Between The Lines
Historians have critiqued the assumed universality of western categories in explaining south Asian history; yet none have applied the notion of “difference” to Gandhi’s discourse of freedom. Mithi Mukherjee finds it differed, radically, from western notions of freedom: and, it had roots in the Indic tradition of renunciation. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Gandhi anguished over his tragic discovery that the freedom struggle had not been as unique a non-violent struggle as perceived; communal riots greeted the dawn of independence: The renouncer had been renounced. But Gandhi says Sudhir Chandra , defying old age and declining health continued his radical attempts to humanise our psychic system. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Both Marx and Gandhi critiqued capitalism. Both advocated “socialism.” But for Marx it was predicated on the seizure of power and enhancement of modernity. For Gandhi it was built upon an ethical need for Swaraj and a non-hierarchical stateless society, says K.P. Shankaran, in which the individual’s freedom imprisoned by consuming modernity is restored. …[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In this seminal essay, the late D.R. Nagraj journeys to the intersection of the Gandhi-Ambedkar encounters of the 1930s, investigates their metaphors and meanings and discovers a discourse of Dalit emancipation in “the village-centric vision of Gandhi” whetted by Ambedkar’s distrust of its “romantic excesses.” In their differences, Nagraj finds a “dynamic unity”. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this poetic dialogue with a marginalized present, Gandhi’s truth of ahimsa gets through to the unborn, holding out the promise of redemption. …[Read More]…
Arthur in the rains
Literary Trails
A young man from Bombay reluctantly takes a job as a storekeeper in a sugar factory in Bahedi, a North Indian town where the past catches up with him in ways he could never have imagined. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
In an age of globalization, the project of Swaraj is still incomplete wrote Ananya Vajpeyi in 2009, the centenary year of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Today, more than ever before, Gandhi is appropriate because an Indian sovereignty that encloses its poor, its minorities, its separatist and dissenting constituencies in zones of exception and abandons them to the most egregious forms of violence and deprivation is not consistent with the idea of swaraj. …[Read More]…
