Recent Articles
The Tiger’s Nature, but Not the Tiger: Bal Gangadhar Tilak as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Counter-Guru
Hind Swaraj’s importance is born out of a dialogue with a figure whom Gandhian commentary has all but deleted: Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Much of Gandhi’s thought and writing has to negotiate the central problem of Tilak’s dominance of India politics through…Hindu Modern: Considering Gandhian Aesthetics
A friend recounted what I believe might be an apocryphal story upon hearing about my interest in Gandhian memorials. The story goes as follows: during outbreaks of communal violence in Ahmadabad, a group of volunteers go around the city, blindfolding…Gandhi before Mahatma: The Foundations of Political Truth
In the early 1930s, a critical biography on Gandhi was written. The critique of Gandhi in the 1930s was striking for two reasons, at least.1 For one, thanks to Romain Rolland in the West and Gandhi’s acceptance in the Indian heartlands on the other, by…The Case of the Missing Mahatma: Gandhi and the Hindi Cinema
M. K. “Mahatma” Gandhi (1869 – 1948) is regarded as the father of the Indian nation, or as Bapuji. Yet while Gandhi left many volumes of his work and many biographies have been written; his image is well known in India and throughout the world, mostly…Gandhi’s Progressive Disillusionment: Thumbs, Fingers, and the Rejection of Scientific Modernism in Hind Swaraj
Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj — the anticolonial manifesto that defined him as one of the key political actors of the twentieth century — after six years of struggle over the fingerprint registration of Indians in the Transvaal. His little book is an angry…