Ashis nandy biography of mahatma
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How to find Gandhi today
It is ’s misfortune that he has become an icon in India — as a symbol of honesty and non-violence, projecting a utopia that modern India has nothing to do with. As a result, Gandhi has become a highly venerable, saintly person who has no practical significance in everyday life and politics.
His birthday is now an “official” event, where you take your family to listen to bhajans in the morning and tame, didactic speeches in the evening. And you think that you have done your duty. Nothing much of Gandhi has remained in Indian public life.
For instance, Gandhi said armed nationalism was no different from imperialism. This stance cannot even be mentioned in India today. Gandhi’s avowed guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, once said that Gandhi’s book was the work of a lunatic; it went against everything that the great sons of India had said.
Yes, Gandhi remained an unapologetic dissenter. When, during his last days, an American journalist asked him
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Rediscovering Gandhi
IN CONVERSATIONS, social theorist Ashis Nandy fondly recalls an exchange between philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi and poet Umashankar Joshi. The philosopher argued that MK Gandhi was inconceivable without his spiritual strivings, while the poet—and one suspects Ashis Nandy too—insisted that Gandhi’s significance lay in his willingness to engage and transform the “slum of politics”.
This divide between the religious, spiritual Gandhi and the political one or, more aptly, the divide between Gandhi the ashramite and Gandhi the satyagrahi has come to shape not only our academic engagement with the life and thought of Gandhi, but also our memory of the man whom we revere, revile or remain indifferent to. The dichotomy is a superficial one. Gandhi saw himself as a satyagrahi and an ashramite. His politics was imbued with spiritual strivings and his relationship with tro was a deeply political one.
A long, rich and diverse biographical tradition, which has dem
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Nandy first achieved renown as a student of colonialism and of colonized mentalities. He wrote about the decolonization of the Indian mind, and about the relationship between India and Britain, colonized and colonizer, “intimate enemies”. He examined the British and other European colonial states, identifying among them as “First World losers”, with all their machismo, their hyper-masculine will to power that feminized and emasculated the cultures, like India, that they sought to conquer and dominate. So the first question I want to ask him is the following.
If the Indian mentality needs decolonizing, what needs to be done about the European mentality? In the relationship between “the West” and “the Rest”, the Rest must free itself of its conscious and subconscious subordination, and the West too needs detoxifying. But how? What changes are possible in the European mentality? What would you call this process? The removal of egocentric manias? “Provincialization”- as suggested bygd