Tag: Gandhi
-
Episode 19: The Unexpected Force of Non-violence: In conversation with Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
Gandhi’s method of non-violence faced significant challenges after Jinnah’s declaration of Direct Action Day, continuing until the partition and beyond. The miracle of non-violence seemed to fade, leaving peace as a fleeting hope. To counter the violence, Gandhi walked through areas devastated by violence- Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta, and Delhi in the last fifteen months of…
-
Episode 15: India, Pakistan, Burma and Beyond: A History of Partitions- In Conversation with Sam Dalrymple
As recently as 1928, a vast region spanning twelve of today’s Asian countries—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait—were bound together as a single entity known as the Indian Empire, or simply the Raj. In less than 50 years after 1928, this Indian empire was shattered by five…
-
Episode 7: The Multiple Careers of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
Nico Slate begins his book ‘Coloured Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India‘ with the following paragraph: In the spring of 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya sat down in the “whites only” section of a segregated train traveling through the American South. Just across…
-
Wit and Humour of Rajaji
One of the greatest tragedies for the disciplines of history and political science in India is the fact that we have less biographies about the people we study about. What we have are (a) hagiographies that are uncritical and hero-worshipping in their content and bizarre in their prose, (b) good and quality biographies focusing only…
-
ARGUMENTS WITH BILGRAMI: REVISITING GANDHI’S IDEAS OF SECULARISM
Secularism is one of the important pillars of India’s Constitution and the guiding light of its national polity. “In the early years after independence, it was believed that secularism would fast acquire a consensus as a value underlying Indian polity. But today it is under fierce attack” (Mohanty, 1989). Notions of Secularism are shrouded by…
-
Conceptualizing Gandhi’s Thinking
—
by
Writing an essay on Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Philosopher Akeel Bilgrami noted that “Its generally foolhardy to write about Gandhi, not only because you are never certain you’ve got him right, but because you are almost sure to have him wrong”. This is a pessimistic proposition in the light of the huge corpus of literature that…
-
GANDHI AND CHURCHILL: A COMMON FATE
Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill are contemporaries of their age. But they are completely two different poles divided by oceans and ideologies. One is the apostle of non-violence and another one is an exponent of war and bloodshed. Whatever they may be in their lives, both destined to the same fate in their own countries,…
-
Message for Our Times from Mahatma
150 years after his birth, relevant or not, Gandhi remained the most interesting and inevitable figure in the global arena. It is an undeniable truth that he is one of the greatest human beings of this century or even for the centuries to come. Gandhi is a man of multitudes. For his most adherent followers,…
-
A SHORT NOTE MAHATMA GANDHI’S CHILDHOOD AND LIFE IN ENGLAND
“All those who came in contact with him including those who were ranged against him perceived that there was something unique about Gandhi” (Varma, 2000). What is it that is unique about Bapu? I believe it is his continuous experiments in his life where he moved from inconsistencies towards perfection by being truthful to himself…
rishvanth.com 