Veena Howard

“Gandhi showed that the law of nonviolence was for all times -- truth-force and soul-force are the most potent forces for change ever discovered,” says Dr. Veena Howard, Professor of Asian Religious Traditions at California State University, Fresno and founding director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. For her, this is no abstraction. Her own family were refugees of the 1947 Partition of India -- they lost nearly everything, and somehow passed on not bitterness, but grace.

Veena’s parents were given three hours’ notice to leave their home. They walked sixty kilometers in the heat -- her mother carrying her eldest brother, six months old, in her lap -- before crossing the border into India. They left behind their house, their business, their entire world. “Not all stories of India’s independence were romantic,” she has said. “There was a great deal of pain and suffering.” Yet what her family passed down was something else: “My grandmother, uncles, dad, and mom used to tell me stories of their exodus, homelessness, and humiliating life in the refugee camps -- but I don’t remember there being any bitterness in their hearts.”

Her landmark book, Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action, makes a case most historians had missed. Where Gandhi’s fasting, celibacy, and voluntary poverty were seen as personal piety, she saw something else: a deliberate strategy. He had not retreated from the world through renunciation -- he had found in it his most powerful political weapon. Surrendering things, done publicly and with total conviction, could move millions.

Few scholars of Gandhi’s nonviolence also belong to a living mystical lineage. Veena does. The Sant tradition of northern India -- the path of poet-saints who held that the divine is experienced directly within, as inner light and sound -- is her own. She has spent years translating three books from this tradition into English, sitting with ancient words until something essential crosses over. For her, renunciation and non-possessiveness are not scholarly concepts. They are personal ones.

“My healing comes through my studying and teaching,” she has said -- a striking admission that the library and the classroom are also places of repair. At the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya at Fresno State, students encounter Gandhi’s moral experiments not as history but as live provocations: What are you willing to surrender? What are you holding so tightly it is holding you? When students begin sitting with these honestly, she says, she can feel “the cycle of violence starting to break down.”

Most of the world has never heard of Shrimad Rajchandra, Virchand Gandhi, or Mridula Sarabhai. A Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award recently sent her to India to recover their legacy: Jain thinkers and activists who, in the late 19th century, championed women’s rights and nonviolence long before the world had language for it. She serves on the Board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and has collaborated with civil rights elder Rev. James Lawson on nonviolence’s enduring relevance today.

Join us in conversation with this scholar-practitioner who has spent a lifetime showing that ahimsa is not the absence of anything -- it is, in her own words, “an active, creative force that can transform the minds and hearts of people.”