The Common Cause: Leela Gandhi's Ahimsaic Historiography and the Postcolonial Ethic — M.D.Muthukumaraswamy

 The Common Cause: Leela Gandhi's Ahimsaic Historiography and the Postcolonial Ethic

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M.D.Muthukumaraswamy 

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Leela Gandhi, the John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University and a founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies, stands as a pivotal figure in the evolution of postcolonial theory. Her body of work marks a significant "ethical turn" within the discipline, moving its focus from a primary concern with opposition and resistance toward a more nuanced exploration of non-antagonistic engagement, transnational collaboration, and radical ethics. Central to this intellectual project is her sustained and critical re-reading of the life and thought of her great-grandfather, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. This familial connection is not merely a biographical footnote but a profound methodological premise. It provides a unique vantage point from which she deconstructs the nationalist hagiography surrounding M.K. Gandhi, extricates his philosophy from a purely Indian context, and repositions it within the global, transnational networks where it was forged.

Her academic trajectory, from her foundational text Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction to her more recent works Affective Communities and The Common Cause, reveals a progressively deepening engagement with Gandhian ethics. This is not an exercise in defending a legacy but in using it as a critical lens to challenge the very foundations of postcolonial thought. By demonstrating that some of M.K. Gandhi's core philosophies, such as nonviolence and vegetarianism, were influenced by "transnational as well as indigenous sources," she transforms a personal connection into a powerful analytical tool. This approach allows her to challenge the binary opposition between "West" and "non-West" that has long structured the field, instead recovering what she terms "transnational traditions of anti-imperial ethics"—forms of global connection that are "intimate and minor and small and interpersonal”. Through this project, Leela Gandhi re-imagines post-colonialism not just as a critique of power, but as the pursuit of a non-injurious and radically inclusive mode of community.

Leela Gandhi's first major work, “Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction “(1998), was a landmark text that sought to "'name' post-colonialism" by mapping its complex intellectual genealogy. In it, she meticulously drew connections between the burgeoning field and its philosophical antecedents in poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism, establishing a coherent context for its emergence. A crucial intervention of the book was its positioning of M.K. Gandhi and the Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon as the primary intellectual heritage of postcolonial theory. She argued that both thinkers, despite their stark differences, fundamentally revealed the "ethical inadequacy and undesirability" of the West's colonial civilising mission. In her reading, they shared an optimistic vision for the postcolonial task: to rebuild liberated nations into a state of "creative autonomy from Europe”. By placing M.K. Gandhi at the origin point of the discipline's theoretical concerns, she established him not merely as a historical figure of anti-colonial resistance but as a foundational theorist whose work anticipated the core questions of post-colonialism.

This initial positioning, however, also brought into sharp relief the complexities and contradictions that her later work would need to navigate. Leela Gandhi herself acknowledged the paradox of M.K. Gandhi's status, noting that "while it may be revolutionary to teach Gandhi as political theory in the Anglo-American academy, he is, and has always been, canonical in India”. This observation highlights the different intellectual weight his figure carries across geopolitical contexts, complicating any simple appropriation of his thought. Furthermore, the canonical figure of M.K. Gandhi is beset by powerful postcolonial critiques that challenge the very foundations of his legacy, creating the intellectual tension that her subsequent scholarship seeks to resolve through a non-defensive, theoretical reframing.

Among the most significant are postcolonial feminist critiques. Scholars such as Ketu Katrak have argued that while M.K. Gandhi successfully mobilized women for the nationalist cause, he did so by appropriating and idealizing traditionally "feminine" traits like passivity and suffering for his campaign of non-violent resistance. This strategy, critics contend, ultimately reinforced patriarchal structures by promoting a "'traditional' ideology wherein female sexuality was legitimately embodied only in marriage, wifehood, domesticity," doing little to liberate Indian women from their subordination to men.

Equally profound is the critique from Dalit perspectives, most forcefully articulated by B.R. Ambedkar. This critique charges M.K. Gandhi with a deep-seated paternalism, exemplified by his coining of the term "Harijan" (children of God) to refer to Dalits. Critics argue that he defended an idealised version of the Hindu caste system (varna) even while condemning untouchability, thereby failing to attack the root of the oppression. His "fast-unto-death" in 1932, which coerced Ambedkar into signing the Poona Pact and relinquishing the demand for a separate electorate for Dalits, is seen as a political manoeuvre that permanently weakened Dalit political autonomy in favour of a unified, upper-caste-dominated Hindu society.

A review of the first edition of “Postcolonial Theory” noted that the book "largely takes an uncomplicated view of Gandhi's legacy," a valuable observation that helps frame Leela Gandhi's subsequent intellectual trajectory. This initial, broader mapping of the field, which established M.K. Gandhi's relevance, appears not as an oversight but as a necessary first step. It set the stage for a more ambitious, long-term project visible in her later books: to move from situating M.K. Gandhi within post-colonialism to actively reforming post-colonialism by using a deeply complicated, de-nationalised, and re-theorised Gandhian ethic as its primary analytical tool.

In her second major work, “Affective Communities: Anti-colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship” (2006), Leela Gandhi makes her first decisive move away from the antagonistic binaries that she felt constrained postcolonial theory. Expressing a scholarly dissatisfaction with the "impossible colonial divide," her objective in this book is to excavate a hidden history of anti-colonialism located not in overt opposition but in "minor narratives of cross-cultural collaboration between oppressors and oppressed”. To do this, she develops the concepts of "affective communities" and the "politics of friendship." She defines friendship not as a private emotion but as a political practice—a form of "affiliative solidarity that rubs against the grain of obligations to kin, party, or nation" and thus holds a "dissident potential”. This form of anti-colonialism is grounded in what she calls "xenophilia," an ethical disposition of openness and hospitality towards the stranger and the foreign.

The most compelling case study for this thesis is her radical re-reading of M.K. Gandhi's formative years in London. Instead of presenting his political philosophy as an organic outgrowth of purely Indian traditions, she meticulously traces the "social networks of activists" that connected the young law student to various marginalised Western subcultures. She demonstrates how his encounters with fin-de-siècle vegetarians, animal rights advocates, spiritualists, and homosexual reformers like Edward Carpenter were instrumental in the development of his most iconic political concepts: ahimsa (non-violence) and swaraj (self-rule). This analysis directly challenges conventional genealogies that trace his philosophy solely to indigenous sources like Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist thought.

Leela Gandhi draws a crucial distinction between the paternalistic, utilitarian animal welfare movements of the high Victorian era—which she argues were often in league with "the colonial imperatives of utilitarian philosophy"—and the more radical fin-de-siècle dissidents M.K. Gandhi encountered. These latter groups coupled their advocacy for animal rights with socialist and anti-colonial aims, creating a platform for an "enlightened model of anarchic, disobedient, and paradigmatically nongovernmental sociality”. It was within these "affective communities" in the imperial metropole that the young M.K. Gandhi found a warm welcome and the intellectual resources to transform his personal commitments into a revolutionary political philosophy.

By tracing M.K. Gandhi's core principles back to his interactions with these marginalised Western groups, Leela Gandhi performs a radical re-routing of the genealogy of anti-colonial thought. The conventional narrative of post-colonialism, which often centres on an indigenous response to a monolithic colonial power, is disrupted. Her analysis shows that the very tools of resistance are themselves hybrid and transnational, co-produced in the "minor" spaces of cross-cultural friendship and ethical collaboration. This deconstruction of origins reveals that the ethical resources for anti-imperialism were not located exclusively in the colonised periphery but could also be found within the metropole itself, among those who were, for various reasons, outsiders to the imperial project.

Leela Gandhi's third book, “The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–1955” (2014), represents her most theoretically ambitious intervention. In it, she presents a "transnational history of democracy" not as a set of political institutions but as an ethical practice of "disciplined self-fashioning”. The book's central argument rests on a powerful distinction between two competing ethical systems that defined the first half of the twentieth century.

On one hand, she identifies a "shared culture of perfectionism" that cut across dominant ideologies like imperialism, fascism, and even some forms of liberalism. This ethic, she argues, prized ideals of sovereignty, mastery, heroism, and self-consolidation—a politics of power that inherently "excluded the ordinary and unexceptional”. On the other hand, she uncovers a counter-tradition she terms "moral imperfectionism." This is an anti-colonial and anti-fascist ethic devoted to "ordinariness and abnegation," a practice of "self-ruination, inconsequence, making oneself less rather than more”. It is an "ethics of undoing" that finds political potential in failure and celebrates the “inconsequential".

The critical link in her argument is the reinterpretation of M.K. Gandhi's "spiritual discipline" as the quintessential political practice of moral imperfectionism. His ascetic practices—such as fasting, celibacy, and vows of silence and simplicity—are often viewed as his most esoteric or religiously motivated actions, and have been critiqued by figures like George Orwell as anti-humanist and a flight from the world. Leela Gandhi radically reframes this asceticism. She argues it is not a retreat from politics but a profound political technology: "the art of making yourself small and creating conditions of democracy through styles of self-reduction”.

In this framework, M.K. Gandhi's self-abnegation becomes the ethical precondition for a truly radical and inclusive democracy. By refusing the heroic, sovereign self demanded by the perfectionist ethic of empire, he clears the ground for an "ethics of becoming common”. His seminal text, Hind Swaraj, serves as a "cue for democratic imperfectionism," calling for a form of self-rule (swaraj) based not on state power but on self-control and non-sovereignty. This connects directly to her evolving thoughts on friendship as a "commitment to making unfinished”. This "imperfectionist democracy" is a friendship-based democracy, a mode of "utopian inclusivity" premised on perpetually "keeping the gates open" to the other. By re-theorising M.K. Gandhi's asceticism, Leela Gandhi transforms what is often seen as his most controversial feature into a coherent theory of democratic practice, offering an ethical antidote to the logic of power that undergirds both colonialism and its violent aftermaths.

Leela Gandhi's engagement with ahimsa (non-violence) transcends a mere thematic interest in her great-grandfather's philosophy; it becomes the guiding principle for her scholarly methodology. In a review of The Common Cause, her method is aptly named "ahimsaic (non-violent) historiography," a concept she herself has explored in lectures on "nonviolent historiography".This approach represents a deliberate "reworking of M.K. Gandhi's ahimsa" and its application to the academic practice of writing history. It is a method born from the conviction that the way scholars engage with the violent past of colonialism has profound ethical implications for the present and future.

The principles of ahimsaic historiography are rooted in a refusal to reproduce the logic of the conflicts it studies. First, it requires a rejection of the "Manichean and binary discourse concerning the colonised and the coloniser" that has dominated much of postcolonial thought. Instead of reinforcing antagonistic divides, it seeks to theorise a "non-coercive relationship" with the past and its actors. Second, this method actively recovers "minor stories of cross-cultural encounter" and "forgotten meetings, surprise encounters, and anomalous events" that are typically erased by grand, teleological narratives of nationalist struggle or imperial domination. Finally, this historiographical practice is connected to the ethics of "renunciation" and "exit" that she outlines in the epilogue to the second edition of Postcolonial Theory. Here, postcolonial thinking itself becomes a "contemporary philosophy of renunciation, with a unique proposal for uninjured life and non-injurious community”. The theoretical groundwork for this methodological turn can be found in her early article, "Concerning Violence: The Circulations and Limits of Gandhian 'Ahisma'" (1997), where she first began to analyse the complex, transnational circulation of the concept, preparing it for its later transformation into a scholarly practice.

The ultimate implication of this methodological innovation is the re-imagining of postcolonial studies as a constructive and redemptive ethical project. Post-colonialism, born out of the violence of empire, has often been structured around opposition and critique. By applying ahimsa to the act of writing history, Leela Gandhi proposes that the scholar can engage with this violent past without perpetuating its logic of antagonism. The goal is not merely to deconstruct power, but to write about history in a manner that opens up possibilities for a "noninjurious community." The how of scholarship becomes as important as the what. The historical narrative can be either a continuation of conflict by other means or a form of non-violent engagement that seeks to repair and create new forms of relation. This elevates the role of the postcolonial critic from that of a detached analyst to an active ethical agent, whose work contributes to the very world it describes.

Leela Gandhi's intellectual journey represents a profound and sustained effort to shift the grounds of postcolonial theory from a politics of opposition to an ethics of relation. At the heart of this transformative project is her critical and creative dialogue with the legacy of M.K. Gandhi. She moves beyond the binaries of celebration and critique to re-theorise his core principles as vital resources for a contemporary global ethics. From her initial positioning of him as a foundational anti-colonial thinker, she proceeds to deconstruct his thought from its nationalist moorings in Affective Communities, and finally reconstructs his practice of asceticism as a radical theory of democracy in “The Common Cause”.

Her most enduring contribution may be the powerful concept of "unfinishedness," a theme that weaves through her later work and interviews. For her, both friendship and the radical democracy it enables are not "perfective" verbs—completed projects or states of being—but "imperfective" ones, defined as "incomplete and iterative activities”. They represent a "commitment to making unfinished," a continuous and open-ended practice of relation. She extends this metaphor to post-colonialism itself. In the manifesto-like epilogue to her updated Postcolonial Theory, she concludes that "Postcolonial thinking is best as an imperfect outlook that remains indefinite, unfinished, and peripatetic”. Her work thus defines the discipline not as a static body of doctrine but as an ongoing ethical project, always in the process of becoming.

Ultimately, Leela Gandhi's scholarship does not seek to offer the final word on her great-grandfather. Instead, her ahimsaic historiography "makes him unfinished." It rescues his thought from the fixed and often sterile categories of nationalist sainthood and postcolonial critique, re-presenting him as a dynamic, complex, and perpetually relevant source for imagining a global, ethical, and radically democratic future.