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Economics

Hinduism

Sustainability

23 August 2023

10 min read

What Gandhi's economist can say about sustainability today

As twentieth-century notions on economic growth for its own sake are questioned it may be worth revisiting JC Kumarappa, the most influential Christian of the India’s independence struggle.

'Sha'

'Sha' serves as the administrator of Indo-Christian Culture, a Twitter account and Medium blog.

A mechanic stands in a workshop beside a motorcycle under repair.

A motorcycle mechanic in his Chennai workshop.

Photo by Palash Jain on Unsplash.

J.C. Kumarappa (1892 – 1960) was an Indian economist, writer and freedom fighter in the Indian Independence Movement. Widely regarded as the most influential Christian of the India’s independence struggle, Kumarappa’s most notable contribution was as the father of Gandhian economics. Informed by a lifetime of travel through rural India, Kumarappa fused Gandhian thought with Christian ethics to create a school of economics that is difficult to place within the traditional Western understanding of the political spectrum.

Fusing traditionalist perspectives on economics with a radical commitment to universal upliftment, Gandhian economics was regarded by many as being too idealistic for real world application. But in an era where twentieth-century notions on the inherent superiority of central planning, material consumption and economic growth for its own sake are being increasingly questioned, it may be worth revisiting this school of thought, its early achievements and its founding father.

Early Life

J.C. Kumarappa was born on January 4, 1892, in what is now Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu, India. The son of a well to do civil servant and the grandson of a Lutheran Pietistic Minister, his family descended from some of India’s earliest Protestant converts.

His parents were strong believers in Pietistic notions of morality and charity. Kumarappa’s father was a strong proponent of academic achievement and professional success, encouraging all his children, including daughters, to pursue higher education and careers.

Kumarappa’s mother believed in the importance of imparting a sense of personal responsibility and concern for the poor to her children. A defining experience of Kumarappa’s childhood working alongside his siblings to raise chickens and turkeys for sale in the market, with all proceeds going to support his mother’s charitable endeavors.

Though most readers would nod approvingly at the Kumarappa’s parenting strategies they were ahead of their time in many ways. Facilitating higher education for their daughters at a time when even many upper-class Indian women were illiterate and encouraging their children to raise chickens in a society where the upper classes recoiled at the thought of performing any sort of manual labour.

In keeping with the high academic and professional expectations of his family, Kumarappa would go on to study history before departing for London in 1913 to pursue an accounting apprenticeship. Unlike many Indian independence activists, including Gandhiji, Kumarappa steered clear of the political activism that was becoming increasingly mainstream among Indian students studying in the UK.

A regular church goer at first, he grew disillusioned by the British church’s active support for World War I war efforts and became increasingly influenced by Christian Pacifist war resistors. He returned to India in 1919 to pursue a career as a successful accountant before travelling to the United States in 1927, at the age of 35, to pursue a business degree at Syracuse University.

By this time, Kumarappa had psychologically detached himself from the organized church in favor of independent spiritual practice. Kumarappa was not alone in this. The ascetic, Sadhu Sundar Singh, and the women’s rights advocate, Pandita Ramabai, regarded as the mother of Indian Pentecostal Christianity are two other notable Indian Protestant figures, from the twentieth-century, also rejected formal church affiliation. In all three cases, an intense Christian devotion coexisted alongside a sense of disillusionment over the organized church’s support for the British Raj.

With his spiritual transformation complete, Kumarappa’s time in the United States marked the start of his political awakening. Following the lead of two of his elder brothers, who had already joined the independence movement, Kumarappa grew increasingly disillusioned by the actions and attitudes of the British Raj. He published Public Finance and India’s Poverty, a critical analysis of British colonialism’s economic exploitation of India. The publication was disseminated internationally and widely read by many including Gandhiji himself.

He also expressed skepticism in the unchallenged belief that technological innovation was always a net good.

Kumarappa had returned to India in 1929, where after his request for an audience with Gandhiji was approved, he became a full-time independence activist and adherent of the Gandhian social movement. His first undertaking included an assessment of the economic state of rural India, something which had previously only be done from the perspective of the British colonial government and would eventually go on the become the editor of Young India, the official English language newspaper of the Gandhian movement. It was through this work that Kumarappa began to develop a school economic thought he dubbed Gandhian economics.

Gandhian economics

Inspired by the teachings of Gandhiji along with his own Christian worldview, Gandhian economics served as an indigenous alternative to the dominant ideologies of capitalism and socialism. Kumarappa recognized that contemporary Indian society was plagued by extreme poverty, low-social trust, and systemic exploitation of the rural majority at the hands of the colonial state, feudal landlords and caste hierarchy. However, he was unconvinced of capitalism and socialism’s ability to effectively address these issues, fearing their propensity to centralize decision making authority in the hands of a few, be they bureaucrats or CEOs, would only further disenfranchise ordinary Indians.

He also expressed skepticism in the unchallenged belief that technological innovation was always a net good and believed technology should be critically assessed to evaluate whether it advances the interests and values of the communities they serve.

The six pillars of Gandhian economics include the concepts of:

1. Sarvodaya (universal upliftment): Gandhian economics believed economic development must focus around achieving welfare and upliftment for all people, including those who have been historically marginalized. The emphasis on Sarvodaya is also why Gandhian economics should not be confused with reactionary political thought which emphasizes the preservation of traditional social and economic institutions for the benefit of the elite.

2. Decentralization: The decentralization of decision-making authority is necessary to protect individual autonomy and empower communities. Kumarappa believed that centralized authority and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few would lead to exploitation and disenfranchisement, regardless of the prevailing ideology. Kumarappa argued that an emphasis on small scale industries and local self-sufficiency would be more effective as a means of poverty alleviation in India.

3. Trusteeship: Gandhian economists believed that a decentralized economy would limit extreme concentrations of wealth but recognized that class differences would likely never truly disappear and thus believed that wealthy individuals be encouraged to engage in the voluntary redistribution of wealth.

4. Swadeshi (self-reliance): Gandhian economics was skeptical of globalization and believed in economic self-reliance at the national and local level with the aim of reducing dependence on foreign imports.

5. Nonviolence: Gandhian economics advocated non-violence which when taking an economic perspective includes avoiding practices such as usury, hoarding and predatory lending.

6. Environmental sustainability: Gandhian economics believed that environmental stewardship and the sustainable use of natural resources were key to ensuring the long-term wellbeing of society and that this was best achieved by giving local communities autonomy and decision-making authority over their resources and local environments.

The impact of Gandhian economics

Though the tenets of Gandhian economics often come across as overly idealistic, the ideology inspired several major economic movements during the Indian Independence Movement. The All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) was established by Gandhiji and Kumarappa in 1934 with the aim of identifying best practice solutions that could be disseminated to promote village industries and improve economic self-reliance

One early initiative undertaken by the AIVIA was to address rural India’s dependence on foreign kerosene and kerosene lamps for lighting, at a time when rural electrification was extremely rare. AIVIA technicians worked to develop the magan dipa, a locally produced alternative to kerosene lamps that could operate on domestic supplies of non-edible vegetable oils. Aside from the employment generated through the manufacturing of magan dipas, the newly created demand for locally produced non-edible vegetable oil incentivized Indian farmers to process their oilseed crops locally rather than sell them for export. This would boost employment through the establishment of oil presses and also provide farmers with a new stream of income as they could now rent out their cattle to power oil presses. AIVIA believed that solutions like the magan dipa could create economic growth at the local level and improve the quality of life for India’s rural majority without the need for an industrialized export driven economy.

Gandhian economic principles also manifested as social movements such as Gandhiji’s call for the boycott of imported clothing from Britain in favor of locally produced homespun clothing. The impact of the boycott led to a 20% decline in sales among British clothing exporters and an upsurge in local clothing manufacturing.

Throughout all this, Kumarappa played a central role in the real-world application of Gandhian economics and was widely considered to be a major figure in the Indian Independence Movement. His activities landed him in prison on more than one occasion with his most notable stint being in 1942 where he penned two of his most famous texts. The first being The Economy of Permanence, which summarized the rationale and principles of Gandhian economics, and the second being the Practice and Precepts of Jesus, which contained his religious views on Christianity and the teachings of Jesus Christ. As his prison sentence progressed Kumarappa developed a severe kidney ailment that led to his premature release. He gradually recovered on the outside and soon resumed his activist duties.

Kumarappa’s later life

After India’s independence, in 1947, Kumarappa worked for the Planning Commission of India which sought to develop national policies for agriculture and rural development. During this time, he travelled widely throughout East Asia and Europe to study various rural economic systems. However, a rift between him and the post-independence political establishment quickly began to form.

Despite the early victories of Gandhian economics, the post-independence Indian establishment came to view the field with extreme skepticism, despite lionizing its early achievements as major victories of the Indian Independence Movement. The Congress Party, with whom Gandhiji was aligned with, adopted a more mainstream attitude to economics viewing industrialization, urbanization and the centralization of decision making through modernized bureaucracies as imperative for India’s development.

Furthermore, decades as an independence activist made it difficult for Kumarappa to adjust to the conformity and hierarchy of the Indian bureaucracy and he quickly developed a reputation for outspokenness and defiance and did not hesitate to openly criticize his own government’s mismanagement and ineptitude. The Congress government began to view him as a growing irritant but were limited in their ability to control him. The public viewed Kumarappa as an incorruptible advocate for India’s rural poor and a hero of the independence era which meant disciplinary action would likely harm the government’s reputation more than Kumarappa’s.

Kumarappa grew increasingly disillusioned with the Planning Commission which he believed was staffed by out-of-touch bureaucrats who lacked a personal understanding of the rural poor and the economy of rural India. By 1954, Kumarappa’s declining health forced him to retire from his public duties though he remained as staunchly committed to his Gandhian ideals urging followers that work towards achieving sarvodaya and swadeshi though their own personal and community efforts rather than relying on the “superficial schemes” of the Government. And on January 30, 1960 Kumarappa passed away following a paralytic stroke that had overtaken him four days earlier. The Kumarappa Institute of Gram Swaraj was established in his honour and continues to operate to this day by working to promote economic opportunities for India’s rural poor.

Conclusion

As the twentieth-century progressed, Gandhian economics gradually faded into obscurity, often viewed as too naïve for the real world. And maybe it was in some ways. Gandhian attempts at voluntary land redistribution failed almost everywhere, except in Telangana where they succeeded in part because landlords were growing increasingly fearful of the region’s growing Communist insurgency. But the core principle of Gandhian economics, the belief that economic growth can come about through grassroots organizing at the community level remains relevant. In his book Everybody Loves a Good Drought, journalist Palagummi Sainath, documents the dehumanizing poverty hundreds of millions of Indians experience and how the Indian state frequently exacerbates their situation through social, economic and political disenfranchisement. Villagers who find their public schools and clinics mismanaged by apathetic officials, entire communities are branded as born criminals and treated as such, and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy consistently drags progress to a near standstill.

Yet Sainath also describes hopeful tales of what happens when the poor are given the opportunity to take matters into their own hands. In one of his most inspiring case studies, Sainath describes what happens when illiterate, landless, female stone quarry workers are given the opportunity to form a cooperative society entirely managed by them. Within a few short years these women establish a system that boosted productivity, wages for themselves and even taxes collected by the state. Health and safety were improved, adult education classes instituted. The women even began publishing their own newsletter. The improvements contrast greatly with a similar quarry which decided to join a professionally managed cooperative society only to end up with half their income deducted to fund the salaries of the white-collar professionals now tasked with their supposed wellbeing. Likewise, across India, the fight for environmental protection and regeneration is often being led by local communities. One notable example being how the village of Lapodiya in India’s arid Rajasthan state came together to transform their communities water table and is now seen as a role model for water conservation across the country. Watch the video below.

The successful self-organization of both these communities is exactly what Kumarappa believed would happen when we as a society respect the personal and economic autonomy of individuals and communities and shift decision making power from the top of the pyramid to its bottom. Too often, in India and across the world, the poor are infantilized as being incapable of improving their own lives without the outside intervention of the state, private enterprise or professionally managed not-for-profits. Maybe Gandhian economics can help us revisit this harmful assumption and reassess how it has been used to inadvertently disenfranchise the poor across the world.

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Community

Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.