Gandhi is revered as a historic leader, the father of Indian independence, and the inspiration for nonviolent protest around the world. But the importance of these practical achievements has obscured Gandhi’s stature as an extraordinarily innovative political thinker. Ramin Jahanbegloo presents Gandhi the political theorist—the intellectual founder of a system predicated on the power of nonviolence to challenge state sovereignty and domination. A philosopher and an activist in his own right, Jahanbegloo guides us through Gandhi’s core ideas, shows how they shaped political protest from 1960s America to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond, and calls for their use today by Muslims demanding change.
Gandhi challenged mainstream political ideas most forcefully on sovereignty. He argued that state power is not legitimate simply when it commands general support or because it protects us from anarchy. Instead, legitimacy depends on the consent of dutiful citizens willing to challenge the state nonviolently when it acts immorally. The culmination of the inner struggle to recognize one’s duty to act, Jahanbegloo says, is the ultimate “Gandhian moment.”
Gandhi’s ideas have motivated such famous figures as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. As Jahanbegloo demonstrates, they also inspired the unheralded Muslim activists Abul Kalam Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, whose work for Indian independence answers those today who doubt the viability of nonviolent Islamic protest. The book is a powerful reminder of Gandhi’s enduring political relevance and a pioneering account of his extraordinary intellectual achievements.
At the same time that 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. Gandhi’s Printing Press is an account of how this project, an apparent footnote to a titanic career, shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma. Pioneering publisher, experimental editor, ethical anthologist—these roles reveal a Gandhi developing the qualities and talents that would later define him.
Isabel Hofmeyr presents a detailed study of Gandhi’s work in South Africa (1893–1914), when he was the some-time proprietor of a printing press and launched the periodical Indian Opinion. The skills Gandhi honed as a newspaperman—distilling stories from numerous sources, circumventing shortages of type—influenced his spare prose style. Operating out of the colonized Indian Ocean world, Gandhi saw firsthand how a global empire depended on the rapid transmission of information over vast distances. He sensed that communication in an industrialized age was becoming calibrated to technological tempos.
But he responded by slowing the pace, experimenting with modes of reading and writing focused on bodily, not mechanical, rhythms. Favoring the use of hand-operated presses, he produced a newspaper to contemplate rather than scan, one more likely to excerpt Thoreau than feature easily glossed headlines. Gandhi’s Printing Press illuminates how the concentration and self-discipline inculcated by slow reading, imbuing the self with knowledge and ethical values, evolved into satyagraha, truth-force, the cornerstone of Gandhi’s revolutionary idea of nonviolent resistance.
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.
The Impossible Indian offers a rare, fresh view of Gandhi as a hard-hitting political thinker willing to countenance the greatest violence in pursuit of a global vision that went far beyond a nationalist agenda. Revising the conventional view of the Mahatma as an isolated Indian moralist detached from the mainstream of twentieth-century politics, Faisal Devji offers a provocative new genealogy of Gandhian thought, one that is not rooted in a clichéd alternative history of spiritual India but arises from a tradition of conquest and violence in the battlefields of 1857.
Focusing on his unsentimental engagement with the hard facts of imperial domination, Fascism, and civil war, Devji recasts Gandhi as a man at the center of modern history. Rejecting Western notions of the rights of man, rights which can only be bestowed by a state, Gandhi turned instead to the idea of dharma, or ethical duty, as the true source of the self’s sovereignty, independent of the state. Devji demonstrates that Gandhi’s dealings with violence, guided by his idea of ethical duty, were more radical than those of contemporary revolutionists.
To make sense of this seemingly incongruous relationship with violence, Devji returns to Gandhi’s writings and explores his engagement with issues beyond India’s struggle for home rule. Devji reintroduces Gandhi to a global audience in search of leadership at a time of extraordinary strife as a thinker who understood how life’s quotidian reality could be revolutionized to extraordinary effect.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Charming and brilliant.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Provocative, stimulating, wise―the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read.”―Tom Holland
“Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next…I was absorbed by Bradatan’s book even—or especially—when I felt uncomfortable with its implications.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
“Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life’s inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure—and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality.” —Michael S. Roth, Washington Post
“Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their respective worlds counted as success. A gripping read, start to finish.” ―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life’s challenges.
In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but positively transformative.
Gandhi's Quit India Movement of 1942 was the climax of a nationalist revolutionary movement which sought independence on India's own terms. Indian independence was attained through revolution, not through a benevolent grant from the British imperial regime. "The British left India because Indians had made it impossible for them to stay."
The bases for Francis Hutchins' thesis are new facts from hitherto unused sources: interviews with surviving participants in the movement, private papers from the Gandhi Memorial Museum and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, documents in the National Archives of India. In particular, he has studied the secret records of the British government, recently made available, which reveal for the first time the extent of the revolutionary movement and Britain's plans for dealing with it.
Of the British records Hutchins says, "No other regime has left such careful documentation of its strategies or compiled such extensive records revealing the way in which it was overthrown." Even though England had always proclaimed its hope that India would one day become independent, the tacit assumption was that this was a remote eventuality. Only after Gandhi's Quit India Movement did Britain's political parties resign themselves to the necessity to leave quickly, whether or not they believed India was "ready."
Obscured by censorship in India and by preoccupation with World War II, the significance of Gandhi's revolutionary technique was not appreciated at the time. Hutchins' impressive analysis uses the Indian case to develop a general theory of the revolutionary nature of colonial nationalism.
Sudhir Kakar, India’s foremost practitioner of psychoanalysis, has focused his career on infusing this preeminently Western discipline with ideas and views from the East. In Mad and Divine, he takes on the separation of the spirit and the body favored by psychoanalysts, cautioning that a single-minded focus on the physical denies a person’s wholeness. Similarly, Kakar argues, to focus on the spirit alone is to hold in contempt the body that makes us human.
Mad and Divine looks at the interplay between spirit and psyche and the moments of creativity and transformation that occur when the spirit overcomes desire and narcissism. Kakar examines this relationship in religious rituals and healing traditions— both Eastern and Western—as well as in the lives of some extraordinary men: the mystic and guru Rajneesh, Gandhi, and the Buddhist saint Drukpa Kunley.
Enriched with a novelist’s felicity of language and an analyst’s piercing insights and startling interpretations, Mad and Divine is a valuable addition to the literature on the integration of the spirit and psyche in the evolving psychology of the individual.
Gandhi, with his loincloth and walking stick, seems an unlikely advocate of postmodernism. But in Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph portray him as just that in eight thought-provoking essays that aim to correct the common association of Gandhi with traditionalism.
Combining core sections of their influential book Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma with substantial new material, the Rudolphs reveal here that Gandhi was able to revitalize tradition while simultaneously breaking with some of its entrenched values and practices. Exploring his influence both in India and abroad, they tell the story of how in London the young activist was shaped by the antimodern “other West” of Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau and how, a generation later, a mature Gandhi’s thought and action challenged modernity’s hegemony. Moreover, the Rudolphs argue that Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj was an opening salvo of the postmodern era and that his theory and practice of nonviolent collective action (satyagraha) articulate and exemplify a postmodern understanding of situational truth.
This radical interpretation of Gandhi's life will appeal to anyone who wants to understand Gandhi’s relevance in this century, as well as students and scholars of politics, history, charismatic leadership, and postcolonialism.
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