Gandhi’s West, the West’s Gandhi

Abstract

Gandhi had a life-long engagement with “the West.” He was educated in Britain, had close Jewish friends in South Africa, and engaged in discussions with Christian clergymen for much of his life. In the midst of struggles against racism and colonialism, Gandhi never lacked friends and admirers in Britain, Europe, and the U.S. Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Ruskin—the “Holy Trinity”—are widely believed to have influenced him, but the idea of “influence” has less analytical purchase than is commonly believed. Taking Thoreau as an illustration, this paper suggests that a different hermeneutics of reading is required to understand the structures of feeling shared between Gandhi and his many interlocutors in the West. Wedded to the idea that freedom is indivisible, Gandhi constructed a West with which he could strike common ground, and his sojourns in the Other West form an astounding chapter in interculturality. The West’s Gandhi, on the other hand, is arguably a sanitized figure, the apostle of nonviolence and the prophet of peace. True, two generations of African-American leaders and intellectuals wrestled with Gandhi’s ideas before they appeared to be embodied in the person of Martin Luther King. Gandhi is acknowledged in the West as a supremely world historical figure, but this Gandhi is not easily reconciled with the emphatic critic of nearly all the critical categories of modern political thought. This paper concludes with an assessment of Gandhi’s challenge to the idea of “global history,” pointing to Gandhi’s suspicion of the view that all our universalisms are to be derived from the West, and it places for consideration the idea that his most enduring contribution may be his relentless questioning of the presuppositions of modern knowledge systems.