50 chApter one
tively perform this ethical commitment. Parama Roy points to this shift-
ing status of the animal in Gandhian thought when she argues, “In his
more mundane communications with correspondents from all over India
and the globe, he was possessed by the question of the relative importance
of human and animal life, arguing sometimes against an anthropocentric
bias and sometimes in favor of the greater moral worth of human beings”
(2010, 105). Animals were among Gandhi’s most unreconciled, inconsis-
tent, and indeed for him haunting aspects of his ethico- politics. The spe-
cific instance of a “mercy- killing” of an injured calf at Gandhi’s Sabarmati
Ashram and Gandhi’s provocative gesture of serving meat at the otherwise
all- vegetarian Ashram to his carnivorous allies, Louis Fischer, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and Maulana Azad, are instances of public controversies around
Gandhi’s animal politics (Roy 2010, 106).^16 His ethico- political stance on
stray dogs likewise shocked many of his readers and followers, which ap-
peared to them to fall problematically short of ahimsa.^17 Often undernour-
ished and carriers of disease, stray dogs in India were at times dangerous
to human communities and had become a serious concern for the nation.
To Gandhi’s mind, stray dogs were a direct reflection of the “ignorance and
lethargy” of human society. If the state was to blame for failing to control
the epidemic of stray dogs, so too were seemingly benevolent citizens in
the wrong for perpetuating the problem by feeding them. Gandhi insisted
that to feed stray dogs was a “misplaced kindness” that left intact the struc-
tural problem that produced them (1976, 28:5). True kindness, he declared,
would necessitate housing and caring for the dogs in all respects. He also
argued that in certain circumstances, euthanizing stray dogs was necessary
to the eradication of suffering and the welfare of human communities. This
position outraged many, who saw Gandhi as abandoning ahimsa outright.
His was not an easy position to reconcile, but it reflected the path of ahimsa
as necessitating contextual decisions that would produce ahimsa even while
pursuing nonviolence.
One of Gandhi’s most revealing discourses on the limits of his spir-
itual capacity emerges through his failure to protect sheep, a failure on
which he dwells during a recollection of a visit to the Kali temple in Cal-
cutta. With great anticipation, Gandhi set off to see the famous temple but
along the way witnessed a “stream of sheep” being led to sacrifice in the
name of Kali (Gandhi 1993, 234). Gandhi stopped to converse with a sadhu
(wandering ascetic), and both men agreed that animal sacrifice was by no