[Reader-list] A critique of nonviolence

[Jeebesh]

dear all,

in this essay of exceptional scholarship we could find an opening for  
a renewed thinking.

warmly

jeebesh



http://www.india-seminar.com/2010/608/608_sibaji_bandyopadhyay.htm

A critique of nonviolence

SIBAJI BANDYOPADHYAY

Ahimsā paramo dharmo – this is one aphorism with which almost every  
Indian schoolchild is acquainted. From early childhood we are tutored  
to discern the symptoms of the pathological everyday we inhabit,  
taught to be increasingly protective of ourselves in a progressively  
more violent world, and in the same breath told that all sane Indians  
of the past swore by the creed of ‘nonviolence’. Offering, as  
though a therapeutic solace to the troubled souls of today, it is  
incessantly reiterated that ancient Indians were unwavering in  
asserting the ethical propriety of ahimsā.

We are repeatedly reminded, the one singular achievement of ancient  
India was that all her sages, meaning ‘custodians of people’ called  
upon to preserve harmony among different callings and thus augment  
loka-samgraha or ‘social wealth’, condemned himsāor ‘violence’  
without so much as a demur. And, to refurbish this popular wisdom, the  
modern ideologues committed to it invariably hark back to the  
Mahābhārata, the colossal work that within the tradition of Indian  
taxonomy of genres bears the title itihāsa. With the express intention  
of affirming iti-ha-āsa or ‘so indeed it was’, they cite selective  
portions of the Mahābhārata.

With great fondness, they keep mouthing, for example, the dictum  
handed out to Yudhishthira by grandsire Bhishma in  
‘Anuśānaparvan’. The dictum, lilting in terms of lyrical cadence,  
makes the expression ‘ahimsā paramo dharmo’ or ‘ahimsā is the  
highest dharma’ more weighty by appending to it expressions such as,  
‘Ahimsā is the highest form of self-control’, ‘Ahimsā is the  
highest austerity’, ‘Ahimsā is the highest sacrifice’,  
‘Ahimsā is the best friend’, ‘Ahimsā is the greatest  
happiness’, ‘Ahimsā is the highest truth’ (13.117.37-38).*

Indisputably, there is a kind of critical consensus that itihāsa  
places an exceedingly high premium on ‘nonviolence’. Also  
certainly, it is this uncritical or unconscious adherence to the same  
unanimity, which gives to the painstaking statistical exercise  
undertaken by Alf Hiltebeitel the quality of the unexpected. Alf  
Hiltebeitel, in his 2001 book Rethinking the Mahābhārata, prepares a  
tally-sheet for the phrase paramo dharmo and demonstrates that out of  
the 54 times it occurs in the Mahābhārata, it is conjoined with the  
word ahimsā only four times – and, of those four, one is contained  
in Bhishma’s dictum quoted earlier!1


Even if we grant that frequency distributions based on quantitative  
analyses are by themselves not sufficiently strong measures of weights  
attached to values, Alf Hiltebeitel’s chart provides other  
information that have the potential to meet the deficiency. We gather  
from it that along with ‘nonviolence’ and ‘truth’ there is one  
order of excellence extolled by the Mahābhārata, which by a curious  
twist of logic, appears to give lie to the truth of nonviolence. And  
that is ānŗśamsya or ‘noncruelty’. Moreover, and surely this is  
telling, although the expression ānŗśamsyam paro dharma or  
‘noncruelty is the supreme dharma’ features eight times in the  
Mahābhārata, it is only very recently that scholars have begun to  
take cognizance of ānŗśamsya as a complex concept on its own right.

Mukund Lath, in his path-blazing 1987 article on the term has gone so  
far as to say, ‘It has been kind of voyage of discovery for me, to  
understand what ānŗśamsya means in the Mahābhārata… [It is more  
so because] outside the Mahābhārata, whether in the literature  
preceding the Mahābhārata or following it, the word hardly has the  
supreme significance [as] it has in the epic’.2

The obvious questions that this observation gives rise to are: (a)  
What is the ideological role of ānŗśamsya in the Mahābhārata? (b)  
Does it have any relevance beyond the framework of itihāsa?


In the justly famous dialogue between Yudhishthira and Dharma, the  
highest authority on the meaning of Good-ness, appearing as a Yaksha  
in the ‘Âraņyakaparvan’, the philosophical Yudhishthira’s  
response to Yaksha’s question, ‘What is the greatest virtue in the  
world?’ was, ānŗśamsyam paro dharmo, ‘absence of cruelty is the  
highest virtue’ (3. 297.54-55 and 3. 297.71). In the course of the  
interrogation which took in its stride such intriguing existential  
issues as ‘the substance of self’, ‘the meaning of happiness’,  
‘the surest path of acquiring authentic knowledge’, ‘the problem  
of recognizing one’s own mortality’, the statement ānŗśamsyam  
paro dharma comes twice. The fact that Yudhishthira the Dharmarāja  
chose to conclude the session by stating it once again gives to the  
expression the air of a well-considered maxim (3.297.11-298.22).

It surely is instructive that the person most sensitive and upright  
among the chief protagonists of the Mahābhārata, the one hero  
compulsively obsessed with intricacies involving moral conundrums,  
should choose to mark ‘noncruelty’ and not ‘nonviolence’ as the  
ultimate humane attribute. However, the underlying assumptions behind  
the privileging is supplied not by Yudhishthira but by a fowler by  
profession – instead of Dharmarāja, they are spelt out by a Sūdra  
reverentially referred to as Dharmavyādha. They are there in the  
lecture, rather lengthy and tiresome one at that, which the Dharmic  
Fowler delivered to a haughty Brahminin ‘Âraņyakaparvan’ (3.198.1  
to 3.206.32).


Let us now focus on the salient features of the discourse on  
ānŗśamsya spun by Dharmavyādha of Mithilā, the conscientious  
Sūdra whose very livelihood depended on killing fowls of the air,  
beasts of the field and selling flesh in the open market.  
Schematically put, this is what Dharmavyādha said:

1. ‘Ahimsā is the highest dharma, which, again, is founded upon  
truth’ (3.198.69). (Incidentally, of the four times we encounter the  
phrase ahimsā paramo dharma in the Mahābhārata, one of them comes  
from Dharmavyādha.)

2. But, even though men of learning and wisdom have advocated non- 
violence from the earliest times, anyone who thinks hard enough is  
bound to reach the conclusion that there is none who is nonviolent  
(3.199.28). (This same view is forcefully voiced by Arjuna in  
‘Śāntiparvan’. The hero whom an immobilizing depression seized  
immediately before the commencement of the Kurukshetra War but who,  
thanks to Krishna’s sobering as well as stimulating discourse managed  
to shake it off just in the nick of time said, long after peace had  
returned to the land, ‘I do not see a single person in this world who  
lives by nonviolence’ (12.15.20).

3. Hence, the best way to resolve the paradox is to temper the  
exacting demands of ‘nonviolence’ by emphasizing ‘leniency’ or  
‘noncruelty’ and, for all practical purposes, replace the  
commandment ‘ahimsā is the highest dharma’ by ‘ānŗśamsya is  
the highest dharma’ (3.203.41). (In Mukund Lath’s words, ‘What  
the Mahābhārata preaches is not ahimsā but ānŗśamsya’.3  
Lath’s claim is indeed provocative. Unlike J.L. Mehta, who believes  
‘[Mahābhārata’s] central message, repeated again and again, is  
that non-violence (ahimsa) and compassion (anrisamsya) are the highest  
duties of man’4, Lath sees a distinct hierarchy at work in the  
Mahābhārata – a subtle distinguishing operation that places  
ānŗśamsya over and above ahimsā.)


Dharmavyādha reckons ‘state of violence’ to be an irremediable,  
unavoidable factor of ‘human condition’. By the same token, in his  
system of Ethics, ahimsā obtains the precarious status of an  
unrealizable ideal – it is as if, no matter how morally judicious a  
subject is in conducting his daily life, the goal of ahimsā can only  
be approached by moving along an asymptomatic curve that converges  
only at infinity. The Dharmic Fowler’s axiomatic propositions –  
propositions that he himself claims to be part and parcel of authentic  
‘Brahmanic philosophy’ (3.201.14) – lead inexorably to the  
framing of, what, for the sake of convenience may be called, a  
‘principle of proxy’.

In the Brāhmanic universe of the scrupulous Sūdra, the notion of  
ānŗśamsya functions as a stand-in for ahimsā. It maintains a  
critical distance from both the components of the himsā-ahimsā or  
‘violence-nonviolence’ binary without dissolving either of the two.  
It opens up a discursive space within which excessive violence is  
condemned and unqualified nonviolence considered unviable. Placed as a  
golden mean between two extremes, ānŗśamsya gestures towards the  
apparently contradictory prescript of ‘violence without violation’.  
In short, given the fact that every being on earth is obliged to abide  
by certain violent but objective conditions, the only way left to man  
to differentiate himself from other living things and assert his  
specific species-being is to treat ānŗśamsya as the closest possible  
approximate of ahimsā.


But then, we are dealing with itihāsa, a compendium of fables that has  
the extraordinary felicity of attaching contending signifieds to the  
same signifier. This flexibility may be bothersome; but, it often  
achieves effects that are overwhelming. Ānŗśamsya too has an  
indeterminate ambiguity about it. There are moments in the  
Mahābhārata in which the word comes so close to anukrosha or  
‘empathy’ as to make ahimsā and ānŗśamsya not only mutually  
exchangeable (as envisaged by J.L. Mehta) but also to construe a  
general grammar of ‘ethical care’ on the basis of ānŗśamsya.5  
The ‘fable of the parrot’ in the Anuśāsanaparvan is a case in  
point. On Yudhishthira’s plea ‘I wish to hear of the merits of  
ānŗśamsya’, Bhishma had recounted the legend (13.5.1-31).

The story went: a fowler had mistakenly pierced a forest-tree with a  
poison-arrow; as a result, the tree withered away; despite the  
destruction, a parrot living in the hollow of the tree’s trunk did  
not desert his nest; surprised by this show of (irrational)  
attachment, Indra approached the parrot and enquired into his reasons  
for cohabiting with the condemned; justifying his voluntary decision  
on the grounds of ‘compassion’, ‘kindliness of feeling’ and  
affection for the erstwhile protector, the parrot invoked successively  
the concepts ānŗśamsya and anukrosha (13.5. 22-23).6


The puzzle posed by the parable was, how come lower animals exhibit a  
sensibility which humans take for granted to be peculiarly humane.  
Indra wondered about the parrot’s supernatural feat of practicing  
ānŗśamsya (13.5.9) and resolved the problem by adducing to the  
primary supposition of a (supposed) ‘Natural Ethics’. Indra  
discerned in the parrot’s behaviour a confirmation of the principle  
of ‘mutual care’ – there was no mystery; the urge to be generous  
towards others was a predilection common to allcreatures (13.5.10).

Doubtless, the ‘fable of the parrot’ exceeds the limit set by  
Dharmavyādha to the category of ānŗśamsya. Similar exceeding can be  
found in other parts of the Mahābhārata too. For example, in the  
almost last (significant) episode of itihāsa in which Indra forbade  
Yudhishthira from entering the celestial abode if Dharmarāja insisted  
on continuing with the dog that had been accompanying him in his final  
journey. Yudhishthira was, however, adamant; he refused to abandon the  
humble animal. In expressing his touching loyalty for the loyal dog,  
Yudhishthira employed the word ānŗśamsya (17.3.7); and, a little  
later, shedding the disguise of the dog, Dharma himself praised  
Yudhishthira for being thoroughly informed by the moral compulsion of  
anukrosha (17.3.17). Here too, conjoined as it is with a word  
etymologically rooted in the notion of ‘crying out that  
"follows" (anu) someone else’s "cry"(krosha)’7, ānŗśamsya over- 
steps the boundary imposed on it by Dharmavyādha.

But, before one can cognize the ‘supplement’ that ‘supplants’  
any ‘steady’ signification, it is imperative to follow the  
‘logic’ of the ‘main argument’ to its end. Hoping that spots of  
confounding aporia would inevitably appear as we proceed and the spree  
for the free play of deconstruction would gather force, we mostly  
restrict ourselves to Dharmavyādha’s discourse in this paper.


To trace the genealogical route of the term ānŗśamsya (as explicated  
by Dharmavyādha) most scholars refer back to the great ideological  
clash that took place about two and half thousand years back in the  
Indo-Gangetic plain. The two parties involved in the battle are  
generally known as the Brahmin and the Śŗamaņ – the former  
comprising the votaries of animal sacrifice and the latter men  
disenchanted by Vedic chants and the magical powers imputed to the act  
of sacrifice.

Most of the Śŗamaņs – the two most prominent of whom were the  
Buddhists and the Jains – denounced the senselessness involved in  
killing innocent animals for either gratification or appeasement of  
the so-called gods. It was the dumbness of being cruel towards ‘dumb  
creatures’, a form of dumbness unhesitatingly sanctified by priests  
practiced in the art of Vedic rituals, which exercised them the most  
– the dissenting Śŗamaņs fleshed out their idea of ahimsā as a  
protest against this outrage. This, however, does not mean that all  
those anti-Brahminical sects which propagated ahimsā also preached  
that it was beneath the dignity of men to consume meat as food.


The fact that the ideals of ahimsā and vegetarianism did not stem from  
the same origin but evolved along two different paths is borne out by  
facts like: while the Theravāda school of Buddhism permitted its  
followers to eat flesh provided they were not guilty of procuring the  
flesh by their own hands, the Jain scriptures poured scorn on the  
Theravāda ordinance as being an example of sophistry designed to  
camouflage the desire for the taste of meat – in contradistinction to  
the early Buddhists, the Jains from the very beginning favoured  
absolute prohibition on all meat-eating.8 While the Buddhist Emperor  
Ashoka (3rd c. BCE) is credited to have introduced virtual  
vegetarianism, the declaration in his First Rock Edict, ‘Here  
[meaning perhaps, Ashoka’s capital] no animal is to be killed for  
sacrifice’, clearly imposed a limiting condition on the solicitous  
state policy governing the practice of vegetarianism.9


It is also legitimate to think that in the process of bringing about a  
‘revaluation of all (Brāhmanical) values’ through the category of  
nonviolence – in the Jain-like exaggerated diction or otherwise –  
the Śŗamaņs reinforced some of the precepts which were part of the  
tradition of (pre-Śŗamaņic) Upanişad. The Śŗamaņic insistence on  
ahimsā certainly cast a new light on sayings such as, ‘Verily, a  
person is a sacrifice… austerity, almsgiving, uprightness, ahimsā,  
truthfulness are the gifts [for that sacrifice]’ (Chāndogya  
Upanişad: III. 16.1 and III. 17.4).10

Again, undoubtedly, fighting against the home-dwelling Brāhmins, the  
priests who had no qualms about earning their livelihood by gifting  
animal flesh to gods, the homeless Śŗamaņs could have garnered moral  
support for their irremediable wanderlust as well as claim a longer  
and nobler lineage than the himsā-epitomizing Brāhmins from pre- 
Śŗamaņic utterances as ‘Verily, he is the great unborn Self…  
Desiring Him only as their worlds, monks wonder forth. Verily, because  
they knew this, the ancient (sages) did not wish for  
offspring’ (Bŗhad-āraņyaka Upanişad: IV. 4.22).11

On the whole, despite the earlier invocations of the creed of  
nonviolence, the Brāhmin-Śŗamaņ hostility was scripted by treating  
ahimsā as the moot point of contention – and, due to that, what were  
before, at best, perfunctory and scattered, coalesced to shape a  
wholesome discourse. Moreover, such is the wholesomeness of the  
discourse, it still shows no sign of disintegration.

Patanjāli, India’s legendary grammarian of 2nd c. BCE, had compared  
the Brāhmin-Śŗamaņ hostility with the natural snake-mongoose  
hostility. Then again, while expounding on the ‘antagonistic  
compound’, Patanjāli had instantiated it by referring to the  
‘eternal conflict’ between the Brāhmin and the Śŗamaņ!12 This  
grammatical wit is sufficiently incisive to keep us forewarned that  
the ancient ideological contrariety is yet to be transcended.


Neither Mukund Lath13 nor Alf Hiltebeitel14 would face any difficulty  
in accepting Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya as a compromise formula –  
a formula devised to diffuse the disaccord between the orthodox  
Brahmana and the non-conformist Śŗamaņ. What is more, this view is  
quite palatable to many a radical interpreter of India’s past, such  
as, Kashi Nath Upadhyaya, the author of the outstanding treatise,  
Early Buddhism and the Bhagavadgītā (1971).15 None of them would  
contest that the concept of uncompromising ahimsā conceived by a  
section of the Śŗamaņs in order to morally nullify the himsā- 
oriented Brāhminical practices provided the founding condition for  
Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya. Of course, there are dissenters; e.g.,  
Chaturvedi Badrinath, the author of The Mahābhārata: An Enquiry in  
the Human Condition. He wrote as late as in 2006, ‘The three powerful  
words ahimsā paramo dharmo that [keep] resound[ing] in the  
Mahābhārata …would later become the cardinal foundation of  
Jainism’.16

Nevertheless, if we leave aside the complicated business of arguing on  
the basis of historical evidence and take the softer option of  
deriving information from literary study of characters, it seems the  
first view has the greater chance of being vindicated. Take a look at  
the Mahābhārata’s chief ideologue of ānŗśamsya, the Dharmic  
Butcher.


Dharmavyādha’s body is like a repository of various contesting  
predilections; it houses all but combines them in such a fashion that  
all real antagonistic contradictions seem to disappear: he does not  
slay animals but pursues his family-trade by selling the meat of hogs  
and buffaloes killed by others (3.198.31); he lays out chopped out  
flesh in the marketplace for the gratification of culinary appetite of  
his customers but he himself is a strict vegetarian (3.198.32); he  
subscribes to the theory of karmaphala but, (as though to negate the  
Buddhist-like semantic revolution of redefining the word karma to  
connote ‘personal intention’ in place of ‘Brahmin  
ritualism’17), insists that it is Destiny which calls people to their  
respective vocations (3.199.2).

He readily admits that his profession is heinous but exculpates  
himself on the ground that he is a mere ‘passive  
instrument’ (3.199.3); he displays a great sense of discomfiture vis- 
à-vis the cruelties he daily practices but mitigates it by claiming  
that his steadfastness in observing swadharma or ‘the duty of one’s  
order’ (3.199.14) bestows upon his job the benediction of  
ānŗśamsya or ‘noncruelty’; he appreciates the lowliness of his  
rough trade but it gladdens him to think that he supplies meat to  
‘gods’ (3.199.4) offered in duly conducted Sacrifices.

On the whole, Mahābhārata’s Dharmavyādha, a rare example of a  
Sūdra trained in ‘Brahmanic philosophy’, stands out as a person  
who to the last syllable of his being fulfils one of Manu’s kernel  
injunctions. In the very first chapter of his Book of Laws, Manu had  
issued the writ: ‘The Lord assigned only one activity to a Sūdra:  
serving the other castes without resentment’.18 And, it is this lack  
of ‘resentment’ (or better still of Nietzschean ressentiment)  
towards so-called natural superiors which enables Dharmavyādha to  
simultaneously epitomize servility and make a case for ‘leniency’  
or ‘compassion’.


It is, therefore, not surprising that playing the role of mediating  
middle term, ānŗśamsya should come to the rescue of the Vedic  
Sacrifice, remove the taint of himsā ascribed to it by the Śŗamaņs.  
It underpins the rationale behind the new ‘rules of the game’  
chalked up by embattled Brahmanism, by lawmakers embarrassed by  
Śŗāmaņic charges. Ânŗśamsya places, for example, Manu’s  
dictum, ‘…killing in sacrifice is not killing…The violence  
sanctioned by the Veda and regulated by official restraints is known  
as nonviolence’,19 on a surer footing.


Clearly, the ‘new word’20 which captures the imagination of both  
Mukund Lath and Alf Hiltebeitel, is rather about attitude than any  
concrete instance of violence or nonviolence – set up to countermand  
the Śŗāmaņic over-valorization of ahimsā, ānŗśamsya bespeaks of  
an ‘affective state’. Encourages as it does to cultivate a sense of  
detachment to the consequences of his actions in the mind of the doer,  
the ‘new word’ bears familial resemblances with many Brahmanic and  
Śŗāmaņic concepts. For example: in ‘Śāntiparvan’, after  
saying, ‘I know what ānŗśamsya is, because I have always marked  
the conduct of good people’ (12.158.1), Yudhishthira heaps praises on  
a sensibility central to the set of precepts associated with the famed  
nishkāma karma (12.164.41-46).

Aparigrahah is one word that ānŗśamsya recalls most strenuously. The  
word itself has a checkered history. Aparigrahah generally implies  
‘non-possession’. It appears in the ancient, most probably pre- 
Buddhist, Jābāla Upanişad;21 it is one of the ‘Five Great Vows’  
enjoined by Jainism;22 it recurs once in Chapter Six, Verse number ten  
in the Bhagavadgītā.23

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the apostle of ahimsā of modern India  
who on occasions looked back to Yudhishthira in his attempts to define  
the term24 and besides translating the Gītā into Gujarati composed  
immensely influential commentaries on the book – was deeply impressed  
by the Gītā’s employment of aparigrahah. Lest we muddle up things,  
it is important to remember that aparigrahah or ‘[to be] free from  
longing for possessions’25 used in conjunction with thoroughgoing  
ahimsā connotes a value quite distinct from the one produced by its  
conjunction with the more malleable ānŗśamsya.


Being a self-professed ‘practical idealist’,26 Gandhi was often  
driven to reflect on the epistemological limits of the creed of  
‘nonviolence’. A pacifist, he consistently disavowed the  
‘doctrine of the sword’ in his battles against imperialist forces.  
In pointing to the distinctive character of man’s species-being  
Gandhi did not, unlike the Dharmic Fowler, stop at ‘noncruelty’,  
but said, ‘Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the  
law of the brute’.27 He paid tributes to Mahavira, the Jain teacher  
who was among the staunchest advocates of the gospel of ahimsā, and  
the Buddha as well and termed them ‘soldiers’ for the cause of  
‘nonviolence’.28 Nonetheless, Gandhi maintained, there were certain  
aspects of violence which were ‘inevitable’;29 he boldly asserted  
that his own doctrine of ahimsā was ‘new’, not ‘dependent upon  
the authority of [previous] works’ including those belonging to the  
Jain school of thought.30


There are several passages in Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story  
of My Experiments with Truth (volume I: 1927; volume II: 1929) in  
which he expresses great fascination with the Gītā and its English  
translation by Edwin Arnold titled The Song Celestial(1885).31 He took  
the Gītā as his Book of ‘conduct’ and sought to develop his idea  
of ahimsā on its basis.32 And, it is striking that Gandhi’s  
political lexicon is most profoundly coloured by a word which appears  
only once in the Gītā, his ‘dictionary of daily reference’.33  
That word, as Gandhi put it himself, ‘gripped’34 him from the start  
and as years passed by, helped him to forge his most original  
contribution in the field of social sciences: the notion of  
‘trusteeship’. The word was aparigrahah.

Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography: ‘I understood the Gita teaching of  
[aparigrahah or] non-possession to mean that those who desired  
salvation should act like a trustee who, though having control over  
great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own’.35 Note  
the crucial difference: while according to the Jain tenet aparigrahaħ  
signifies renunciation of all material possession in the exact sense  
of the term, Gandhi derives from Gītā’s aparigrahaħ the profile of  
a ‘subject’ who does not give up his private property for good but  
has the perspicuity to not to call anything one’s own for the sake of  
public good.


It may now be safely surmised that the concept of ānŗśamsya has a  
positive bearing on itihāsa as well as on modern history. The  
‘supreme significance’36 ascribed to it in the epic is doubtless  
absent in post-Mahābhārata literature. However, its hidden  
intellectual career can be uncovered once we align ānŗśamsya with  
aparigrahah and follow the latter’s role in shaping the image of the  
responsible leader of New India – a man gifted with both control over  
great possessions and the right attitude towards them; a man who  
affirms ahimsā but knows periodic release of controlled violence may  
be mandatory in the discharge of his duties.

There still remains a serious epistemological problem. It is quite  
apparent that in pre-modern texts the will to himsā is equated to will  
to slay – it is assumed that even the most trivial act of himsā  
inclusive that of ‘speech’ or ‘thought’ is grounded on and  
geared to the final solution of annihilating some other. Even when the  
Jains advised that it was advisable to avoid violence ‘not so much  
because it harm[ed] other beings [but] because it harm[ed] the  
individual who commit[ed] it’,37 the ‘selfish’ motive was  
dictated by the fear of damaging, in the extreme case damaging  
physically, someone else. Nonetheless, it seems, in the light of more  
recent formulations, neither the Śŗāmaņic celebration of ahimsā  
nor the Mahābhārata’s resolution of opposites through ānŗśamsya  
nor the latter’s disguised deployment in modern political theory,  
evince sufficient alertness to the mechanisms of violence.


A whole section of Mahābhārata’s ‘Śāntiparvan’ is devoted to  
āpad-dharma, to the rules in situations of extremity when normal rules  
do not apply (12.129.14 to 12.167.24). Almost at the beginning of the  
section there is a sloka which is like a prelude to what is to follow.  
It says: ‘As a hunter discovers the track of a deer wounded with  
arrow by marking spots of blood on the ground, so should one try to  
find out the reasons of dharma’ (12.130.20). We are then introduced  
to a series of tales and counsels whose chief burden is to underscore  
the over-riding importance of ‘self-preservation’.

The instruction is: ‘See the efficacy of self- 
interest’ (12.136.140). Therefore, recognizing instinctively that  
‘this body is my friend’ (12.139.73), a person should not refrain  
from doing things, no matter how distressful or distasteful they are,  
in order to save his most intimate friend; knowing that, ‘One should  
keep up his life by any means in his power without judging of their  
charter’ (12.139.59), it is quite permissible and passable for a  
person threatened by imminent death to cause injury to others.  
(Incidentally, Gandhi too accepted the necessity of applying violence  
for self-defence.)

This means at the moment of deepest crisis, the man caught up in it  
has every right to suspend all codes of formal behaviour orsadāchāra.  
More importantly, this also indicates that, in the ultimate analysis,  
the source of violence is always positioned as beingexternal to the  
body; it is taken for granted that the violence which may entail  
one’s destruction is always inflicted from the outside; the terrible  
enemy is forever stationed elsewhere. This sense of exteriority in  
relation to fatal dangers also circumscribes the reach of ahimsā –  
to be ‘nonviolent’ then becomes a corollary and an extension of the  
urge to conserve one’s body.


It is no wonder, therefore, that Sudharman, a direct disciple of  
Mahāvira, in stating the irrevocable factum tenet of the Jain system,  
the first of the ‘Five Great Vows’,38 took recourse to the metaphor  
of the ‘body’ dreading foreign invasion and the criterion of  
‘reciprocity’. He said: ‘All [bodies] are subject to pain; hence  
they should not be killed… Know this to be the real meaning of the  
Law of ahimsā: as you do not wish to be killed, so others do not wish  
to be killed’.39

Armed with this Law, Sudharman launched a frontal attack on the  
competing Śŗamaņ school of Buddhism and declared: ‘See! There are  
men pretend[ing] to be houseless, i.e., monks such as the Bauddhas,  
[who] destroy earth-body by bad and injurious things…a wise man  
should not act sinfully towards earth, nor cause others to act so’.40  
Going by this extremist dogma, if a man lays down his life for any  
cause, say, for ahimsā, he does so because he willfully lets the other- 
directed himsā to fall upon him and not because desire for violence  
stems from his own body. Mahābhārata too – the text, that in S.  
Radhakrishnan’s opinion is a stellar example of ‘readjustments’  
initiated by Brāhmanism to process some of the objections raised by  
diverse ‘systems of revolt’41 – in substance reiterates the same  
criterion of ‘reciprocity’ when it teaches that the sum total of  
man’s duties is contained in the maxim, ‘Thou shalt not do to  
others what is disagreeable to thyself’.42


However, complacency apropos violence can no longer be entertained.  
Among others, the psychoanalytic intervention in the matter precludes  
such a possibility. In 1920 Sigmund Freud published Beyond the  
Pleasure Principle (English translation: 1922). Sitting in Vienna,  
Freud composed that perplexing work just after the First World War  
ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had vanished from the political  
map. The two inter-related concepts he introduced in the book have  
radically altered all earlier visions as regards man’s aptitude for  
controlling violence. One of them was primary masochism and the other,  
death-instincts.

At one point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud alluded to E.  
Hering’s theory that all ‘living substance[s]’ were subject to  
two contrary processes, one ‘constitutive or assimilatory’ and the  
other ‘destructive or dissimilatory’. Next, with no prior  
intimation whatsoever, Freud suddenly took a mighty speculative leap.  
He substituted Hering’s ‘vital processes’ by ‘instinctual  
impulses’ and proposed that every living substance was  
‘dualistic’ in nature – each was simultaneously motivated by  
‘life instincts’ and ‘death instincts’.43


The expression ‘death-instincts’, later more famously known as  
Thanatos, makes its ‘first published appearance’44 in Beyond the  
Pleasure Principle – and, at the very moment of its debut it forces  
us to take seriously, perhaps for the first time in recorded history,  
bizarre hypotheses such as, ‘[There exists an irresoluble] opposition  
between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life  
instincts’45 or ‘The instincts of self-preservation… are  
component instincts whose function is to assure that the organism  
shall follow its own path of death’.46

The death-driven Freudian psyche supplies the aetiology necessary for  
sociological analyses of ‘suicide’. But, it does more. Thanatos and  
the ‘primary regression’ called masochism together bring  
‘violence’ to centre stage – the human appetite for self- 
consumption changes the meaning of ‘danger’ to include instances  
that overstep boundaries set by the principle of ‘self- 
preservation’; the sensational hypothesis that ‘pain’ can jolly  
well be a pleasurable sensation for the human animal, in effect,  
problematizes the Śŗāmaņic doctrine of ‘mutual dependence’, the  
psychosomatic axiom upon which the pre-modern notion of ahimsā was  
premised.


The 1932 correspondence between Albert Einstein, the physicist whose  
elegant formula e = mc2 provided the theoretical frame for making the  
atom bomb a practical proposition, and Sigmund Freud, the  
psychoanalyst who widened the horizon of ‘violence’, unambiguously  
demonstrates that the latter in later life regarded the antimony of  
two basal instincts, eros and Thanatos, as one inviolable factor of  
‘human condition’.47 So did the Śŗamaņs when they spoke of  
bodily pains and Mahābhārata’s Dharmavyādha when he said it was  
absurd to think that one could avoid doing violence to others in any  
absolute sense. In each case the theory is produced in response to a  
specific circumstance, each articulation is backed by a political  
intention.

If the Śŗāmaņic insistence on ahimsā, on according respect to all  
and giving credence to individual suffering was a strategy to mount an  
ethical attack on Brahmanism and Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya an  
apologia for Brahmanism, then Freud’s Thanatos was an offshoot of the  
brutalities regularly practiced by men during the First World War and  
the initial phase of Nazism. And, Adolf Hitler, the arch-ideologue of  
Nazism, in the concluding chapter titled ‘The Right to Self- 
Defence’ in his 1924 autobiography Mein Kampfhad written: ‘[just  
as] a weak pigmy cannot contend against athletes, a negotiator without  
any armed defence at his back must always bow in obescience’.48

On 6 August 1945, the allied forces fighting against the Evil of  
Nazism dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and thereby officially  
inaugurated the Nuclear Age. With that strike, at one stroke man  
acquired a ‘new attribute’: ‘the ability to extinguish all life  
upon earth’.49 Replaces as it does the age-old diachronic order  
associated with ‘death’ by the possibility of the ‘synchronic’,  
by the ever-looming terrifying thought that man can actually make  
everything and being sign out all at once if he so wills, also brings  
to Freud’s idea of Thanatos or individualistic death-wish a quaint  
charm. It is in the historical context of the technological revolution  
which has the capacity of posing ‘utter calamity’ as the telos of  
humanity, that the real one feels, epistemological challenge of today  
is to re-think the question of ‘nonviolence’; ask again, what  
really is ahimsā?


Footnotes:

* All Mahābhārata references are to the Critical Edition of the  
Mahābhārata published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute,  
Pune. The English translations are based on (a) M.N. Dutt, The  
Mahābhārata (nine volumes), Parimal Publications, Delhi, 2004 and (b)  
Kisari Mohan Ganguli, The Mahābhārata (four volumes), Munshiram  
Manoharlal, New Delhi, 2004.

1. Alf Hiltebeitel, ‘Chapter Five: Don’t Be Cruel’, Rethinking  
the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma  
King (first published 2001), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002,  
p. 207.

2. Mukund Lath, ‘The Concept of Ānŗśamsya in the Mahābhārata’,  
The Mahābhārata Revisited, ed. R.N. Dandekar, Sahitya Akademi, New  
Delhi, 1990, p. 113, p. 115.

3. Mukund Lath, ibid., p. 119.

4. J.L. Mehta, ‘The Discourse of Violence in the Mahabharata’,  
Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation, Indian Council of  
Philosophical Research and Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi,  
1990, p. 256.

5. Vrinda Dalmiya, ‘Dogged Loyalties: A Classical Indian Intervention  
in Care Ethics’, Ethics in the World Religions, eds. J. Runzo and  
Nancy M. Martin, Oxford, 2007, pp. 293-306.

6. For discussions on the fable see: (a) Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p.  
213; (b) Vrinda Dalmiya, op cit., p. 294.

7. For a detailed discussion on the moral implications of anukrosha,  
see Vrinda Dalmiya, ibid., pp. 298-305.

8. Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One: ‘From the Beginning to  
1800), ed. Ainslie T. Embree, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1992, pp.  
170-171.

9. The original text: ‘1 Shilānusāshana’, Ashokalipi, ed. and tr.  
Amulyachandra Sen, Mahabodhi Book Agency, Kolkata, 1994, p. 144.

For English translation see: Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One),  
op .cit., p. 144.

10. Chāndogya Upanişad, ‘III.16.1’ and ‘III.17.4’, tr. S.  
Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanişads, HarperCollins Publishers  
India, New Delhi, 1998, p. 394 and p. 396.

11. Bŗhad-āraņyaka Upanişad, ‘IV.4.22’, The Principal  
Upanişads, ibid., p. 279.

12. The Vyākaraņa Mahābhāsya of Pataňjali, edited by F. Kielhorn,  
Volume 1, p. 474, p. 476.

13. Mukund Lath, op cit., pp. 118-119.

14. Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p. 203.

15. Kashi Nath Upadhyaya, ‘Chapter II: Section B: The Compromising  
Character of the Bhagavadgītā’, Early Buddhism and the  
Bhagavadgītā, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2008, pp. 106-109.

16. Chaturvedi Badrinath, ‘Chapter Five: Ahimsā – Non-violence,  
the Foundation of Life’, The Mahābhārata: An Inquiry in the Human  
Condition, ed., p. 114 [emphasis added]

17. Richard F. Gombrich, ‘Chapter III: The Buddha’s Dhamma’,  
Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern  
Colombo, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 67.

18. Manusamhitā, ‘I.91’, ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, Sanskrit Pustak  
Bhandar, Kolkata, 2000, p. 40.

For English translation see: The Laws of Manu, ‘I.91’, tr. Wendy  
Doniger and Brian K. Smith, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1991, p. 13.

19. Manusamhitā, ‘V.39 & V.44’, ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, op cit.,  
p. 129 and p. 130.

For English translation see, The Laws of Manu, ‘V.39 and V.44’, tr.  
Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, op cit., p. 103 and p. 103.

20. (a) Mukund Lath, op cit., p. 113. (b) Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p.  
202.

21. Jābāla Upanişad, ‘Verse No. 5’, tr. S. Radhakrishnan, The  
Principal Upanişads, HarperCollins, New Delhi,1998, p. 898.

22. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book II, Lecture I5: i-v’, tr. Herman  
Jacobi, The Sacred Books of the East (Volume 22), ed. F. Max Müller,  
Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2002, pp. 202-210.

Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, ‘Lecture XXIII’, tr. Herman Jacobi, The  
Sacred Books of the East (Volume 45), ed. F. Max Müller, Motilal  
Banarsidass, Delhi, 2004, pp. 119-129.

23. The Bhagavadgītā, ‘VI.10’, ed. S. Radhakrishnan,  
HarperCollins, New Delhi, p. 192.

24. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Problems of Non-violence’ (in Gujarati: 9 August  
1925), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXXII, The  
Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,  
Government of India, Delhi, 1968, p. 273.

25. The Bhagavadgītā, ‘VI.10’, tr. S. Radhakrishnan, op cit., pp.  
192-193.

26. M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’, (in Gujarati: 11  
August 1920), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXI, op  
cit., p. 134.

27. Ibid,, p. 134.

28. M.K. Gandhi, ‘On Ahimsa’, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed.  
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Penguin Books, New Delhi,1993, p. 97.

29. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Problems of Non-violence’, The Collected Works of  
Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXXII, op cit., p. 273.

30. M.K. Gandhi, ‘On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai’ (October  
1916), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XV, op cit., pp.  
251-252.

31. ‘I have read almost all the English translations of [the Gītā],  
and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold’s as the best’: M.K. Gandhi, An  
Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Selected  
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume I, Navajivan Publishing House,  
Ahmedabad, 1968, p. 100.

32. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with  
Truth, The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume II, ibid., p. 393.

33. Ibid., p. 393.

34. Ibid., p. 393.

35. Ibid., p. 394.

36. Mukund Lath, op cit., p. 115.

37. A.L. Basham, ‘Introduction: Basic Doctrines of Jainism’,  
Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One), op cit., p. 57.

38. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book II, Lecture I5: i’, op cit., pp.  
202-204.

Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, ‘Lecture XXIII’, op cit., pp. 119-129.

See also, Upinder Singh, ‘Chapter Six: Cities, Kings and  
Renunciasists: North India, c. 600-300 BCE: Section: Early Jainism’,  
A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to  
the 12th Century, Pearson Longman, Delhi, 2009, pp. 312-319.

39. Sūtrakritāňga, ‘Book I, Lecture I, Chapter 4: Verse nos. 9 &  
10’, tr. Herman Jacobi, The Sacred Books of the East (Volume 45), ed.  
F. Max Müller, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2004, pp. 247-248.

The same commandment is repeated in: Sūtrakritāňga, ‘Book I,  
Lecture II: Verse nos. 9 and 10’, op cit., p. 311.

40. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book I, Lecture I, Lesson 2’, op cit.,  
pp. 3-5.

41. S. Radhakrishnan, ‘Chapter VIII: Epic Philosophy’, Indian  
Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999, pp.  
477-478.

42. Ibid., p. 506.

43. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey,  
The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 11: ‘On Metapsychology’, Penguin  
Books, London, 1991, pp. 311-322.

44. Angela Richards, ‘Footnote 2’, Beyond the Pleasure Principle,  
op cit., p. 272.

45. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op cit., p. 316.

46. Ibid., p. 311.

47. For a detailed discussion on the subject see, Sibaji  
Bandyopadhyay, ‘Defining Terror: A Freudian Exercise’, Science,  
Literature and Aesthetics, ed. Amiya Dev, History of Science,  
Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, Volume XV, Part 3,  
Centre for Studies in Civilization, New Delhi, 2008, pp. 567-631.

48. Adolf Hitler, ‘The Right to Self-Defence’, Mein Kampf, Jainco  
Publishers, Delhi, p. 572.

49. Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, tr. Ruth  
Speirs, Methuen, London, 1967, p. 67.