“In the study that I have conceptualised, nonviolence encompasses and ‘informs’ violence. For our future as a species and civilisation we have to think about nonviolence. But those who study violence don’t study nonviolence. Similarly, Holocaust scholars as a general rule do not study nonviolence,” said Vinay Lal of the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “What, exactly, is nonviolence: as I argue, we know very little about it, and various dialectics of the negative that have informed strands of theoretical thinking in the West have eschewed any real engagement with nonviolence. The idea of nonviolence only seems to come into play in association with resistance but that is far removed from what Gandhi thought of as nonviolence. I’m thinking of violence and nonviolence dialectically and dialogically.”
Cultural critic, writer and professor of history, Lal is working on a four-book project titled The Genocide and Hope Quartet: Studies in the Architecture of Oppression and the Redemptive Possibilities of Nonviolence. Each of the books is named after a place of critical importance in the global history of nonviolence and violence in the 20th century which he described as both the century “of total war and of creative nonviolence. Total war has to produce an apposite reaction.”
Describing the books as “discrete works that can be read independently” and that are yet intimately related, he added “This is a work in progress as all good work is. The books are not written, some are not conceptualised as such as yet.”
The four places are Dandi, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Robben Island.
“What is signified by each of these places transcends the meaning we attach to each name. ‘Auschwitz’ has become the byword for nearly everything signified by the Holocaust, for an unprecedented combination, in Primo Levi’s words, ‘of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty’. Similarly, ‘Hiroshima’ has transcended that site called Hiroshima, suggesting some extraordinary moral transgression on the part of man.”
He explained that the contemplated books will not just be on Auschwitz and Hiroshima as places. “Auschwitz is not just a camp in Poland but a metaphor for the entire Holocaust. Yet there were 40 500 camps and subcamps as well as mobile killing units – the latter killed about three million people. The book on Auschwitz will transcend Auschwitz, even the camp universe: it is intended to be primarily an ethical and philosophical set of reflections on what could not even be imagined, but I will draw upon history, cultural anthropology, visual anthropology, sociology and religious studies as well.”
“Similarly with Hiroshima. The bombing of Tokyo and other cities that preceded it killed more people. Yet there is something quite different about Hiroshima. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were left untouched during the fire-bombing of Japanese cities as virgin territories to try out the atomic bomb. They wanted to see the impact using measuring instruments on the second plane. Hiroshima symbolises the moral vacuum into which humanity had fallen.”
Dandi and Robben Island – the book ends of resistance
Lal focused in some detail on the books on Dandi and Robben Island. “The two book ends are about resistance. In Dandi and Robben Island I hope to explore the redemptive possibilities of nonviolence while simultaneously complicating the histories of nonviolence. Gandhi’s salt satyagraha at Dandi opened the world to the transformative and performative aspects of mass nonviolent resistance. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many of South Africa’s other leading political prisoners from the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress were interned, earned a reputation as the world’s most notorious penitentiary. Yet, Robben Island became a great site of learning, so much so that it earned the nickname ‘Robben Island University’. I argue that we are yet to understand how ideas of anti-colonialism revolutionise reading and how reading, in turn, engenders revolution, and how Robben Island possibly seeded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a distinctive step in advancing the idea of nonviolence.”
“Gandhi looms large over everything,” he continued. “I’ve been thinking about him for over 40 years. My first scholarly article 35 years ago was on Gandhi – on fasting, a subject in which my interest was triggered in May 1981 when Bobby Sands who led the IRA hunger strikers died.”
Although Gandhi’s first march took place in South Africa in 1913, it was the Salt March (in opposition to British salt taxes) in Dandi in 1930 that catapulted him to global renown. Although the British initially laughed at the idea of the march, it created a type of revolution unlike anything that the British or indeed the world had ever witnessed. Gandhi became a world historical figure including becoming Time’s Man of the Year, and the march was the first globally recognised event in the history of mass nonviolent resistance later influencing leaders in the US civil rights movement (leading to famous marches like the one from Selma to Montgomery in 1965), as well as Albert Luthuli and others in South Africa.
“Robben Island is the most notorious prison in the world,” said Lal. “It was a prison within a prison but the message of resistance still spread to the world. The prisoners reterritorialised Robben Island – it became a university – a site of learning and resistance. Ahmed Kathrada earned four degrees while incarcerated on Robben Island.”
He also noted that the more radical forms of resistance, of which hunger strikes were the most common, occurred in the general section not in the segregated section where the Rivonia Trialists were kept.
Lal also spoke briefly about the difference between fasting and hunger strikes. “Hunger striking as resistance inverts the power structure while fasting is about the evacuation of not just the body but ego, seeking the negation of suffering.”
In addition to the examination of nonviolence, Lal will also look at themes like temporality, spatiality, topography, the body and nakedness in politics (both as dehumanising and powerful) and the dialectic of the collective and the individual.
“I also want to think through the topography of the Holocaust,” he explained. “The camps in Poland were specifically set up as death camps and were mostly in wooded forest areas. Auschwitz was the only one that was not in such an area. I want to think about the ways in which the earth was ‘massacred’ by man. No book on the Holocaust really addresses the environmental destruction because we elevate the dominion of man over nature. Auschwitz was also a laboratory and a factory—a massive manufacturing entity. At the height of its operations it used more electricity than Berlin.”
“I’m also interested in understanding the uses of nakedness. How many times does the idea of nakedness appear in the texts and material that I’m looking at and just how is this nakedness to be interpreted? Levi effectively described nakedness as a way of animalising humans. How does Levi’s testimony of nakedness differ from Gandhi’s nakedness? How do we think about this in the history of violence and nonviolence? I’m using nakedness here as an illustration for how one might link all the four books of the project as well.”
“While there are no images of nakedness from Robben Island, testimonies document the rituals of stripping”, he added. “In contrast, Gandhi adopted nakedness; he exercised, in modern parlance, agency in doing so; for Gandhi stripping naked was also about becoming zero and thus a receptacle for God’s love.”
“Robben island was a political penitentiary, but the resistance of prisoners suggests how you insert the body into the body politic,” he added.
Nonviolence according to Gandhi
Returning to the overriding theme of nonviolence, Lal pointed to the impossibility of talking about nonviolence in a Western framework of knowledge. “Nonviolence as the absence of violence means you must define violence first. St. Augustine defined evil as the absence of good but good, in contrast, is just good; it does not need an ontological dependence on the opposite. In Western civilization, there is a dread of the negative.” Lal also explained that in any pair of oppositions, the two terms are seldom if ever equal; there is always hierarchy.
He explained that in Indian philosophy violence and nonviolence are explained by the concepts of himsa and ahimsa, respectively – “but ahimsa carries a different load than does ‘nonviolence’ in English; it has a different ontological significance, an ontological life of its own, not dependent on something that is prior to it”.
“To Gandhi nonviolence was a way of being in the world and not only resistance. Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence is not what you imagine it is. It’s something he thought about for his entire adult life.”
“I’m not at all dismissive of satyagraha which particularly refers to nonviolent resistance and nonviolent movements. But I want to think of nonviolence beyond resistance. The only thing taken by the Western world from Gandhi is the methodology of nonviolence—not the spirit or larger set of meanings that Gandhi associated with ahimsa (nonviolence).”
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: Ignus Dreyer