Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth

This article aims to reconstruct Gandhi as a political thinker. In so doing it argues that truth rather than nonviolence was the central category of Gandhian politics. Truth for Gandhi was a capacity that broke with the consensual and took the form of an insistent visibility. Gandhi circumvented the dominant political languages of liberalism, historicism, and Marxism by focusing on sacrifice and the transformation of the self. This radical politics of truth, while impossible to institutionalize, nevertheless signaled the twentieth-century reevaluation of human experience. The Gandhian political subordinated the abstraction of nation and economy via the immediacy and visibility of embodied practice.