V. K. Kool - Gandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence, Volume 2 : Applications across Psychological Science

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One of the most difficult challenges a professor faces is when a student in the West is to be taught a concept rooted in the Eastern philosophy or vice versa. Gandhi employed several concepts such as aparigraha , anasakti, tapas and many more derived from the Indian religions and philosophies that are not easy to grasp by students and public at large in the West and elsewhere. But come to think of it, Gandhi and his principles and the concepts that he used are not really difficult to understand.

Let us start our explanations by imagining what would have taken place if Gandhi had been a subject for Milgrams obedience to authority experiment reported in almost every book of psychology. What Gandhi would have done, how would he have behaved, were he to participate as a subject in the experiment inviting him to deliver lethal shocks to an erring learner? For one thing, Gandhi would seldom refuse if a person approached him for help. So, would he have gone along with the instructions to help the experimenter? Certainly not! Instead of obeying Milgrams instructions to deliver shocks, Gandhi would have asked if there was any other way in which he could help Milgram so as to serve the purpose of the experiment. No civilized person would start giving shocks simply because he had been told to do so. Using his wisdom and following the Socratic dictum of challenging oneself with questions before embarking on a journey in unfamiliar terrain, Gandhi would have given Milgram an analogy of the windows in the homes of the Netherlands, the majority of which are generally not draped with curtains or blinds. Well, the Dutch believe that they have nothing to hide and even as darkness sets in the late evening and the inside of their Dutch homes are visible from the outside, the residents do not cover their windows for privacy. This attitude is, in many ways, akin to the Protestant religious tradition of Calvinism which stipulates that there is nothing to hide: we are the same, both from the inside and from the outside. Since psychologists, often, do not tell subjects the real purpose of the experiment until the debriefing session is conducted after the experiment is over, Gandhi would not have been a willing and cooperative subject in a psychology experiment, let alone the famous Milgram experiment. What is the reason for such an attitude? The reason is that for Gandhi, any achievement of goals is contingent upon the fairness of the means; otherwise, no matter how great the success, in the absence of pious means, it is harmful and carries a poor message for humanity. Gandhi would have told the Yale professor Milgram to learn from the Dutch.

As stated in the Preface of Volume 1 of this book, people do not become saints overnight. It is only through their struggles, both within and without, that they learn, they grow and they evolve. The same was the case with Gandhi, and one of the important objectives of this book was to delve into the experiences that made him a Mahatma (saint) for the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and Bapu (father) for the teeming masses that followed him, through thick and thin. Another objective of this book was an analysis of Gandhis creed of nonviolence and to study it in the context of twenty-first-century empirical research and theory in psychology. Further, we felt a need to establish the idea that Gandhis ahimsa or nonviolence was not only in a class of its own, but that it was based on sound principles derived from the multifarious experiments Gandhi conducted on himself and Truth . In sum, the majority of books of psychology, including those on social psychology, reveal that the brunt of the focus has been on people characterized by aggression and even violence, with those who choose nonviolence as their characteristic mode of reaction receiving negligible attention. In contrast, the present book, offered in two volumes, was written with the aim of highlighting the psychology of nonviolence, with specific reference to Gandhi. While the significance of concepts such as self-control and moral inclusion have been noted relatively recently in the field of psychology, Gandhi had long put them in the backyard of psychology, on the basis of his social experiments. There is much to learn from his life and philosophy, which can be used to enrich the content of modern psychology in general and well-being in particular.