(This is a selection of Gandhi’s observations on consistency and changing one’s mind) My Inconsistencies I DECLINE to be slave to precedents or practice I cannot understand or defend on a moral basis. (YI, 21-7-1921, p228) I must admit my many inconsistencies. But since I am called ‘Mahatma’, I might well endorse Emerson’s saying that… Read More Mohandas Gandhi: My Inconsistencies
First posted October 03, 2019 NB: This article appeared today in the Deccan Chronicle, as part of a series commemorating Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary. This is an audio-visual recording of a talk with the same title, given on October 4, 2019, under the auspices of the Raza Foundation. DS The Compass Gandhi’s life-work combined a complex of ideals, concepts and practical… Read More The Compass
Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 First posted March 30, 2012 This article is based on a lecture I prepared for university students, named Mahatma Gandhi’s Legacy. It includes the text of the Delhi Declaration on communal harmony, January 18, 1948. Citations are from Gandhi’s Collected Works Gandhi’s Last Fast: January 13-18, 1948 From September 1947,… Read More Another time, another mosque
First posted January 31, 2015 यह चिट्ठी महात्मा मोहनदास करमचंद गाँधी को पहुंचे. महात्माजी, मैं न संसद-सदस्य हूँ, न विधायक, न मंत्री, न नेता. इनमें से कोई कलंक मेरे ऊपर नहीं है. मुझमें कोई ऐसा राजनीतिक ऐब नहीं है कि आपकी जय बोलूं. मुझे कोई भी पद नहीं चाहिये कि राजघाट जाऊँ. मैंने आपकी समाधि… Read More हरिशंकर परसाई: महात्मा गाँधी को चिट्ठी पहुँचे (1977)
First posted October 3, 2020 India’s greatest leader had moved to a village called Segaon two years earlier. He had renamed it Sevagram or a village of service. He built an ashram, a commune which was home to “many a fateful decision which affected the destiny of India”. Gandhi had moved in with his wife, Kasturba,… Read More Soutik Biswas: Rare photos of the last ten years of Gandhi’s life
First posted May 24, 2014 On May 27, 2014 it will be 50 years since the passing of Jawaharlal Nehru. Can one ever imagine him instigating or conniving in a pogrom? Or becoming a plaything in the hands of corporate capital? Or spending on a general election amounts bearing comparison with American Presidential elections? – Anil… Read More Anil Nauriya: Gandhi on secular law and state (2003)
First posted June 15, 2020 NB: Since the Black Lives Matter movement, some intellectuals have begun (yet again) their campaign to slander Gandhiji as a ‘racist’. An interview published in The Caravan in January 2019 reiterated this. Much can be said about the prejudices of various leaders, and I have appended some comments beneath that interview. Leaving India… Read More Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”, September 1958
First posted June 13, 2014 ‘A persuasive and a totally new way of thinking about a difficult subject, a truly significant achievement‘ Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013) by Sumit Guha Reviwed by Tirthankar Roy EPW vol – XLIX No. 24, June 14, 2014) Three building-blocks structure this book.… Read More Book review: Sumit Guha’s new book on the history of caste
First posted May 31, 2014 “The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and died without accomplishing anything.”-V. D. Savarkar: D.V. Kelkar, The R.S.S. Economic Weekly (4 Feb 1950: 132); p. 36; The Brotherhood in Saffron; Andersen and Damle,Vistaar, 1986, Delhi) I / Celebrations at the central hall… Read More Subhash Gatade. Foot-soldiers in Search of an Icon
First posted September 06, 2020 Born on September 9, 1950 at village Talwandi Salem in Jalandhar, Avtar Singh Sandhu wrote under the pen name of Pash. Inspired by the Naxalite movement, he was known for his poetry of resistance. The four volumes of his poetry – ‘Loh Katha’, ‘Udadiyan Bazan Magar’, ‘Saddey Sameyaan Vich’ and… Read More Pash, my father: Winkle Sandhu remembers the revolutionary Punjabi poet / Sonia Mann’s emotional letter to her father Baldev Singh Mann
After the truth-shower 