Atlantic Gandhi

Atlantic Gandhi PDF Author: Nalini Natarajan
Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited
ISBN: 9788132109686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using the frames of diaspora theory, post-colonial discourse theory and the recent Atlantic turn in studies of resistance, this book brings into relief Gandhi's experience as a traveler moving from a classic colony, India, to the plantation and mining society of South Africa. The author forwards the argument that this move between different modes of production brought Gandhi into contact with indentured laborers, with whom he shared exilic and diasporic consciousness, and whose difficult yet resilient lives inspired his philosophy. It reads Gandhi's nationalistic (that is, anti-colonial) sentiments as born in diasporic exile, where he formed his perspective as a provincial subject in a multiracial plantation. The author's viewpoint has been inspired by the new analytic that has emerged in the last few decades: the Atlantic as an ocean that not just transported the victims of a greedy plantation system, but also saw the ferment of revolutionary ideas. Advance Praise Learned and insightful, Nalini Natarajan, has written an amazing study of Gandhi which shows how transnational, planetary forces from the Caribbean, South Africa, and India were brought to bear on his concept of Indianness. His reading of Thoreau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy helped him form his conception of India as frugal, vegetarian, spiritual, adhering to ahimsa and satyagraha, and a style of anti-modernism which would lead to a very modern struggle of independence on the one hand but separation from the struggles of Zulu in Africa and blacks in Guyana on the other hand. Call them coolie, subaltern, or proletarian, Gandhi's construction of the idea of "India" arose in relation to, but not identity with, the workers of the barracks, the cane field, and the gold mine who produce in war, drugs, and money the defining experiences of modernity. Few will be able to read this book without serious reconsideration of Gandhi's cultural politics and political philosophy. Here is an oceanic Gandhi. Peter Linebaugh author of London Hanged Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991) and co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001) with Marcus Rediker In Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas, Nalini Natarajan places the "coolie woman" in South Africa under the microscope of Gandhian lens against the parallel discourses on their questionable sexuality and value as a labour resource in other sites of Indian indentured labour, including the Caribbean. In doing so she moves us towards a current and more comparative rethinking of the historical clichés that have typified the study of diasporic Indian gender relations under the colonial enterprise. Patricia Mohammed, Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Caribbean gender studies historian and maker of the award winning film Coolie Pink and Green

Atlantic Gandhi

Atlantic Gandhi PDF Author: Nalini Natarajan
Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited
ISBN: 9788132109686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using the frames of diaspora theory, post-colonial discourse theory and the recent Atlantic turn in studies of resistance, this book brings into relief Gandhi's experience as a traveler moving from a classic colony, India, to the plantation and mining society of South Africa. The author forwards the argument that this move between different modes of production brought Gandhi into contact with indentured laborers, with whom he shared exilic and diasporic consciousness, and whose difficult yet resilient lives inspired his philosophy. It reads Gandhi's nationalistic (that is, anti-colonial) sentiments as born in diasporic exile, where he formed his perspective as a provincial subject in a multiracial plantation. The author's viewpoint has been inspired by the new analytic that has emerged in the last few decades: the Atlantic as an ocean that not just transported the victims of a greedy plantation system, but also saw the ferment of revolutionary ideas. Advance Praise Learned and insightful, Nalini Natarajan, has written an amazing study of Gandhi which shows how transnational, planetary forces from the Caribbean, South Africa, and India were brought to bear on his concept of Indianness. His reading of Thoreau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy helped him form his conception of India as frugal, vegetarian, spiritual, adhering to ahimsa and satyagraha, and a style of anti-modernism which would lead to a very modern struggle of independence on the one hand but separation from the struggles of Zulu in Africa and blacks in Guyana on the other hand. Call them coolie, subaltern, or proletarian, Gandhi's construction of the idea of "India" arose in relation to, but not identity with, the workers of the barracks, the cane field, and the gold mine who produce in war, drugs, and money the defining experiences of modernity. Few will be able to read this book without serious reconsideration of Gandhi's cultural politics and political philosophy. Here is an oceanic Gandhi. Peter Linebaugh author of London Hanged Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991) and co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001) with Marcus Rediker In Atlantic Gandhi: The Mahatma Overseas, Nalini Natarajan places the "coolie woman" in South Africa under the microscope of Gandhian lens against the parallel discourses on their questionable sexuality and value as a labour resource in other sites of Indian indentured labour, including the Caribbean. In doing so she moves us towards a current and more comparative rethinking of the historical clichés that have typified the study of diasporic Indian gender relations under the colonial enterprise. Patricia Mohammed, Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Caribbean gender studies historian and maker of the award winning film Coolie Pink and Green

Gandhi Before India

Gandhi Before India PDF Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 038553230X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history. Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s contemporaries and co-workers; contemporary newspapers and court documents; the writings of Gandhi’s children; and secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: “Great Soul.” And, more clearly than ever before, he elucidates how Gandhi’s work in South Africa—far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India—was profoundly influential in his evolution as a family man, political thinker, social reformer and, ultimately, beloved leader. In 1893, when Gandhi set sail for South Africa, he was a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had failed to establish himself in India. In this remarkable biography, the author makes clear the fundamental ways in which Gandhi’s ideas were shaped before his return to India in 1915. It was during his years in England and South Africa, Guha shows us, that Gandhi came to understand the nature of imperialism and racism; and in South Africa that he forged the philosophy and techniques that would undermine and eventually overthrow the British Raj. Gandhi Before India gives us equally vivid portraits of the man and the world he lived in: a world of sharp contrasts among the coastal culture of his birthplace, High Victorian London, and colonial South Africa. It explores in abundant detail Gandhi’s experiments with dissident cults such as the Tolstoyans; his friendships with radical Jews, heterodox Christians and devout Muslims; his enmities and rivalries; and his often overlooked failures as a husband and father. It tells the dramatic, profoundly moving story of how Gandhi inspired the devotion of thousands of followers in South Africa as he mobilized a cross-class and inter-religious coalition, pledged to non-violence in their battle against a brutally racist regime. Researched with unequaled depth and breadth, and written with extraordinary grace and clarity, Gandhi Before India is, on every level, fully commensurate with its subject. It will radically alter our understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century India’s greatest man.

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet PDF Author: Nico Slate
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295744979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as a holistic approach to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs. His key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed in coordination with his dietary experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt expressed his opposition to economies based on slavery, indentured labor, and imperialism. Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi’s life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa, the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during India’s struggle for independence. What became the pillars of Gandhi’s diet—vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding processed food, and fasting—anticipated many of the debates in twenty-first-century food studies, and presaged the necessity of building healthier and more equitable food systems.

The Gandhi Reader

The Gandhi Reader PDF Author: Mahatma Gandhi
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802131614
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Provides primary sources about Gandhi's life using Gandhi's own writings where possible, or otherwise the writings of those who knew him best.

Great Soul

Great Soul PDF Author: Joseph Lelyveld
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307389952
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments—his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor. “A revelation. . . . Lelyveld has restored human depth to the Mahatma.”—Hari Kunzru, The New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in vivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, social values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on another subcontinent—during two decades in South Africa—and then tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” while following him only a small part of the way to the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges as one of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to political and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through the heroic—and tragic—last months of this selfless leader’s long campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing that ended only with his own assassination. India and its politicians were ready to place Gandhi on a pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were less inclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables—for whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole—produced their own leaders. Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of Gandhi’s extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy, which more than six decades after his death still ensures his place as India’s social conscience—and not just India’s.

The South African Gandhi

The South African Gandhi PDF Author: Ashwin Desai
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals. Praise for The South African Gandhi “In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India “This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

Gandhi & Churchill

Gandhi & Churchill PDF Author: Arthur Herman
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 055390504X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, bestselling historian Arthur Herman sheds new light on two of the most universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century, and reveals how their forty-year rivalry sealed the fate of India and the British Empire. They were born worlds apart: Winston Churchill to Britain’s most glamorous aristocratic family, Mohandas Gandhi to a pious middle-class household in a provincial town in India. Yet Arthur Herman reveals how their lives and careers became intertwined as the twentieth century unfolded. Both men would go on to lead their nations through harrowing trials and two world wars—and become locked in a fierce contest of wills that would decide the fate of countries, continents, and ultimately an empire. Gandhi & Churchill reveals how both men were more alike than different, and yet became bitter enemies over the future of India, a land of 250 million people with 147 languages and dialects and 15 distinct religions—the jewel in the crown of Britain’s overseas empire for 200 years. Over the course of a long career, Churchill would do whatever was necessary to ensure that India remain British—including a fateful redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East and even risking his alliance with the United States during World War Two. Mohandas Gandhi, by contrast, would dedicate his life to India’s liberation, defy death and imprisonment, and create an entirely new kind of political movement: satyagraha, or civil disobedience. His campaigns of nonviolence in defiance of Churchill and the British, including his famous Salt March, would become the blueprint not only for the independence of India but for the civil rights movement in the U.S. and struggles for freedom across the world. Now master storyteller Arthur Herman cuts through the legends and myths about these two powerful, charismatic figures and reveals their flaws as well as their strengths. The result is a sweeping epic of empire and insurrection, war and political intrigue, with a fascinating supporting cast, including General Kitchener, Rabindranath Tagore, Franklin Roosevelt, Lord Mountbatten, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. It is also a brilliant narrative parable of two men whose great successes were always haunted by personal failure, and whose final moments of triumph were overshadowed by the loss of what they held most dear.

Swaraj in One Year

Swaraj in One Year PDF Author: Mahatma Gandhi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description


The Way to God

The Way to God PDF Author: Mahatma Gandhi
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583944419
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Short, easy-to-read essays revealing Gandhi’s most important teachings on love, meditation, service, and prayer—with profound wisdom and inspiration for readers of every faith. Mahatma Gandhi became famous as the leader of the Indian independence movement, but he called himself “a man of God disguised as a politician.” The Way to God demonstrates his enduring significance as a spiritual leader whose ideas offer insight and solace to seekers of every practice and persuasion. Collecting many of his most significant writings, the book explores the deep religious roots of Gandhi’s worldly accomplishments and reveals—in his own words—his intellectual, moral, and spiritual approaches to the divine. First published in India in 1971, the book is based on Gandhi’s lifetime experiments with truth and reveals the heart of his teachings. Gandhi’s aphoristic power, his ability to sum up complex ideas in a few authoritative strokes, shines through these pages. Individual chapters cover such topics as moral discipline, spiritual practice, spiritual experience, and much more. Gandhi’s guiding principles of selflessness, humility, service, active yet nonviolent resistance, and vegetarianism make his writings as timely today as when these writings first appeared. A foreword by Gandhi’s grandson Arun and an introduction by Michael Nagler add useful context.

The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir

The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir PDF Author: Appu Esthose Suresh
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 935489061X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The Murderer, the Monarch and the Fakir is a fresh account of one of the most controversial political assassinations in contemporary history-that of Mahatma Gandhi. Based on previously unseen intelligence reports and police records, this book recreates the circumstances of his murder, the events leading up to it and the investigation afterwards. In doing so, it unearths a conspiracy that runs far deeper than a hate crime and challenges the popular narrative about the assassination that has persisted for the past seventy years. The Murderer, the Monarch and the Fakir examines the potential role of princely states, hypermasculinity and a militant right-wing in the context of a nation that had just won her independence. It relies on investigative journalism and new evidence set in a strong academic framework to unpack the significance of this tumultuous event.