Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Benedict Anderson argues that nationalist ideas in Asia and Africa are modeled on the ‘modular' forms of nationalism that developed in the Americas and Europe. This paper argues that anti-colonial nationalism is a field of contestation between different ideas and practices. Some of these were indeed based on selective appropriation of Western practices, whereas some of these rejected such ideas and practices and contended that decolonization or emancipation necessarily entailed rejecting the examples set by Western nations. This paper compares the thoughts of Frantz Fanon and M.K. Gandhi, two of the most influential figures in post-colonial thought in the twentieth century as well as active participants in major anti-colonial struggles, and argues that in spite of contextual and ideological differences between them both rejected the Western models of nationalist politics and emphasized a repudiation of colonialism through political and institutional innovations in similar ways. The three major sections of the paper deals with their respective critiques of colonialism and elite nationalism; the prescribed modes of political practice; and the projects of national reconstruction. The unifying thread in each of these three sections is their common concerns regarding negation of colonialism as well as the cultural alienation of the nationalist elite and the necessity of a radical break with Western models of nationalist politics. The concluding section attempts to understand the reasons why their visions of national independence remains unfulfilled.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper aims to situate M. K. Gandhi philosophically within current debates about discourse ethics and deliberative democracy. Gandhi offered an expansive view of public reason that includes much that is generally excluded from more formalist theories. He openly appealed to the passions and to comprehensive religious doctrines. Gandhi’s Satyagraha, or ‘truth-firmness’, was more than the strategy of an anti-colonial movement. It was a means for achieving the necessary conditions for radical deliberative democracy, an ideal political system in which all engage in political deliberation and in which important moral/political problems are matters for consensus, not contest. Gandhi suggested an ideal of democratic deliberation that was not based on formal pragmatics, but on the cultivation of virtues among the populace, notably the very virtues required for ‘swaraj’, or self-rule.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How do we arbitrate between competing conceptions of moral truth that arise from particular individual or cultural views of the human good? Here, I suggest that self-suffering through nonviolence is Gandhi?s answer to this question. Gandhi privileges the subjective call of particular individual consciences, even as he recognizes the incompleteness and relativity of their grasp of the truth. On the Gandhian view, the willingness to undergo non-violent self-suffering is itself proof of truthfulness, and thus serves as epistemological arbiter. A practitioner of nonviolence, while holding on to the truth as she sees it, will assume her own fallibility and give the opponent every chance to prove that her position is erroneous. The doctrine of nonviolence can thus mediate between competing visions of morality.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: MK Gandhi’s political vision of an ‘enlightened anarchy” was never realized in India though the anti-colonial movement he led was unquestionably successful. This paper tries to understand this failure of the political vision at the moment of success of the political movement. Gandhi’s critique was not just limited to the particular colonial state he was opposing, but was targeted at the fundamental rationale of modern sovereign state itself. Two fundamental tenets of this critique was the denial of the fear (the need for security, in the Hobbessian sense) that lies at the heart of the state; and the denial of the possibility of an absolute ascription of meaning that founds the sovereign order. Instead Gandhi used the trope of a continual search, through the process of suffering at the heart of his politics. It was a search for the collective ethical self of the community. However, his political role as the leader of an organized movement and his radically dispersed notion of sovereignty created an inherent contradiction within his project. It was this contradiction that lead to the failure of the latter precisely when the former became successful. However, his critique does not lose relevance, or get subsumed by the success of the movement. Instead, it remains its radical potential as long as the modern state remains the preeminent form of a political community.