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The last chapter of the book looks at the religious and political developments in India after the arrival of the British colonialists. The chapter focuses primarily on the Hindu response to missionary and economic pressures and the changes introduced into Hindu theology as a result. Men such as Rammohun Roy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose receive the greatest attention in the discussion over religion, politics, and ethics. The chapter ends with the founding of India.

This chapter examines the Indian policy of the second Labour Government, arguing that many of the official obstacles that had hampered progress in 1924 were removed at the initiative of the Viceroy, and others were attacked by the Labour ministers through novel institutional forms such as the round table conference and the (unsuccessful) attempt to appoint a Viceroy of their own. It is argued, however, that the key weakness remained: the lack of an effective working alliance between British left-wingers and Congress. The principal reasons for this absence are identified through an analysis of the visit made by Gandhi to Britain in 1931.

This chapter returns to Congress' dilemma of metropolitan organization. It examines the constellation of anti-imperialist groups in Britain in the early 1930s, identifying their relationships with and dependence on British associations and parties. In doing so, it also tests the theory that London acted as an anti-imperialist junction box, providing connections between nationalists from India (and other colonized countries) and metropolitan radicals. It is argued that the tendency of metropolitan anti-imperialism was to become more parasitic, working not through direct connections between British anti-imperialists and Indian nationalists, but through a delicate web of connections between the nationalists and a variety of other-directed movements and causes: theosophy, socialism, communism, pacifism, feminism, and others. The strengths and weaknesses of each alliance are analysed, as are the uncompromising terms of the Gandhians with respect to them.

This chapter examines the efforts of metropolitan anti-imperialists to influence the work of the Liberal Government between 1906 and 1910. It begins by explaining the failure of the British Committee to persuade the new administration to meet the demands of the Congress Moderates as a consequence of the weaknesses identified in the previous chapter. It also traces the development of a splinter group: the Indian Civil Rights Committee. It explores a very different mode of metropolitan anti-imperialism: the rejectionist stance of Shyamji Krishnavarma, Vinayak Savarkar, and the political revolutionaries of India House in Highgate, London. The chapter concludes by examining the emergence of a third mode of anti-imperialism, which developed in London partly through debate in London with advocates of the first two positions: that of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

This chapter examines the growth of co-operation between the British Labour Party and the Indian National Congress, which it is suggested to have peaked at the end of the First World War when Tilak and the Labour Party formed a political alliance over their response to the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. This alliance took organizational form in a revived British Committee. The chapter explores the implications of the death of Tilak and the Gandhian takeover of Congress in 1920, arguing that contrary to conventional wisdom, the British Committee did not slip into decline, but was a healthy organization abolished on principle because its vicarious approach was incompatible with the self-reliance urged by the Gandhians. The chapter concludes by examining the problems the British Labour Party identified with the strategy of Gandhian non-co-operation. The Gandhian proposal — which offered a combined, experimental search for truth between Briton and Indian — is outlined as an alternative, but largely unused mode of co-operation.

This chapter discusses how the Indian American character is the accent or the suburban “sidekick” character to the dominant narratives of young, white masculinity that are prevalent in American culture. The representation and use of the historical figure Mohandas Gandhi in the MTV animated series Clone High revisits and challenges American representations of Asian Americans and South Asian Americans as model minorities. The use of the historical leader Gandhi as a teenage “geek” sidekick without recognition of how Gandhi fits into South Asian history and influences South Asian American communities shows how American stereotypes dwarf any other representation of South Asians or South Asian Americans in the United States.

This chapter examines Labour's evolving Indian policy in the 1920s and early 1930s, focusing on two interrelated developments. The first is Labour's closer engagement with the machinery of imperial governance, especially during its two periods of minority government in 1924 and 1929-31. It is argued that officials in Britain and India managed to prevent ‘linked-up’ campaigning in 1924, but did so less successfully from 1929-31. The second development was Labour's troubled relationship with the increasingly alien Gandhian Congress. This revived the question briefly smothered by Tilak: was Congress really a modernizing, progressive force or not? Labour's answer to this question was affected by the emergence of a distinctive British trade union view of Indian political development, which is also explored in the chapter.

This chapter demonstrates that interreligious learning is not just a desirable project to be pursued by academics alone. Interreligious learning has taken place prominently in public life and with world transforming significance. The circuit of learning between M. K. Gandhi, his teachers, and other black leaders of the American Civil Rights movement is an exemplary instance of interreligious learning and the virtue of interreligious receptivity. By taking a brief look at this momentous engagement across religious traditions and the profound transformations generated by this auspicious instance of interreligious learning, this chapter shows that constructive theology through interreligious learning has already transpired to great public good.

This chapter talks about spiritual nationalists Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore, who constructed a Hindu identity that are in conflict with the Indian railway and wrote against the ideology of modernization. It interprets the political and creative writings of the spiritual nationalists in order to reveal an historical counter-narrative of modernity that is rooted in religion, but articulated in a discussion about technology. For Vivekananda, Ghose, Gandhi, and Tagore, the train’s status as an icon of Western culture is a critical context in which culture had become an instrument of domination, and represented as an alien way of being mechanistic or devoid of moral truth.

Howard Thurman, who played a significant role in racial reconciliation in the United States during the period between the 1940s and the 1970s, was included in the group of African American religious leaders who journeyed to India for a pilgrimage in 1935. One of the most important highlights of this trip involved a conversation with Mohandas Gandhi regarding race relations in the United States and how even in the church, the color bar still had influence and power. Thurman then realized that the color bar was honored in the Christian religion. This chapter explores some of the efforts and experimentations made to integrate gradually racial reconciliation and multiracial congregations, with Howard Thurman's insights being used as a starting point.

The conclusion turns to the writings of M. K. Gandhi, especially Hind Swaraj (1909), to draw together the several theoretical strands that run throughout Spiritual Despots. Gandhi, like his contemporary Max Weber, was interested in the intertwined histories of subjectivity, religious asceticism, and colonial capitalism. As is well known, Gandhi’s notion of self-rule or swaraj was a means of recuperating religious asceticism as a political tool in the struggle against the British Empire. Less discussed is the particular structure of subjectivity that Gandhian self-rule entails. This conclusion argues that, in contrast with the self-enclosed subject prized by the Victorian cult of the individual, the self-ruling Gandhian subject opens out onto networks of tutelary social relations. This structure can be found in different ways in the dialogic structure of Hind Swaraj and in Gandhi’s writings on the Bhagavad Gita. By reading Gandhi through the lens of nineteenth-century religious reform, the conclusion suggests how the early twentieth century “culture of the self” was both a continuation and a refiguring of that earlier historical moment.

In specifying the global as a historical and philosophical condition of the twentieth century, this essay situates India as methodologically instructive for the study of major political concepts ranging from liberalism to democracy. The centrality of conflict and rupture as productive for political projects of the twentieth century is emphasized in relation to current metaphors and methods of global history, be they circulation and exchange or dialogue and dissent. The primacy of the political, in the Indian context, is elaborated in relation to the ethical and the social encompassing issues of violence and nonviolence. The parting with history conditioned the ideological innovation of twentieth-century India that radically reappraised, as it rejected, inherited political vocabularies of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Precisely because it was without precedent, this essay argues, agonism appeared as the enduring form of the world’s largest democracy.

This chapter argues that pacifism is not merely an applied ethic—a narrow approach to the particular moral problem of war—but rather a comprehensive ethical theory. The same is true of just war theory, the other main approach to the morality of war. The chapter looks at several pacifist traditions, beginning with the Radical Reformation or Anabaptist stream within Christianity. It also explores the pacifist thought of Martin Luther King Jr., who emphasized the relationship between means and ends, a theme that is also central to the thought of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi insisted that practices are not just tools for achieving predetermined goals, however, but shape the ways we conceive of those ends and of the possibilities and obstacles we face in achieving them. This offers a novel way of conceiving not just of means and ends but of ethics generally, in which practices are central from start to finish

This chapter examines the active role of Viśvāmitra’s mythological persona within the social history of colonial and postcolonial India over the last century—within the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, the political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, cinema and television, and especially within the Marathi devotional performance tradition known as nāradīya kīrtan. Special attention is given to a colonial-period critique of Viśvāmitra’s egoism (ahaṃkār) that appeared in the context of Brahmin social reform in Maharashtra, and how, by the onset of the twenty-first century, his hybridity has now come to reflect a desire to internalize traditional Brahmin identity amidst the corrupt politics, hyperurban chaos, and transnational cultural flows of contemporary Maharashtrian life, pointing toward a new, “postmodern” configuration of Brahmin social power.

This chapter discusses the technological imaginings present in Rokeya Hossain's “Sultana's Dream” and Mohandas Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). The two works shared a common concern for technology and its role, and the centrality of the machine and of technology generally in Indian thinking about the past, present, and future. The chapter also discusses the contrasting views of Gandhi and Rokeya Hossain about modern technology.

Political imprisonment originated in the mid-nineteenth century, as European states turned away from the use of exile (to places such as Australia or Siberia) and increasingly placed opponents in state prisons for lengthy periods. At the same time, opposition movements became more organized around coherent ideologies and developed the capability of celebrating and publicizing their imprisoned comrades. This era would see the first concentration camps, the first genocides, and the first civilian refugees. It is not surprising that political prisoners would take their place on stage at the same time. The Fenian movement in Ireland, the socialists in the Russian Empire (especially in Poland), the British suffragettes, and Gandhi’s satyagraha resisters in British South Africa are the primary examples used.

This introduction lays the conceptual groundwork for the book as a whole by re-theorizing a term that has been important to the academic study of religion since the early twentieth century: Max Weber’s notion of “worldly asceticism.” By pairing Weber with M. K. Gandhi, the introduction adjusts Weber’s story about the place of Protestantism in modernity, suggesting a much more open-ended account of how ascetic technologies of self-rule circulate between the religious and the secular. It also works to amplify both thinkers’ critique of modern subjectivity by positioning them as heirs to nineteenth-century polemics against Hindu “priestcraft.” These polemics, it is argued, implied a normatively liberal model of the subject as ideally autonomous from external control. The introduction draws on the work of Michel Foucault to rethink this ideal of self-rule. It uses the figure of the despotic priest to propose a model of the subject in which the line between self and other, or autonomy and heteronomy, becomes productively blurred. The discussion then turns to the broader scene of anticlericalism in colonial India, asking how Indian modernity came to be defined against the priest.