Authors:

Amarendra Pandey

Abstract:

Non-violence has remained a cornerstone of M.K. Gandhi’s thoughts and action. Apart from Satyagraha, it is non-violence, as theorized and practiced by Gandhi, which has received maximum critical attention from scholars and activists from across the world in last 125 years. Gandhi has written a lot on non-violence and most of those writings sought to clarify what is not non-violence and Gandhi took lot pain to define this term in a positive way, i.e. non-violence as a practice of love and compassion towards every other thing in the world. But still, many commentaries on non-violence, even by his own co-workers and followers, fail to grasp the intricate nature of Gandhi’s non-violence. The present paper seeks to read and attempt a critique of Kishorlal Mashruwala’s short essay “Non-Violence Instinct.” The paper challenges Mashruwala’s ‘instinctive’ theory of non-violence through three points: one, Instinct Versus Reason; two, Violence Versus Non-Violence; and three, Religion and Politics. The paper argues for a more nuanced and epistemological understanding of Gandhi’s non-violence to rescue it from obfuscation and posit it into the realm of everyday practice ‘reason’ of existing in the world. 

Keywords:

Non-violence, instinct, reason, epistemology, politics. 

Vol & Issue:

VOL.18, ISSUE No.1, March 2026