essay on gandhiji relevance in the age of globalization
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Gandhi and Globalization
- Aruni Mukherjee
University of Warwick
This article gives an insight about Gandhi's views on globalization. Gandhi himself was a product of globalization. Hence he did understand the advantages and disadvantages of globalization. He opined that globalization was not evil but to believe that everything western was superior was not the correct stand to take. He did not perceive any threat to our culture due to globalization but he did believe that it would lead to environmental hazards and consumerism - both of which have proved correct. Today world over NGOs are working along Gandhian principles to save and improve the environment and to spread peace through his works).
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.1
- Mohandas K Gandhi
It seems ironic that world wide anti-globalisation movements often portray Gandhi as someone who shared the same side of the ideological spectrum, when Gandhi himself was clearly a product of globalisation. He was educated in London, started his political activities in South Africa before he even joined the political arena in India and was greatly influenced by western figures such as Jesus, Tolstoy, Thoreau and Ruskin. Gandhi himself identifies globalisation as an ancient phenomenon, whereby he claimed that it was not a bigger threat to India as various races starting from the Greeks and Huns to the British had invaded India but ended up being a part of the nation.2 He believed that the mingling of cultures in India would not be a threat to India's own customs and culture. However, he did identify that the establishment of a global society would carry certain dangers for the sovereign nations such as colonialism, both cultural and political, industrialisation and commercialisation of the economy leading to class antagonism and environmental hazards. Today, we see many of those problems emerge clearly in our lives and hence, Gandhi's relationship with globalisation remains extremely important and his ideas valid even today.
Gandhi himself was a great believer in the preservation of the ancient Indian culture and norms of society. However, with India's integration in the world community, especially during the last decade of the 20th century, it could be argued that western cultural hegemony has affected India and most other developing countries. Urban India today seems very much in an age of 'diet Coke, flat screen televisions and super express highways'.3 It is not this that Gandhi would have been against, but it is the automatic assumption of the superiority of anything originating from the west that Gandhi would be dissatisfied with. These problems are very much real in today's India crash diet courses and anti-wrinkle treatment creams have been a fad in urban India, yet Gandhi would argue that the Indian alternatives are in no way, inferior. Consumerism is another western attitude that Gandhi would be against, a phenomenon which is rapidly engulfing urban India's middle classes.4 However, this is not to say that cultural globalisation is something which we should vehemently oppose. In the latter half of the 1990s and in the early years of the new millennium, we clearly notice a reversal of trends in some ways. It is increasingly seen that Indian culture, along with ones like Chinese, have influenced the west in many ways. Oriental restaurants are on every major street of most of the famous western cities, there is a considerable Oriental diaspora among the top professionals and academics in the west, Indian music, films, Oriental clothes are getting a global fame. This is something Gandhi would have highly appreciated a true global culture without a hegemonistic impact which was witnessed in the first phase of globalisation and undisputed western dominance.