Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.6

c5.6

The protagonists of the second view are equally large in number, the more scholarly amongst them linking Gandhiji’s inspiration to Prahalada or other figures of antiquity. According to R.R. Diwakar, taking his inspiration from Prahalada, Socrates, etc., Gandhiji adapted ‘a nebulous, semi-religious doctrine to the solution of the problems of day-to-day life and thus gave to humanity a new weapon to fight evil and injustice non-violently.’ Taking note of the traditional Indian practices of *dharna*, *hartal* and *dasatyaga* (leaving the land with all one’s belongings), Diwakar comes to the conclusion that ‘their chief concern was the extramundane life and that too of the individual, not of the group or community’, and states ‘there are no recorded instances in Indian history of long-drawn strikes of the nature of the modern “general strike”.’⁴ According to an analyst of Mahatma Gandhi’s political philosophy, ‘the Gandhian method of non-violent resistance was novel in the history of mass actions waged to resist encroachments upon human freedom.’⁵ According to another recent student of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhian non-cooperation and civil disobedience ‘was a natural growth and flowering of a practical philosophy implicit in his social milieu.’⁶