Gandhi, Hinduism and Humanity

Speaker: Dr. Faisal Devji, Reader in Indian History, University of Oxford

 

Chair & Discussant: Dr. Avijit Pathak , Professor in Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

As a critic of modern civilization Gandhi was deeply suspicious of its desire for universality. While universal ideals like freedom, therefore, were enthusiastically taken up by many anti-colonial thinkers, the Mahatma focused instead on their darker aspects and links with imperialism. And yet he refused to become a partisan for the particular either, recognizing it as a category belonging to the universal as well. Hinduism provided Gandhi with an important example of a phenomenon that he thought might avoid the violence of the universal while at the same time denying relegation to a mere particularity. This lecture will explore how Gandhi posed Hinduism against what he saw as the violent appeal to humanity as a universal ideal, looking in particular at his understanding of three contentious issues: caste, conversion and cow protection

 

(Collaboration: South Asian University and Society and Culture in South Asia)