The 19th century Italian writer Emilio Salgari once remarked that ‘reading is travelling without the bother of baggage’. That is great advice, particularly in the time of COVID-19. Now that one is forcibly home-bound, works of literature and of scholarship can help transport one to different countries, different times. They can stimulate the mind, and uplift [...]
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) run to one hundred volumes. Many years before I read these volumes, one by one, their Chief Editor, Professor K. Swaminathan, had satirised scholars like myself in verse: ‘Hundred hefty haystacks Cluttering up the landscape Hold within their entrails hidden Half a dozen needles. Researchers of the future With [...]
On the 8th of September 1951, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published in London. When the book finally arrived in India, several weeks later, the author sent a copy to his literary mentor, Mohitlal Majumdar. Majumdar soon wrote back with his words of appreciation, but then asked: ‘What does Jawaharlal Nehru think of it?’ [...]