The 1960s were a tremendous period when the idea of peace showed intellectual acuteness, with a sense of poetry and a deep understanding of folklore. One thinks of a whole range of intellectuals—from Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky to Benjamin Spock, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
There was a sense of poetry, power and community to peace movements, which has dried up today. Peace is seen as an empty idea today. A broken contract or even an act of hypocrisy. Sadly, the Trumpian victory has also been at the level of ideals and ideas. There is no Chomsky replying to it.
India, too, is in a similar position. In the Sixties, the commitment to non-alignment had a civilisational sense, raising repeated invocations of Buddha and Gandhi.
Today, India seems to have run dry of peaceniks and peace movements. Whenever you offer an article on peace to various journals, they appear hesitant. One of them said, “Why don’t you think of something less boring and more demanding?”
Today, there is a desperate need to keep ideas of peace intact. To explore them, this essay looks at three peaceniks in India and examines their ideas. The three individuals are all teachers and mentors of mine, all deeply involved in constructing democracy as an imagination. The first is Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self Employed Women’s Association. The second is Ramu Gandhi, the philosopher. Third is C V Seshadri, the distinguished scientist.
Ela Bhatt worked on cooperatives. She was a Gandhian and a feminist. I remember her saying once that the real feminist reply to Gandhi’s idea of ethics and aesthetics is the Indian sari—it has the beauty and craftsmanship to answer generational questions. Ela spent several years working with international groups, discussing peace with the likes of Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson, Hilary Clinton and Desmond Tutu.
She also told me that women have to think of peace in a different way. The annals of war do not capture the aeons and intensity of women waiting in pain for their husbands and children. They wait for wars to be over. Waiting, said Ela, defined the phenomenology of peace. While tackling peace, one has to go beyond mere contract, tariffs and trade. One has to go to the lived world and build a sense of everydayness around peace. Peace is a narrative that needs multiple kinds of time.
Ramu, the second teacher I wish to cite, was a playful thinker deeply concerned with concepts and language. I remember that he was an authority on Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician-philosopher. He used to quote Whitehead’s inaugural lecture at Harvard, where he walked into the class, banged his head and said, “Gentlemen, I have disturbed the most distant star.” This sense of interconnectedness of action and communication is what fascinated Ramu.
For Ramu, satyagraha was a continuous experiment in philosophy. His examples of peace flowed from philosophical thinking. He was concerned about the fate of the body and the fate of Earth. He felt India as a civilisation had to respond to the question of the Anthropocene more mythically and practically. Thus, for Ramu, peace became an act of healing. And a peaceful Earth reflects the process of healing. For Ramu, one had to go beyond ecology and human rights to think of holism, which to him was an example of peaceful thinking.
The third is my oft-cited example of C V Seshadri. He did not believe in an official constitution for peace. The Japanese Constitution, he felt, was imposed on them by General Douglas MacArthur, who was governing Japan after the Second World War. He claimed one needed a tacit constitution—a collection of informal terms which covered folklore, ecology, myth. A series of words that connected the unconscious to the current reality and articulated ideas.
Seshadri felt that the peace movement should work on a tacit constitution. He felt that a constitution was an informal organic system where deeper understandings appeared indirectly. Myth and folklore can articulate law without linear logic.
One must mention that all three were in constant touch with each other mainly through the psychologist S Anandalakshmy, director of Lady Irwin College in Delhi.
There was a deep sense and understanding of childhood among the three. Peace could not be a protestant exercise or an act of catechism. It had to be playful and open, and go beyond the logic of game theory. Each came with interesting suggestions in this context.
Seshadri suggested that ashrams become experimental centres and Gandhian think tanks. An ashram of the mind to capture the logic of peace. Ramu had a slightly different idea. He wanted every university to experiment with peace. To experiment with pedagogy that he saw as an integral part of politics. Ramu and Seshadri argued that peace is not a rigid doctrine. It needs diversity, alternatives and imagination of the future.
Ravi Subrahmanyan, a director of the Raman Institute, once gave an example. His institute had started a programme for children aged between eight and 14. One of his friends had a boy who never got up before noon. After attending the programme, this child was suddenly ready for school at early hours and went around telling people, “I am studying blackholes.” That sense of joy and insight was what Ramu connected with peace.
Ela went in a different direction. She felt childhood had to have a sense of craftsmanship, and peace was the ultimate craft before creation. One has to understand peace as craftsmanship. One realises the years of discovery and learning that goes into it. She added that one needed a sense of sewa, of sacrifice and gift, to eventually embrace peace.
All three realised that the current American system had changed from an open form of democracy to something more totalitarian and rigid. The transition and solidification from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, and from Henry Kissinger to Trump have created a new anthropology of evil. The Other—as the Palestinian, the Mexican or the Primitive—was subject to erasure.
Genocide has become an everyday solution. All three confessed that they had little in way of an answer to genocide or obsolescence.
Memory had to become an important part of morality in an age where information was discarded indifferently. Ramu pointed out that the satyagrahi is an ethical pneumonic, his body a choreography of protest.
These dialogues can be very detailed, conducted through intermediaries. One hopes to capture the content of the overall vision of an Indian idea of peace in the future.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)