Understanding Gandhi is a collection of interviews conducted by Fr d J. Blum (1914-1990),of six of Mahatma Gandhi′s closest associates--J.B. Kriplani, Raihana Tyabji, Dada Dharmadhikari, Sushila ...Nayar, Jhaver Patel and Sucheta Kripalani. The interviewees reflect on Gandhi′s ideas in the light of changes that took place in India after Independence. The book provides glimpses of Gandhi′s ideas and working relationship with his colleagues who came from a wide range of backgrounds, professions and geographical regions. It also brings out the thoughts of Gandhi and his followers on several important issues such as Satyagraha, non-violence, Brahmacharya, spirituality, and fasting. This blend of an intimate knowledge of Gandhi and the reflective hindsight gives the book a unique vantage point that promotes a holistic understanding of Gandhian thought and philosophy.
When Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper, Indian Opinion. In ...Gandhi's Printing Press Isabel Hofmeyr provides an account of how this footnote to a career shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma.
No single person is more directly associated with India and India's struggle for independence than Mahatma Gandhi. His name has equally become synonymous with the highest principles of global ...equality, human dignity, and freedom. Joseph Alter argues, however, that Gandhi has not been completely understood by biographers and political scholars, and inGandhi's Bodyhe undertakes a reevaluation of the Mahatma's life and thought. In his revisionist and iconoclastic approach, Alter moves away from the usual focus on nonviolence, peace, and social reform and takes seriously what most scholars who have studied Gandhi tend to ignore: Gandhi's preoccupation with sex, his obsession with diet reform, and his vehement advocacy for naturopathy. Alter concludes that a distinction cannot be made between Gandhi's concern with health, faith in nonviolence, and his sociopolitical agenda. In this original and provocative study, Joseph Alter demonstrates that these seemingly idiosyncratic aspects of Gandhi's personal life are of central importance to understanding his politics-and not only Gandhi's politics but Indian nationalism in general. Using the Mahatma's own writings, Alter places Gandhi's bodily practices in the context of his philosophy; for example, he explores the relationship between Gandhi's fasting and his ideas about the metaphysics of emptiness and that between his celibacy and his beliefs about nonviolence. Alter also places Gandhi's ideas and practices in their national and transnational contexts. He discusses how and why nature cure became extremely popular in India during the early part of the twentieth century, tracing the influence of two German naturopaths on Gandhi's thinking and on the practice of yoga in India. More important, he argues that the reconstruction of yoga in terms of European naturopathy was brought about deliberately by a number of activists in India-of whom Gandhi was only the most visible-interested in creating a "scientific" health regimen, distinct from Western precedents, that would make the Indian people fit for self-rule. Gandhi's Body counters established arguments that Indian nationalism was either a completely indigenous Hindu-based movement or simply a derivative of Western ideals.
In his Autobiography, Gandhi wrote, "What I want to achieve-what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years-is self-realization, to see God face to face. . . . All that I do by way ...of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end." While hundreds of biographies and histories have been written about Gandhi (1869-1948), nearly all of them have focused on the political, social, or familial dimensions of his life. Very few, in recounting how Gandhi led his country to political freedom, have viewed his struggle primarily as a search for spiritual liberation.Shifting the focus to the understudied subject of Gandhi's spiritual life, Arvind Sharma retells the story of Gandhi's life through this lens. Illuminating unsuspected dimensions of Gandhi's inner world and uncovering their surprising connections with his outward actions, Sharma explores the eclectic religious atmosphere in which Gandhi was raised, his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that morality and religion are synonymous, his attitudes toward tyranny and freedom, and, perhaps most important, the mysterious source of his power to establish new norms of human conduct. This book enlarges our understanding of one of history's most profoundly influential figures, a man whose trust in the power of the soul helped liberate millions.
As a precocious young girl, Surekha knew very little about the details of her mother Amma’s unusual past and that of Babu, her mysterious and sometimes absent father. The tense, uncertain family life ...created by her parents’ distant and fractious marriage and their separate ambitions informs her every action and emotion. Then one evening, in a moment of uncharacteristic transparency and vulnerability, Amma tells Surekha and her older sister Didi of the family tragedy that changed the course of her life. Finally, her daughters begin to understand the source of their mother’s deep commitment to the Indian nationalist movement and her seemingly unending willingness to sacrifice in the name of that pursuit. In this re-memory based on the published and unpublished work of Amma and Surekha, Meenal Shrivastava, Surekha’s daughter, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi’s national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves these written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.
Horace Alexander was an English Quaker who played a significant part in relations between Indian nationalist leaders and the British Government in the years before the transfer of power in 1947. He ...came to know Gandhi well and was trusted by him as an intermediary.
A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism-in
India, South Africa, and Black America-used print media to connect
with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their
...undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities:
Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the
story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath
Tagore's writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi's recollections of South
Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois's invocations of India, Madhumita
Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires
new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language
("the global Anglophone") in order to encourage alternate
geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such
as people of color).
The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this
account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in
South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India,
collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an
African American, brought the world home to young readers through
her work as an author and editor.
Reading across races and regions, genres and genders,
Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the
neologism for postcolonial literary studies.
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.
