Faisal
Devji
"Anti-liberal Mahatma"
Talk Summary
About
While Gandhi is often invoked by Indian liberals to support their views, he was in fact a stern critic of liberalism, which he thought had provided the justification for colonial rule. Rather than purging liberalism of its colonial associations, as Nehru sought to do, Gandhi reimagined India’s social relations against and outside its reach. He did so by questioning the role of the state as well as the uniformity of citizenship. In this talk I shall explore the ways in which Gandhi’s non-violent mobilizations endeavoured to establish national freedom outside the ambit of state and even citizenship by setting other foundations for society in their place.
Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History, Fellow of St. Antony’s College and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago and has held positions at Harvard, Yale, and the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of four books, including The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence.