Dennis Dalton’s ‘Indian Ideas of Freedom’: What freedom meant for Indian thinkers

Avijit Pathak

IF you wish to engage with a spectrum of Indian thinkers and their ideas of freedom, you cannot escape Dennis Dalton’s well-researched and philosophically nuanced book, written with what I would regard as a dialogic spirit.

Think of, for instance, the binaries we are fond of creating in this polarised world say, Gandhi vs Ambedkar, or poetic Tagore vs revolutionary MN Roy. With the burden of intellectual stubbornness and political correctness, we tend to place these thinkers in different hostile camps. Well, it is true that Ambedkar kept interrogating Gandhi on the caste question; Tagore and Gandhi differed on the efficacy of ‘non-cooperation’ as a mode of political resistance; and MN Roy’s language a mix of Enlightenment rationality and intellectual freedom was not like Sri Aurobindo’s spiritually nuanced meditative quest. However, Dalton, because of his rigorous research and authentic quest, succeeds in convincing us that, despite these differences, there is a thread of connectedness as far as the deeper meaning of their ideas of freedom is concerned.

Indeed, once you meditate on this book, you forget polemics and catchy political slogans. Instead, you become a wanderer, and love to walk with the group of seven Indian thinkers Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan. Yes, the distinctive Indian idea of freedom begins to strike your imagination.

What is freedom? Is it merely ‘outer’? Say, freedom from the colonial empire or freedom from slavery/feudalism/capitalism/authoritarianism? Or is there something called ‘inner’ freedom the freedom to realise the possibilities one is endowed with say, the freedom for self-actualisation, or the freedom from egotistic desire, greed, fear and violence? Is emancipatory politics only about ‘outer’ freedom the urge to overthrow an oppressive regime, capture the state and rule in the name of nationalism, socialism and democracy? Or, is it possible to have a more holistic notion of freedom that unites the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, the ‘means’ and the ‘end’, or the political and the spiritual?

Dalton’s book acquires its significance precisely because it reminds us that what is distinctive about Indian ideas of freedom is that it is possible to see this integral notion of freedom in all these seven thinkers. Gandhi’s ‘swaraj’ or ‘experiments with truth’, Vivekananda’s ‘practical Vedanta’, Tagore’s poetic universalism, Ambedkar’s engagement with Buddhism, Aurobindo’s quest for human ascendance towards the divine and a new society beyond the social Darwinism of capitalism and political authoritarianism in the name of socialism, MN Roy’s radical humanism and Jayaprakash Narayan’s communitarian democracy these ideas have a higher purpose beyond the mere acquisition of political power. To quote Dalton:

All saw their task as primarily supra-political in nature; they insisted that though their activities might influence the political sphere, and though their ideas may embrace political issues, their ultimate purpose was beyond politics. This purpose was none other than individual self-realisation the discovery, by each, of the reality of his own nature. Only in this way, they believed, could a radical transformation of society occur.

There are 10 chapters lucid, reflexive and academically enriched. Moreover, I will urge every reader of the book to go through Dalton’s ‘Memoir of India’. Feel the intensity of his quest, or the journey he undertook. His conversations with Nirmal Kumar Bose, the author of ‘My Days with Gandhi’; his dialogue with Mirabehn to understand her autobiography, ‘The Spirit’s Pilgrimage’; or his engagement with VM Tarkunde in order to know more about MN Roy… This sort of deep research, I believe, has inspired scholars like Ramachandra Guha and James Tully to write insightful ‘Foreword’ and ‘Afterword’, respectively.

We live in toxic times. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish Indian democracy from some sort of electoral autocracy. We are witnessing the normalisation of political opportunism, the absence of nuanced philosophic/civilisational debates and conversations amid fake news and filthy language disseminated through the instantaneity of social media, and the cult of narcissism packaged through the discourse of hyper-nationalism. The question is: where is the ideal we once saw in Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’, Sri Aurobindo’s ‘The Ideal of Human Unity’, Ambedkar’s ‘Buddha and His Dhamma’ and Vinoba Bhave’s ‘The Social and Political Philosophy of Sarvodaya After Gandhiji’? It is, therefore, not surprising that while concluding this wonderful book, Dennis Dalton reflected on this ‘gap’, and urged us to ponder whether ‘the challenges and standards posed by its formidable intellectual tradition by the group of seven will have a significant impact on what India’s leaders and people do today’.