Revisiting Gandhi from a Postcommunist Perspective

Abstract

This article investigates the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi’s writings and ideas for the intellectual interactions and activist movements in postcommunist ¹ Romania while also considering the parallels between the larger region of Central and Eastern Europe and the postcolonial space. Despite the asymmetrical timeline and the geographical differences, postcommunism and postcolonialism share a series of common features, among which are hybridity and the will to disrupt the hegemonic discourse of the former colonisers. It is thus difficult to understand how postcommunist Romania seems to be largely unaware of Gandhi’s philosophy. The discussion takes into consideration, on the one hand, the lack of publications of Gandhian philosophy and thought in the Romanian market of ideas and, on the other hand, the clear intersection of Gandhi’s vision of passive resistance, civil disobedience and search for truth through satyagraha and ahimsa with the 35-year-long peaceful protests in Romania, which culminated in a major diaspora protest in 2018. In this way, the hypothesis of the transactive character of postcolonialism and postcommunism is verified, as well as the exchange of knowledge of their similar (once subaltern, now quasi-liberated) conditions.

Introduction

In an online article in 2014, Eugen Ciurtin, a Romanian philosopher and historian of religions with a special research interest in India, expressed his total surprise and utter shock at the absence of both Gandhi’s theories in the Romanian intellectual space and his writings in the Romanian book market (Ciurtin, 2014). He blamed it on Romanians’ provincialism and arrogance, that is, an expression of ridiculous Orientalism, a sustained collective and ‘shameless form of shame’, which, nevertheless, ‘is wrong, incomprehensible, amazing, unacceptable’. Ciurtin puts it down to a complex of Eurocentric superiority, combined with an inferiority complex of a society inferior from all points of view (including in population) to the Indian one and even to its individual cities, such as Mumbai (Ciurtin, 2014).

Indeed, postcommunist Romania knew only one volume related to Gandhi, and even that is not authored by Gandhi himself: it is Mahatma’s biography by Romain Rolland (2017); the volume had its first edition in 1924 but was published in Romania for the first time in 2017, under the title Mahatma Gandhi: A Legendary Life (The Biography), with a reprint in 2019, on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. ² It is difficult to understand how postcommunist Romania seems to be so unaware of Gandhi’s political and personal philosophy, so that the only major publication for the past 35 years connected to his name has been this biography by Romain Rolland (as important as it is), and none of his original writings.

Although few, there have been along the years some events celebrating Gandhi in other postcommunist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Among those, we could mention the erection of a cluster of statues entitled ‘The Garden of Philosophy’ in the Hungarian capital, Budapest (1997), which includes a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, as well as another statue in Bulgaria (2018) and one at the University of Warsaw Library, Poland (2002). In 2003, Václav Havel, the first postcommunist president of the Czech Republic, was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize for ‘his outstanding contribution towards world peace and upholding human rights in most difficult situations through Gandhian means’ (for more details, see Marinescu, 2019).

The present article seeks to respond to this reality by looking into the general similarities between the postcolonial and postcommunist spaces (but also pointing out their inherent differences). Also, the article will be examining the specificities of the repositioning of Gandhian thought within the postcolonial India and the postcommunist Central and Eastern Europe, especially Romania, in the context of the globalised contemporary world, from a transnational perspective and by considering a re-interpretation of the concept of diaspora. Gandhi’s intensive support of civil disobedience is explained within the Romanian postcommunist paradigm, with a 35-year-long experience of peaceful protests, which culminated with the so-called diaspora protest in 2018 in the capital Bucharest.

Postcolonialism and Postcommunism: ‘Siblings of Subalternity’

The ignorance of Gandhian thought is even more difficult to understand, as Romania and India are ‘siblings of subalternity’ (Ștefănescu, 2012, p. 66), a condition which resulted from Soviet and British colonialism, respectively. ³ For, despite the asymmetrical timeline and the geographical differences, postcommunism and postcolonialism share a series of common features, among which are hybridity in their subaltern ⁴ status vis-à-vis their former empires and especially the will to disrupt the hegemonic discourse of their former colonisers.

The postcommunist condition includes an imaginary self-construct which clearly does not correspond to the way the postcommunist space is imagined from its new coveted centre, the West, be it Western Europe under the guise of the European Union or the United States. As Marinescu demonstrated (2018), Romanians (and other Central and Eastern Europeans) have historically imagined themselves ‘at the border of the Orient’, ‘the guardians of the West’, ‘saving the West from the East’, the heroes who stopped the ‘invaders’ (from both the West and the East). Conversely, the image construed by the West of Central and Eastern Europe is similar with that of ‘the Orient’, but not the same. Central and Eastern Europeans are ‘different’, ‘strange’, ‘not quite Oriental’, but not ‘like us either’ (Marinescu, 2018, p. 61). This indicates a sameness in the positioning of the West vis-à-vis the East/the Orient, with nuances pertaining to the liminality of the geographic space. In other words, the postcommunist space, because it belongs to Europe geographically and is therefore closer spatially (and to some extent culturally), is perceived as a sort of in-between and hybrid one. Nevertheless, it is a space viewed through the same orientalist lens. So, it is even more interesting that Eastern Europeans should position themselves in a self-attributed hegemonic position towards the more Eastern nations and perceive them as the other and thus orientalising them. ⁵ The trans-diasporic (Circassian-Uzbek) feminist thinker, fiction writer and university professor at a Swedish university Madina Tlostanova found a perfect name for this Eurocentric (even racist) attitude: the ‘victimhood rivalry’ (2018), all in agreement with the Polish researcher Tomasz Zarycki, who posits that Central and Eastern Europe is ‘a prisoner of what Edward Said called Orientalism. The region can be seen as both a victim of external orientalisation and, at the same time, as a locus of intensive production of orientalist discourses’ (Zarycki, 2014, p. 1). In context, the Bulgarian philosopher Alexander Kiossev (2008) talks about ‘self-colonization’ to designate a tendency of the local elites of the peripheric nations (e.g., the Bulgarian or the Romanian) of embracing Western hegemonic values, norms and narratives.

Moreover, Nataša Kovačević (a researcher who comes from the former Yugoslavia, in Eastern Europe) also embraces the idea that neo- or postcolonialism has taken the shape of an ‘East European Orientalism’, as the images of the postcommunist countries resulting from Western preconceptions have to do either with their low level of civilisation (as compared to the Western one, considered more evolved) or with praiseworthy unaltered pristine land (due also to their low level of civilisation). In any case, Western logic seems to favour a chronological linear historic evolution, and on that evolutionary line, the Orient (closer or more distant) is behind. One reads a clear orientalising effort in the following description of:

a long history of Western attempts to identify Western Europe as enlightened, developed and civilized in distinction to Eastern Europe and, as a result, to intellectually master Eastern Europe through description and classification, fixing it into stereotypes of lamentable cultural, political or economic backwardness (e.g. agrarian, old-fashioned, despotic, totalitarian, obedient, abnormally violent, bloodthirsty), or, alternatively, praiseworthy conservation of its ‘noble savages’ (here, pallid Western city-dwellers, enervated by industrial fumes or corporate discipline, are contrasted with big, healthy, lazy, and gregarious Eastern Europeans). (Kovačević, 2008, p. 2)

Interestingly, these images clearly remind one of the postcolonial West-centred constructs over the once-dominated colonies and the aftermath of independence. The Western stereotypes of the East (be it European or otherwise) show a staggering lack of imagination: the other is described in the same terms and even with the same adjectives, irrespective of its geographical proximity.

Similarly, in Imagining the Balkans (1997), Bulgarian academic Maria Todorova describes the mechanism through which the Balkans is construed by the West as Europe’s other within. Partially overlapping regions, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, are defined in the Western mind by violent ethnic and religious wars, and Balkanism (like Orientalism) becomes a strategy of colonisation, through imposing a hegemonic power discourse on the populations in this European region.

Mahatma Gandhi’s Repositioning Within the Postcolonial and Postcommunist Paradigm

In this context, it is relevant to investigate why the positioning of East Europeans, and specifically Romanians, both towards the West and towards the (farther) East contains such peripheric and simultaneously arrogant images as the ones described by Ciurtin, mentioned at the beginning of this article. It is also relevant to examine the implications of such repositioning for the postcommunist context, as Gandhi’s philosophical framework is revisited, and as he is now reclaimed as ‘the father of postcolonial world as well’ (Trivedi, 2011, p. 522). The situation is described by Trivedi in the following terms: Gandhi appears to be mainly absent in postcolonial theory, and when he is present, it is nearly always in terms of disapproval, denigration or denunciation. Why so? Because, says Trivedi,

According to colonial thinking Gandhi’s non-violent struggle was considered only as a passive strike against British rule. (Trivedi, 2011, p. 530)

However, he claims this is wrong, as Gandhi’s fight was double: first, against oppressors from outside and, second, against the ones from within. He not only desired the independence of India from British rule but also imagined an India free of oppression of all kinds, thus including a visionary political, economic and social democratisation and modernisation of India, well beyond the fight for independence:

But his affirmations and actions indicated that this was not only a political fight against colonizers but also against all dominating and oppressing structures prevailing in India. (Trivedi, 2011, p. 530)

For Trivedi, there lie the reasons for this re-assessment of Gandhi. To which he adds the international dimension, specifically Gandhi’s ‘wider influence abroad as a leader of the movement for anti-colonial nationalist liberation and decolonization’. Ultimately, the aim of this repositioning is not only to view Gandhi in a new light also but ‘to rescue the history of the “repressed,” and to give it autonomy against the grand narrative of history itself’ (p. 533). The universal character mentioned by Trivedi, as well as his positioning as a promoter of the so-far-muted voices of the subalterns would open Gandhian philosophy and ideas to the world, and specifically to the postcommunist space, which can find in them inspiration for its own decolonising process.

Moreover, Gandhi’s fight against the British rule and against all the dominating structures in India of the time, through satyagraha and ahimsa, need to be re-positioned within a larger twenty-first-century context, as now this includes other forms of derived or semi-postcolonialism, ⁶ such as the one in Central and Eastern Europe. One of the reasons for this parallelism lies in the transferability of Gandhian thought to a postcommunist environment, favoured by ahimsa’s double meaning and universal character. According to Leela Gandhi, the way protests were conducted in a non-violent manner is also a conscientious positioning against any sort of state-led violence, past or present:

As a category and practice of resistance, Gandhian ahimsa can be understood in two ways: first, as a form of nonviolent protest and second, as a form that protests against violence. In either case, ahimsa can be identified as a concept constituted within and occasioned by the rhetoric of struggle, particularly struggle against the state—whether it be the Transvaal government in South Africa, the colonial state in India, or the increasingly centralized postcolonial Indian state. (Gandhi, 1996, p. 114)

Gandhi himself explained ahimsa as ‘the farthest limit of humility’ in his Autobiography (Gandhi, 1927, p. 454). He also gave several definitions and explanations for it, out of which the following one is the most relevant for its positive connotations and its universality, thus the ease of transferability to other contexts, specifically the postcommunist one:

Ahimsa is not merely a negative state of harmlessness, but it is a positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer. But it does not mean helping the evil-doer to continue the wrong or tolerating it by passive acquiescence. On the contrary, love—the active state of Ahimsa—requires you to resist the wrong-doer by dissociating yourself from him. (Young India, 1920, p. 2, in Gandhi, n.d.)

Therefore, through applying this concept and by way of peacefully protesting through extending positive feelings, one can successfully resist violent and negative actions.

Conversely, the satyagraha movement, as imagined by Gandhi, emphasises the idea of non-violent cooperation in search of truth and insists on the resistance against the authority of the state and the general welfare of the people. Practicing non-violence and seeking peace and love, as understood by Gandhi, are part of an alternative lifestyle, which departs from the strict Western-centred postcolonial logic and which can be adopted by diverse protest groups throughout the world. Observing non-violence and seeking truth and self-analysis are processes which need to be followed closely, to depart from the state power paradigm and to create alternative institutions, while reaching a state of harmony with oneself and the universe.

Thus, paradoxically, Central and Eastern Europe, in their attempt to reach a Western-type position towards the other, seem to move away from the profound meaning of these Gandhian concepts. It is their very postcommunist condition which would not allow them to assume this distancing while favouring a straightforward and easy re-interpretation of Gandhian thought.

From a Central and Eastern European postcommunist perspective, the relevance of Gandhi’s repositioning comes together with a new understanding of postcolonialism as such. There are many more voices interpreting postcolonialism as centred on a Western understanding of history and of ideas and ignoring the subaltern position of the colonised spaces. Thus, postcolonialism continues ‘to render non-Western knowledge and culture as other in relation to the normative self of Western epistemology and rationality’, while not realising the centrality of the Western positioning in describing it. As Leela Gandhi explains in her critique, postcolonialism

fails to recognise that what counts as ‘marginal’ in relation to the West has often been central and foundational in the non-West. Thus, while it may be revolutionary to teach Gandhi as political theory in the Anglo-American academy, he is, and has always been, canonical in India. (Gandhi, 2019, pp. viii–ix)

Leela Gandhi includes in this interpretation of postcolonialism Gandhi’s rejection of the discourse of colonial masculinity, as well as of the nationalist appeal to maleness, while promoting what she calls ‘dissident androgyny’ (Gandhi, 2019, p. 100). According to her, Gandhi repudiates this logic on two counts: first, through his systematic critique of male sexuality and, second, through his ‘self-conscious aspiration for bisexuality or the desire, as he put it, to become “God’s eunuch.”’ In this way, Gandhi gives an equal share to femaleness in the making of colonial subjectivity. Moreover, ‘by refusing to partake in the disabling logic of colonial sexual binaries, he [Gandhi] successfully complicates the authoritative signature of colonial masculinity’ (Gandhi, 2019, p. 100).

Unfortunately, this is a course of action that postcommunism has not followed (or at least not until the present time). As shown above, postcommunism strives to be accepted as part of the Western/European paradigm, while disregarding the divergent historic paths of the West and the East of the continent and the (partial) convergence of Eastern Europe with the postcolonial Orient. The postcommunist space, from a clear subaltern position, embraces the Western postcolonial discourse and fails to recognise its own marginality vis-à-vis the West and its own similitude to the postcolonial and decolonising East.

This could be, according to Madina Tlostanova (2018), because the postcolonial and the postsocialist discourses in their predominant descriptive forms go in parallel, without intersecting each other, although they seem to be similar. They do not acknowledge the relevance of their similarities and ‘refuse to notice each other’s histories or see them as relevant’. And this is happening even though a true decolonisation means departing from this line of logic and refusing to compete for a higher place in modernity. By taking the Soviet Union as a case study, Tlostanova writes about the main distinction between the two types of colonialism, which is at the basis of this lack of congruence, namely the fact that the racism of British colonialism was translated into classism (‘the language of class’) in the case of the Soviet one. In other words, in the former Soviet Empire, the construct of race-as-inferior was transformed into class-as-inferior. In this case, the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie were regarded as the lower classes, who were despicable, bad, inferior. The geography of the Soviet Empire, which was founded on the principle of liminality, did not allow for the same racial logic as in the case of the British Empire. For, in Tlostanova’s words, ‘the colonial othered spaces were not sharply divided from the metropolitan sameness by the seas and oceans’ (2018), and not even by a clear racial difference, to allow for the same kind of colonial logic.

Nevertheless, when decolonisation is at stake, the postcommunist space has the same features as the postcolonial one, as categories such as ‘creolization, hybridity, bilingualism, the psychology of the returned gaze and the colonialist/colonizer intersection, as well as a stress on transculturation instead of acculturation and assimilation’ (Tlostanova, 2012, p. 138) are to be found in specific forms in the postcommunist space, as well.

Transnation and the Diaspora

To enlarge the perspective even further, repositioning Mahatma Gandhi’s role is taking place in a world much different from the one when India got its independence, a world in which globalisation constantly erodes the concept of the nation itself. It is a world where ‘the idea of a transnation disrupts and scatters the construct of centre and periphery’, as it ‘is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation’ (Ashcroft, 2009, p. 73). The transnation, according to Ashcroft, is not only a product of the nation and of the state but also a product of their diasporas, as it is characterised by a continuous ‘movement, displacement, relocation’ (Ashcroft, 2009, p. 83). The transnation includes both globalisation and localisation and considers the circular movement of the people, which characterises the new definition of the diaspora nowadays: ‘The transnation, by seeing the movement of peoples in globalisation as a fundamental feature of spatiality, accentuates the circulation of the local in the global’ (Ashcroft, 2009, p. 83). It is in the very space of the transnation where the rapprochement between the postcolonial and the postcommunist can take place, due to its profoundly glocalised and permeable character.

The definition of the diaspora and the way it is construed in the contemporary globalised world becomes, thus, relevant for this discussion, as it problematises the way non-violent resistance against forms of oppressive states is meaningful within transnational constructs, such as the European Union. In the present context, this definition has moved away from the one William Safran had given in 1991, based on a one-way movement from centre (the homeland) to the periphery (the host countries). According to him, diaspora shares a collective memory, vision or myth about their homeland, regarded as their true, ideal home, a place of eventual return (Safran, 1991, pp. 83–84). As shown by Marinescu (2021), this definition does not fit the postcommunist Romanian reality, due to the disruption of the centre–periphery axis and accession to the European Union (Romania joined the European Union in 2007). Thus, the movement is not unidirectional anymore, but circular and continuous, as the diasporans look for economic, educational or social opportunities. As Adrian Favell explained (2008), this new reality in the case of the East European diaspora in the European Union supposes temporary free movement and mobility rather than final no-return decisions, as in the period before 1989, when the change of regime took place:

East European migrants are in fact regional ‘free movers’ not immigrants and, with the borders open, they are more likely to engage in temporary circular and transnational mobility, governed by the ebb and flow of economic demand, than by long-term permanent immigration and asylum-seeking. (Favell, 2008, p. 703)

In this circular movement, the postcommunist diaspora is involved in the homeland political life to a comparable extent as the population that remained in the country. So, the same kind of logic, and the same type of actions, apply when examining the Gandhian principles of a peaceful quest for truth.

Non-violent Protest and Civil Disobedience

An example of a non-violent protest is a diaspora rally which took place in August 2018 in Bucharest, and it was organised against the state/government, perceived as corrupt and incompetent. The 10 August 2018 rally was the culmination of a year-long series of non-violent sit-ins and rallies organised in opposition to perceived corrupt practices of the government. The Romanian diaspora decided to organise this rally to express their support and solidarity (August is the month when they usually travel back to Romania to visit their families). Although the protest was fully peaceful, the participants were met with pointless state violence.

In a 2021 article, Gubernat and Rammelt claim this protest was strongly influenced by the Western discourse on state building, manifested through the pro-European messages and the main slogan ‘We want a country like the ones abroad’ (a recurring theme in protests in Romania since 2013 and an expression of Romanians’ desire to meet the Western European standards and lifestyle). They show how marginal European societies (e.g., the Romanian one) are witnessing an increased pan-Europeanism, which also informed the 10 August protest in Bucharest, as it placed at its core European (even European Union) values and a desire to follow a European identity path.

Nevertheless, we can also identify another trend in this protest manifestation. Although not mentioned by name in their repeated appeals for the rally (promoted mainly through social media), the Romanian diaspora in the European Union seemed to acknowledge the reality of these Gandhian words:

Civil disobedience therefore becomes a sacred duty when the State has become lawless, or which is the same thing, corrupt. And a citizen that barters with such a State shares its corruption and lawlessness. (Young India, 1922, p. 2, in Gandhi, n.d.)

It is beyond any doubt that civil resistance in the Gandhian sense or ‘people’s power’, that is, non-violent methods of protest and persuasion, non-cooperation and intervention, practiced through satyagraha and ahimsa, has crucially shaped contemporary world politics. People can practice civil disobedience through demonstrations, vigils, sit-ins, marches, petitions, boycotts and non-cooperation with corrupt justice (or injustice), as an alternative to power politics, but also as a moral right, conducive to a more just juridical system, and as a sacred duty not to participate in evil actions.

All the above forms of civil disobedience have taken place during decolonisation (starting with the 1989 change of regime in Central and Eastern Europe) and in the transition period/postcommunism, as a way of maintaining constitutional order, for environmental protection or demanding the general democratisation of society. Such examples include Czechoslovakia, with both Soviet resistance during the Cold War and the Velvet Revolution (1989); Poland and its Solidarity movement and revolution (1980–1989); Serbia, under Slobodan Milošević (1991–2000); Kosovo’s ethnic conflict negotiated through civil resistance (1990–1998); Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003 and Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004—all analysed in a volume edited by Sir Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (2009, Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present). I could add to this list the Romanian example, where people have continued to fight against a regime perceived as oppressive with the permanent slogan Fără violență (No violence). It is worth mentioning in context that Romania knew the only violent revolution to change the communist regime in 1989 with its official 1,116 victims, ⁷ as well as a number of other violent national incidents, chronologically described below, to which the people’s response has only been peaceful and non-violent.

In post-1989 Romania, peaceful protests (almost always violently suppressed by the successive governments) had become a tradition. The first one took place on 12 January 1990 when thousands of people gathered in front of a government building peacefully demanding to know what had really happened during the Revolution and why there had been so many victims (see Note 8). About a month after the Revolution, on 20 January 1990, peaceful demonstrators protested what was believed to be a total power grabbing by the only political party which existed at the time, and they were met with state violence: a few thousand coal miners were brought by the president to oppose the demonstrators, with many violent clashes following.

The longest peaceful protest took place the same year (from 22 April to 13 June 1990) and involved hundreds of thousands of people who occupied University Square in the centre of Bucharest to establish a ‘communism-free zone’. The non-stop protest had its peak moments in the evenings, when artists, students or writers took the floor and spoke or sang in front of the crowd. On 13 June, the government invoked the necessity to clear the square from what they called the ‘danger of the extreme right’ and did that with the help of the same category of workers, coal miners from a nearby mine. For 3 days, until 15 June, the latter terrorised the population of the capital city ⁸ and were finally asked to leave by the president of the country in a very controversial speech (they were warmly thanked for re-establishing the order in the city and for showing great citizenship and democratic spirit). Romanian historian Andrei Pippidi compared the miners’ actions from June 1990 to the killing of the Jewish population in nazi Germany (Kristallnacht) and the actions of the Camicie nere (black shirts) organisation in fascist Italy during the Second World War (Pippidi, 1990).

Another important peaceful protest which involved hundreds of thousands of people overall in the capital Bucharest and other major cities in Romania took place between 1 September 2013 and 11 February 2014 and supported sustainable development of a local region in the Western part of Romania, the preservation of local culture and environmental protection, against a gold mining project which would have destroyed the community. Starting on 1 September, thousands of Romanians took to the streets in 24 major cities in Romania and another 34 around the world and marched peacefully under the slogan ‘Save Roşia Montană’ (the place where the 300-ton gold extraction was planned). The environmental risks involved were huge, as the plan was to pump 13,000 tons of cyanide into the mine each year, which would have been over 130 times the amount used in another Romanian gold mine (Baia Mare) in 2000, when a catastrophic cyanide spill happened, one of Europe’s worst environmental catastrophes. ⁹ To any Gandhian scholar, these marches are remindful of the 1930 Salt March Campaign, and in the online piece mentioned at the beginning of this article, Ciurtin mentions these marches and draws attention to the similitude.

On a symbolic level, this protest emphasises Gandhi’s prescient remarks on what we now consider sustainable development, that is, the necessity to reduce wants and desires which lead to a relentless pursuit of Western-style material comforts. We can consider his words on the questionable consumerism of the Western world as a warning against the endless quest for resources which India needed to resist at the time, and which the postcommunist space, in conjunction with the postcolonial one, need to oppose now:

The incessant search for material comforts and their multiplication is such an evil; and I make bold to say that the Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves. It may be that my reading is wrong, but I know that for India to run after the Golden Fleece is to court certain death. Let us engrave on our hearts the motto of a Western philosopher, ‘Plain living and high thinking’. (Young India, 1931, p. 83, in Gandhi, n.d.)

In 2015, another series of non-violent marches and protests took place following a fire in a club which killed 64 people, seen as a symbolic fight against the corrupt government, eventually forced to resign.

The diaspora rally of 10 August 2018 is the latest of these peaceful manifestations; it took place in the capital city of Romania and gathered members of the Romanian diaspora in the European Union, as well as locals, protesting the perceived corruption of the government. In the same way, as for Gandhi, every citizen has not only the right but also the duty to disobey their own repressive state; the Romanian diasporans considered they fulfilled their duty towards the state they had temporarily left. Peaceful demonstrators were met with fierce violence by the state institutions, in a hugely disproportionate response to the non-violent manifestations of the protesters. The violence of the state and local police did not receive the same violent response from the protesters; there are photos and films showing protesters raising their hands or sitting down on the streets as a clear sign of non-violence. ¹⁰

Conclusion and Way Forward

In this general context, as the postcolonial and the postcommunist are part of a transactive process, they could also share Gandhian ideas in the process of exchanging knowledge of their similar (once subaltern, now quasi-liberated) conditions, a process from which, hopefully, both will learn from each other’s experience. Harish Trivedi defined this as a ‘transactive’ process, which is ‘interactive, dialogic, two-way process rather than a simple active-passive one; as a process involving complex negotiation and exchange’ (Trivedi, 1995, p. 15). This exchange is defined by ‘cosmopolitan provincialism’, as ‘transnational narratives of the local, peripheral and non-metropolitan that cut across monolithic formulations of globalisation’ and lead to a re-routing of the postcolonial Western-centred narrative. According to Polish researcher and academic Dorota Kołodziejczyk, they ‘encourage an exploration of the region’s ambivalent self-positioning vis-à-vis Europe’ and ‘a new understanding of periphery which, among others, actively reimagines itself in a politics of provincialism’ (Kołodziejczyk, 2010, p. 152). Postcolonialism and globalisation interfere, as they have

a shared ethical concern to reconceptualize cosmopolitanism in order to more effectively address the implications of problems which globalization has brought to the fore and which require ‘global’ solutions. (Kołodziejczyk, 2010, p. 152)

Postcommunism shares (or, at least, it should) the same concerns, as postcolonialism in the era of globalisation, regarding their Orientalised realities. Romanian researcher Cristina Șandru uses the term ‘the capitalist West’s proximate Third World’ when describing the postcommunist space, which of course is indicative of a clear similitude with the post-empire situation on the South Asian subcontinent, as

the process of transition in post-Cold War East-Central Europe has brought with it a cocktail of accelerated marketization, commodification and integration in the global circuit of capital. This, coupled with a large supply of cheap labor and the very postcolonial phenomenon of economic migration to the affluent metropolis (from brain drain to the siphoning off of skilled labor), has turned the region into the capitalist West’s proximate Third World. (Șandru, 2016, p. 160)

She deals with the similarities between the postcommunist and the postcolonial, and focuses on their shared ‘experience of trauma and the pre-dominance of the retrospective look, an almost obsessive calling to account of the past in all its forms; their major tonality is the confessional with undertones of nostalgia or anger’ and ‘nationalist revivals, collective myths and commemorative gestures’ that ‘museumify’ the past, and of a nostalgia for the ‘might have been’ (Șandru, 2016, pp. 166–167). But, at the same time, they are different in their ‘inflections in terms of historical and geographical co-ordinates; divergent types of imperial occupation; asynchronous advents of modernity; different practices of othering; and, finally, post-Cold War ideological emphases’ (p. 157).

Thus, the transactive process (in Trivedi’s terms) can take place between these two spaces; not only, as Trivedi had announced, between the East and the West but also between the East and the East of the West, that is, the postcommunist space in Central and Eastern Europe. They share some common points, enumerated by Șandru in a sort of an intersectional dialogic space: ‘structures of exclusion/ inclusion’, ‘formations of nationalism, structures of othering and representations of difference’, ‘forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle’, ‘the experience of trauma’ and ‘resistance as a complex of discourses ranging from openly oppositional to carnivalesque and magical realist’ (Șandru, 2012, p. 8).

The mutual benefits of such an exchange are clear. They refer, on the one hand, to the contribution of the postcolonial experience for the postcommunist countries:

the articulation of how structures of domination work; how models of alterity are formed; and how the imbrications of power and knowledge produce ideologically interpellated subjects, as well as the emphasis on how subjects negotiate and contest these hegemonic ideological structures. (Șandru, 2016, p. 157)

On the other hand, ‘post-communism can offer the neo-Marxist versions of post-colonialism a necessary reality check’ (Șandru, 2016, p. 157).

Clearly, Ciurtin’s reflections, noted at the beginning of this article, indicate an acknowledgement of Gandhi’s absence in the Romanian postcommunist space. It was a saddened acknowledgement and a revolted explanation of an intellectual interested in Indian culture. The author was pleasantly surprised by the relevance of Gandhian thought on the Romanian reality, which nobody else seemed to identify in the public manifestations of civil disobedience. Sadly, since the appearance of this online piece (Ciurtin, 2014), very timid steps have been made in the direction of familiarising the Romanians with the great Gandhian work. However, as these go in parallel with the involuntary appropriation of his theories, we can conclude that the transactive process between the postcolonial and the postcommunist is under way.