As I grow older, my world gets emptier and my memories get fuller. Deep down, I miss the very people I once took for granted. I miss the friends I could argue with. I miss the teachers I could learn more from. I want to talk of one in particular.
Ramchandra Gandhi, a friend, philosopher and guide to me, was a professor of sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He gave me more lectures in the Delhi School of Economics canteen than he did to other students.
Ramu had a profound academic interest in violence. He felt that the concept of non-violence had to be reworked again and again to handle the inventiveness of evil. He had a profound critique of the Emergency, which he saw as ritualised violence. He once accosted Indira Gandhi while she was standing at the Gandhi Samadhi and said, “Stop insulting my grandfather!”
For Ramu, the Emergency was a profound insult to the non-violent tradition. He often articulated a whole series of alternatives. He felt violence was more inventive than science. One had to do something profound to philosophy in order to handle these issues.
Once, Ramu told me that modern violence was quite different. It had to confront three ‘technical problems’. The first was the Oppenheimer issue—about the scientist who felt that the atom bomb was a technical answer to a technical question. This idea of technicality and rationalisation is something we must confront because it turns violence into a technical question or an engineering problem when it is something more profound.
The second issue is numeracy. Today, war is often dealt with in body counts alone. Ramu said numbers were an illiterate way of explaining much of reality. The third issue he emphasised was of language—something that had to be reinvented to mean more than was assumed.
The vocabulary of violence is extremely stunted. One needs new concepts to create a new kind of storytelling.
Ramu gave three examples. First, he pointed out that esoteric concepts often become everyday issues. When triage, which began as a tradition in sorting coffee beans, moved to medicine, the question became more profound. Here is an example. Say, during a war, two groups of soldiers are afflicted—one because of their visit to the red-light district of a town, and the other for being stricken in an act of war. The question is, given a limited amount of penicillin, which lot should one cure? The rational answer was that the people stricken in red-light districts were more likely to recover faster and be ready to fight.
Triage, in that sense, is an attempt to eliminate people on grounds of rationality and economics. It is a deep economisation of war. The idea travelled into international relations with Henry Kissinger, who believed aid should be cut off from ‘weaker nations’. For Ramu, the very idea of triage was a deep form of violence.
The second idea he often talked about was of genocide. He said it’s something we don’t understand, though we make it a big issue. We talk of it in numbers, but a philosophy of genocide is missing. In this context, he discussed Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. For Arendt, Eichmann was eventually understandable in terms of management theory. It was merely a profound extension of Taylorism, which analyses workflows to maximise efficiency, and Gilbrethian ideas for scientific management through motion study and ergonomics.
Eichmann saw himself as a clerk and the concentration camp as an organisation. But for Ramu, such depiction was not complete. One had to, in a fundamental way, articulate Eichmann not just as a managerial technique, but as a profound form of life. One had to understand his ontology, by studying his being.
Arendt, for all her profundity, eventually brought genocide down to a certain kind of management theory. Ramu said to reduce Eichmann to theory would be a profound mistake.
The third issue he pointed out was a deep understanding of what he called obsolescence, defined as an attempt to declare irrelevant a way of life that was once relevant. For Ramu, Western civilisation could be profoundly understood between vivisection and obsolescence.
And because of these three issues, one needs a new understanding of violence as a way of life. First of all, a new centre for ethics is needed, where a new language can be invented after understanding the inventive nature of evil.
One needs to understand violence in a variety of ways. Ramu would have pointed out that Hindi movies at one time served as a powerful myth for understanding the nature of violence. It was also a profound way of understanding Partition. Saadat Hasan Manto went to the extent of saying that Bollywood couldn’t exist without Hindus and Muslims working together. So the Hindi movie was a transcending act of solidarity at the time of Partition.
Recent Hindi movies have changed in the way they conceive violence. It is no longer a kind of easy, convenient correlation that could be visualised on, say, Amitabh Bachchan. On-screen violence today is excessive. One can look at Animal and Dhurandhar to understand the change, though violence itself is a form of excess.
But it’s so very extremely depicted today that it breaks down the film as a myth, as it often has no corresponding reality. For Ramu, it would have been a profound crisis if he felt that violence had no categories of understanding in a literary or a philosophical sense.
One must go back to the ontology, epistemology and cosmology of violence. This is what Ramu Gandhi would have argued for. For him, non-violence was a profound act of understanding the inventiveness of violence. And to do this, one had to explore silences of the day. In the silences of today one might find the violence of tomorrow.
Ramu Gandhi would have added that one of the most destructive elements in modern philosophy is the elimination of the body as a metaphor. It no longer exists in a profound way in philosophy. It’s no longer the body that shapes body politics. We need another set of metaphors. We need a new set of concepts, a new narrative. Ultimately, we need new kind of storytelling.
Pedagogues like Gandhi created a new philosophy, a new language to understand evil. Today, we need to do it all over again.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)