The Cambridge companion to Gandhi

Even today, six decades after his assassination in January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi is still revered as the father of the Indian nation. His intellectual and moral legacy – encapsulated in works such as Hind Swaraj – as well as the example of his life and politics serve as an inspiration to human rights and peace movements, political activists, and students in classroom discussions throughout the world. This book, comprising essays by renowned experts in the fields of Indian history and philosophy, traces Gandhi's extraordinary story. The first part of the book, the biography, explores his transformation from a small-town lawyer during his early life in South Africa into a skilled political activist and leader of civil resistance in India. The second part is devoted to Gandhi's key writings and his thinking on a broad range of topics, including religion, conflict, politics, and social relations. The final part reflects on Gandhi's image – how he has been portrayed in literature and film – and on his legacy in India, the West, and beyond.

Judith M. Brown is Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford. Her many publications include Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (1972), Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928–1934 (1977), Gandhi. Prisoner of Hope (1989), Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (1984), Global South Asians: Introducing the Modern Diaspora (2006), Nehru: A Political Life (2005), and The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, co-edited with William Roger Louis (2001).

Anthony Parel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His published works include Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings Centenary Edition (2009) and Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (2007).

Judith M. Brown

University of Oxford

Anthony Parel

University of Calgary

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First published 2011

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ISBN 978-0-521-11670-1 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-13345-6 Paperback

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Contents

Notes on contributors

Akeel Bilgrami holds the Johnsonian Chair of Philosophy at Columbia University and is a member of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought. After a first degree in English from Elphinstone College at Bombay University, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (forthcoming). He is currently working on a short book on Gandhi's philosophy.

Judith M. Brown is Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College. She has written widely on Indian history and politics and has published major studies of Gandhi and Nehru. She recently edited a new edition of the volume of Gandhi's writings in the Oxford World's Classics series, Mahatma Gandhi. The Essential Writings (2008), and her latest book is a series of methodological essays, Windows into the Past: Life Histories and the Historian of South Asia (2009).

David Hardiman lived and worked in Gujarat for many years, and is now Professor of History at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District 1917–1934 (1981), The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (1987), Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (1996), Gandhi: In His Time and Ours (2003), and Missionaries and Their Medicine: A Christian Modernity for Tribal India (2008).

Jonathan Hyslop is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. He is a long-standing member of the Johannesburg History Workshop and has published widely in the field of late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century southern African social history. His current research focuses on the impact of militarism on modern South African politics and society and on the world of maritime labour in the British Empire from 1880 to 1950.

Yasmin Khan was educated at the University of Oxford and is a Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her principal research interests are the twentieth-century history and contemporary politics of India and Pakistan, particularly decolonization, ethnic conflict, and nationalism. Her first book, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007), won the Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society.

Anthony Parel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgary. His research interests include Western political thought and Indian political thought, with a focus on Gandhi. He is the author of The Machiavellian Cosmos (1982) and Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (2006), and the editor of Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (1997, 2009).

Tanika Sarkar is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her recent publications include Rebels, Wives and Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (2009); and she co-edited with Sumit Sarkar, Women and Middle Class Social Reform, Vols. 1 and 2 (2008).

Tridip Suhrud is a political scientist and a cultural historian, working on the Gandhian intellectual tradition and the social history of Gujarat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar. He translated from Gujarati and edited C. B. Dalal's Harilal Gandhi: A Life (2007) and Narayan Desai's four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message (2009). His other books include Writing Life: Three Gujarati Thinkers (2008) and Hind Swaraj Vishe (2008) and An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: A Table of Concordance (2009), and, with Suresh Sharma, a bilingual critical edition of Hind Swaraj. At present, he is working on the English translation of Govardhanram Tripathi's four-part novel Saraswatichandra.

Ronald J. Terchek is Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy (2000) and numerous articles on Gandhi. He is also the author of Republican Paradoxes and Liberal Anxieties (1997), as well as co-editor of Theories of Democracy (2001). He is currently writing on the connection of ethics and economics in Gandhi's thought.

Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago and London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993: rpt. 1995), and has co-edited The Nation across the World (2007), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (2000), and Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (1996; rpt. 2000, 2006).

Thomas Weber is a Reader in the Politics and International Relations Program and head of Peace Studies at Melbourne's La Trobe University. He has been researching and writing on Gandhi's life and legacy for more than thirty years. His most recent publications include The Shanti Sena: Philosophy, History and Action (2009); Gandhi, Gandhism and the Gandhians (2006); and Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor (2004). He is currently working on Gandhi's relationship with Western women.

Glossary