Truth and Nonviolence
by Nirmal Kumar Bose
Editor’s Preface: This article is the text of a speech delivered at the World Pacifist meeting in Shantiniketan, India, 1-5 December 1949, and continues our War Resisters’ International archive series. Nirmal Kumar Bose was an important figure in Gandhi’s life in the 1930s and 40s, and the author of an important diary of his life in Gandhi’s ashrams. For more biographical details please see the Editor’s Note at the end, along with an archive reference and a link to a pdf reproduction of the entire, original article. JG
India has tried to follow the principles of satya and ahimsa, truth and nonviolence through centuries of her history. The actual application of these concepts has varied over the centuries and they have also been successfully employed in the solution of numerous problems relating to personal life or even group-life, where the group was based upon common religious experience.
Mahatma Gandhi drew his inspiration from the deep wells of Indian tradition and insisted upon the application of age-old methods to the problems of modern Indian life. According to him, this was the most civilized thing to do. As he wrote:
Some friends have told me that truth and nonviolence have no place in politics and worldly affairs. I do not agree. I have no use for them as a means of individual salvation. Their introduction and application in everyday life has been my experiment all along. (1)
We have to make truth and nonviolence matters not for mere individual practice but for practice by groups and communities and nations. That at any rate is my dream. I shall live and die in trying to realize it. My faith helps me to discover new truths every day. Ahimsa is the attribute of the soul and therefore to be practised by everybody in all the affairs of life. If it cannot be practised in all departments it has no practical value. (2)
Self-government depends entirely upon our own internal strength, upon our ability to fight against the heaviest odds. Indeed, self government which does not require that continuous striving to attain it and to sustain it, is not worth the name. I have therefore endeavoured to show both in word and deed, that political self-government— that is, self-government for a large number of men and women—is no better than individual self-government and, therefore, it is to be attained by precisely the same means that are required for individual self-government or self-rule. (3)
Gandhiji also wrote at another time that he was a believer in war, but war which was carried on by means of nonviolence. This was as different from 'passive resistance' as the North Pole is from the South Pole. It is the purpose of the present article to present in outline the high points of Gandhiji's efforts in this direction and thus to show how he tried to fashion a tool of wide-spread social application out of materials that had been lying rusting in the world's private armoury.
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Now that Gandhiji is no longer with us, it has become all the more necessary to examine what exactly he stood for. If we are to carry on the brave experiments, which were initiated by him, we must know the full meaning of his ideals, as well as acquaint ourselves with the methods he used to realize them.
Gandhiji's aim was to establish nonviolence in all spheres of life. He never drew a line between economic, social and political spheres, or between individual and social life. For him, what was good and applicable in private life was equally applicable in public life. Of course, the method had to be adapted to the particular situation in which one was working, but he never subscribed to the theory that the rules of public conduct had nothing to do with the rules of private morality.
Some enthusiastic friends once invited him to go to America, in order to tell people about India and his own experiments. But Gandhiji never felt that it was worth while, as long as the method had not proved entirely successful in India, where he had to grapple with problems which demanded an immediate solution if India were to take her due place in the world's life. In India, the principal battle in which he fought as a general, and towards which many eyes were turned from all over the world, was his fight against British Imperialism. This was naturally something in which many countries took keen interest and in which political workers, with a variety of aims, flocked round him when he was leading the Indian National Congress in some severe campaigns of nonviolent resistance. 
But there were other aspects of social life in which he was also the author of powerful movements. The latter naturally failed to evoke the same measure of interest or enthusiasm as the political battles did. But to Gandhiji these other movements were of no less importance than the battle for freedom. He often used to say that unless millions of men in India shed their inertia and became enthusiastic in the task of rebuilding New India's life on the basis of economic and social justice, mere political freedom would prove to be no more than an empty husk.
This interdependence of the economic, social and political aspects of life was an axiom with him and he argued from this that bad methods employed in one sphere of life inevitably led to similar methods elsewhere, and eventually to the defeat of one's original purpose. His principal task in life was therefore the introduction of good means in ever}' sphere of life for the attainment of good ends.
We shall now try to indicate, mainly by means of quotations from his published writings, how he endeavoured to create a revolution in various walks of Indian life. For there is no doubt that his life and methods were revolutionary in character. He loved to call himself a revolutionary, but he always qualified the expression by adding that he was a nonviolent revolutionary.
Endnotes: (NKB)
(1) BOSE, Nirmal Kumar, Selections from Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1948; selection # 127. 
(2) Ibid, # 128,
(3) Ibid, # 139.
Read the pdf of the complete article here: Truth and Nonviolence
Reference: IISG/WRI Archive Box 62: Folder 1. We are grateful to WRI/London and their director Christine Schweitzer for their cooperation in our WRI project.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nirmal Kumar Bose (1901-1972) was a leading Indian anthropologist and in his early years a follower of Gandhi. In 1931 he accompanied Gandhi on the famous Salt March, and was jailed with Gandhi for his participation. He lived in various of Gandhi’s ashrams, and in the 1940s was one of Gandhi’s secretaries. He wrote one of the more controversial books about Gandhi, My Days with Gandhi, Calcutta: Nishana Press, 1952. The book was self-published and details the controversial practice by Gandhi of sleeping naked with his nieces as a “test of brahmacharya”. Bose protested this to Gandhi and the book faithfully renders his doubts and Gandhi’s replies. Bose was to have a falling out with Gandhi over this, but he remained a loyal supporter of Gandhian nonviolence and satyagraha. 

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