This book is about the Mahatma as a political thinker, one who recognised how the quotidian reality of modern life could be radicalised to produce the most extraordinary effects. In this sense he belongs with Lenin, Hitler and Mao as one of the great revolutionary figures of our times, though his politics was directed along paths other than state-building.
Focusing on his unsentimental engagement with the hard facts of imperial domination, fascism and civil war, The Impossible Indian places Gandhi at the centre of modern history, exploring the new political reality he claimed to have discovered. This was a politics the Mahatma mobilised in practices that required as much sacrifice, and even death, as those propagated by his revolutionary peers, if for very different reasons.
Faisal Devji’s book reveals Gandhi as the hard-hitting political thinker he was, someone willing to countenance violence to achieve his objectives, and challenges the idealistic portrayals of the Mahatma that prevail even today. ( )