It is perhaps fitting that a political leader who chose to title his autobiography “The Story of My Experiments with Truth,” should himself be regarded today as an open text, one worthy of continuous reinterpretation as times change. Mohandas Gandhi was an unusual political leader in too many ways: in his emphasis on nonviolence and truth-force (Satyagraha) as instruments of political change during the decades dominated by world wars, genocide, and imperialism; in a relentless refusal to separate ethics from politics but possessed of an uncanny sense for the political jugular of his much stronger opponents; in the crafty use of emerging media to outflank the colonial regime alongside his ready sense of humor and quick repartee; in his ascetic lifestyle and sartorial tastes; and in the eclectic and truly universal range of philosophical and intellectual sources of his thought. He was an early critic of modern industrial civilization during the era of its hegemonic sway, and saw little point in independence if all it meant was Indians gaining sovereignty to do unto themselves what alien rule had been doing to them in the name of modernization.
In the first two essays in Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays, Lloyd Rudolph presents a compelling case for Gandhi as a postmodern thinker avant la lettre. He shows how, as early as 1909 in his book Hind Swaraj, Gandhi anticipated key ideas that would later be coalesced into definitions of the postmodern. For instance, his “refusal to privilege modernism's commitment to the epistemology of universal truths, objective knowledge and master narratives” (p. 4), and his emphasis on the contingency of both our knowledge of the world and the partial nature of our understandings of truth and ethical actions, anticipate key ideas regnant in later times. So, too, Gandhi's critique of mega-developmental projects (which he saw as rendering the vast majority of India's, and the world's, poor redundant) that inspired both Soviet collectivization and capitalist industrialization sounds very prescient in a time marked by protests against globalization and anxieties over global warming.
In the highly interesting second essay “The Road Not Taken”, Lloyd Rudolph joins a number of other recent authors (Gyan Pandey, Ayesha Jalal, David Page, and Mushirul Hasan, to mention only four) in revisiting the Partition of India from the point of view of the (perhaps unanticipated) impact of the institutions of liberal modernity in producing that event. Ideas like elections based on universal suffrage, a distaste for separate electorates for “primordial” collectives, the ascent of interest-group politics, and an unswerving commitment to the notion of equal, secular, and individual citizens seemed commonsensical and entirely progressive to leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, who also happened to be from the majority (Hindu) community. Yet, such a commitment to secular notions of citizenship in an overall context, marked by the continued salience of regional and religious differences and inequalities, could not but sound like the entering wedge of majoritarian dominance (in the progressive guise of secular citizenship) to someone like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League. Differences between the Nehruvian commitment to a singular notion of secular Indian citizenship and a strong center, on the one hand, and, on the other, Jinnah's interest in the protection of “permanent” minorities (who also happened to be concentrated as regional majorities in western Punjab and eastern Bengal) through a confederal system of autonomous provinces with a weak center, were rapidly coming to a head. In this context, the Nehruvian (and Congress Party) insistence on “complete independence” or Purna Swaraj, did little to allay Jinnah's fears. A more graduated transfer of sovereignty through Dominion Status offered the possibility of a compromise that might have addressed Jinnah's fears and prevented the slide into Partition. This did not happen, in some part at least, because of Nehru's and Congress's intransigence (itself deriving from a modernist conception of secular citizenship and state-centric notions of development) and British myopia at the Second Round Table conference in September–November 1931.
Lloyd Rudolph argues that Gandhi was astute enough to realize that Dominion Status offered the possibility of averting Partition and allaying Jinnah's fears, and therefore supported it at this point. He suggests that this acute political sensitivity of Gandhi's to the ways in which Dominion Status diverged from Complete Independence indicated a postmodern skepticism about the unalloyed benefits of monolithic sovereignty and of liberal individualist separation between private and public spheres that underlay the modernist political order. Gandhi's postmodernism enabled him to empathize with the minority, and to push for forms of pluralism and layered sovereignty that were not yet apparent to the high modernist viewpoint. I agree substantially with this argument, and the sympathy it entails for the minority position when the majority seems to have not just numbers on their side but history and progress as well.
Considerations of space prevent me from detailing the other excellent essays in this volume, four of them by Susanne Rudolph in coauthorship with Lloyd Rudolph, which counterpoise Gandhi's experiments with collective life in Ashrams and Habermasian notions of the public sphere; engage with Gandhi's distinctions between nonviolence and cowardice; and expound on his idea of political potency as derivative of sexual abstinence. There is also a rich essay on the mixed reception of Gandhi within the political and intellectual life of the United States. There is much that is both original and nuanced in these essays. By and large, the central claims of the Rudolphs, that Gandhi anticipated the current zeitgeist marked by the “twilight of certitudes” (to steal a phrase from another astute commentator on the Mahatma, Ashis Nandy), and that he remains a fascinating political persona with potent ideas, are amply substantiated by this excellent collection of essays.
If the Rudolphs range broadly in their efforts to interpret Gandhi, Anthony Parel takes the opposite trajectory—depth—in his work. Few books have been so aptly titled as Parel's. He thoroughly demonstrates that Gandhi's philosophy may most usefully be understood in terms of a relentless effort to harmonize four crucial poles of a Hindu understanding of human and social life—that of moksha (or liberation from the earthly cycle of birth-death-rebirth), artha (the worldly and quotidian exercise of power, politics, and wealth), dharma (a religious or sociocultural code of ethics), and kama (the pursuit of pleasure, both carnal and otherwise). These are condensed into the notion of purushartha, the conjoined pursuit of these four aspirations that “gives human activities their basic meaning and purpose” (p. 5).
The nub of Parel's reinterpretation of Gandhi is that the latter always strove to keep these four aspirations in a dynamic equilibrium and saw the excessive pursuit (or complete neglect) of any of them as disastrous from a civilizational and individual point of view. Thus, modern industrial society was marked by an overvalorization of the spheres of artha (power politics and economy) and kama (the satiation of physical desires) at the expense of ethics (dharma) or transcendence (moksha). Gandhi was similarly unsparing in his critique of holy men (mystics, mendicants, and sadhus of various hues) disengaged from the world, lost in idle contemplation, and parasitic on charity for their daily needs, ostensibly in the pursuit of moksha. For Gandhi, the road to moksha came not from passive meditation, nor was it something appropriate only during the final years of one's life. Rather, moksha is attained by a total and principled engagement with one's life and social circumstances at all times. Parel's depiction of Gandhi's emphasis on physical work, on engaging with one's calling to the best of one's ability, and on the full immersion in the ethical and political life of one's own society and time draws a picture of the man that is much closer to the dynamic person he was than the emaciated and pietistic image he sometimes is saddled with today.
Through a close reading of the immense corpus of Gandhi's Collected Works (numbering a hundred volumes), Parel shows how Gandhi sourced his derivation of purushartha in the Bhagavad Gita for its balance between earthly duties and the allure of transcendence. It enables Parel to convincingly argue that Gandhi's unparalleled efficacy as a political actor came from the constant eye he trained on matters of artha and to show that he was no pacifist arguing for unilateral disarmament but quite cognizant of the need for a state capable of national defense; that he was sensitive to the need for a self-reliant and resilient economy that could fulfill the earthly needs of the population; and, most importantly, that Gandhi's nonviolence came from a robust sense of ethics, truth, and strength of self rather than anything resembling the ressentiment of the weak. This picture of an earthy yet ethical, canny yet spiritual, Gandhi is one that would be readily recognized by his South African, British colonial, and Indian political adversaries who found themselves, too often and too late, outflanked by the Mahatma.
The main weakness in Parel's work is his rather tone-deaf attitude to the situation of religious minorities (like the Muslims) and the lower castes in India. Parel's understanding of the Muslim drive for a separate homeland in South Asia simply does not take into account the immensely insightful works that emerged with and after the publication of Ayesha Jalal's The Sole Spokesman (1985), which do not allow one to idly attribute the creation of Pakistan to some form of uncompromising Islamic religious nationalism. Parel's arguments would be enhanced by engaging with that scholarship, some of which underlies the chapter in the Rudolphs' book on “The Road Not Taken” referred to earlier. To see Jinnah or the Indian Muslims as having an innate proclivity for secession because of religious injunction or scriptural ideas of jihad, as Parel does, is to completely miss the complex ways in which the new ideas—of majorities and minorities, elections and vote-banks, federalism and provincial autonomy, secularism and faith, and colonial machinations during the World War II—all interacted to produce a situation in which partition became a tragic outcome favored by none but in the end accepted by all (including Gandhi). Similarly, Parel's B. R. Ambedkar is little more than a straw man, seemingly incapable of understanding the capaciousness of Gandhi's revisioning of Hinduism and the caste system. There was so much more to that encounter between Gandhi and Ambedkar, whose legacies are incredibly complex and still being worked out even as we speak, as a burgeoning literature now shows.
Notwithstanding such limitations, Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony, alongside the Rudolphs' book, represents a new and invigorating way to interpret Gandhi—and to appreciate the ever-changing but continued salience of his thought for our times. As we are held hostage yet again by a superpower bent on remaking the world in light of its own fantasies of omnipotence and terror, Gandhi's thought remains as germane as ever.
