This chapter begins by discussing Gandhi and Tagore’s perspectives on politics and uses those and other ideas to substantiate Nehru’s international political thought. It then goes on to suggest that in order to successfully theorise non-alignment, it is necessary to historicise it. The main argument in this chapter is that non-alignment is best understood not only as an approach to India’s international relations, but also to International Relations in general. Therefore, the case studies chosen are all instances of the breakdown of political processes where India’s national and territorial interests were not threatened, but where India chose to mediate nevertheless.

In this chapter, the second of the book’s mini-studies of dignity, we turn to early twentieth-century India. Here the object is cloth, and the focus is on Gandhi’s campaign for the manufacture and use of homespun cloth (khadi). The language of dignity was a striking feature of that campaign; Gandhi appealed to Indians to ‘realise their dignity’ by discarding their foreign cloth and renewing their home textile industry. Yet while he made that appeal, the great Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar insisted that dignity could not be achieved for all Indians without social transformation, including the dismantling of the Hindu system of caste.

My introduction offers an overview of the rise and fall of Gandhian passive resistance and places it in the context of a burgeoning arts movement both in India and concerned with India. It sketches the arc of the book, from Gandhi’s 1909 pronouncement of passive resistance to the play Tagore would soon write that takes up passivity as a form of unexpected resistance, to the role of the English language in Indian arts, and ends with the modernist memorial commissioned to commemorate the victims of India’s Partition. The introduction’s main work is to define its central concept, map its complications, and locate its role within a global arts movement.

This chapter focuses on the Noncooperation Movement (1920–1922) and, in particular, the role played by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The NCM was the largest political movement for swaraj that India had ever seen. As the leader of this movement, Gandhi would demand noncooperators refuse mercy, and if necessary, sacrifice their lives in pursuit of political freedom. For Gandhi, it was only by reclaiming the right to die a political death that the satyagrahi could finally escape the label of the criminal and the category of rebellion. The chapter studies the place of mercy in Gandhian thought by paying close attention to his response to the Amritsar Massacre, his public speeches and writings, and his performance in his trial for sedition in 1922. As I argue, by embracing guilt and rejecting mercy, Gandhi threatened to finally explode the political conditions upon which imperial sovereignty had been organized.

To the modern political philosopher Amartya Sen, democracy appears a universal good, but others have seen it as a product of European and American thought bound up with colonialism, and have looked for qualities better attuned to ‘Asian’ values like consensus or the connection of human beings to nature. Gandhi presented himself as a man of transparent truth and integrity, so echoing Socrates, the Christian puritan tradition and (except in regard to violence) Robespierre. He disliked Parliamentary democracy, but needed it in order to secure independence. His encounter with Charlie Chaplin highlights the central problem: Was the Mahatma a staged role that he played, or an expression of his authentic self? Many were impressed, but some like Jinnah and Ambedkar were not. Rabindranath Tagore shared Gandhi’s objections to metropolitan Western-style electoral democracy, but distrusted Gandhi’s authoritarianism. As an artist, Tagore saw performance as an essential feature of human nature. He found no way in which he could himself enter the political arena, and fell back upon being an educator.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

Romantic writing in English developed a rich repertoire of variations on the classical distinction between undertaking and undergoing an action, one that descends to us, for example, in the grammatical distinction between the active and passive voice. Shelley’s central writings often foreground this kind of distinction, as when in Act I of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus tells Jupiter: “I weigh not what you do but what you suffer.” Yet, in Shelley’s case, suffering is more particularly identified with the experience of pain and sorrow, and nowhere more clearly so than in Prometheus Unbound, where the Titan is repeatedly defined by his suffering, and his suffering is repeatedly cast as his capacity not only to confront the pain and sorrow of the world but also to bear them. Such radical passivity would become crucial to Shelley’s proto-Gandhian doctrine of revolutionary nonviolence, as spelled out in his Philosophical View of Reform, written in the wake of Peterloo just weeks after the completion of Prometheus Unbound. This doctrine, which Gandhi would have encountered in his London days from Henry Salt, would be eventually embraced, mutatis mutandis, by Christian leaders of the American civil rights movement who would have been otherwise unsympathetic to Shelley’s atheism, and in nonviolent movements around the world ever since.

Chapter 6 looks at Naipaul’s travel writings on India and on Islam. To Naipaul, the novel, the novel of the long twentieth century, no longer gets at “difficult social and human truth.” The novel, having lost its dynamism is no longer the correct or even legitimate form for the expression of the heightened, sensitive, and expansive human imagination. In its place, suggests Naipaul, the forms that will re-shape our ideas of the world, are “biography, art history, cultural history, perhaps even history.” The travel form, as a historical undertaking, however, cannot be simply a factual survey of an unfamiliar place; it must be about things seen and people met, with writing matching the experience to be transmitted. The turn away from the novel produced works that were original and challenging, even if, at the level of social anthropology, they may be seen as throwbacks to ethnographic narratives of imperialist writers like James Anthony Froude. A close reading of the travel books, however, shows the persistence of the ironic temper, without that proactive or politically determined piety which has been the hallmark of much contemporary ethnographic writing.

Taken as a whole the story told in this book is one of disembodiment, a loss of body. As such it corresponds to other stories of alienation told by sociologists. Yet restoring what has been lost is fraught with dangers. We cannot readily go back, and attempts to do so have had disastrous consequences. It is not enough to simply add physical exercises to our daily routine. Instead, we need once again to take movements seriously as intentional acts.

The chapter sees India as a stain on Churchill’s reputation. As a young officer, Churchill spent twenty-two months in India, representing his longest concentrated stay outside of Britain, but his prejudice against Anglo-Indians meant that he engaged only with the elites of British India and remained isolated. The Empire and its permanence became the bedrock of a deep-seated conviction just at the time of India’s nationalist upsurge for self-rule and independence. He condemned the Amritsar massacre but thereafter opposed all ideas for Indian political evolution. The fact that he held no responsibility for India affairs apart from May 1940 to July 1945 did not stop him speaking about the subcontinent. His campaign against the India Act of 1935 was conducted at enormous political cost to himself and left the leaders of the Indian independence movement embittered, contributing to Hindu–Muslim polarisation. During the Second World War Churchill manipulated Britain’s response to the Indian independence movement, titling policy in favour of Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. His response to the Bengal Famine has to be framed in terms of race.

Tolstoy’s life and works have been interpreted in myriad ways in India. His emergence in the South Asian literary scene coincided with an important moment in the development of anti-colonial resistance to British imperial rule. In this moment, competing strands of ideological influence sought to interpret and introduce Tolstoy to the Indian reading public in their own way. This chapter studies two major streams into which these interpretations can be divided – the well-known one of Tolstoy as a pacifist, religiously based intellectual by Mohandas Gandhi, and the lesser-known, radical interpretation of Tolstoy as a figure of active resistance to issues ranging from landlordism to patriarchal oppression. The chapter investigates how the image of Tolstoy moved seamlessly between different cultural and linguistic entities across the region, providing insights into the category of “Indian literature” itself.

To respond to the ecological, social and democratic crises we face we need to realize that participatory democracy is the necessary permaculture of healthy representative and accountable democracies. Democracy is brought into being and generated by being democratic here and now in everyday relations. And, for all types of democracies to be sustainable they have to be integrated into the “mutual aid” or “gift-gratitude-reciprocity” relations of biodiversity by which life sustains life on this planet: Gaia or Earth democracy. The coordination and integration of democratic diversity set out in this volume has the capacity to bring about eco-democratic succession, modelled on ecological succession, as the alternative to failed reform and revolution.

There is a multiplicity or pluriverse of modes or families of democracy and citizenship on this planet, from diverse types of participatory democracy to Gaia or Earth democracy. In response to the ecological and democratic crises, the aim of this volume is to disclose and survey five modes of democracy: Indigenous democracies, Local/global participatory democracies, representative democracies, international/global democracies, and Gaia democracies. We study how they are enacted and the ways in which they interact in order to show how they can coordinate and cooperate democratically in response to the ecosocial crises we face. We call this integration of democratic diversity “joining hands” and explicate six ways of joining hands in practice. The Introduction includes overviews of each chapter.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.

Chapter 20 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet continues the book’s exploration of the early Cold War years and the threshold of the Urban Planet’s Greatest Acceleration. It visits imperial capitals like London and Paris as certain types of spaces there became “proto-Third worlds” where young nationalist leaders formed their early ideas of liberation and development, then brought them back to colonial cities to launch struggles for national independence. Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha or non-violent resistance transformed the practice of mass urban protest even as Gandhi fought global urban industrialism, rising sectarian violence, and the British Raj en route to Indian independence. Mao Zedong took a contrasting route to power that also started with villages, in this case as effective military bases to expel far better-armed imperial and bourgeois nationalist forces and then seize China’s great cities. Dozens of other independence movements adopted mixtures of these two strategies, which coalesced above all around development – starting with state or capitalist investment in advanced industrial facilities as well as the housing, educational, health, transport, and planning infrastructure aimed to erase the sheer inequalities of the imperial-era Urban Planet.

In 1905, Mohandas Gandhi paid homage to Joseph Chailley, the founding father of the International Colonial Institute. Gandhi’s appreciation for Chailley exposed the complex interconnectedness of the colonial world around 1900. The Indian Opinion, a journal Gandhi published in South Africa, bestowed honor upon the Frenchman Chailley, who had recently spent several months in the Dutch Indies and was about to coauthor a book with British colonial administrators. To give the imperial interconnectedness an institution, Chailley had established the International Colonial Institute (ICI) in Brussels, as early as 1893. By 1905, this institute had grown to become the most important think tank for colonial rule, continuing with 136 (white) members. As it styled itself as reformist, this institute raised hopes among colonial subjects around the world. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion saw in Chailley’s writings on India “an unbiased testimony of a stranger,” and an adequate description of British colonial mismanagement: “He finds himself in a vast agricultural country, where there is great poverty and where commerce and trade are entirely local and therefore without real importance. He notices an absence of industrial activity, he discovers some people, perhaps owning fortunes, but – there is no capital.”1 Fighting against the underdevelopment of colonies was the declared aim of the ICI. Its members claimed to develop colonies through cooperation among international experts who would get the most out of the colonized population and the colonial economy. Gandhi was not alone in falling for this delusion, which actually served to legitimize and perpetuate colonial domination.2