Mahatma Gandhi famously claimed that ‘India lives in her villages’. The focus of his political and social work, and his philosophical writings, was that India was essentially an agrarian civilization, and that it must remain that way. In fact, India had always lived in her towns too. Our epics spoke of the fabled cities of Ayodhya [...]
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 [...]
This column appears days before the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That anniversary shall be observed at a time when a former pracharark of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the country’s Prime Minister, and when the RSS exercises a hegemonic hold over our political and social life. On 2nd October, nice things will be said [...]
When the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits took place, I was based in Delhi, working at the Institute of Economic Growth. The IEG’s Director was the eminent sociologist Triloki Nath Madan, who had been born and raised in the Valley, and gone on to write a classic ethnography of Pandit life. Professor Madan’s brother, himself [...]
Many years ago, while working in the Manuscripts Section of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, I found a postcard by an unknown Tamil to that great Indian, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, ‘Rajaji’. Written in the late 1950s, it described Nehru, Patel, and Rajaji as being the ‘heart, hand, and head’ of Mahatma Gandhi respectively. This was so [...]
Many years ago, I came across this striking definition of ecological responsibility: ‘If we produce everything we want from within a limited area, we are in a position to supervise the methods of production; while if we draw our requirements from the ends of the earth it becomes impossible for us to guarantee the conditions of [...]
In January 2013, when the Congress was in power at the Centre and General Elections were more than a year away, I published a column on Rahul Gandhi in the Telegraph. After reviewing his political career over the past decade, I wrote: ‘The nicest thing one can say about Mr Rahul Gandhi is that he is [...]
In the early 1990s, the veteran Gandhian Dr Sushila Nayar, was in the temple town of Ayodhya, on a mission to promote communal harmony. At an inter-faith prayer meeting she led the singing of a hymn much beloved of the Mahatma, ‘Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram’. When she came to the line ‘Ishwar Allah Tero Naam’, a [...]
A term greatly beloved of the Modi Government is ‘surgical strike’. It was first invoked in September 2016, after a cross-border raid undertaken by the Indian Army on camps in Pakistan. In November of the same year, the Prime Minister’s sudden, catalysmic, withdrawal of the Rs 1000 and Rs 500 currrency notes was also termed a [...]
On 13th April 1919—exactly a hundred years ago—a British Brigadier-General named Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a crowd gathered in a place called Jallianwala Bagh, not far from the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Close to five hundred people were killed in the firing. Folklore has magnified the figure to a thousand, and more. [...]