Indian Critiques of Gandhi

Indian Critiques of Gandhi PDF Author: Harold Coward
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791485889
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Although Gandhi has been the subject of hundreds of books and an Oscar-winning film, there has been no sustained study of his engagement with major figures in the Indian Independence Movement who were often his critics from 1920–1948. This book fills that gap by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Gandhi's contribution to India as evidenced in the letters, speeches, and newspaper articles focused on the dialogue/debate between Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Annie Besant, and C. F. Andrews. The book also covers key groups within India that Gandhi sought to incorporate into his Independence Movement—the Hindu Right, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs—and analyzes Gandhi's ambiguous stance regarding the Hindi-Urdu question and its impact on the Independence struggle.

Indian Critiques of Gandhi

Indian Critiques of Gandhi PDF Author: Harold Coward
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791485889
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although Gandhi has been the subject of hundreds of books and an Oscar-winning film, there has been no sustained study of his engagement with major figures in the Indian Independence Movement who were often his critics from 1920–1948. This book fills that gap by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Gandhi's contribution to India as evidenced in the letters, speeches, and newspaper articles focused on the dialogue/debate between Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Annie Besant, and C. F. Andrews. The book also covers key groups within India that Gandhi sought to incorporate into his Independence Movement—the Hindu Right, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs—and analyzes Gandhi's ambiguous stance regarding the Hindi-Urdu question and its impact on the Independence struggle.

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.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi PDF Author: Dennis Dalton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Dennis Dalton's classic account of Gandhi's political and intellectual development focuses on the leader's two signal triumphs: the civil disobedience movement (or salt satyagraha) of 1930 and the Calcutta fast of 1947. Dalton clearly demonstrates how Gandhi's lifelong career in national politics gave him the opportunity to develop and refine his ideals. He then concludes with a comparison of Gandhi's methods and the strategies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, drawing a fascinating juxtaposition that enriches the biography of all three figures and asserts Gandhi's relevance to the study of race and political leadership in America. Dalton situates Gandhi within the "clash of civilizations" debate, identifying the implications of his work on continuing nonviolent protests. He also extensively reviews Gandhian studies and adds a detailed chronology of events in Gandhi's life.

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

Gandhi PDF Author: G. B. Singh
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615923608
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Among prominent leaders of the twentieth century, perhaps no one is more highly regarded than Mahatma Gandhi. He is revered by the vast majority of Hindus as the hero of Indian independence, and many people throughout the world consider him to be a modern saint.In this explosive, intriguing, and provocative investigation, Colonel G. B. Singh charges that the popular image of Gandhi is highly misleading. Despite his famous philosophy of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha), Colonel Singh''s analysis of the evidence leads him to conclude that Gandhi''s ideology was in fact rooted in racial animosity, first against blacks in South Africa and later against whites in India. The author also finds evidence of multiple cover-ups designed to hide Gandhi''s real history, including even collusion to cover up the murder of an American.This provocative thesis is sure to be controversial.

Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 PDF Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307474798
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Opening in July 1914, as Mohandas Gandhi leaves South Africa to return to India, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1918 traces the Mahatma’s life over the three decades preceding his assassination. Drawing on new archival materials, acclaimed historian Ramachandra Guha follows Gandhi’s struggle to deliver India from British rule, to forge harmonious relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims, to end the pernicious practice of untouchability, and to nurture India’s economic and moral self-reliance. He shows how in each of these campaigns, Gandhi adapted methods of nonviolence that successfully challenged British authority and would influence revolutionary movements throughout the world. A revelatory look at the complexity of Gandhi’s thinking and motives, the book is a luminous portrait of not only the man himself, but also those closest to him—family, friends, and political and social leaders.

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 Pilgrimage of Faith

Gandhi's Pilgrimage of Faith PDF Author: Uma Majmudar
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Millions around the world revere Mahatma Gandhi, yet only a few know the man Mohandas Gandhi and the internal journey of his soul. This pioneering book fills the spiritual void in Gandhian literature by focusing on the soul and the substance of the man. Uma Majmudar shows that, contrary to popular belief, Gandhi's rise to greatness was not meteoric; it was, rather, a continuous process of faith development, punctuated by conflicts, crises, and turning points. Using James W. Fowler's theory of "Stages of Faith" as a guide, Majmudar undertakes the first developmental study to analyze the fundamental role of faith in transforming Gandhi's life. She proposes that the power that nourished Gandhi's soul was his ever-growing faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth and in the innate Godliness of the human soul. Along with making an invaluable contribution to numerous cross-cultural disciplines, the book also offers something special to those wishing to embark on their own faith developmental journey, guided by Gandhi's example. "Majmudar wants us to touch and feel Gandhi. He is not on a pedestal, he is not made of granite or bronze, he is warm and vulnerable." — from the Foreword by Rajmohan Gandhi

The Indian Ideology

The Indian Ideology PDF Author: Perry Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most populous democracy. Even critics of Indian society still underwrite such claims. But how well does the “Idea of India” correspond to the realities of the Union? In an iconoclastic intervention, Marxist historian Perry Anderson provides an unforgettable reading of the Subcontinent’s passage through Independence and the catastrophe of Partition, the idiosyncratic and corrosive vanities of Gandhi and Nehru, and the close interrelationship of Indian democracy and caste inequality. The Indian Ideology caused uproar on first publication in 2012, not least for breaking with euphemisms for Delhi’s occupation of Kashmir. This new, expanded edition includes the author’s reply to his critics, an interview with the Indian weekly Outlook, and a postscript on India under the rule of Narendra Modi.

Radical Equality

Radical Equality PDF Author: Aishwary Kumar
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080479426X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.