[Anthropgrad] M.K. Gandhi: The ‘Inconsistent’ Thinker as Moral Icon

[Fay castles]

******************************************************************************************
*

*The Research School of Humanities presents,
The 1^st _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 <mailto:administration.rsh at anu.edu.au>
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
*All Welcome*

 


-- 
=============================================
Fay Castles
Departmental Administrator
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
+61-2-612 52162  Fax: +61-2-612 53023
Fay.Castles at anu.edu.au
http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
ANU CRICOS Provider Number: 00120C
=============================================