For the past half century, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph have published significant works on India in general and on Gandhi in particular. Their Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays is a substantial, insightful, challenging, and controversial work.
This volume will appeal to a wide and diverse readership of specialists, students, and general readers who are interested in Gandhi's relevance for today's world. The essays are valuable for readers in history, politics, cultural studies, Asian studies, comparative studies, postcolonial studies, and other fields.
The four chapters in part II are all coauthored by the Rudolphs, and all are reproduced from their book The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, later included in Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983]). The essays focus on the normative oppositional dichotomies used by British colonialists to categorize Indians: assertive, courageous, and violent versus passive, cowardly, and nonviolent; masculine versus feminine; and real versus assimilated unrepresentative Indian. Gandhi adopted, inverted, and subverted these stereotypes, thus transforming Indian self-constructions and furthering the anticolonial freedom struggle.
The book ends with a chapter from the 1960s that, in terms of Gandhi's earlier philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political methods and goals, seems modest and suggests little future for what Gandhi considered most significant. Gandhi's bold vision for India was largely irrelevant and dead. The Rudolphs end with the proposal that Gandhi's “worldly asceticism” might still contribute to political modernization, but only in terms of more modest, middle-level norms, allowing for instrumental effectiveness, a stronger work ethic, better use of time and resources, and a more rational, democratic professionalism. In short, Gandhi, the radical critic of modernization, might now, at best, contribute to political modernization. Modernism had won.
Reading part I, especially the first chapter, written forty years later, is like night and day. No longer is modernism so triumphant. Postmodernism has exposed the limitations and weaknesses of Western modernism. And where does this leave Gandhi? The radical critic of modernism can no longer be dismissed as an irrelevant premodernist and antimodernist. His qualitatively different assumptions, values, concepts, and approach are extremely significant for the contemporary world. Indeed, they share many of the features of recent postmodernism. Gandhi emerges as a major postmodernist!
Lloyd Rudolph authored the first three chapters of part I, with the fourth chapter coauthored by the Rudolphs. The first chapter, entitled “Postmodern Gandhi,” is the most ambitious and challenging, and it best defines what is innovative about this book and what is most significant for current Gandhi scholarship. Rudolph correctly shows that Gandhi's charismatic leadership was rooted in traditional Indian symbols, language, and ideals, but that Gandhi was not an old-fashioned, out-of-date traditionalist. He used these traditional resources to convey new meanings and reconstitute new social and political actions.
Rudolph positions Gandhi, historically and epistemologically, with respect to modernity. Gandhi critiqued and rejected dominant characteristics of modernity: instrumental rationality; the emphasis on science, technology, and development; big meta-narrative theories and claims about universal absolute truths; centralization and the big state; and the erasure of religion and myth. Instead, Gandhi embraced dominant postmodernist characteristics: understanding truth as relative, experimental, contextual, and situational; an emphasis on the particular and subjective, the village and localism, self-help and self-rule, decentralized production, and appropriate technology; and a focus on civil society with a minimalist state. Rudolph concludes that this Gandhian postmodernism is visible and relevant today in India and throughout the world.
Chapters 2–4 are applications of this modernism versus Gandhi postmodernism framework. In chapter 2, Jawaharlal Nehru's triumphant high modernism, committed to complete independence, the modern state, equal rights, and majoritarian democracy, is contrasted with Gandhi's postmodernism, committed to dominion status, a minimal state, and minority rights and protections. Rudolph submits that Gandhi's “road not taken” might have avoided the partition and extreme violence that resulted from the Nehruvian modernist approach.
Chapter 3, “Gandhi in the Mind of America,” explores the historical, contextual, multiple constructions of Gandhi the anti-imperialist, the guru, the mahatma, and the fraud. Chapter 4 analyzes how a Gandhian postmodernist approach can critique and reformulate Habermas's formulation of modern civil society with its public sphere into a greatly enlarged, more vibrant, democratic, and relevant civil society.
Interpretations of Gandhi as an antimodern traditionalist are misleading and fail to address the experimental complexity, openness, and relevance of Gandhi's approach. The Rudolphs—along with Nicholas Gier, Naresh Dadhich, and several other Gandhi scholars—have made an invaluable contribution to current Gandhi research by focusing on a relevant and significant postmodernist Gandhi.
Such an interpretation is open to serious questions and criticisms. Gandhi, like postmodernists, embraced difference, diversity, the otherness of the other, decentralization, localism, and relative truth. But Gandhi also affirmed a strong sense unity and commonality and the role of absolute truths as ideals, rejection of incommensurability of others, and formulation of a kind of inclusive grand narrative that Western postmodernists find troubling, unacceptable, and hegemonic. In short, the Rudolphs' book can serve as a valuable catalyst for further scholarly debate.
