Gandhi, Orwell and our Understanding of Combating Totalitarianism Lachlan Forster Mahatma Gandhi’s death on January 30th 1948 led to immediate canonisation in the public eye for the lawyer turned revolutionary. The impact of Gandhi’s protests in establishing a self-determining India, along with his pacifist form of civil resistance called
Satyagraha,
lead
to
the
world
recognising
his
ideological
piousness.
For
example, The New York Times wrote in their obituary ‘(Gandhi) made himself the living symbol of India’. As is often the case for public figures, Gandhi’s death made him more relevant, especially as his autobiography, The Story of my Experiments with Truth, was published for the first time outside of India in 1948, meeting a large readership eager to take in the words of the departed ‘light of India’.
One of these readers was British icon George Orwell, who having finished the final draft of his landmark novel 1984, decided to write a review of the autobiography and reflection upon Gandhi as a political figure for Partisan Review. In his piece ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Orwell levels a number of criticisms against the ideology of Satyagraha and the effectiveness of Gandhi’s proposed method of fighting oppression. Although noting that Gandhi was ‘genuinely liked’ amongst even Britons, and that ‘(Gandhi’s) natural physical courage was quite outstanding’, Orwell’s major issues with Gandhi include his flattery of martyrdom, tendency to side with ‘the other-worldly’ over man, and crucially his inability to ‘understand the nature of totalitarianism’.
Orwell built this final criticism around a number of comments that Gandhi had made regarding the Second World War and particularly the oppression of Jews during the Holocaust, with the ethicist stating in interviews that German Jews ‘ought to commit collective Germany
suicide’, of
as
Hitler’s
this
act
violence.’
‘would Further
have
aroused
comments
the
made
world
by
and
Gandhi
the
people
surrounding
of the
supposed effectiveness of ‘non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion’ lead Orwell to conclude that Gandhi’s interpretation of totalitarianism was naïve, and his methods of resistance towards domineering political powers were suited likely only to India, where British colonial control was idle compared to the fascist practises of Nazi Germany. As Gita V. Pai notes, Gandhi ‘never lived in a totalitarian regime’ and his manner of non-violent protest ‘could not have worked in Stalin’s Soviet Union’ because Satyagraha’s success relied heavily on media coverage, an impossibility in totalitarian societies. As Orwell would clearly state in his essay, ‘it is difficult to see how his strategy of
fasting
and
civil
disobedience
could
be
applied
in
a
country
where
political
opponents simply disappear and the public never hears anything that the government does not want it to hear’.
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