Gandhi In His Time and Ours (review)

Gandhi punctuated several of his major political pronouncements with invocations of good and evil, religion and irreligion, God and Satan. His pious language of sin, virtue, sacrifice, and devotion, culled from major religious traditions, transfigured the lexicon of modern politics. By the early twentieth century, this confluence of different moral and political languages with its mix of new and old ways of thinking attained a steady balance and a self-contained economy in its own right. Gandhism produced a way of seeing that acknowledged its own contradictions. This way of seeing understood that the proper reasons for living would arise primarily from two simultaneous activities: bringing these contradictions into conversation and attempting to enter into dialogue with all those who differed from or opposed one's own outlook. With this general principle, Gandhi's vision sought to spiritualize politics with the simultaneous reform of religions. He wanted to establish a new moral state by positing the perfectibility of each future citizen. He thought that "political life must be an echo of private life" and that "there cannot be any divorce between the two."¹ Ultimately, Gandhi's aim was to circumvent the pull toward a modern civilization that he saw as diseased, corrupt, and spiritually irredeemable, though the conditions of this very civilization forged the tools of his own mission and made it intelligible. This "civilization" has over the course of the past several decades overcome many barriers to soak practically the entire globe in its values. As images of Gandhi have begun to appear in Apple Computer advertisements, one may rightly wonder what exactly made up his project in the first place, what has become of it since his assassination, and what claim it might have now to any future.

The means Gandhi assembled for his program against the modern sociopolitical dispensation included nothing less than an innovative adoption and transposition of ascetic practices and otherworldly goals onto the domain of politics. The legacy of this development of religious thought and political practice remains uncertain, contradictory, and even troubling in our contemporary context. Was Gandhi a political mastermind who employed religious symbols for political gain? So argues one body of scholarship. Or was he primarily a spiritual figure whose doctrine of Truth and truthful living in the modern world makes his political career seem negligible in comparison? Thus insinuates the Vintage Spiritual Classics series. (By including Gandhi with major religious thinkers of the world the series' view accords well with the Hindu Right's own sanctification of Gandhi as a means for neutralizing his political message.)

The legacy of Gandhi's bringing religion and politics together raises other questions as well. Is it possible for moral forms of critique ever to enter into and sustain an impact on politics without either becoming compromised or losing political efficacy? Does not morality act within political contexts to blind its exponents to their own will to power? Does it not, in its strongest forms, help rationalize the most abusive means for attaining its enshrined ends? Does not the predominance of the moral code in political rhetoric and practice more often than not maintain a particular status quo in which the powerful remain cynically in control and the powerless remain righteously outside it? These are difficult, yet pressing, questions that Gandhism along with a slew of other morally motivated movements of both the Left and Right have brought about in more recent years. How one might go about grappling with such questions with respect to Gandhism obviously depends on how one understands the overall purport of the Gandhian message and how one makes sense of its legacy.

No guide better than David Hardiman's Gandhi in His Times and Ours currently exists for addressing these questions or comprehending the formation of the Gandhian message and legacy on a global scale. The merits of the work may be attributed to what the author describes as his own "troubled dialogue" (11) with Gandhi. His relationship with Gandhism, he writes, has run back and forth between emotional commitment and...