The proposed geological epoch of the contemporary period is the Anthropocene epoch. Because , “humankind has become a geological force in its own right” (Steffen, 843), affecting the global ecosystem in ways that have increasingly been becoming inhospitable for its old inhabitants, including humans; leading to the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Starting from 1800 AD ( Steffen, 849) while the English Industrial revolution had gradually been gaining force, the impact of the Anthropocene has now become undeniable, due to the increase in the destructive quality and quantity of the ecological disasters (including the climate crises) around the world. A huge part of these eco-disasters have been taking place due to the unprecedented amount of ever-increasing biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste products being produced daily.
The Anthropocene is the result of the past eco-destructive activities of the humans, along with their contemporary ones. In our attempts to survive this civilizational destructions, we have now started to review the past actions on our ancestors’/our own parts that have made possible and have still been making possible the now unstoppable rise of the Anthropocene. This is where the importance of a Posthuman approach comes in this paper.
The term was coined by Ihab Hassan in his article “Prometheus as performer: Toward a posthumanist Culture?” (Ferrando 45). The importance of the Posthumanist approach has been elucidated by Francesca Ferrando:
Historically, it can be seen as the philosophical approach which suits the informal geological time of the Anthropocene…. While Philosophical posthumanism focuses on decentering the human from the centre of the discourse, the Anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, and thus stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well (41).
India has been witnessing strong environmental movements to save its ecology for many years now. India stands at a unique place with regard to the contemporary human-influenced ecological disaster. Because, it is the third largest emitter of the carbon di oxide gas (Greenhouse gas) to the world’s ecosystem ( Wire, NP); also, as a developing country, it has now become one of the countries to be most affected by climate change; according to the ‘global Climate Risk Index 2021’ (Deccan Herald, NP ). A major reason behind this is the country’s caste-class-wise hierarchies, that leave the lower caste-classes in a helpless impoverished condition, most vulnerable to climate crisis. Ramchandra Guha is of this opinion that the Indian environmental movement started from the Chipko Andolon, and since then “…Mahatma Gandhi has been the usually acknowledged and occasionally unacknowledged ‘patron saint’ of the Indian environmental movement”. (Guha, Varieties, 256). He added, “Gandhi was not a systematic thinker, he was preoccupied with pressing questions of politics and social reform – …and could scarcely have had the time to chart an economic or environmental program in detail. (Guha, Varieties, 260).Therefore, in this context, a posthuman critique of Gandhi’s environmental doctrines will be useful to check how far his views are still useful for today.
Before venturing deeper into Gandhi’s perspectives with the help of posthumanism, let us see what the criteria of posthumanist criticism is.
‘“Post’’ in Latin means both “behind”… and “after” (if related to time). “Post” implies a continuity, a discontinuity, and a transcendence … of the term for which it is a “post”, and so it necessarily reconciles its own identity to it in a symbiotic relation.’ ( Ferrando 101). Ferrando adds, “[ The hyphen’s] presence can be substituted with its absence without a significant loss [,which] makes of it a suited mark for the post-dualistic approach of the posthuman” (103).
The posthumanist discourse focuses on the language as well, so that they do not fall prey to essentialised (Ferrando 106)definition:
we shall strive for the use of a language that is fully mindful of its own implications; that is why using the verb “humanizing” may be a better fit for our attempt to empathise the human as a process that is constantly enacted, re-enacted, according to specific cultural modes and social norms that are co-constituted in the process. (116).
As already opined, the ecological crises is worsened by the caste-class divisions in Indian societies. The paper will also try to show that this discriminatory view itself is also instrumental in the anthropocentric ecological destructions. “[w]hen thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. [Since Caste has long been the] central symbol of India, indexing it as fundamentally different from other places as well as expressing its essence” ( Dirks, qtd in Guha , Beyond, 19).
While critically reading Gandhi’s perspectives, the paper will focus mainly on his perspectives on the untouchables, one of the most affected caste-classes of India in this epoch, to see how their past and contemporary existences themselves are one of the many ‘symbolic’ representations of the causes of the Anthropocene. It is also important to note Gandhi himself had been an active proponent of the abolition of untouchability. A large part of his Sarvodaya, his Ashram planning and his environmental doctrine had been sanitation works and maintenance of personal and communal hygiene.
Unlike ‘Jati’, ‘Caste’ is not originally an Indian concept. Coming from the Spanish term, Casta, through the Portuguese invasion to the Indian subcontinent, the term ‘Caste’ has by now become the uniqueness of Indian social-culture. “[I]nitially a collective noun that referred to a pure blood-line or species”; Caste, in the context of Spanish and Portuguese colonial societies alone, “alluded to a system of social order centered on biological parenthood in which “reproducing the pure and noble group”’ was the sole intention of maintaining caste distinction. ( Guha, Beyond, 22). From Sixteenth Century onwards, the Ibernian Colonising forces started using it ‘‘as various biologically distinctive ( and ranked) social groups generated by Western expansion in the Americas and Asia”. (Guha, Beyond, 22).it is due to this cultural meeting of the Ibernian colonisrs with the colonised Asians of the Indian subcontinent, that the word gotintroduced to ‘India’. Sumit Guha wrote:
Eighteenth-century Spanish American legislation prohibited intermarriage between high and low status groups,… Thus the Portuguese, who introduced later-coming Europeans to India society, were evolving a system of ethnic and social stratification by biological ancestry; it was for this reason that they immediately assumed that Indian jatis aimed exclusively at maintaining ‘purity of blood’. (Beyond, 23).
Interestingly, Ferrando also pays attention to the issue of race, which (as shown and will be elaborated upon later) is connected to the issue of caste also. Gandhi and Ferrando go parallel in their opinions regarding the emergence of the ‘others’ in the human cultural history:
While Ferrando says, “the categories of human which have been repeatedly denied full recognition as human beings…repeatedly and consistently re-emerged within the history of humanity”. (Ferrando 117-118); Gandhi observed
The ancient Jews regarded themselves as the chosen people of God, to the exclusion of all others, wit the result that their descendants were visited with a strange and even unjust retribution. Almst in a similar way the Hindus have considered themselves Aryas or civilised, and a section of their own kith and kin as Anaryas or untouchables, with the result that a strange, if unjust, nemesis is being visited not only upon the Hindus in South Africa, but the Musalmans and Parsis as well, inasmuch as they belong to the same country and have the same colour as their Hindu brethren( Gandhi, My Experiment, 151).
One of the significances of Gandhi’s aforementioned perspective is he considered the Aryan jatis and the ‘Anarya’ lowest jatis as all belonging to the same ‘kith and kinship threads’. Therefore, making the distinction between the Jews’ pride in inter-racial superiority and the Aryans; pride in intra-kin/race superiority. This difference is important for a better understanding of Gandhi’s take on Racial superiority. In his autobiography, he noted, while pardoning a white South African soldier for racial molests, he commented:” All coloured people are the same to him. He no doubt treats negroes just as he treated me/” (My Experiment, 68).
The faith in racial superiority had been there in his ideals. This idea will be stretched further later. It was rather this feeling of superiority in his own Hindu kinship models as well, that had also inspired him to abolish untouchability , “the greatest blot on Hinduism” (All Men, 18)
Unlike the European racist caste system, the Indian ‘jati’ system made possible the sharing of rituals among the higher Jatis of the Hindu society. The kin and family of Gandhi himself too up to the ritual of wearing the sacred thread like the Brahmans, even though they were non-Brahmin “banias” :
“The practice of wearing the sacred threads was not then common among the vaishya families in Kathiawad. But a movement had just been started for making it obligatory for the first three varnas…several members of the Gandhi clan adopted the sacred thread (including him)” ( Gandhi, My Experiment, 208).
This relaxation among the first three varnas, added to the fact that the relaxation could have been entertained by attaining higher spiritual knowledge, seem like the influences behind Gandhi’s preaching to the Untouchables as to how to become respectable:
“But I am trying …to tell fellow-scavengers that, while we may handle dirt, we must be clean ourselves both inwardly and outwardly. After we have done the cleansing…I would beseech you to give up all evil habits, and you will at once find that you are accepted as honourable members of society without any stain on you.” (qtd in Muhammad, Space and caste, NP)
Having considered all the ‘castes’ as kin of each, he uses the term ‘class’ to denote the ‘untouchable’ exploited lot: ‘’ Some of the classes which render us the greatest social service, but which we Hindus have chosen to regard as ‘untouchables’ (, My Experiments, 150). He tried to improve their situation by moral uplift and to save them from the social stigma, by renaming them as ‘Harijan’, thus bringing them closer to the superior spiritual realm he had faith on.
Even though he dissociates sanitary waste and dirt from the body of the generationally untouchable, he maintains distance from the negative connotation of dirt. Ad he also essentially calls all of them Hindus this abhorrence for dirt and waste seem to have been influenced by the Brahminical rituals of cleansing the body of the pure Brahmin:
…the alienation from the body, a precondition for spirituality of any kind whatever….only after this alienation from the body that any study of the inherited knowledge is possible. The alienation from one’s own body begins, contradictorily perhaps, from the initiation rituals….rituals of entry into the community. (Jaaware, 147-148).
The matter of problem here is the figure of the preacher, who seems to portray Gandhi’s belief in a higher power and the human-medium of that power eager to preach the ignorant. Even though, “[the ‘Dvija’s’] entry into a community is dependent on a negation of the body, a certain death of the body, a certain death of the centering of the self in the body” (Jaaware 147) seem like a posthumanist association of the self with the other, but the body only becomes part of the society to maintain its order as a trustee of some highest power. Thus, again conforming to order and hierarchies; against the Posthumanist ‘nomadicity and decentralisation’. (Ferrando 123 ).
This belief and faith in the existence of some higher spiritual world and of his persistent strive towards the same made him feel apologetic for the practice of untouchability, that makes his “kith and kins” unable to pursue the same. T. N. Khoshoo writes: “Gandhi undertook facts for Harijan issues ‘intended to sting Hindu conscience into right religious action’ in a spirit of ‘Prayaschitta’ (penitential amends) on part of the caste Hindus, since ‘those whom they had subjected to discriminations and indignities were as much sparks of the divine as they themselves were’ “(116).
Thus, even though Brahman is above his material body and more than body, he is posthuman not in the sense that is applicable to post-anthopocentric, post-speciesist posthumanism.. Rather, they are the icons of the centralisation of power in the Hindu way Gandhi thought: ‘thus, it is that a variety of hardships have to be undergone because unless these things are done…, the “world collapses”. The maintenance of the world is the responsibility given unto you from the moment of initiation’(Jaaware 149).
This faith on the higher spiritual pedestal also seem to have inspired his faith in the distinction between brutes(nonhumans) and humans, dirt and human body:
Nonviolence is the law of our species, as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and he knows no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law- to the strength of the spirit (All Men, 5).
Or when he said,
“ Politics bereft of religion are absolute dirt, ever to be shunned” ( All Men, 6).
Regarding the reproduction of the social order, Gandhi said:
The world depends for its existence on the act of generation, and as the world is the play-ground of God and a reflection of His glory, the act of generation should be controlled for the ordered growth of the world. He who realises this will control his lust…( My Experiment, 106).
This could be the cause why he could not accept the non-human progeny that the contemporary posthuman perspectives cannot consider as completely disposable, abhorrent, unwanted produce.
As Heather Davis says, the lessons of queer social structures, of families not based on biology, and lives not necessarily afforded protection from the state or other institutions of power, might be instructive in facing both our non-filial human progeny, and a world filled with increasing uncertainty. Instead of biological children, our plasticized, microbial progeny will offer a decidedly queerer world”. ( Toxic, 246)
Once this nomadicity and uncertainty of the epoch are accepted, Davis opined “we need to generate a sense of responsibility for our nonhuman progeny [ so much respected and intimate and interrelated inextricable ways], these strange new forms of microbial life, while at the same time recognizing that their existence is predicated on the extinguishment of multiple other forms of life: “ (Toxic, 245)
That is, dirt and the waste produced by us do not remain inferior with reference to us, and to be got rid of. Rather their existence is as equal and significant ( even through their transformation processes) as would be the lives of our human progeny. To quote Mel Chen here:
“ …an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity seems to have the power to turn a lens on the anxieties that produce it and allow for a queer knowledge production that gives some means for structural remedy while not abandoning the claim to being just a little bit ‘off”’ (Chen, qtd in Davis, Toxic 246).
The problem is not that he wants dirt to be expunged, but that he considers it as inferior to the superior body that alone can achieve moral height, and that It is possible to expunge dirt completely, to get rid of the unwanted, even if for a period of time alone.
Thus, it is quite clear that Gandhi’s sanitation related doctrines and his view of the untouchables’ had been largely influenced by his own belief in his moral superiority, and in his apologetic realisation of the moral inferiority of his kin. However, it was replete with racism, anthropocentrism, speciesism and most importantly, binary languages. His environmental doctrine, in which I focused mainly in sanitation work and the ‘Harijans’, show that he didn’t call for the erasure of the untouchables as a specific groups of people or the acceptance of them in the society as an act of interconnectedness, of the realisation that with or without moral fibre, they all are interconnected and responsible for collective and individual affectation. The posthumanist concept of the ‘mesh’ was missing in his views.
To recall Ramchandra Guha: ‘Gandhi’s reservations about the wholesale Industrialisation of India are usually ascribed to moral ground-…the selfishness and competitiveness of modern society- but they also had markedly ecological undertones” (261).
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