Gandhi Contra Modernity

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Michael J. Quirk

Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi. Oxford Past Masters Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 111 pp. $8.95 (paper).

Americans tend to romanticize the figure of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and not without reason. The Mahatma -- the "great souled one" -- is a uniquely inspiring figure in a century whose master politicians seem to be mostly criminals and fools. Gandhi was a harbinger of the civil rights movement, the key influence directing the young Dr. Martin Luther King toward a politics of nonviolent resistance as an alternative to both resigned acquiescence and revolutionary terror. He is clearly a man worthy of emulation and affection. Even a critic of Gandhi, like George Or well, was quick to acknowledge that, when compared to his political peers, he was infinitely more admirable.

Yet this romanticizing of Gandhi often obscures his most enduring contributions, and highlights only those aspects of his achievement that tend to gratify our egos rather than put them to the question. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lavish praise bestowed posthumously upon him when Richard Atten-borough's film Gandhi swept the Academy Awards in 1982. Here was a crowd, dressed to the nines in overpriced gowns and tuxedos, ready to repair speedily to various nightclubs for some serious debauchery as soon as the annual self-congratulatory rituals were to cease, waxing effusive about this wonderful man who would not so much as hurl a fly but who brought down an empire, seemingly unaware that his entire life stood as an indictment of the very culture of excess, vanity, and narcissism that Hollywood epitomizes. While the film was a fairly good one, the celebration missed the point, massively. The empire is us.

The political theorist Bhikhu Parekh's monograph Gandhi, a volume in Oxford's superb "Past Masters" series, is an important and commendable book, in part because it refuses to view Gandhi through the gauze-covered lenses of romanticism and cheap sentiment. Like George Woodcock's Mohandas Gandhi of some twenty-odd years ago, it is short and direct, but instead of concentrating on the Mahatma's biography and political career it highlights Gandhi's place as a thinker -- as a political theorist, social critic, philosopher of religion, and cultural visionary. Parekh does not indulge in hagiography: his exposition is fair and broadly sympathetic, yet never blind to criticisms that might be plausibly leveled at Gandhi as an intellectual figure. The result is often disarming, in two distinct ways. First, Gandhi does not always come across as an infallible oracle of sacred insight. And second, when his arguments and analyses seem most convincing, they are often anything but congenial to the received socio-political wisdom of advanced modernity.

Gandhi's limitations are displayed most clearly in Parekh's account of his religious thinking. The religious environment of Gandhi's childhood was, as Parekh puts it, "eclectic:" his mother was associated with the syncretistic Pranami sect of Hinduism, which venerated the Koran as a holy book along with Vedantic scripture, and his father, a chief administrator of the court of Porbandar, freely associated with Jains and Christians. This cosmopolitan religious background inclined Gandhi toward a position that contemporary theologians have dubbed "religious pluralism" -- the conviction that all religions are valid paths toward transcendence and the holy, differing only in the vocabulary in which the sacred order is described and the perspective from which it is appropriated. Thus, as Parekh describes it,

For Gandhi, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions were all based upon specific conceptions of a personal God. They involved distinct forms of prayer, worship, rituals, and beliefs about his nature and relation to the world, and were all "sectarian." The "pure" or "true" religion lay beyond them, and had nothing to do with organization, belief, and rituals. It consisted in nothing more and nothing less than the belief that the universe was pervaded and governed by the cosmic power, and the decision to organize one's entire life accordingly. It involved living in the constant, intimate, and unmediated presence of the cosmic spirit, and represented the purest form of spirituality. (32)

Gandhi, as a theorist of comparative religion, is also a paradigm case of an advocate for what George Lindbeck, in his book The Nature of Doctrine, called "experiential-expressivism." Experiential-expressivists claim that there is a universal content to "the religious," based on the ubiquitous human experience of "the holy" or "the sacred," of which particular religious traditions are basically local variations. This adds something crucial to the doctrine of religious pluralism: while important, local traditions supply a distinctive yet inessential form to an essential, universal religious content. There are many attractions to this position, not the least of which is that it provides a basis for effective religious liberty and tolerance, and there are many important theologians who embrace it. Yet a problem emerges with experiential-expressivism, as Lindbeck pointed out, in that it invariably seems to evacuate particular religious traditions of their distinctive claims about God, nature, and society, putting them in the position of being mere elaborations of, and ultimately distortions of, a "sacred" truth that in its purest form is apprehended independently of any and all tradition. Experiential-expressivism thus tends to slide towards a reductionist brand of theological liberalism where everything determinately theological is drained off in favor of either a philosophical system that is taken for granted, or a "spirituality" that borders on the vacuous.