Niranjan Ramakrishnan examines the surprising extent to which Gandhi's writings still provide insight into current global tensions and the assumptions that drive them. This book explores how ideas Gandhi expressed over a century ago can be applied today to issues from terrorism to the environment, globalization to the 'Clash of Civilizations.' In particular it looks at Gandhi's emphasis on the small, the local, and the human – an emphasis that today begins to appear practical, attractive, and even inescapable. Written in an accessible style invoking examples from everyday happenings familiar to all, this concise volume reintroduces Gandhi to today's audiences in relevant terms.

This book engages a multidisciplinary approach to understand Gandhi in addressing specific contemporary societal issues. The issues highlighted in the book through thirteen distinct, yet interrelated, themes offer solutions to the societal challenges through the prism of Gandhian thought process. This edited book explores how ideas Gandhi expressed over a century ago can be applied today to issues from the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to peaceful resolution of conflicts. In particular, it looks at the contemporary societies' critical issues and offers solutions through the prism of Gandhian ideas. Written in an accessible style, this book reintroduces Gandhi to today's audiences in relevant terms.

This volume shows how Gandhi's thought and action-oriented approach are significant, relevant, and urgently needed for addressing major contemporary problems and concerns, including issues of violence and nonviolence, war and peace, religious conflict and dialogue, terrorism, ethics, civil disobedience, injustice, modernism and postmodernism, oppression and exploitation, and environmental destruction. Appropriate for general readers and Gandhi specialists, this volume will be of interest for those in philosophy, religion, political science, history, cultural studies, peace studies, and many other fields.

When Mahatma Gandhi died in 1948 by an assassin's bullet, the most potent legacy he left to the world was the technique of satyagraha (literally, holding on to the Truth). His "experiments with Truth" were far from complete at the time of his death, but he had developed a new technique for effecting social and political change through the constructive conduct of conflict: Gandhian satyagraha had become eminently more than "passive resistance" or "civil disobedience." By relating what Gandhi said to what he did and by examining instances of satyagraha led by others, this book abstracts from the Indian experiments those essential elements that constitute the Gandhian technique. It explores, in terms familiar to the Western reader, its distinguishing characteristics and its far-reaching implications for social and political philosophy.

Here is the first volume of a magisterial biography of Mohandas Gandhi that gives us the most illuminating portrait we have had of the life, the work and the historical context of one of the most abidingly influential—and controversial—men in modern history. Ramachandra Guha—hailed by Time as “Indian democracy’s preeminent chronicler”—takes us from Gandhi’s birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi’s contemporaries and co-workers; contemporary newspapers and court documents; the writings of Gandhi’s children; and secret files kept by British Empire functionaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: “Great Soul.” And, more clearly than ever before, he elucidates how Gandhi’s work in South Africa—far from being a mere prelude to his accomplishments in India—was profoundly influential in his evolution as a family man, political thinker, social reformer and, ultimately, beloved leader. In 1893, when Gandhi set sail for South Africa, he was a twenty-three-year-old lawyer who had failed to establish himself in India. In this remarkable biography, the author makes clear the fundamental ways in which Gandhi’s ideas were shaped before his return to India in 1915. It was during his years in England and South Africa, Guha shows us, that Gandhi came to understand the nature of imperialism and racism; and in South Africa that he forged the philosophy and techniques that would undermine and eventually overthrow the British Raj. Gandhi Before India gives us equally vivid portraits of the man and the world he lived in: a world of sharp contrasts among the coastal culture of his birthplace, High Victorian London, and colonial South Africa. It explores in abundant detail Gandhi’s experiments with dissident cults such as the Tolstoyans; his friendships with radical Jews, heterodox Christians and devout Muslims; his enmities and rivalries; and his often overlooked failures as a husband and father. It tells the dramatic, profoundly moving story of how Gandhi inspired the devotion of thousands of followers in South Africa as he mobilized a cross-class and inter-religious coalition, pledged to non-violence in their battle against a brutally racist regime. Researched with unequaled depth and breadth, and written with extraordinary grace and clarity, Gandhi Before India is, on every level, fully commensurate with its subject. It will radically alter our understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century India’s greatest man.

Sometime early in the twenty-first century India will overtake China as the most populous nation in the world. For all its size and importance, India is a relatively unknown nation to the rest of the world, trapped in its own self-absorption, suspicious of the outside world, unwilling to interact as a nation among nations. Torn by racial violence and conflict, impoverished, ardent, mystical, religious, exciting, dangerous, and powerful - India is all of these things and more. Barbara Crossette gives us a brilliant short introduction to the world's largest democracy. In Part I, she looks at the inner self and tries to draw some general conclusions for the uninitiated on the nature of Indian myth and psychology. Part II deals with daily realities - the violence of contemporary Indian society, problems of ethnicity, caste, and religion, the plight of children, bureaucracy in sports, the darshan effect, and the growing power of the secular middle class. Part III treats politics: the problems of political history and self-definition, India and its neighbors, and the relationship between the United States and India. An afterword looks, tenuously and tentatively, toward India's hope for the future.