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Universal Benefit: Gandhi's doctrine of Trusteeship: A review article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2014

BIDYUT CHAKRABARTY
BIDYUT CHAKRABARTY*
Affiliation:
University of Delhi, India Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Trusteeship is Gandhi's conceptualization of the contribution of business houses towards social well-being. Trusteeship is a theoretical construct seeking to redefine the relationship between indigenous business houses and the nationalist movement. That Gandhi succeeded in persuading the business men to participate in the freedom struggle, despite adverse consequences, suggests the extent to which Trusteeship was an effective mechanism in political mobilization. Besides elaborating the concept, this paper also argues that Gandhi was indebted to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Ruskin, amongst others, in his effort to articulate Trusteeship as a bridge between business houses and the freedom struggle; and that this Gandhian idea is a forerunner of the contemporary conceptualization of Corporate Social Responsibility.

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 572 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 This argument is pursued in detail by Bain, William in his ‘the idea of trusteeship in international society’, The Round Table, Vol. 368, 2003, pp. 67–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This was also an assumption which informed the Mandate system under the League of Nations which justified the doctrine of ‘tutelage’ or ‘trusteeship’ of the victorious nations over the vanquished. In Britain, the man most intimately associated with the idea was General Jan C. Smuts, a member of the War Cabinet, though not an Englishman. Winkler, Henry R. elaborates the doctrine of colonial trusteeship in his ‘British labour and the origins of the idea of colonial trusteeship, 1914–1919’, The Historian: a journal of history, vol. 13 (2), 1951, pp. 154–172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 The quantity of Literature available on Gandhi's contribution to the nationalist movement in India is enormous. Because this paper focuses on a Gandhian conceptual category that had clear implications on the movement that Gandhi led, these texts may not exactly be relevant for my purpose. Hence I have drawn on those theoretical texts which provide useful insights in order to comprehend and conceptualize ‘trusteeship’ as a meaningful (though controversial) category to understand Gandhi's argument for equality or what he plainly articulated as ‘universal benefits’.

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