Gandhi: Law and the Law-giver

Gandhi was trained in law and he practiced as lawyer for some time. However, the determinations given by him to the term Law are distinct from the practices of the legal institutions before which he often appeared as the under-trial. Gandhi understood the laws of the legal system to be operating in opposition to the Law which is true. Gandhi would often refer to the true laws as "the Maker’s Law". Yet, it is not that the Maker, as the sovereign of all that He made, is the empty power which promulgates the Laws from which He is exempt. As Gandhi reminds us "The Law and the Law-giver are one"; the identity between the two insists even when there are miracles and divine chastisements. The two senses of the Law and the possibilities of movements between them generates Gandhi’s politics.

Bio notes:
Divya Dwivedi is a philosopher based in the sub-continent. She teaches Philosophy and Literature at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She is the co-editor with Sanil V of Public Sphere from outside the West (Bloomsbury Academic, London 2015). Her forthcoming publications include a philosophical monograph on Gandhi with Shaj Mohan, Narratology and Ideology co-edited with Richard Walsh and Henrik Skov Nielsen (forthcoming, Ohio State University Press), and ’Anti-Mimetic Theory and Postcolonialism’ in the Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theory.