Content area
Full text
Introduction
Gandhi is known for his idea of 'religious politics'.1In the preface of Satyana Prayogo athva Atmakatha (1925-29; hereafter, Autobiography), he illustrated this explicitly:
What I want to do, what I have been eagerly doing for the last 30 years, is self-realization (atmadarsan), to see God face to face (Isvarno saksatkar), [and] the liberation of the self (moks). My every activity is practiced just from this perspective. My every writing is undertaken just from this perspective, and my jumping into the political sphere (rajyaprakarani ksetr) is also subject to this thing [perspective].2
Later, in the concluding chapter, 'Purnahuti',3Gandhi remarked: 'One who says religion (dharm) is not related to politics (rajyaprakaran) does not know religion.'4Anthony Parel pertinently argues in this connection that Gandhi's Autobiography represents 'the dynamic nature of the relationship of politics to moksha'.5This dynamism in Gandhi's philosophy is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of his religio-political conception of satyagraha (literally meaning 'holding onto/insisting on the truth').
In contrast to this established view, however, some recent works highlight that, towards the end of his life, Gandhi began to put forward his ideas on 'secularism', in which he reiterated that, while religion was bound to be 'individual' or 'personal', the state should be wholly 'secular'.6Although Gandhi at no time in his life espoused the top-down religious compulsion of theocracy, it was not until the 1940s that he desperately called for the individualization of religion along with the creation of the secular state. He became particularly vocal in support of the dissemination of this principle during the period after the partition.
There are two major interpretations of this secularism of Gandhi's last years. The first is the argument proposed by Bipan Chandra and K. Sangari.7According to these works, Gandhi came to realize that a religion could no longer 'be a binding force in a multireligious society', since the unrelenting communal violence during the 1940s had 'destroyed or transformed the "inside" of all religions'.8This embryonic recognition ultimately led Gandhi to advocate the principle of secularism, pushing 'against his own earlier insistence on the fusion of (the spirit of)...