Book Review Sociological Bulletin

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DOI: 10.1177/0038022920923241
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Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theoretical

Anti-politics. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019, ix + 272 pp., `799 (hardback).
ISBN 978-93-88414-43-2.

The personality of Gandhi possesses a unique character in modern times: It is all

at once the emblem of the most of the important colonial liberation—of an entire
subcontinent—and the figure of radical spiritual exigency for asceticism and
freedom from the world’s enslavements. No other guide towards emancipation or
enfranchisement has united these two dimensions, the political and the spiritual,
in this way—even if the desire to join the rejection of domination with the open-
ing of a new dimension of meaning has more or less manifested itself among all
the others.
Gandhi left a vast body of writings. This book under review outlines the
system that gathers Gandhi’s writings and practices into a corpus within which his
precise conception of nature, truth, violence, resistance and the end is clarified.
But, Gandhi’s writings and practice remain in a critical relation to technology in
modern society.
The book consists of ten chapters excluding an introduction. These are as
follows: 1. Hypo-physics, 2. Scalology: Speed, 3.The Faculties I: Body, 4.The
faculties II: Mind and Soul, 5. Dynamics: Active and Passive, 6. The Law of
the Maker, 7. Truth and Will, 8. Violence and Resistance, 9. Critical Nation, 10.
Conclusion: Anastasis.
When we explore about Gandhi we find that there were many things that
Gandhi was. He was the last of a kind. He was the first of his kind. Which one is
it better to be? He was the first one to ask this question. Gandhi founded a new
materialism, which was the theory of nature as the reification of spirit. Gandhi
opposed the separation of religion as a business of the spirit and politics as the
field of material relations.
To Gandhi, nature is value, the moral is the natural. Deviations from nature are
measured by the scalology of speed—the quick is the evil and slow is the good.
In Gandhi’s world, earthquakes, thunderstorms and famines carry out judgments
upon the deviations from the natural and bring about corrections. Gandhi con-
ceives a new system of limits that cures the ills of deviations from nature’s moral
course, that is, the syndrome of civilisation, the perils of speed and the desire
for progenies. His sexual experiments, his theoretical apparatus to determine
truth, his resistance to democracy and women’s liberation movements, his racism
2 Book Review

towards the Africans and untouchables of the subcontinent and his startling politi-
cal positions with respect to great events of early twentieth century such as the
Nazi camps and atomic bombs are understandable only by thus recovering the
systematic unity and uniqueness of his thought. This new system to delineate pro-
genesis (commonly understood as sex, desire, pleasure) from other virus (those
of material, moral and the sense of finality) such that it could be rendered ‘Zero’.
The book aims to bring to light the technology of Gandhi’s system and examine
the fate of certain programmes that today follow his steps. It does so by develop-
ing the counter-system, which hovers over his own corpus and evading its capture.
Gandhi was not a philosopher—the history of philosophy was ‘Satanic’ for
him. Yet, Philosophers (Martin Buber, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Ardent in
the last century, and Etienne Balibar and Slavoj Zizek recently found) found it
necessary to engage him. Hence, recently, European Philosophers have initiated
dialogues between Gandhi’s concept of non-violence and other western political
projects; for example, Slavoj Zizek (Gandhi and Hitler) and Etienne Balibar
(Gandhi and Lenin).
Gandhi wanted to be a philosopher, but he was not the well-trained sort, so
he left these fragments of thought that are to be systematised comfortably by the
scholar today. In his communication with Radhakrishnan, Gandhi himself wrote
about the philosophical task left to be undertaken. Indeed, clarification of the
concept of violence has become an urgent philosophical task today. In this context,
Gandhi’s major contribution to political thought was to question the primacy of
the concept of violence in political theory: politics as the artifice regulating the
ever-present threat of the natural, or violence, while he rejected the conception
of non-violence as the mere absence of violence. Gandhi was a great politician
whose singular ambition was to get independence for India and he did whatever
he could to get to do that. He used the method of non-violence for this mission.
However, Gandhi never claimed to be a philosopher, he was either Indian or
occidental. He never acknowledged any thought-system as perfect and hence
worth following, not evens the religious kind. Gandhi’s system has been allowed its
maximum articulation such that it approaches its limit and its telos. Methodology
had always been a problem regarding Gandhi. In this matter Gandhi himself added
several complications by suggesting that one must follow his most recent writing
if one encounters a conflict in the corpus and at the same time asserting that all he
ever wrote since the Hind Swaraj were corollaries of it.
In the current atmosphere of theoretical discourse and political posture that
gags the Master in whose ‘native name’ there should be speech, although the
Master himself shall not speak, the speech of Master is still some other Master’s
words, that ‘of western thought’—one, the Master of authority and the other,
the Master of words. Hence, Gandhi often speaks of gargoyle of the fashionable
theory though Gandhi’s writings and transcripts of speeches run into more than a
hundred volumes.
In brief, what Gandhi’s liberating thought questions is all that the West has
wanted to put into the word ‘humanism’. Yet what moved Gandhi was indeed
the concern for a human life freed from its frenetic Western pace, attuned to a
just rhythm. Above all, it is exactly this frenetic pace (this ‘speed’, as Gandhi put
Book Review 3

it) that is increasingly questioned from within the heart of the West today. And
what Contemporary thinkers, especially in Europe, have been concerned with
for quite some time exactly is what the words ‘man’ or ‘human’ and ‘humanist’
ideas encompass, after having worried about the ‘preterhuman’ perspectives of
vision designated as totalitarian—since Gandhi’s time, and to say nothing about
‘transhumanist’ oracles spreading today as viewed in the forward of the book by
Jean-Luc Nancy.
Finally, in conclusion, Mohan and Dwivedi call attention that we are in the
Gandhian era of criticalisation. Critique is also the work that develops and trains
within the system the powers for future encounters. Gandhi adopted the style of
a critique, particularly that of Thomas Taylor, when it came to his analysis of the
effects of modern technologies in the villages of the subcontinent.
Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi seem to have thought seriously of doing on
Gandhi and Philosophy though many scholars exclaim about this. A figure of
spiritual resistance to modernity, today Gandhi draws the limits of geopolitics as
we can test them in the planetary regression characteristics of the beginning of
this century. The authors of the book reveal the main lines of Gandhi’s thought
circumscribing the limits of the East–West division as well as the ambiguities of
a politics of resistance whose projects have been, ultimately, to create a Hindu
nation invested with a global eschatological mission.
This book presents a hitherto unexplored, critical dimension to contemporary
debates on truth and fidelity. Gandhi’s remarkably different uses of these two terms
have not received sufficient attention. He re-interpreted the concept of passive
resistance or non-violent protest in the neologism Satyagraha, literally, holding
fast to the truth. Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi’s Gandhi and Philosophy:
On Theoretical Anti-politics is an intellectual penetration to examine Gandhian
thought. It is a sophisticated reflection on modernity in its own right. Drawing
on a wide range of philosophical resources, Gandhi and Philosophy succeeds in
expanding new vistas of thought, which gives us a radically new Gandhi. The
book is a most valuable contribution to orient us towards the Gandhian thought.

B. K. Nagla
Former Professor of Sociology
M. D. University
Rohtak, Haryana, India
bnagla@yahoo.com