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Gandhi's Body Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism by Joseph S. Alter Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 207 pp. $34.95 Martin Luther In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India by Susan Billington Harper Eerdmans, 2000 320 pp. $32.99

There are numerous Mahatmas. There is the saintly Mahatma (or "great soul," as the honorific is often translated) about whom the more that is positively said, the better, and critique of any kind seems churlish; there is the ascetic Mahatma, living and burnishing an ideal of the simple life; there is the political Mahatma, cannily outfoxing the British; there is the ambiguous Mahatma, whose views on the body and on women may be extreme or not, politically correct or not; there is the messianic Mahatma leading the way to social justice and peace, a Mahatma good for all times and places. Each of these Mahatmas makes an appearance in the books under review, to which one must add the intolerant and jealous Mahatma who generated a "cult of personality" that must be scrutinized critically.

Mark Juergensmeyer's Mahatma is a rather predictable figure who shows the way to contemporary political protest and, even more grandly, to peace on both the personal and political levels. Gandhi's Way is not in fact a new book but rather a newly titled reissue of a book previously published as Fighting with Gandhi and Fighting Fair. Tellingly, Juergensmeyer subtitles his book a "handbook" for "conflict resolution." The problem—and it is a pervasive one in Gandhian literature, especially that of a hagiographic tilt—is that Gandhi's approach is not challenged for its possible inapplicability to conflicts between nation-states by comparison to conflicts within nation-states, at least those that have some developed rule of law—as did the British Raj.

The critical distinction posed by Augustine and taken up by Aquinas—that what is incumbent upon the individual may be forbidden to the statesman responsible for the safety and well-being of an entire people—is simply ignored by Juergensmeyer. If I am engaged in the vocation of statecraft, it may be necessary for me to undertake tasks of collective self-defense-protecting the innocent from certain harm. There was a reason that Gandhi refused to become the first prime minister of a newly independent India. It wasn't simply that he opposed the partition (of India and Pakistan) and found himself helpless to prevent it, but because he knew full well the demands upon a state leader were demands he could not live up to and remain "Gandhi."

Thus, when Juergensmeyer compares the "unneighborly hostilities of A and B" as persons to "wars that have plagued Europe in the past several centuries," he confounds situations of an entirely different scope. Inter-state relations are characterized by an aura of wariness, density, and lack of transparency that can be overcome on the personal level but are nigh impossible to penetrate on the level of states—unless centuries of relatively amicable and helpful relations, including allying against common foes, precede whatever is the conflict of the moment. (Like the United States and the United Kingdom, for example. It is almost impossible to construct a plausible scenario that would find the two countries fighting each other openly. This has nothing to do with discovering Gandhianism but, rather, with the cement of common traditions, concerns, and, yes, enemies.)

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