July/Aug 2004 History Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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There are numerous Mahatmas. There is the saintly Mahatma (or "great soul," as the honorific is often translated) about whom the more that is positively said, the better, and critique of any kind seems churlish; there is the ascetic Mahatma, living and burnishing an ideal of the simple life; there is the political Mahatma, cannily outfoxing the British; there is the ambiguous Mahatma, whose views on the body and on women may be extreme or not, politically correct or not; there is the messianic Mahatma leading the way to social justice and peace, a Mahatma good for all times and places. Each of these Mahatmas makes an appearance in the books under review, to which one must add the intolerant and jealous Mahatma who generated a "cult of personality" that must be scrutinized critically.

Mark Juergensmeyer's Mahatma is a rather predictable figure who shows the way to contemporary political protest and, even more grandly, to peace on both the personal and political levels. Gandhi's Way is not in fact a new book but rather a newly titled reissue of a book previously published as Fighting with Gandhi and Fighting Fair. Tellingly, Juergensmeyer subtitles his book a "handbook" for "conflict resolution." The problem—and it is a pervasive one in Gandhian literature, especially that of a hagiographic tilt—is that Gandhi's approach is not challenged for its possible inapplicability to conflicts between nation-states by comparison to conflicts within nation-states, at least those that have some developed rule of law—as did the British Raj.

The critical distinction posed by Augustine and taken up by Aquinas—that what is incumbent upon the individual may be forbidden to the statesman responsible for the safety and well-being ...