Living up to the spirit of satyagraha

MUMBAI: On Sunday, in the small village of Panamanna in Kerala, 25-year-old Malavika Tara Mohanan will spend the day fasting and meditating.

At dusk, she will take the oath of a ‘Shanti Sainik’, and “commit herself to truthforce, soulforce, satyagraha; turn her heart, mind and body into weapons of love, and take them with her as she steps into the depths of hate”.

By articulating her lifelong commitment to an active peaceful existence, Malavika believes she will better realise what her words mean. For sometime now, she has been exploring a way of being, such that everything her body does—from the food she eats, to the way she washes her clothes, to how she smiles at someone—has something to do with making a more peaceful world. By waiting for September 11 to take the oath, she is expressing solidarity with other Shanti Sainiks across the world in commemorating  100 years of ahimsa and satyagraha.

Having grown up with a strong sense of community, Malavika vests her faith in the collective. “There is something powerful about people in different places, or in the same place, deciding on something together, at the same time,” she says. And something powerful there was, when in September 1906, thousands of Indians in Johannesburg pledged themselves to non-violent civil disobedience under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi in protest against apartheid.

When Gandhi’s biographer Louis Fischer recorded those proceedings 50 years later and titled the chapter ‘ September 11, 1906’, he dated the birth of the satyagraha movement that grew iconic for the Indian struggle for Independence. That the calendar of modern-day history has tokenised that date as ‘9/11’—when the ghost of terrorism went global, makes civil society’s reaffirmation in the vitality of the non-violent ever more crucial. Peace groups in the United States, some comprising families of victims of the World Trade Centre attacks, seek to overcome the rhetoric of terrorism by celebrating “A 100 Years of Non-Violence” through movements in history.  

The efforts of groups such as the New Yorkers for a ‘Department of Peace’, parallel a paradigm shift that Malavika too experienced. Studying Drama at Stanford University, she was attracted to the notion of struggle. “I allowed that ‘anti-war’ label for a while,” she says.

But it was in the run-up to the US government bombing of Iraq that her ideas changed. “We were constantly talking about war and anti-war,” she recalls, “but then we started realising it was war and peace. We weren’t working against war, we were working for peace. And just rephrasing it changed all the dynamics, the tactics; the fundamental way of being.”

Malavika is now conscious of everyday living, acutely aware of the resources she uses. “Using too many resources involves violence,” she states. “The concept of water wars, oil wars, where one set of people are using too much, is a violence on another set of people, and invites violence from that other set of people.”

When asked how her love of Bharatnatyam flows through all of this, she laughs heartily: “It has to!” She has brought her two worlds together. “Dance is movement, a way of
becoming aware of your own body and the violence within: violence towards yourself, or another, or as part of a collective,” she explains. “I’m interested in dance or ‘movement’—even like anti-dam or peace movements, movements of the body for non-violence.”

Somewhere during her formative years, spent between Singapore and California, Malavika had vague and romantic notions of becoming a freedom-fighter like Mahatma Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar or Subhash Chandra Bose. She knows Bose is of a slightly aggressive order, but it is in comprehending the tendency to violence that she clarifies, “To me, more than ahimsa, it is the commitment to truth or satyagraha that is important.”

An Emmy-nominated documentary on non-violence, ‘A Force More Powerful’, will be screened at 6pm at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai on Monday

What happened on September 11, 1906?

It was on this day that an angry crowd of about 3,000 Indian men and women gathered at the Imperial Theatre in Johannesburg to protest against a proposed move by the government of Transvaal which would require all Indians to register with the authorities, submit to finger-printing and accept a certificate which they would then have to carry with them at all times.

A person who failed to register could be imprisoned, fined or deported. By the time Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, then a young attorney, rose to speak, others had already threatened to shoot any officer who imposed such a law on Indians. Gandhi’s line — “There is only one course open to me, to die but not to submit to the law” — became the clarion call for satyagraha.