Truth Transcends History Gandhi's Response to the Colonial Logic of History and Allegory of Progress

Abstract

This article is an attempt to read Gandhi's critique of history in the context of colonial political discourses. There is a school of thought that argues that Gandhi rejected history for metaphysical reasons. On the other hand, there is another school of thought that claims that Gandhi's rejection of history should be viewed in the historical context irrespective of his metaphysical beliefs. Examining the arguments of these two schools of thought, this paper intends to argue that behind Gandhi's rejection of history, there was also a strong subtext of dismissal of colonial political discourse and colonial knowledge production that justified history as 'essential as well as 'marker of progress' for any nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Moreover, as the discourse on history was also employed by colonials to justify their civilization mission and perpetuate their rule in India, Gandhi's rejection of history may also be seen as an ideological attempt to subvert the whole logic of colonial politics. Besides, in response to the colonialist claim that India is not a nation as it has no history, Indian nationalists attempted to write their own versions of Indian history that characteristically mimicked the colonial epistemology of us/other which, in turn, generated another set of problems. In this discursive nationalist context, by discarding the validity of history and the colonial mode of reasoning Gandhi attempted to resolve a crucial ideological problem of Indian nationalist historians by opening up a new mode of thinking to deal with Indian past.