ABSTRACT
Gandhi had no settled tradition to transmit – he had to make one, remake himself, and make a constituency all at once. Both his discourse and his tutelary persona were conjunctural and made up of rapid responses and reactions, changes in points of view in the pressure of immediate situations, dotted with subsequent clarifications and modifications, and centered on day-to-day synthesis rather than on theology proper. This essay focuses on the nature of his Hinduism and his attempt to craft a political and moral will in the 1920s and 1930s. The striking and unresolved contradiction in Gandhi’s discourse is whether political action was going to form the Indian into a new sort of historical agent or express and make manifest the inner essence of Indian civilization. There is a related and pervasive contradiction between extracting the essence of scriptural texts by expurgating misogynist or morally repugnant passages and “history” as the figure of veracity, verisimilitude, memory and political change.
