Amongst the increasing number of scholars who have been writing on M.K. Gandhi—the leader of India’s struggle for independence from British colonial domination—Ajay Skaria is already recognized as one of the most important and original voices. His long anticipated monograph further strengthens that reputation. One reason for both the importance and distinctiveness of his voice is deceptively easy to identify. Unlike most other scholars of Gandhi available to an international reading public, Skaria has both the ability and the will to study Gandhi’s writing in his native Gujarati, along with his (already voluminous) writings in English. This labor doesn’t go towards recovering an ‘authentic’ Gujarati version of Gandhi; rather, to offer a careful and exceptionally rigorous reading of his texts, uncovering the various “aporetic tensions” that mark them, within and between languages. It is not just a thorough exercise in textual analysis, however. Skaria is interested in offering a specific kind of reading aimed at disclosing and destabilizing Gandhi’s thought—of a kind one might associate with Jacques Derrida. This characterization is not just the result of a reviewer’s instinct to slot books into familiar boxes. Derrida (along with Heidegger, to a lesser extent) appear frequently in the book, both in chapter epigraphs as well as the text itself, as a partner in conversation with Gandhi—their “uncanny resonances” (p. 11) carefully noted.

Skaria’s form of reading is housed within a problematic that Gandhi grapples with in his thought. Gandhi was not just opposed to the particular instance of British colonial domination in India. Rather, his critique was directed more broadly at the vision of politics that rule instantiated. The key term for Skaria throughout the text is sovereignty. Sovereignty here is not to be understood merely as the locus of political authority, whose transfer from British to Indian hands would fulfill the promise of the anti-colonial struggle. Sovereignty, as he clarifies early in the text, is not limited only to the State but “always exercised everyday by the self” (p. 8)—especially in practicing two of the most cherished goals of the Enlightenment: autonomy and reason (Kant appears frequently as the representative of such a practice). Skaria’s critique includes—though is not exhausted by—the most common form in which the Enlightenment and its associated concepts have been an object of critique by postcolonial scholars: as a historically specific discourse that both colonized and justified the marginalization of non-Western worlds and selves. He however is interested in taking up a far more radical task (and I use the word radical here in the same way he does in the text, as going to the root). The practice of self constituted by the Enlightenment worldview, and the institutional forms it inevitably engenders, are inescapably linked to domination and marginalization. Within this framework the ‘subaltern’ can only escape subordination by becoming dominant herself. The stake therefore is to think “how might a subaltern politics not only refuse subordination, but do so by relinquishing autonomy and even sovereignty?” (p. 9).

Skaria does not claim to recover a coherent theory of such a politics from Gandhi’s words. He reads Gandhi’s texts as scrupulously struggling—even against itself—in search of a practice (identified as satyagraha) that can “destroy sovereign laws while itself remaining without sovereignty,” and do so in a “non-sovereign manner” (p. 272). Each chapter of the book examines this search from varying points, building up to a slow crescendo.

What this reading searches for is a practice of ‘absolute’ or ‘unconditional’ equality, as the title of the book suggests. Skaria argues that at the heart of the Enlightenment ideal of equality lies ‘measure.’ One can only be offered a “general equality” amongst those that can “exercise and submit to a rational measure” (p. 7). Such a calculus inevitably excludes certain forms of beings—non-humans or the colonized (which were often associative categories in colonial discourse)—constituting a conditional relationship between plurality and equality. Gandhi’s writing gestures towards an “equality of what seems uncomparable” (p. 211), between those who share precisely nothing: not reason, not even language (p. 272). One approaches such an equality through a distinctive practice of ‘self-sacrifice,’ one that ‘surrenders’ one’s sovereignty over both the self and the other. It is a praxis that can potentially sustain a community that is not political in the usual sense—unmoored from any shared language or reason, and extended to not just all humanity but all beings.

At the heart of this vision lies religion, and one of Skaria’s attempts in the book is to rethink religiosity in politics, beyond and against the “common sense” of “liberal secularism.” Religion here is not a conscious surrender to a higher power of the divine—another variant of sovereignty—but a faith that seizes the satyagrahi. She cannot choose when to have faith, but pray and wait for it (p. 245). It is mysticism, rather than theology, with which he seeks to infuse political action. Figuring out the praxis of such a religious politics leads Skaria to propose a fascinating concept of ‘machinity’ whereby the satyagrahi undertakes vows—for fasting or renunciations, say—automatically, without thought, deliberation, or in adherence to maxims of reasons. The rationality of their own actions are thereby concealed from the satyagrahi’s themselves. Faith and prayer—received without sovereign agency—supplants knowledge.

Skaria acknowledges that a politics that eschews any measure for equality can easily end up preserving the “immeasurable inequalities” of the traditions it draws upon (p. 151). He draws our attention to the trope of ‘thekana’ i.e., proper or rightful place in the social order that appears in Gandhi’s thought—especially around questions of gender and caste—and one that he never “explicitly or systematically renounces” (p. 158). This dovetails with a well-known critique of Gandhi from the left. Skaria argues that while thekana was a necessary starting point for a move against the modern empire of reason, the search for unconditional equality alone always must bring thekana to its own ruination. While thekana rests on the proper economy of the gracious donor and the grateful receiver, Gandhi’s texts gesture towards the concept of pure or aneconomic gifts, which relinquishes the sovereignty of both the donor and the receiver. Despite Gandhi’s own inclination or intentions, the developments of his vision “constantly undo and unsay his affirmation of the thekana” (p. 158).

Skaria, as he makes clear in the introduction itself, does not take upon the task of defending the concrete political interventions of Gandhi. The terms he sets for himself in the book are to explore the radical extent of Gandhi’s writings for another world against and beyond the modern political imaginary. There is no doubt that his reading is brilliantly original on those terms. Yet one could note—more as a provocation for further thinking on Gandhi rather than a straightforward criticism—a few passages in the book that unsettles those terms. Writing about thekana, Skaria notes parenthetically that Gandhi thought through this problem more in the case of caste than gender, “perhaps because … his thinking of caste comes to be powerfully questioned by his interlocutors and critics, above all by Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, in a way that his thinking of gender is not” (p. 158). The suggestion here, that concrete political struggles and contestations challenge and shape Gandhi’s vision, is not taken up in full within the narrative of the book due to the terms chosen by the author. There were various mystics, in India and elsewhere, who had offered their own critiques of western modernity. What attracts our extensive attention to Gandhi is the momentous political role he played as the leader of a movement. That by itself does not give rise to an imperative to always and only read Gandhi through the concrete political struggles he was engaged in. But for future scholars of Gandhi for whom it should be impossible to ignore the immense contribution of this book, one could pose two questions that may arise in thinking with it. How do those struggles encroach (even if parenthetically), unsettle, and even constitute the text that Skaria explores? And more broadly, as we encounter a practice marked by silence and concealment, inhabit a community that shares “precisely nothing,” and wait for the “miracle” of reciprocation (the closest we come to solidarity?) that “arrives without slightest expectation,” what remains of the politics of the organizer of one of the largest mass movements in history?