Abstract
What role does civil society play in the transition to democracy? A central question especially during the 1990s, the term of ‘civil society’ has been used widely and extensively. Taking up the case of India, this chapter examines the associational forms created by Mahatma Gandhi, such as the Ashram, and discusses implications for collective action during India’s freedom struggle. It will be argued that the use of categories such as civil society and the public sphere (which developed under particular European spatial and temporal conditions) and simply transporting and transplanting them from one historical and social context to another can be misleading. Instead, a re-calibration is required in order to identify institutional variations and to grasp shifts in cultural meaning. Drawing upon Habermas, the European idea of civil society and public sphere is discussed and Gandhi’s variations are explored, leading to a number of observations on contrast and congruence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This chapter was first published in Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Working Paper No. 15, June 2003, South Asia Institute, Department of Political Science, Heidelberg University, URL: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/3723/1/hpsacp15.pdf
- 2.
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
- 3.
- 4.
See for example my defence of treating transnational religious movements as an aspect of transnational civil society , in Rudolph (1997).
- 5.
The “original” 1962 Habermas has a more restrictive vision of civil society , focussing on narrowly political associations with a strong rationalist and speech-act oriented dimension. The Habermas who appeared at a panel on his work in 1989 had expanded his horizons to include associations with mainly social ends.
The institutional core of ‘civil society ’ is constituted by voluntary unions outside the realm of the state and the economy and ranging […] from churches, cultural associations, and academies to independent media, sport and leisure clubs, debating societies, groups of concerned citizens , and grass-roots petitioning drives all the way to occupational associations, political parties, labor unions, and ‘alternative’ institutions (Calhoun 1992: 253).
- 6.
For an account and analysis of the emergence of opinion and the rise of parties see Lloyd. I. Rudolph, “The Origin of Party: From the Politics of Status to the Politics of Opinion in Eighteenth Century England and America,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Government, Harvard University, 1956.
- 7.
Habermas speaks of a “weakening of the public sphere ”; of the public sphere becoming “a field for competition among interests in the cruder form of forcible confrontations”; “Laws that have obviously originated under the ‘pressure of the streets’ can scarcely continue to be understood in terms of a consensus achieved by private persons in public discussion”. Deploring the “refeudalization” of the public sphere he notes that “today [publicness] has […] been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups” (Seidman 1989: 236). Much of this is reminiscent of the impatience with political bargaining that lies behind Max Weber’s distaste for democratic politics.
- 8.
There is a deviant lineage in the western tradition which argues otherwise. See Althusius (1995: 32). His pluralist view of the polity as constituted by a graduated set of socio-political units encompasses the family as a basic unit: “By politics alone arises the wisdom for governing and administering the family”.
- 9.
‘Beyond the Nation? or Within?’, Economic and Political Weekly, January 4–11, 1997, pp. 30–34, 32. Chatterjee’s article recognizes the distinction between the traditional definition of civil society and public sphere and the Gandhian variant of this definition which we are about to elaborate. But he would prefer, apparently in the interest of heuristic sharpness, to “retain the term civil society [for] those characteristic institutions of modern associational life originating in western societies that are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and exit, contract, deliberative procedures of decision-making, recognized rights and duties of members […]” even though non-western countries provide “numerous examples of the emergence of what could well be called civil-social institutions which nevertheless do not always conform to these principles.” It is a position that denies (on historical grounds? on normative grounds?) the fluidity and adaptability of institutions. This is a different theoretical road than the one which we adopted in an earlier work in which we argued that “caste associations” represent a hybrid form of civil society which transgresses the dichotomy between ascribed and voluntary groups. See our The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Reprint, 1996).
- 10.
See Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, Selected Works (New York, n.d.), II, p. 415.
- 11.
India saw a proliferation of ashrams in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, institutions which mixed classical models with more recent institutional forms and spiritual needs. The forms also traveled across denominational lines, to Christians and New Agers. For an introduction to the forms and review of historical instances see Taylor (1986).
- 12.
See Susan Seizer, [Dissertation on traveling village drama troupe] (Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Spring 1997).
- 13.
See Ramanujan (1991: Introduction).
- 14.
For a remarkable display of juridical village rhetoric see the documentary, “Courts and Councils”, made by the University of Wisconsin and available from its Center of South Asian Studies.
- 15.
For an extended discussion of the cross-cultural meaning of “Privacy” see Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph (2000); Introduction to Part V, “Private Lives in Patriarchal Space”.
- 16.
M.G. Ranade (1842–1901), who favoured social reform as an appropriate issue for the Indian National Congress, was forced to back off when it became apparent social reform, as against political freedom, would deeply divide the Congress.
- 17.
For the massive repercussions in India of the violence committed against the South African strikers in 1913, including Viceroy Lord Harding’s surprising condemnation of the South African authorities, and G.K. Gokhale’s amplification to India of the news he received from South Africa, see Gandhi (1928: 286).
- 18.
“There was to be one single kitchen, and all were to dine in a single row. Everyone was to see to the cleaning of his own dish and other things. The common pots were to be cleaned by different parties in turn” (Gandhi 1928: 216).
- 19.
It is not our objective in this paper to analyse Gandhi’s rhetoric, but it is worth pointing out that Gandhi’s accounts of the Ashram’s negotiated voluntarism report no agents: “It was agreed”, “it was decided upon”. The various decisions to create a common vegetarian kitchen, at Tolstoy Farm, at Champaran, appear to happen without the active intervention of any advocate or persuader, but rather appear as the fortuitous and appropriate result of a spontaneous consensual expression of ashram souls.
- 20.
See Prasad (1956).
- 21.
“One of the great prophetic books of the nineteenth century”, which “pierces through the smoke-screen of classical economics, and reveals true human realities”. Clark (1982: 265).
- 22.
See Clive Wilmer’s review of six books on Ruskin that herald the “return” of this alternately celebrated and shunned figure, “Go to Nature,” Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 2000, pp. 3–4.
Bibliography
Althusius, J. (1995). Politica. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Bayly, C. A. (1999). The Indian Ecumene. An Indigenous Public Sphere. In C. A. Bayly (Ed.), Empire and information. Intelligence gathering and social communication in India 1780-1870 (pp. 180–211). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Calhoun, C. (1992). Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clark, K. (1982). Ruskin today. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Coleman, J. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Eley, G. (1992). Nations, Publics and Political Cultures. Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gandhi, M. K. (1928). Satyagraha in South Africa. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press.
Gandhi, M. K. (1957). An autobiography. The story of my experiments with truth. Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Keane, J. (1998). Civil society. Old images, new visions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Prasad, R. (1956). Gandhi in Bihar. In J. A. Homer (Ed.), The Gandhi reader. A source book of his life and writings (pp. 149–159). Bloomington: Princeton University Press.
Putnam, R., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. Y. (1993). Making democracy work – Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ramanujan, A. K. (1991). Folktales from India. A selection of oral tales from twenty-two languages (The Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library). New York: Pantheon Books.
Rudolph, S. H. (1997). Transnational religion and fading states. Boulder: Westview Press.
Rudolph, S. H., Rudolph, L. I., & Kanota, M. S. (2002). Reversing the gaze. Amar Singh’s diary, a colonial subject’s narrative of imperial India. Boulder: Westview Press.
Seidman, S. (1989). Jürgen Habermas on society and politics. A reader. Boston: Beacon Press.
Taylor, C. (1990). Modes of civil society. Public Culture, 1(3), 59–118.
Taylor, R. W. (1986). Modern Indian ashrams. Religion and Society, 3(33), 3–23.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Susanne, Rudolph, L. (2015). The Coffee House and the Ashram: Gandhi, Civil Society and Public Spheres. In: Wolf, S., et al. Politics in South Asia. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09087-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09087-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09086-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09087-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)