[Anthropgrad] 1st key Thinkers Seminar - Debjani Ganguly on Gandhi

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
The 1st Key Thinkers Seminar for 2009

5 - 6.30 pm, Tuesday 5th May, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

M.K. Gandhi: The 'Inconsistent' Thinker as Moral Icon

Debjani Ganguly

 

On February 13, 1930, at the height of India's struggle for independence
which he helped lead, Mahatma Gandhi published a piece in his newspaper,
Young India. Entitled 'My Inconsistencies', the article sought to make a
brief case - the lawyer that he was - for why Gandhi's ideas could never
offer a coherent body of political thought. His quest for 'truth' was
too worldly, it claimed, it was all too immersed in life's flux. 'But',
continued Gandhi, 'since I am called the "Mahatma" [literally, 'great
soul'], I might well endorse Emerson's saying that "foolish consistency
is the hobgoblin of little minds". There is, I fancy, a method in my
inconsistencies'. My talk will seek to unravel this 'method', exploring
the import of Gandhian moral vernaculars - Ahimsa, Satyagraha, Sarvodaya
- in his time and ours. It will also foreground the simultaneous
relevance and irrelevance of Gandhi in late modern India: relevance,
paradoxically, in the context of both India's intellectual life and
popular culture, but irrelevance in the domain of national politics.

 

Debjani Ganguly is Head of the Humanities Research Centre, RSH. A
literary and cultural historian by training, she has published in the
areas of postcolonial studies, global anglophone writing, theories of
world literature, caste and dalit studies, cultural histories of
mixed-race, Gandhi and nonviolence and Indian literary criticism. Her
publications include Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity (Routledge,
2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, co-edited (MUP,
2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality, co-edited
(Routledge, 2007).

 

Convenors: Ned Curthoys

For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome