cover image The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

Faisal Devji. Harvard Univ., $24.95 (215p) ISBN 978-0-674-06672-4

This dense, scholarly work addresses Mohandas Gandhi’s political philosophy through a prism that seeks to refigure him as an extraordinary realist whose creed of nonviolence was less idealistic than a means to an end. Devji (The Terrorist in Search of Humanity), reader in Indian history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, contends that Gandhi implicitly accepted the inevitability of horrific violence as part of the quest for India’s independence. This was a major factor in his demand for a speedy British departure in 1947 without their supervising the religious division of the subcontinent. Partition was an orgy of violence, which, Devji argues, Gandhi—“the most hard-headed of all self-proclaimed realists”—accepted because it would prompt Indians to accept “political responsibility, which they could do by dealing directly with each other.” This notion is laboriously and meticulously sketched in abstract terms, concluding that Gandhi helped develop a “prejudice” that would allow Indians to evolve politically in a postcolonial context. While this treatise is appropriate for graduate-level scholars, Devji does allow a few accessible ideas to seep through, notably that the Mahatma praised the Bhagavad-Gita’s detached creed of swadharma (sacrificial killing) because it represented the most sublime of moral acts and emphasized that “ethics was either possible everywhere and available to everyone or it had no meaning at all.” (Sept.)