A multitude of scholarly works have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas K. Gandhi’s epic life and work from numerous angles.¹ In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. (“Truth” is capitalized when it specifically denotes Gandhi’s sense of an absolute, ontological principle.) As he put it, “morals are closely linked with health....

Gandhi’s use of fasting as a tool—or, as he referred to it, a “weapon”—in his broad-based sociopolitical work is well known and has been given careful consideration by a number of close associates and scholars (Brown 1977; Erikson 1969:227–378; M. Gandhi 1959; Pyarelal 1932). Between 1918, when he stopped eating in support of a textile workers’ strike in Ahmedabad, and 1948, when he gave up food for five days to protest a resurgence in communal violence, Gandhi engaged in at least thirteen major fasts. Many of the fasts unto death he undertook were pivotal in the sequence...

To understand yoga as it has been practiced in India for the past century it is probably more important to read the works of various late-nineteenth-century German nature cure doctors, along with their counterparts in the United States, than to read Patanjali’s Yogasutra or the Hathyogpradipika, the Shivasamhita, or the Gherandasamhita. The fact of the matter is that over the past seventy-five years it has become virtually impossible to distinguish yoga therapy from naturopathy. Even “higher” forms of yoga have been heavily influenced by the philosophy of nature upon which nature cure techniques are based. To be sure, the structure...

Ostensibly, surya namaskar—prayer or salutation to the sun—is an ancient Indian exercise routine that is nominally structured on the principle of Vedic ritual and is even said to hark back to the earliest prostrations performed by the Indo-Aryan participants in a pre-Vedic solar cult. Today, surya namaskar routines are an integral part of most yoga regimens practiced throughout the world. Apart from the putatively ancient origins of this modern exercise, the history of surya namaskars can be traced precisely to the small princely state of Aundh, in what is now Maharashtra, and the concern of the rajah of...

In his influential collection of essays entitled The Nation and Its Fragments (1993a) Partha Chatterjee argues for a treatment of nationalism that is cultural rather than political, one that is not limited by a discussion of institutional structures, policies, and government. In doing so, and in placing the culture of nationalism squarely in the imaginary of the colonized middle class, Chatterjee follows, but also extends, Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities (1991). Chatterjee poses this significant question: what is left to imagine, in terms of the meaning of community in countries such as India, if, in fact, the nation as...