or non-human, was sinful. Further, causing harm to other creatures was also thought wrong; it had to be minimised because harm itself was considered a form of partial death. Harm was defined widely to include not only physical injury, but also all forms of pain, including depriving persons of their livelihood or intimidating them. Violence could be committed personally, it could he instigated or aided, or it could be condoned by observing it without protest. [1] However, it is not possible to survive in this world without at least some violence, for we depend on other living beings for our food. Avoiding all killing must result in our own death.

Our sages were deeply concerned that humans must necessarily be involved in violence and death and that absolute innocence was unattainable. They understood the concept of ahimsa to mean the minimum or least possible violence. While causing some harm is inevitable, we do not have a licence to kill other creatures ruthlessly, to act on the basis of the “survival of the fittest”, which in effect means survival of the most violent. Rather, we should have greater respect for those beings whose lives must be sacrificed in order that we may survive. The survival of the fittest means that the rest perish. Social justice is incompatible with this theory.

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by Arne Naess

It was Gandhi’s claim that the greater the efficiency he acquired in the use of nonviolence, the greater the im­pression nonviolence made on his opponents. This claim he held to be a legacy of his experiences in South Africa. Was he right in this? Did his claim follow, ac­cording to inductive principles, as a valid conclusion from what he saw?

The railway-strike episode and others of a similar kind did, in fact, provide Gandhi with an empirical basis for the hypothesis that the more he applied, even to fanatical extremes, the principle of nonviolence, the greater was its effect, and that every increase, no matter how slight, in the purity of the application of the principle meant an increase in the chances of success. Thus we can see what was meant by Gandhi’s seemingly ex­treme claim that if one man were able to achieve an entirely perfect, nonviolent method, all the opposition in the world would vanish. Yet we must be careful to note that Gandhi explicitly stated that we are all more or less imperfect, not least himself, and that therefore we can talk only in terms of degrees of success and not per­fection.

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by Arne Naess

Some of Gandhi’s fellow-workers, just as some of Nehru’s in a later day, were Socialists and Marxists. Though critical of their views, Gandhi was far from negatively disposed toward their aims. He believed, however, that it could not be in the employer’s interests to behave badly toward the workers, and that the employer could be persuaded to make radical reforms. On the basis of psychological and social interests common to both sides, he believed it impossible, in the long run, for one group to profit at the expense of the other. Exploitation and oppression amounted to violence, in Gandhi’s terms, and could only drive participants apart.

Today we might well admit that the acceptance of Gandhi’s view could have spared us Lenin’s uncritical acceptance of means and also the kind of laissez-faire liberalism we find in Western Europe, a liberalism which rejects all measures of economic control to remedy the undeserved suffering of the poor. We have seen in our time how both of the political philosophies from which these economic views are derived have led to violence and oppression.

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by William J. Jackson

Gandhi on the Salt March, 1930; public domain photo; photographer unknown

The image of Gandhi in action, walking with a staff in his hand, is well known. We see it in newsreels, statues, films and photos. Thomas Merton described Gandhi as a human question mark. Perhaps we should amend that to “a walking human question mark” moving across the landscape. He was a man on the move, inquiring why injustices exist and how to remedy them.

When Gandhi returned to India after being away for years studying in England and practicing law in South Africa, he tirelessly traveled all over the subcontinent. He went to places where he was invited to resolve conflicts, and was constantly taking the pulse of the people of India, assessing their needs and views, diagnosing the nation’s ills, and, when possible, trying to address them with his legal expertise. During much of this period he traveled by trains in third class cars.

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by Jim Forest

Thomas Merton; photograph by John Howard Griffin.

This is the text of the annual Oakham lecture, given in April 2012 at the meeting of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Oakham School, England.

What initially put Merton on the world map was the publication in 1948 of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. It was an account of growing up on both sides of the Atlantic (part of his adolescence was spent here at Oakham), what drew him to become a Catholic as a young adult, and finally what led him, in 1941, to become a Trappist monk at a monastery in rural Kentucky, Our Lady of Gethsemani. He was only 33 years old when the book appeared. To his publisher’s amazement, it became an instant bestseller. For many people, it was truly a life-changing book. I have lost count of how many copies of the book have been printed in English and other languages in the past 64 years, but we’re talking about millions.

Merton was and remains a controversial figure. Though he was a member of a monastic order well known for silence and for its distance from worldly affairs, Merton was outspoken on various topics that many regard as very worldly affairs. Merton disagreed. He was a critic of a Christianity in which religious identity is submerged in national or racial identity and life tidily divided between religious and ordinary existence.

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by Jim Forest

Dorothy Day in her room at the CW Farm. Tivoli, New York; c. 1970; photo by Bob Fitch

I first met Dorothy Day a few days before Christmas in 1960 while on leave from the U.S. Navy. After reading copies of The Catholic Worker that I had found in my parish library, and then reading Dorothy’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I decided to visit the community she had founded. I was based not so far away, in Washington, DC.

Arriving in Manhattan for that first visit, I made my way to Saint Joseph’s House — then in a loft on Spring Street, on the north edge of Little Italy in the Lower East Side of New York City. Discovering that it was moving day, I joined in helping carry boxes from an upstairs loft to a three-storey brick building at 175 Chrystie Street, a few blocks to the east. Jack Baker, one of the other people assisting with the move that day, invited me to stay in his apartment in the same neighborhood. A few days later I visited the community’s rural outpost on Staten Island, the Peter Maurin Farm. Crossing Upper New York Harbor by ferry, I made my way to an old farmhouse on a rural road just north of Pleasant Plains near the island’s southern tip. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea at one end of the dining room table.

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by Nathan Schneider

Nicholson Baker; public domain photograph; courtesy of Wikipedia.com

Anyone who makes even a modest habit of speaking out against war in public soon runs up against the inevitable, supposedly unanswerable question: What about World War II? It’s meant to be the ultimate stumper. This was the “good war,” wasn’t it, the war waged by the “greatest generation” against the evil incarnate of Hitler and imperial Japan? There was simply no other choice before the forces of goodness and truth but to leap into the single most deadly undertaking in all of human history. Right?

That won’t work if you’re talking to Nicholson Baker. In an extraordinary cover story in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” Baker explains how learning about World War II was actually a big part of what made him a pacifist in the first place. “In fact,” he writes, “the more I learn about the war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists.”

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by P. Sreenivasulu Reddy

In the 1920s and 1930s Gandhi was not yet an undisputed leader. There were many who did not have faith in his nonviolent, non-cooperation movement. But his social reforms, such as eradication of untouchability, the picketing of hot toddy shops, and the social reform ideals influenced by Ruskin (sarvodaya) drew nearly everyone’s attention. The most humiliated and long neglected sections of Indian society had at last found someone to champion their cause, and by the late 1930s, Gandhi’s successful Salt Satyagraha campaign and march demonstrated to the world the effectiveness of the nonviolent struggle for independence. Apart from nonviolence (ahimsa), Gandhi’s love of truth and spirit of sacrifice made him the guiding spirit of the Indian freedom struggle. Under his influence, many sacrificed what little they had for the sake of making India a free country.

R. K. Narayan. Cover photo of Penguin Classics Edition

This article gives an overview of some appearances of Gandhi as a figure in Indian English-language fiction, for example as a character in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), The Sword and the Sickle (1942) and Little Plays of Mahatma Gandhi (1991), and by other authors such as K.A. Abbas in Inqilab (1955), R.K. Narayan in Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and The Vendor of Sweets (1967), and Nagarajan in Chronicles of Kedaram (1961).

Although he does not appear as a character in K.S. Venkataramani’s Murugan, the Tiller (1927) or Kandan, the Patriot (1932) nor in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), Gandhi is nonetheless the driving force represented by characters inspired by his ideals. Gandhi’s followers, if not Gandhi, also appear in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s  So Many Hungers (1947), Mrs. Sahgal’s  A Time to be Happy (1957) and the previously mentioned The Vendor of Sweets by R. K. Narayan.

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by Lawrence Rosenwald

For most of my life, reading literature has given me some of my most intense and purest experiences.  I know from these experiences what Nabokov means when he writes, “ . . . a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (316-7); what Kafka means when he writes, “a book must be the axe for the frozen seas within us”; what Emily Dickinson means when she writes, “if I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” (NA I: 2483). A society that sought to deprive readers of such experiences, that sought to keep writers from creating works in relation to which such experiences might be found, would seem to me cold and impoverished – the frozen seas would remain within us, with no axe to break them up.

More recently, I have also become intensely committed to nonviolence – to nonviolence in relation to national conflict, i.e., to pacifism, but also to nonviolence as a way of life.^[1]  I am a modestly obedient citizen in most spheres of public life; in this one, I have become a deliberate and assertive lawbreaker.  For the past sixteen years, when my wife, Cynthia Schwan, and I have paid our federal income tax, we have subtracted from what we owe (though I don’t believe that “owe” is the right word for our relation to the government in this matter) the percentage of the federal budget that goes towards current military expenses, sent the subtracted percentage to progressive organizations or a progressive escrow fund, and informed the IRS of the action that we have taken.  This is, as noted, illegal, and the IRS has accordingly seized the money we have refused to pay, either from our bank accounts or from my salary at the college.  I do this annual act of civil disobedience because, just as I refuse to endorse a world without literature as I might imagine it, so I refuse, with equal intensity, to endorse the violent world I actually inhabit, the world of East Timor and Rwanda and Bosnia and the sanctions on Iraq, and in particular the violent country I inhabit, with its military budget that is by far the largest in the world, greater than the military budget of the twelve next largest military budgets combined.

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by Nathan Schneider

A year ago around this time, Occupy Wall Street was celebrating Advent — the season when Christians anticipate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. In front of Trinity Church, right at the top of Wall Street along Broadway, Occupiers set up a little model tent with the statuettes of a nativity scene inside: Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child in a manger, surrounded by animals. In the back, an angel held a tiny cardboard sign with a verse from Luke’s Gospel: “There was no room for them in the inn.” The reason for these activists’ interest in the liturgical calendar, of course, was the movement’s ongoing effort to convince Trinity to start acting less like a real estate corporation and more like a church, and to let the movement use a vacant property that Trinity owns.

A year later, even as a resilient few continue their 24-hour vigil on the sidewalk outside Trinity, churches and Occupiers are having a very different kind of Advent season together. Finding room in churches is no longer a problem for the movement.

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