The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence

ISBN: 0674066723

Author: Devji, Faisal

Condition: New

The Impossible Indian offers a rare, fresh view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went far beyond a nationalist agenda. Revising the conventional view of the Mahatma as an isolated Indian moralist detached from the mainstream of twentieth-century politics, Faisal Devji offers a provocative new genealogy of Gandhian thought, one that is not rooted in a clichéd alternative history of spiritual India but arises from a tradition of conquest and violence in the battlefields of 1857.Focusing on his unsentimental engagement with the hard facts of imperial domination, Fascism, and civil war, Devji recasts Gandhi as a man at the center of modern history. Rejecting Western notions of the rights of man, rights which can only be bestowed by a state, Gandhi turned instead to the idea of dharma, or ethical duty, as the true source of the selfs sovereignty, independent of the state. Devji demonstrates that Gandhis dealings with violence, guided by his idea of ethical duty, were more radical than those of contemporary revolutionists.To make sense of this seemingly incongruous relationship with violence, Devji returns to Gandhis writings and explores his engagement with issues beyond Indias struggle for home rule. Devji reintroduces Gandhi to a global audience in search of leadership at a time of extraordinary strife as a thinker who understood how lifes quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.