India, Oct. 2 -- Every October, Gandhi returns as an image: Fixed in statues, printed on stamps, invoked in slogans. He is made to stand still as icon and monument. Yet if we step aside from these rituals of homage, Gandhi can also be approached differently-not as a moral monument, but as a literary event. His autobiography, his letters, his journalism, his speeches: These do more than transmit doctrines. They form a sprawling text, provisional and unsettled, always open to interpretation. Gandhi resists closure; he demands to be read, misread, and read again. To take him seriously is to read him as literature.

But not literature in the narrow sense of crafted fiction or lyrical prose. Rather, literature as the name for a mode of writing...