On the Limits of Democracy: Krishnalal Shridharani's War Without Violence and Its Significance to the Black Left of the 1940s

• In Event: 25.013 - Traveling Discourses of "Democracy": Unsettling Stable Promises and Making Difference Transnationally Through Inclusion

Abstract

This paper unearths and examines a 1940s-era analysis and critique of the limits of democracy as an antidote to racial subjugation; specifically, a critique made by the young Indian anticolonial activist and scholar Krishnalal Shridharani in his 1939 book War Without Violence. Counter to hegemonic notions of “democracy” as synonymous with equality, rights, and justice – a view of “democracy” into which U.S. citizens and subjects were (and are) relentlessly educated, both through formal schooling and via the “big curriculum” (Schubert, 2006) of U.S. nationalism – Shridharani decoupled “democracy” from justice, pointing out that U.S. “democracy” had not prevented the oppression of minoritized peoples, and that democracy as a system was not necessarily equipped to do so. I argue that Shridharani’s attention to the limits of “democracy” was part of what made his book so popular among Black Left scholar-activists during the 1940s.

A theoretical examination of satyagraha based in part on Shridharani’s experiences in the Indian independence movement, War Without Violence was enthusiastically taken up by a number of African American scholar-activists and white allies during the 1940s. Young intellectuals like Pauli Murray, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and the student-activists of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) read and re-read War Without Violence, meeting in study-circles to discuss the book and evaluate its applicability to African American struggles. While historians have generally attributed this intense engagement with War Without Violence to the fact that Shridharani outlines a series of “steps” for implementing satyagraha, I argue that these readers were interested not just in the “steps,” but also in the theoretical content of the book, and that one of Shridharani’s most relevant theoretical contributions, in terms of the concerns of the Black Left during the forties, was his discussion of the limitations of democracy as a solution to the problem of white supremacy. During the 1940s, U.S. governmental and societal rhetoric regularly invoked the idea of “democracy” for the purpose of silencing critiques of white supremacy and quashing demands for racial justice. Opposition to racial oppression was routinely met with the assertion that African Americans (and other peoples of color in the U.S.) should be grateful to be living in a “democracy” rather than living under Hitler. As African American activists demonstrated increasing interest in the theoretical orientations and strategic practices of the Indian independence movement during this era, U.S. commentators pedantically insisted that tactics such as satyagraha and civil disobedience were unnecessary and inappropriate for U.S. civil rights movements, as the U.S. was a “democracy.” Within this context, it became relevant for intellectuals interested in racial justice not only to ask whether or not the U.S. was really a “democracy,” but also to question the nature of democracy as such, of democracy in the abstract. My paper examines Shridharani’s arguments in this regard, and highlights the importance of these arguments in relation to the developing activist praxes of the young scholar-activists of the Black Left whose thinking shaped the activities of the civil rights vanguard of the forties.

Author

• Malathi Michelle Iyengar, University of California - San Diego