Leela Gandhi

The common cause : postcolonial ethics and the practice of democracy, 1900-1955

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism - an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhis spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracys future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

Postcolonial theory and the crisis of European man

In his recent article, ‘The History of Theory’, Ian Hunter suggests that the putative ‘moment of theory’, understood by many as crucial to a series of cultural-intellectual developments within huma...

SPIRITS OF NON-VIOLENCE

In the first few decades of the twentieth century there came into view two competing yet collaborative discourses of non-violence, one non-western and the other western. Where the former found its condition of possibility in the particular forms of anticolonial politics popularized by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, the latter emerged in more muted form out of the curious interchanges between English guild socialism and continental phenomenology. Did these culturally dissonant traditions ever converge or enter into productive dialogue? Do they designate a coherent form of postcolonial ethics, one we might draw upon to counter the epidemic of harmfulness in the present world? The answer to these questions requires that we carefully reconsider the cosmopolitan dimensions of what Jacques Derrida has described as an imaginary colloquium around the thematics of ‘spirit’ which also emerged in the period under consideration: ‘And this is indeed what they are all wondering, in this imaginary symposium, in this invisible university where, for more than twenty years, the greatest European minds met. They echo each other, discuss or translate the same admiring anguish: “So, what is happening to us? So, what is happening to Spirit? Where is it coming to us from: Is it still from spirit?”’(Derrida 1987: 124). This essay hopes to bear witness to M. K. Gandhis role as a crucial interlocutor in this almost, but not entirely, imaginary discussion. It will, first, sketch the historical setting for the cosmopolitan crisis of spirit under review, looking for points of convergence between European and non-European variations on the theme. A second, concluding, section accounts more theoretically for the philosophical contrapuntality between the refrains of non-violence and of spiritual crisis, respectively. My purpose is to enlist Gandhis voice in the design for a ‘modern’ metaphysics of morals founded upon the valorization of the principles of non-violence.

Global Perspectives on Modernity and Modernism: Some Notes on Twentieth-Century Transnational Anticolonial Metaphysics

These notes are structured around the contention that the early years of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a transnational heterodox metaphysics, or properly speaking, postmetaphysics, whose bearer would be the subject of a distinctly modern form of nonviolence. Did these discourses designate a coherent global ethics that we might draw upon to counter the pernicious epidemic of harmfulness in the present world? Can we identify the historical and philosophical catalysts for early twentieth-century postmetaphysics? What bearing does this “movement,” if we may call it that, have upon the question of colonialism? These are some of the questions canvassed in the discussion.

Introduction: ‘Mother Country’

Contemplating in 1840 the imperial reach of the Catholic Church, Thomas Babington Macaulay imagined in a distant future ‘some traveller from New Zealand [who] shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s’ (‘Von Ranke’ 39). A British colonial taking as an object of aesthetic creativity a recognisably English scene is a speculative curiosity. Australasia had been celebrated in his Minute on Indian Education (1835) as one of the ‘great European communities which are rising’ in the southern hemisphere through the spread of the English language and of education in a British and European epistemological tradition. The other was in the ‘south of Africa’ (428). In India he envisioned the reach of that language and tradition to be the ‘form[ation of] a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (430). Twentieth-century writers from the British empire and its decolonizing nations regularly attest to the ways in which being English-speaking and having been educated in the knowledges English makes available has produced England as the centre of an imperial cartography, as a country of the imagination, and as a conflicted site of affiliation (and disaffiliation) encapsulated in the phrase ‘mother country’.