It is far from clear that there is a “Gandhian paradigm”; it is equally unclear that Gandhi was a theorist of the “Indian theory of the purusharthas (aims of life).” Yet Parel insists that “no serious interpreter” can doubt this; Gandhi can't be understood “really well” unless one concedes this. But he fails to substantiate either claim, and this book lacks theoretical cogency. Still, Parel is enlightening on various Gandhian/Indian themes; his grasp of Gandhi's politics, though, is clichéd and unpersuasive. It is excessively dependent on Western sources.
Gandhi stood for fairness, compassion and decency in human relations. For this he drew upon his Indian culture; he deemed Britain's “so-called civilization” irreligious and destructive. He wanted to ethically elevate Indians but especially the British conquerors. He was a savvy political thinker; his writings suggest an autonomous, independent mind. But he was not a “philosopher,” as Parel himself concedes, nor he did try to pass himself off as one. As Gandhi saw it, satyagraha (passive resistance, soul-force, truth-force) was the apposite rejoinder to Western violence and conquest; it was the only civilized response to foreign occupation. By nature, the “enlightened,” modern West was hostile to Indian values and traditions. It was culturally bound to erase Indian-ness radically. Macaulay's ignorant and offensive “Minute on Indian Education” was not an aberration.
Parel unravels, if unwittingly, the West's and India's intellectual and cultural contrasts incisively. He is very illuminating on the ethic of dharma (duty) in various avatars (manifestations), on religion, celibacy, sexuality, art, moksha (spiritual liberation) and on classical Indian texts. Situating Gandhi on this canvass allows the reader to make contextual sense of his thinking and choices. It adds vitally to our knowledge of this seminal figure in human history.
Parel's political analysis is less incisive. Indian politics can't be captured by Western conceptual frameworks and lenses. We learn the degree to which things Indian fall short of superior European models. Indian secularism, civic nationalism, the state, rights, and so forth acquire meaning to the extent that they jettison their Indian baggage. This tactic bolsters the hegemony of Western political science; it does little to enhance knowledge of India.
Parel postulates a colonial reading of Gandhi's politics; he recycles shibboleths which falsify Gandhi's standpoint and political ethics. Suffice it to touch on two instances of this tendency. Parel asserts that Gandhi's advice to the Jews in Nazi Germany to resort to satyagraha was “mistaken,” naïve, and misguided, because this tactic requires “liberal–democratic” oppressors like the British to be successful. Parel espouses the white liberal/white Jewish view (Martin Buber, Judah Magnes) on this issue (125–27). It may be accurately labelled an Indian-Catholic position as well.
Yet this badly misreads Gandhi's central point: don't do business with the Nazis; resist them passively but militantly. In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt made the identical Gandhian point that far fewer Jews would have been killed if Jewish leaders had refused all “co-operation,” instead “done nothing.” Satyagraha in the Nazi context meant absolute “non-participation” in Arendt's idiom, which Parel misses totally. In his essay, “The Jews” (1938), Gandhi addressed them as religious Jews: “Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth.” Gandhi expected Jews to be morally exemplary; Parel fails to notice this.
Likewise, Parel recycles the Hindutva/British canard that Jinnah was exclusively to blame for the partition of India in 1947. He downplays Jinnah's secularism, his passion for India, and absolves the Hindu purists and British rulers of all responsibility (45–47). In classic Orientalist style, he declaims, falsely, that “Islam” mandates “political separatism.” Parel asserts that Gandhi was onto this; he had even asked in 1908, “Has Islam unmade the nation?” Parel's claim is baseless.
In his Hind Swaraj (1908), Gandhi has his prejudiced “reader” raise this question; Gandhi, as “editor,” denies its truth and dismisses it; Muslims, like Christians and Parsis (Zoroastrians), he says, are fellow Indians, “fellow countrymen.” Parel's rendering is a travesty. It is absurd to depict this fiction as “prophetic” on Gandhi's part (34). Yet this is hardly accidental. In thrall to the Western Christian legacy in India, Parel subscribes to the white colonial view of India.
That is why he fails to engage Gandhi's anti-colonialism, and why he is so solicitous of the putative decencies of liberal democracy, so much so that he neglects to report Gandhi's view of the matter. In 1941 Gandhi challenged the legitimacy of the Allied war against the Nazis and the Fascists: there are “powerful elements of fascism in British rule. Both America and Great Britain lack the moral basis for engaging in this war unless they put their own houses in order; … they have no right to talk about protecting democracies and protecting civilization and human freedom, until the canker of white superiority is destroyed in its entirety.”
