Gandhian economics revisited

THE WEB OF FREEDOM
J C Kumarappa and Gandhi's Struggle for Economic Justice
Venu Madhav Govindu & Deepak Maghan
Oxford University Press
358 pages; Rs 895

The Web of Freedom, a political biography of Mahatma Gandhi's close aide J C Kumarappa, comes at a critical juncture in Indian history. While on the one hand, the old understanding of capitalism's transformative powers has eroded, Dalits and other oppressed groups have taken to the streets, unable to bear the injustice that continues to be their lived experience despite being conferred political equality 66 years ago by the Constitution.

Although much has been written on Gandhi's views, little attention has been paid to those who carried out his agenda for constructive work. Kumarappa was at the forefront of this effort, and that of building the decentralised economic order that Gandhi had envisioned.

Kumarappa was born Joseph Chelladurai Cornelius and belonged to a Protestant family. He became a successful chartered accountant and eventually decided to pursue a course at the Columbia University in the US to study public finance.

When he returned to India, he and two of his brothers felt they had become alienated from the Indian masses and decided to change their names to their ancestral ones.

Kumarappa was deeply infuenced by the nationalist fervour of the times. He decided to quit a lucrative practice and join Gandhi and his army of Satyagrahis in Sabarmati in 1929. He soon became a prolific contributor to Young India and other publications run from Sabarmati.

Around this time Kumarappa was also asked to run the All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA). His writings, partially reproduced in the book, help understand the decentralised model much better than Gandhi's own writings, maybe because Kumarappa was tasked with concentrating all his energy towards constructive work.

For both Kumarappa and Gandhi, decentralisation was necessary to help individuals achieve greater autonomy. Thus, true democracy meant centralised industries would be "adjuncts and subsidiaries to decentralised units", much like the oceanic circles of government Gandhi wrote about.

The book also highlights Kumarappa's thoughts on the destruction caused by industrialisation on the environment. In this, he was ahead of his times. For example, on mineral extraction he felt it was "not wise to merely dig up ores and send them abroad", arguing instead for holding them "in trust for generations to come".

Kumarappa criticised urban intellectuals for their failure to help spread the knowledge they gained to the villages. The problem was the "dearth of intelligent and venturesome persons…[to] study the needs of the people" scientifically, and then formulate solutions through "intensive experiment and research". This is clearly a huge departure from Gandhian thought in Hind Swaraj, where he shunned modern scientific thought.

The book presents a cogent argument against one source of criticism Gandhian economics has faced. Marxists have repeatedly argued against Gandhi's economics as being problematic because of its failure to appreciate the transcendental ability of capitalism. They believed industrial capitalism had the potential of destroying feudal societal relations, which in India were premised on caste and the attendant distribution of labourers. More than the book, however, it is the history of the past 70 years that has eroded this argument.

However, on B R Ambedkar's criticism against the village economy, made even while Gandhi was alive, there is little the book has to offer.

Indeed, Ambedkar's views on urban intellectuals could well apply to Kumarappa himself, when he writes: "The love of the intellectual Indian for the village community is of course infinite, if not pathetic…What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism."

The public association with the so-called "untouchables" to rid India of caste failed even during Gandhi's time. The effort to make their labour a part of the mainstream, too, suffered a similar fate. While the AIVIA took up sanitation work enthusiastically in villages, there was "little cooperation [owing to] traditional sentiment".

In fact, the book quotes Kumarappa as saying "scavenging work was the hardest for village workers" because they ended up being ostracised themselves!

The authors, Venu Madhav Govindu and Deepak Malghan, must be lauded for choosing to write a biography of a figure who has been pushed to the periphery of history. One cannot help but feel, however, that a critically annotated collection of Kumarappa's writings would have helped readers explore his thoughts first-hand. The authors' efforts are also let down by poor editing throughout the book, which makes it a difficult read.