Gandhi's Diagnostic Approach Rethought: Exploring a Perspective on His Life and Work

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This book explores a new angle on Gandhi's life and work, the way in which his interest in medical matters shows itself in his language and his responses to situations, people and movements. A dialogue is set up across space and time, highlighting Gandhi's diagnoses of causes and cures, and his unfailing focus on the needs of his own people Discussions include his critique of Russian thinkers, Mazzini, and an extensive examination of his interest in Charles Bradlaugh which brings out the interplay between Gandhi's courtroom experience and his way of distinguishing between truth and untruth. Analyses of his understanding of the moral equivalent of war, the image of the oceanic circle, tradition and modernity, further illustrate his diagnostic approach, laying bare both the intellectual sinews of his thought as well as his constant stress on praxis. Relating Gandhi's hermeneutic of practice to present-day conditions and the maladies which beset us, the author offers an epilogue which will not fail to provoke the reader.

This is Margaret Chatterjee's fourth study of Gandhi's life and thought. She brings to her writing an unusual combination of philosophical training. analysis of historical context and interest in the history of ideas, and concern with contemporary dilemmas. She has taught in Delhi University. Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bryn Mawr and Westminster College, Oxford and been Visiting Professor in many countries. She was at one time Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Her publications include Gandhi's Religious Thought (Macmillan and Notre Dame, 1983), Gandhi and his Jewish Friends (Macmillan, 1992), and Gandhi and the Challenge of Religious Diversity (Promilla & Co., Publishers in association with Bibliophile South Asia, New Delhi & Chicago, 2005).

One of the things that study of Gandhi's life and work teaches is the number of perspectives it can accommodate - a good illustration of anekantavada. To examine his reactions to people. events and movements, his participation in every aspect of his country's affairs, is to be struck, inter alia, by the interest he took in medical matters, especially in nursing. This interest reveals itself in his editorials, and the language he uses at other times. when words like 'disease' and 'infection' are frequently to be found. He showed acuity in diagnosing what lay at the heart of standpoints not his own, and then turned unfailingly to consider what would be suitable for India. To say that his mind was fixed on causes and cures is to put this another, and perhaps more accessible, way. I have not attempted more than to select a few occasions and themes which seem to me to bear this out. I have come to think that here was a man not only whose legal training and practice disposed him to seek a satisfactory, that is just, solution of conflicts, but, and not to be missed, a man whose desire was to heal. It was not my intention to work a metaphor to death, or claim that the perspective I have chosen to concentrate on is the leading one. Of course it is not. Furthermore - and there are many to stress this - new situations, symptoms and maladies could well call for other lines of treatment, and some of this is only palliative. For this reason Gandhi disliked the notion of Gandhism. for each generation had to work out its salvation for itself. But wherever oppression continues and a sense of priorities seems to be missing, and whenever moral blindness obscures vision, it would be foolish in the extreme to ignore what he has to say.