The essays in this volume (republished with new material in 2006) provide an interesting example of attempts to move Gandhi from the margins back to the center in India. The authors argue in the chapter, “Postmodern Gandhi,” that much of Gandhi’s philosophy is “postmodern” in that he embraces the idea that “truth” can only be “partial” and “contingent.” By establishing that Gandhi was an early postmodernist they want to correct the idea he was  “traditionalist” and align him with a more contemporary (and hipper?) mode of philosophizing. This is an intriguing argument, but I didn’t really find it convincing. Why? It seems to me Gandhi’s philosophy is demonstrably invested in essentialist notions of absolute truth difficult to reconcile with any kind of postmodern epistemology. Sure he was a pragmatic thinker and activist, which the authors stress, but pragmatism isn’t postmodernism, and anyway, there are many versions of postmodernism and the essay fails to make this point, distinguish between them, and then make a more narrow argument for Gandhi’s being a postmodernist.  There are lots of quotes from Gandhi used in the chapter that reiterate his commitment to the idea of absolute truth, and these of course are totally incompatible with any kind of postmodernism. It’s interesting to compare this argument to A. L. Basham’s in Debating Gandhi, which makes the case for Gandhi being a traditionalist whose interest in western philosophy was shaped and directed by his early knowledge of classical Indian texts).
   I found the chapter entitled “Gandhi in the Mind of America” particularly helpful in understanding Gandhi’s reception by American thinkers and writers. This chapter presents an overview of responses to Gandhi in America. These responses are organized around different versions of Gandhi that got popularized in America (the anti-imperialist, the guru, the Mahatma, and the fraud—of course we can add to this the authors’ own, the postmodernist). The chapter creates a nice balance between positive views of Gandhi by Americans and more critical ones.
   The chapter entitled “The Coffee House and the Ashram Revisited” usefully draws a connection between some version of Jurgen Habermas’ notion of the “public sphere” and Gandhi’s active interest in the creation of social/political entities. This chapter emphasizes Gandhi’s interest in decentralized power and argues the ashram represents a democratized (i.e. non-elitist) version of Habermas’ public sphere. The authors argue he moves beyond Habermas’ interest in a public sphere that is bourgeois to one that is linked to the village is thus more democratic (at one point the authors link the ashram to an “indigenous public sphere,” which reminds me of the Tribal Arts Academy). This gets worked out in the section called “The Ashram as Public Sphere?”
   I found these essays really interesting, but less for their getting Gandhi “right” than as examples of the attempt to create a usable Gandhi for the 21st century. Connecting Gandhi throughout to western thought makes sense to me, but of course it opens the book to criticism that it’s too preoccupied with making Gandhi important now by aligning him with western intellectual concepts like “postmodernism” and “the public sphere” instead of valuing him on his own terms as an Indian thinker and activist (the way Basham does). But then the essays do a pretty good job trumping this argument by demonstrating the extent to which Gandhi’s own ideas were formed initially out of an engagement not just with Indian intellectual and sacred traditions but in the context of wide reading in Western texts. The irony of books like Postmodern Gandhi and the interest in and influence of Gandhi’s work in the West is that it closes the circle on Gandhi’s own relationship to western thought.