The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.41

c5.41

It has been customary to explain the success of the single most important figure in this process, Gandhi, by pointing to his expert wielding of traditional religious symbols and ideas, but this is only half the truth. Gandhi, apart from his use of symbols that had also been used by others, was a renouncer, personifying in his relation to the sociopolitical world the inner conflict of tradition. This also qualified him to deal with the conflict in its modern form, but as a renouncer he played a totally unprecedented role. It has recently been pointed out that “the reason, over and above the use of religion in politics, why Gandhi was able to initiate national movements with such conspicuous success was because he recognized the social pluralism of India and exploited the traditional loyalties of different sections of society to draw them into political agitations.”³⁶ If I am allowed to paraphrase this statement, I would say that he managed to attend to the organization of both the “vertical” demands of the segmentary order and the conflicting need for “horizontal” unity. That the actions aiming at horizontal unity and therefore centered on universal moral issues were far less successful and showed a far lower degree of control than his earlier, locally restricted ones, which focused on material grievances,³⁷ was to be expected. Given that horizontal, no less than vertical, unity must be sustained by distribution and that access to the center’s power and resources was as yet barred, the measure of reality he gave to horizontal, national unity, if only during the short span of a nationwide agitation, was a totally new phenomenon.