The Gandhian sobriquet is widely deployed in the twentieth century by a variety of political and social actors with a range of interests. To give just three examples: Anna Hazare's movement against corruption in India in recent days has been termed a “Gandhian movement” and has earned Hazare the moniker of the “modern Gandhi,” even though many have found him to be an opportunist rather than a principled ahimsavadi; in the fight against the Indira Gandhi–led Emergency in 1975–77, Jayaprakash Narayan's movement for an end to authoritarian rule earned him the title of “Gandhian Socialist” (though he had been using “Gandhian Socialism” as an analytical term for some time) and his call for sampurna kranti (“total revolution”) was supposed to induce a moral regeneration in India; and as we have seen in this study, in the 1930s, Indian writers writing in English for largely European audiences came to be canonized as “Gandhian writers” because they depicted scenes from the movement for Indian independence in their novels and because Gandhi routinely appeared – as a character, as a trope, as a symbol, as a topic of discussion in their pages. There are, of course, others who have both self-identified as descendants of Gandhi (Vinoba Bhave, Martin Luther KingJr., etc.) and others who have been dubbed Gandhians by virtue of their heroic activism against greater powers (e.g. the Chipko movement in India).

It is perhaps easy enough to understand why anglophone Indian novels of the 1930s and 1940s are called Gandhian novels. Aside from the long shadow that Gandhi casts on all aspects of late-colonial India, the literature of the period also bears heavy traces of the Mahatma. Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable not only includes a long speech by Gandhi as its climax, the entire novel was rewritten after a conversation with Gandhi. Moorthy the main character in Raja Rao's Kanthapura, is affectionately called the “Little Mountain,” a reference to the fact that he is the local lieutenant of the Mahatma, whom the villagers have dubbed the “Big Mountain.” The other novels of the period, like Bhabhani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers (1947) and R. K. Narayan's Swami and Friends (1935), involved Gandhian-style agitations and Congress rallies. The cumulative effect has been to see the literary period in the era immediately preceding independence, as one critic has described it, as the “Gandhian whirlwind.”

But there is a problem with this historiographical procedure: none of the novelists in question would have called themselves Gandhian. Anand was a social democrat, uncomfortable with Gandhian ideas about religion; Rao disagreed with many of Gandhi's ideas about women and politics, joining up with Trotskyist groups in the early 1930s; and Ali, probably the closest politically to Gandhi of all of the writers of the period, was never involved in nationalist politics but is left out of the canon altogether, partly because he is a Muslim and partly because he ended up in Pakistan after partition.

On December 1, 1967, a meeting called by PRC Vice-Premier and Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi ordered the indefinite suspension of all operational use of agents (teqing renyuan), as well as the decommissioning of safe houses nationwide, and the launch of a general inquiry into whether the men and women who for the past eighteen years had been in China what inoffizielle Mitarbeiter were in East Germany had, in Xie's words, “done any bad stuff” (zuole shenme huaishi). Four and a half decades later, historians still struggle to understand what triggered this drastic course of action. Was it simply how Xie chose to respond to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolutionary wish to see the “public security, procuratory, and legal sectors beaten to a pulp”? A few months earlier, in July 1967, Xie had specifically tasked his deputies with exploring ways of meeting this stated desire on the part of the CCP Chairman. Or was it prompted – in part or in full – by something completely different, such as a fatal loss of faith, perhaps, in the political integrity of lower-level public security officers and hence in the utility of the agent operations they ran? Or was the reason more simply cold war paranoia?