Conceived, debated and written in the shadow of our new wartorn millennium, this work brings together an impressive and varied group of scholars across the disciplinary divide to rethink Gandhi’s legacy and nonviolent ethics.What traction do peace and Gandhi have in these violent times when religious fundamentalisms of various kinds are competing with the arrogance and unilateralism of imperial capital? In what possible registers can Gandhian moral vernaculars-ahimsa, stayagraha, sarvodaya-address the ravages of our contemporary world?
In rethinking Gandhi’s relevance in the new world order, the contributors approach Gandhi, not purely as an ‘Indian’ figure, but as an activist-thinker whose transcultural nonviolent ethics of the everyday eminently translates across a range of political sites. The volume also gives us vignettes of Gandhi’s more eccentric aspects-his vegetarianism, his fasts and medical practice, and his experiments in communal living. Without deifying Gandhi, the volume sensitively explores the sheer worldliness and embodied nature of Gandhi’s thought, practice and legacy.
