GANDHI'S CRITIQUE OF WESTERN MODERNITY &
THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF THE FUTURE
THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF THE FUTURE
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By
Prof. Vinay Lal
(Professor of History, Delhi University, India;
formerly Professor of History at UCLA)
. Date: 9 August 2010 (Monday)
Time: 11am - 12.30pm
Venue: Seminar Room, Dept. of Science & Technology Studies,
Faculty of Science, UM.
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All are invited (free admission).
Vinay Lal is a writer, university professor, and cultural critic who divides his time between India and the United States. He has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1993 and he is now Professor of History at Delhi University. He Writes widely on global politics, contemporary American politics, the politics of knowledge systems, Indian history, the popular and public culture of India (especially cinema), and the Indian diaspora. His ten books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; new ed., Sage, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005); and The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (Harper Collins, 2008). He has collaborated with Ashis Nandy on three books, including the co-edited volume, The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin, 2005), and his own edited volume, Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres, appeared from Oxford UP last year. But his principal claim to fame may well be the fact that he is among the faculty members in the United States profiled in David Horowitz's book called The Professors (2008), on the 101 "most dangerous" professors in the American academy.
Vinay Lal is a writer, university professor, and cultural critic who divides his time between India and the United States. He has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1993 and he is now Professor of History at Delhi University. He Writes widely on global politics, contemporary American politics, the politics of knowledge systems, Indian history, the popular and public culture of India (especially cinema), and the Indian diaspora. His ten books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto Press, 2002; new ed., Sage, 2005); The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003); Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005); and The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (Harper Collins, 2008). He has collaborated with Ashis Nandy on three books, including the co-edited volume, The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin, 2005), and his own edited volume, Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres, appeared from Oxford UP last year. But his principal claim to fame may well be the fact that he is among the faculty members in the United States profiled in David Horowitz's book called The Professors (2008), on the 101 "most dangerous" professors in the American academy.
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Abstract.
Gandhi's Critique of Western Modernity and the Cosmopolitanism of the FutureVinay Lal
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In 1909, Mohandas Gandhi, not yet the Mahatma, penned a little tract entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Gandhi at this time still had relatively little experience of India, as he had spent close to twenty years in South Africa, but his efforts to secure rights for Indians in South Africa had earned him something of a reputation in India itself. Gandhi’s intervention in debates on Indian nationalism came at a critical juncture: nationalists were divided between the so-called ‘moderates’, who favored constitutional means to earn dominion status for India within the British empire, and the ‘extremists’, some of whom advocated outright independence from colonial rule and the use of armed revolutionary violence. Gandhi, in his characteristic fashion, would craft a unique position in Hind Swaraj, a treatise that earned him notoriety and fame in equal parts. Hind Swaraj would be the one text to which Gandhi would give his unswerving ‘loyalty’ until the end of his life.
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The West’s Gandhi is arguably a sanitized figure, the apostle of nonviolence and the prophet of peace. However, as I shall argue in this lecture, this version of Gandhi cannot accommodate the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, and much of the hostility to Gandhi in the West stems from the view of Gandhi as a resolute anti-modernist who had quaint if not repulsive ideas about sex, disliked modern medicine, and hearkened back in countless ways to some romantic view of India as a cluster of autarchic village republics. Gandhi, in turn, remained visibly unimpressed by the West’s high culture, and his sympathies lay with dissenting, marginalized, and peripheral philosophies, movements, and figures in the West. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi launched a blistering critique, to which he remained committed for the remaining 40 years of his life, of Western modernity; however, those who seek easy recourse to nationalism have not found Hind Swaraj very palatable either, since Gandhi was neither an unrepentant traditionalist nor was his conception of the West so monolithic as to preclude an understanding of the many kinds of ‘West’ subsumed under the general conception of the ‘West’.
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I will conclude with an assessment of Gandhi's challenge to global histories emerging from the West, indeed to the very idea of 'global history'. This is particularly important in view of the fact that Gandhi is seen as a universal figure, but I shall suggest that Gandhi was no champion of the idea of history, much less of any histories purporting to be global. Gandhi's most enduring contribution may be his relentless questioning of the presuppositions of modern knowledge systems and his gestures towards a new and largely unimagined form of political organizers: 'Think Globally, act locally.' Quite to the contrary, I shall argue, Gandhi was a vigorous proponent of the idea that one must 'think locally, act globally'. In this last thought, Ishall argue, is encapsulated the gist of Gandhi's engagement with the West: he embraced it, as he embraced any part of the world, as the arena of action for any person endowed with a moral conscience, but he was justly suspicious ofthe view that all our universalisms were to be derived from the West.
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