Besides instantiating this connection, Gandhi’s lifework is instructive and exemplary in multiple and complex ways – a fact which explains the large number of diverse interpretations found in the literature. In a perceptive and resolute manner, Terchek focuses on one crucial strand in the Gandhian tapestry of ideas and practices: the “struggle for autonomy.” As he persuasively shows, autonomy – a translation of the Indian swaraj – serves as the inner passkey or Ariadne’s thread linking and illuminating the many dimensions of the Gandhian edifice. In his words: “Autonomy stands at the center of Gandhi’s political philosophy. It is his greatest good and precedes in importance his other political and social goals” (21). In Terchek’s view, swaraj even takes precedence over a number of other prominent themes usually associated with Gandhi’s name, such as those of “truth force” (satyagraha) and nonviolence or nonviolent resistance (ahimsa): “The role of nonviolence for Gandhi is often overstressed. It is not the highest good for Gandhi; autonomy is, that is, governing oneself honestly and courageously” (180). Successive chapters guide the reader through a number of domains which illustrate in different ways the pervasive importance of Gandhian autonomy: the innovative recuperation of cultural and religious traditions; the critical assessment of western-style modernity and modernization; the emphasis on economic self-sufficiency (bypassing both capitalism and socialism); the cultivation of decentralized and participatory politics operating largely on the village level; and the practical enactment of nonviolent struggle (where nonviolence was never an absolute or “perfectionist” yardstick). Although distancing himself from some specific policies, Terchek perceives these various domains as harboring fruitful lessons for the future. “If Gandhi has something to say to the late modern world,” he notes, “it is surely not found in his specific proposals for spinning or a rural economy. His legacy comes with the issues he raises about autonomy, democracy, economic security, participatory communities, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict” (237).

The issues that Gandhi raises are indeed profound and troubling. For the modern western reader, “autonomy” is prone to appear as a synonym for individual freedom – which would permit the rapid integration of Gandhi into the modern western canon. This tactic, however, is foiled by Gandhi’s stern critique of western modernity. In fact, as is evident in Hind Swaraj and many other places, Gandhi persistently and eloquently challenged the vaunted accomplishments of modern western civilization. According to Terchek, Gandhi was “one of the most resolute critics of modernity in the twentieth century,” one who saw modernity, unless checked, “sweeping away everything that stands in its way as it tries to take ‘charge of the world”’ (77). For Gandhi, the defects of western modernity are many and pervasive, while its advantages are few. Among other things, he questioned the modern belief in reason or rationality as the only avenue to “truth,” a belief he denounced as near idolatrous and as unable to compensate for the loss of love, trust, and forgiveness. A close corollary of this belief is the addiction to rationalist modernization geared toward industrial production, the multiplication of technological gadgets, and the spoliation of the earth. Needless to say, his critique would not have found much comfort in a depiction of modernity as an incomplete or “unfinished project”; given its many disastrous drawbacks, finishing the project would have seemed like completing disaster. In Terchek’s view, what most annoyed Gandhi about western modernity was its complete lack of self-critique, a lack due to the rejection of any outside or non-modernist standard of evaluation. It was for this reason that Gandhi invoked tradition – a critically reformed tradition – to serve as a benchmark forcing the modern project “to explain itself.” In Terchek’s words: “Gandhi seeks to complicate modernity and rob it of its certainty...For him, the pressing challenge is to disturb what is settled in the modern project in order to keep it from smothering the kinds of standards and practices he considers essential to autonomy” (78).

Seen against this background, Gandhi’s outlook appears as an oddity or anomaly. Commonly, western modernity, rooted in the Enlightenment, is presented as the advent of freedom; those who stand in this legacy honor themselves as the champions of the “free world.” On the other hand, opponents of this legacy – antimodern traditionalists – castigate freedom as a synonym for license. What is – or should be – disorienting about Gandhi is his simultaneous critique of modernity and defense of freedom or autonomy. To be sure, freedom here has a different meaning. Faithful to the core meaning of swaraj, Terchek presents autonomy not as the will to rule or impose oneself on others, but rather as a kind of self-rule, as the ability to “govern oneself honestly and courageously.” Clearly, such self-rule is far removed from selfishness and, above all, from the modern conception of “sovereign” individuals totally “in charge” of themselves and their world. Swaraj for Gandhi means not only freedom from external but also from internal, self-centered compulsions. As Terchek notes, “individuals who are directed by their desires are not autonomous...For this reason, Gandhi holds that we can be slaves not only of others but also to our own weakness” (22). Hence, Gandhi’s celebration of autonomy or swaraj is different from conventional liberal conceptions. His free agents operate in an “interdependent cosmos,” neither above nor outside the rest of the universe; they are “encumbered with duties” and assigned responsibility to lead moral lives and attend to the good of themselves and their community without constraints. Freedom from this vantage is not an abstract principle enshrined in documents, but a concretely situated performance. Above all, Gandhi wants autonomous agents “to have the freedom to cultivate the love and service he believes characterize the best feature of human nature” (23–24).

Deliberately nonconformist, Gandhi’s outlook puts pressure on a number of cherished trademarks of western liberal modernity, such as the centrality of self-interest, the celebration of the market, the primacy of “self-evident” rights, and the preference for neutral procedures over moralpolitical practices. For Gandhi, the focus on self-interest is liable to foster selfishness rather than autonomy. As Terchek notes, he wants “to make politics safe from interests, not hospitable to them”; if interests are to carry weight at all, he would make “the well-being of the most destitute the highest one” (153–5). A close corollary of the focus on interest is the construal of politics along market lines, with different social groups competing for material advantage. By contrast, Gandhi advocates a social pluralism catering again not to selfishness but to swaraj, that is, one “attentive to and protective of the multiple traditions and practices that mark [his] country.” Another concomitant of Gandhian autonomy is the conception of human agents not as isolated rights-bearers, but as participants in an interdependent moral fabric – from which rights can be derived. In his own words: “The true source of rights is duty. If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek.” Human agency, one should note, extends here equally to men and women, with Gandhi regarding the latter as potentially “perfectly independent and self-supporting” and as equal practitioners of satyagraha (67). Most importantly, Gandhian autonomy challenges the trust in a neutral proceduralism, charging that such standard devices of procedural democracy as universal franchise and majoritarianism are unable to legitimate public power. “In his search for a responsive, nonviolent mode of popular government,” Terchek observes, Gandhi urges fellow Indians to move beyond proceduralism and market pluralism in the direction of “participatory, decentralized modes of politics” (151, 159). The challenge is particularly important given the retreat of the state and the rise of new “megainstitutions” (like corporate business and massive bureaucracies), which completely lack public scrutiny. In the face of such developments, Gandhian politics requires “simplicity, openness, and accountability.”

The portrait of Gandhi offered by Terchek is fascinating and appealing and, on the whole, persuasively coherent. Clearly, critical qualms have to take a backseat to appreciation – but cannot be entirely silenced. A major qualm has to do with a certain tendency to domesticate Gandhi or to make him more readily congruent with modern western predilections than appears warranted. This tendency affects even the central category of autonomy or swaraj, where Terchek often seems confusingly ambivalent. On the one hand, he notes that Gandhi’s “reconceptualization of autonomy and equality,” with their corollaries of community, duty, and cohesion, are “oppositional to modern ones” (i.e., concepts) and meant to mount “a critique of modernity and modernization” (77–8). On the other hand, however, and almost in the same breath, he writes that Gandhi’s critique of modernity was partial and his theory “closely tied to such modern concepts as autonomy and equality.” The ambivalence is intensified by the assertion that, as used by Gandhi, “equality and liberty take on much of the character they do in modern claims about legal, political, and social equality and autonomy” (96). Given such statements, one is not surprised to detect a similar unevenness regarding individualism and liberalism. Although objecting to the modern notion of “sovereign” individuals “taking charge” of the world, Terchek holds that, in the Gandhian view, human agents are meant to “control the process rather than being controlled by it” and, in particular, to “control” the process of economic production (91, 122). Quite consistently, this ambivalence also begins to color his concluding remarks on Gandhi’s future significance, where we read that some form of liberalism is likely to be the “dominant language of politics” in the next century and that “Gandhi’s frequent attacks on many basic principles in much liberal thinking should not obscure his many affinities with liberalism” (236).

The tendency of domestication or assimilation is aided and abetted by Terchek’s own (predominantly) western outlook and his chief preoccupation with the intellectual world of modern western thinkers. Throughout the text, Gandhi is repeatedly compared with or juxtaposed to a host of western philosophers and writers, including Tolstoy, Locke, Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Ferdinand Toennies (misspelled as Toinnes), Weber, and Nietzsche. One misses a similar comparison or juxtaposition with the galaxy of Indian intellectual figures with whom Gandhi was closely engaged, like Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, Ambedkar, and Kalam Azad (even Nehru is mostly consigned to footnotes). This imbalances carries over into the treatment of the broader intellectual tradition to which Gandhi saw himself heir. The discussion of Hinduism is limited to a few pages in the book, and mainly restricted to some references to the Gita and to a few concepts like dharma and ahimsa. In these respects, one might wish that Terchek had troubled his western readers a bit more resolutely, stirring them out of their intellectual self-sufficiency. After all, the notion of “cosmic interdependence,” frequently invoked in the text, is hardly intelligible without some familiarity with Upanishadic teachings and later Vedantic philosophy. (According to one of his grandsons, Ramchandra Gandhi, the Gandhian meaning of swaraj is utterly opaque outside the tradition of Advaita Vedanta.) Comments on the Gita also might have been more attentive to Gandhi’s self-conception as a karmayogin and his deep attachment to Vaishnava religiosity. Without these sharper contours, Gandhi becomes too readily a western-style guru. If this happens, Gandhi’s deeper significance – as stated by Terchek – is foiled, namely, his ambition “to complicate modernity and rob it of its certainty” in order to keep it from “smothering the kinds of standards and practices he considers essential to autonomy.”