ServiceSpace · Awakin Calls · May 10, 2026

When Renunciation Becomes Revolution

Dr. Veena Howard — with moderator Rajni Bakshi

Dr. Veena Howard is a scholar of Gandhi, Jainism, and Indian philosophy at California State University, Fresno. She grew up in a partition-affected Punjabi family steeped in the Jain tradition and took vows of ahimsa at age eleven. It was only years later, in the United States, that a single question from a student in a classroom — why did Gandhi take the vow of celibacy? — cracked open a decades-long inquiry into the inner architecture of nonviolence. Moderator Rajni Bakshi, Mumbai-based author and four-decade chronicler of India's experiments with nonviolence, brought her own partition history and her deep engagement with communal harmony to the conversation. Together they traced one of Gandhi's least-understood moves: his use of renunciation not as a retreat from the world, but as the most powerful form of entry into it.

No summary can do this conversation justice. Please watch the recording. These are the highlights.

A Mother's Spontaneous Ahimsa

Veena's family was among the millions displaced during the 1947 India-Pakistan partition. Her parents were given three hours' notice to leave their home in Punjab; her mother carried Veena's eldest brother — six months old — on her back as they fled. Veena was born over twenty years later, but the memory of that exodus, and the violence against women on all sides of it, was still fresh in the household. It was part of what drew her, eventually, toward ahimsa — not as an ideal to be argued, but as a wound that had to be understood.

Her more immediate teacher, though, was her mother's unreflective behavior on the street. In a mixed Hindu-Muslim-Sikh neighborhood, her mother would leap from a rickshaw the moment she saw a father hitting a child — any child, any faith — and wade straight in. "Don't hit, don't hit. It's a little boy." Veena would cringe with embarrassment. Her mother's explanation was simple: "My heart cannot see violence."

Veena only registered the depth of that sentence many years later. It was not a policy. It was not a philosophy. It was a physical fact about an organ — the heart as the seat of moral perception. And it became, quietly, the template for everything she would eventually come to teach.

Growing up in the Jain community and following a sant from Bihar, Veena took the vows of nonviolence — no alcohol, no meat, no stealing — at age eleven. Vows she took before she fully understood what they meant. She would not understand them until they were tested.

The Fossilized Gandhi

Veena arrived in the United States knowing almost nothing about Gandhi beyond the image on the currency. "Gandhi is fossilized," she says — preserved in bronze and clay and postage stamps, the father of the nation, frozen. He sits in city squares. He appears on stamps. He is called Mahatma and left there. What Indian schooling had not offered her was the lived Gandhi: the man who struggled, changed, failed, argued, and experimented across seven decades.

She encountered him by accident. A colleague at the University of Oregon — she calls him Professor Earl — asked her to co-teach an adult education course on Gandhi's autobiography. The class was full of lawyers, professors, and retired professionals. In one of the first sessions, a woman asked a question that stopped the room: why did Gandhi take the vow of brahmcharya — celibacy — at the age of thirty-seven? He was a lawyer. A political organizer. What was he doing with a vow like that? The class went quiet. Professor Earl turned to Veena. She had no answer.

That question sent her somewhere she had not planned to go. She began to read everything written on Gandhi's brahmcharya — and found mostly psychoanalysis, political instrumentalization, or dismissal. No one had studied it as a genuine spiritual discipline with its own internal logic. So she changed her PhD direction entirely and proposed a book on Gandhi's ascetic activism. It was the first of its kind.

Brahmacharya Is Much Bigger Than You Think

The more she read, the more she saw that the entire framing — Western and much of Indian scholarly too — had missed something essential. Brahmacharya is not celibacy. Or rather: celibacy is the narrowest possible reading of a word whose root goes somewhere far deeper.

Brahman-like conduct. Not the negation of desire but the alignment of every impulse — thought, word, action — with the highest self. Gandhi did something unprecedented: he took the most demanding practices of the inner tradition — brahmcharya, fasting, physical labor, control of the palate — and made them the engine of political action. Not withdrawal from the world. Entry into it, on different terms. Renunciation as the source of power, not its sacrifice.

Renunciation Is Free Will

When Rajni put the common fear on the table — if renunciation is involved, please leave me out of it; I don't want to give up shopping, or drink, or the enjoyment of the taste buds — Veena met it with something that reframes the whole question. Renunciation is not deprivation. And it is not, fundamentally, about giving up things.

Renunciation is one of the primary ways human beings exercise free will.

We are already renouncing constantly. Civilization itself is organized renunciation — the checking, the holding-back that makes coexistence possible. The question is not whether we renounce. It is whether we do it from the outside in, or the inside out. True renunciation is the one that comes from within, not from fear of being seen.

Veena discovered this at an interfaith youth conference in Italy, in her early twenties — for the first time completely alone, no family, no community who knew her. Everyone drank. There was no vegetarian food. A group bet they could get her to try a small cup of wine.

She said no. When there was no vegetarian food, she went to bed hungry. Around eleven that night, a monk knocked at her door with a pear. He had heard she hadn't eaten. She has never forgotten that moment — the small, unexpected grace that arrived on the other side of staying true.

Rajni heard something important in the story and named it: true commitment contains no fear and no obedience. It is Swaraj — self-rule in the deepest sense. "You never know until you test it."

The Student Who Changed

Ideas do not stay in classrooms. In one of Veena's early Gandhi courses at the University of Oregon, there was a student she still remembers clearly: confrontational, skeptical, gold jeans. He had pushed hard on the brahmcharya debate. She had taught it; she had not preached it.

A few months after the semester ended, he called after her on campus. He had been clean, he said, since taking her class. He used to be with different women every weekend. He didn't anymore. He respected women now — and he respected himself. Two years later, an email: Dr. Howard, do you remember me? Would you write me a recommendation letter for law school?

The ideas moved him, not the instruction. Nobody told him what to do. He read Gandhi's autobiography, sat with the question of brahmcharya, and something shifted from the inside. The student's transformation was his own experiment with truth.

Gandhi's Framework

Veena opened her presentation by introducing the Gandhi Center she founded at Fresno State — named, very deliberately, not "Ahimsa Center" but the Center for Inner Peace and Sarvodaya: inner work and the uplift of all. The name captures the double movement Gandhi always insisted on: the inner practice and the social consequence are not separate projects.

She began with violence itself — through the Jain tradition she grew up in: do not repress, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature. Rajni noted that this 2,000-year-old formulation is almost precisely the WHO's current definition of violence. The ancient and the clinical converge. Crucially, the Jain teaching includes the mental dimension — wishing harm, harboring ill-will — which means violence begins before any hand is raised.

• Nonviolence in 3D: Dialogue (we talk past rather than with each other), Dissent (the courage to disagree without anger), and Difference (respect for fundamentally different perspectives). The dissent piece holds a real tension: where does nonviolence tip into complicity? Veena's mother did not stay on the rickshaw. The call to interrupt violence and the call to act from a centered place exist in genuine tension — and were not dissolved.
• Gandhi's eleven ashram vows — satya, ahimsa, brahmcharya, non-stealing, non-possession, physical labor, control of the palate, fearlessness, equal respect for all religions, swadeshi, removal of untouchability — read not as moral obligations but as a complete political toolkit. Each vow closes off a specific vector through which a person in public life can be compromised.
• The one who has nothing to lose cannot be bought, threatened, or turned. Gandhi when he died left five personal articles. No bank account. As British observer Gilbert Murray asked: how do you fight a man with no attachment to his children, his money, his power, his reputation?

She closes the framework with Gandhi's most distinctive claim: renunciation for action, not from it. Most ascetic traditions associate renunciation with withdrawal. Gandhi was doing the opposite — withdrawing from comfort in order to go deeper into the world, unencumbered and uncompromisable. "Renunciation to revolution," she says. "This is the key."

"Was It Only Possible Against the British?"

Rajni put the familiar challenge directly: "Gandhi only worked because it was the British he was facing. In Nazi Germany, he would have been bumped off in the first round." Veena has heard this at every conference. Her response has three parts.

First: read the history you are citing. The British colonial record in India was not one of polite restraint. Jallianwala Bagh was not an aberration — it was a pattern. The premise that the British were uniquely susceptible to moral pressure rests on a romanticized account of empire that does not survive contact with its actual history.

Second: look at the global evidence. Reverend James Lawson and Dr. Martin Luther King faced a regime in the American South that met their nonviolence with dogs, fire hoses, and assassination. They were told explicitly: this will never work here. It did — not only in America but in the Philippines, in Chile, and in other authoritarian contexts.

Third: the Hitler question mislocates the intervention point. "It is like cancer," Veena says. "If cancer goes to stage four, you cannot stop it. But if you catch it early, you can do it with other means." There were fifteen or twenty years of opportunities to stop the conditions that produced Hitler, and the world did nothing. We look at the crisis at its peak. We don't look at the years of smaller choices that made it possible. "Disrupt before it erupts."

She adds carefully that Gandhi himself — toward the end of the war — acknowledged that if any war could ever be justified, the war against Hitler was the one instance he would name. But even then, he knew that defeating Hitler militarily would plant new seeds. "Violence begets violence. It seeds more." The deeper question she asks at every keynote: when has war brought us peace?

Why Love for the Opponent Matters

A significant strand of contemporary scholarship argues that nonviolence can be purely strategic — boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, all deployed while still hating the people you resist. If the tactics work, does the inner disposition matter?

Veena's answer came from Reverend James Lawson, the Methodist minister who brought Gandhian training to the American Civil Rights Movement and who she brought to Fresno State twice before his death in 2024 at age 95.

Strategic nonviolence without love reaches a different destination. You may win rights; you will not win understanding. If you carry hatred through the whole movement, you end up somewhere other than where you were trying to go.

How, practically, do you love someone whose actions you cannot love? "You go to their highest self. You don't love their actions — but you go to the best that person could be. Or the baby, when this person was born." That baby was innocent. That potential is still there.

And then there is the argument from self-interest: "When I hate, I harm myself more than I harm you." Hatred de-centers the one carrying it. The Gita maps it precisely: from anger comes confusion; from confusion you lose yourself. And from that de-centered place, enormous harm becomes possible. "Nonviolence," Rajni said quietly, "is self-interest." Veena laughed. "I am very selfish."

That raises a question the conversation left honestly open: if principled nonviolence requires not just the right tactics but this quality of love — is it achievable at mass scale? Can a movement be built on that inner foundation, or does it always depend on an unusually cultivated vanguard carrying the rest? Veena did not claim otherwise — only that the vanguard must exist, and that each person who does this work is one more center that cannot be bought or frightened.

Fall and Rise

The question came up gently but honestly: Gandhi and King are Olympic-level practitioners. What does this path look like for ordinary people just beginning? And what about the person who turns inward and finds not peace but turmoil — the bubbling up of unease that makes many people give up the practice before it goes anywhere?

Veena's answer was not a curriculum. It was an account of the texture of the journey itself. "At night, my self becomes transparent. If I said something during the day that I shouldn't have, the dreams will come. You shouldn't have said that." She tears up slightly describing it. It is a hard struggle. It is also, she says, the source of the deepest joy she knows.

The teaching she keeps coming back to is from a nun. Someone asked what the nuns did at the monastery. She answered: "We fall and we rise up. We fall again." That is the whole journey. Not arrival — return. Not achievement — the refusal to stop.

A baby learning to walk falls two hundred times and gets up two hundred times. "That's our true nature. We learn to give up only later — through conditioning. But that resilience — that's what we are." Meditation, she says, is the basic practice of sitting with yourself and seeing your own mirror. "Nobody teaches us to look within, ever. All the work is inner work."

Structural Violence and the Metacrisis

Rajni brought the hardest question of the session, and she put it plainly: violence is now structurally profitable in a way that has no historical precedent. Earlier rulers had to laboriously assemble the means for war. Today, a vast arms industry actively incentivizes and sustains conflict at a steady, profitable level indefinitely. Rulers no longer need to seek war; war seeks them. What does personal inner work — meditation, vows, falling and rising — have to do with that?

Veena's response: structural violence does not arise in a vacuum. "It is the failure of human morality." Machines are run by human beings. Someone designs. Someone sells. Someone decides. Structures do not build themselves — and if structures can be built, billions of people can resist them. "Massive structure requires massive response" — but the source of that mass response is not strategy. It is people who have done enough inner work that they cannot be bought or frightened out of it.

Rajni added a note that stayed with the room: the movement for nonviolence today seems to be lacking in numbers, energy, and imagination. She hoped to be corrected. She wasn't, quite. Any young person who says "game over, nothing can be done" is already part of the problem. To keep the idea alive — to keep looking for a way out, even when you don't yet see one — is itself a form of action. The refusal to give up is not naivety. It is, as the whole conversation argued, the most deeply human thing there is.

With deep gratitude to Dr. Veena Howard — for a conversation that was, at every turn, more than a conversation, and a lived demonstration of the ideas it explored. And to Rajni Bakshi, whose questions made visible what the answers alone could not. To the ServiceSpace community of callers, listeners, and volunteers who hold this space week after week: thank you. Sarvodaya.

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