In matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, Mohandas Gandhi was the very model of a postmodern man. From his path from vegetarian to experimental omnivore and back again to his 1930 “salt” satyagraha, such is the vision presented here by University of Chicago emeriti Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Unlike Gilbert and Sullivan's Stanley, Gandhi emerges here as a venerable figure, one who undermined the basic assumptions of modernity and the nation-state and whose vision profoundly influenced and affected not only the quest for an independent India but also his contemporaries and heirs across the world, from John Haynes Holmes and Martin Luther King Jr. to Albert Einstein, Vaclav Havel, and Bob Dylan. The Rudolphs explore this idea throughout this collection of essays, which includes a section of briskly written expositions on Gandhi's political and moral thought, which appeared originally in their The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago, 1967), as well as new pieces meditating on the contingencies of partition, the complicated reception of Gandhi and his thought in America, a reading of Gandhi through Habermas, and of course the eponymous “postmodern Gandhi.”

So, what does it mean to understand Gandhi as “postmodern,” especially when the adjective often serves either as an epithet or a shibboleth, with little room for negotiation in between? In his opening essay, Lloyd Rudolph makes the case that Gandhi was positioned both “epistemologically” and “historically” in the heart of postmodernity (13). His political philosophy and particularly his famously transformative reading of the Bahagavad Gita rejected instrumental rationality and absolute truth, preferring instead the “truth in action” and “situational truth” found in swaraj and satyagraha (159). This philosophical postmodernity is paired with the argument that Gandhi himself was at its vanguard historically, in his rejection of the totalizing narratives of progress and urbanization, of the factory and the large dam, and, of course, of colonialism and the colonial state.

Despite these more formal aspects, the ultimate purchase of the Postmodern Gandhi seems to be to insist Gandhi's legacy be neither as a traditionalist nor an artifact—that is, as “a dead monument rather than a living memory” (32)—but as deeply relevant, then and now. It also rejects a historiographical revision of Gandhi as a pragmatic and at times Machiavellian nationalist leader functionally indistinct from others of his generation, such as Tilak, Gokhale, Periyar, Jiinnah, and even (or especially) Nehru. On this, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays persuades at least that there is something quite unique about the mahatma, even if it is an argument to which many—thanks in part to decades of work from the Rudolphs themselves—would not find themselves intuitively opposed. Calling Gandhi postmodern also raises a corollary worth contemplating: Was the violence of colonialism so great, its physical and psychic toll so steep, that someone like Gandhi, particularly in his Hind Swaraj (1909), was in an exceptional position to become postmodern well before the trauma of the two world wars, of communism and fascism, and of European and American corporate capitalism and would drive the “West” desperately to the very same position? Of course, while the book never quite raises this possibility explicitly, it takes little extrapolation from the arguments here to make a profound statement about the nature of colonial power as well as anticolonial nationalism. More immediately, this interpretive framework also suggests that Gandhi could help explain postmodernity as much as postmodernity can help explain Gandhi.

Still, the notion of a postmodern Gandhi raises a number of conceptual hurdles that seem awfully difficult to clear. Quite often in these essays, “postmodern” simply stands in for “anti-modern” and specifically “anti-state” (62). This is an instructive point, not least in relation to Hind Swaraj, especially when qualified (as is done here) by the important fact that Gandhi does not in the least reject everything modern or even everything British. This is clearly Gandhi, but is it truly “postmodern”? Taken further, the argument also occasionally makes for some strange bedfellows: Gandhi's reading of the Gita easily juxtaposed to his reading of Henry Salt's tract on vegetarianism; his affinities with Tolstoy aligned with Polyani, anti-Fordists, and at times even Weber; and the equation of Gandhi's sense of the village community and the local empowerment offered by a nongovernmental organization, information technology, and microcredit. Gandhi appears most vibrantly postmodern when counterpoised to his longtime ally turned opposite number: Jawaharlal Nehru, the modernist par excellence. This leads to a bit of ventriloquism, where Gandhi is made to prefer almost categorically the market over the state and the local and global over the national. This is postmodern to be sure, but is it Gandhi? One begins to wonder at points about such an argument at its edges, especially when it is predicted that the Gandhi who detested the railway would have “welcomed” the computer, for its capacity to empower the village and the villager, and to privilege “village swaraj” over the “centralized modern state” (27–28). What he might have thought of Bangalore call centers or the World Trade Organization remains quite another question entirely.

In the end, our “postmodern” Gandhi manages to engage in all of the liberating aspects of postmodernity without being forced to confront let alone resolve its core epistemological and historical dilemmas. It is also a somewhat selective vision of postmodernity, one that embraces a complex critique of technology and the state and that champions the kinds of hybridity Gandhi famously embodied. Yet, it does not resolve, for example, why Gandhi took such a modern (and ancient) authorial position in his Hind Swaraj, dependent as it is for its authority on precedent and sources, no matter how eclectic, that Gandhi famously included in an appendix. And of course there is the more obvious but impressionistic problem. Gandhi just does not always feel postmodern. The dialogue between the editor and the reader in Hind Swaraj reads more like Plato than Beckett, the general mood more Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Dutt than Baudrillard, Jameson, Foucault, and Derrida. Like the two sections of this book itself, it seems that one might get more out of a vision of a more conflicted Gandhi, positioned between the “modernity of tradition” and the “postmodern” rather than firmly planted in either camp.

Despite these and other potential complications of the book's polemical frame, it is a lively and provocative read. And of course, this book is not entirely about the postmodernity of Gandhi, though it remains its most salient proposition. The essays on the “postmodern Gandhi,” on Gandhi's influence (in life and afterlife) in America, and on the utter contingencies of partition in particular would seem to have remarkable potential as discussion pieces for classroom debate. None are entirely new arguments, but they are powerful and extremely well-articulated ones. For the more serious scholar, it is also worth mentioning that the endnotes to these essays are discursive and bibliographical gems, each one a kind of historiographical and philosophical essay unto itself.

So, is Gandhi postmodern because he is a self-choosing vegetarian, because he merges myth and reason, or because he stands on the pivot between “Eastern” and “Western” knowledge, between the Republic and the Gita? Is the ashram truly the postmodern coffeehouse? I am still not sure, though the Rudolphs's book does at least make one think about the question. In a way, this would seem to be the most quintessential postmodern achievement of all.