About the Conference
When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2nd October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, Queen Victoria was the Empress of India and the sun never set on the British Empire. When Gandhi was assassinated on 30th January 1948, it was already a very different world. India was an independent nation and Britain had lost the jewel in its crown. What was Gandhi’s role in these world changing events? How had this man who Winston Churchill had called the ‘half-naked fakir’ brought the mighty colonisers to their knees? How did this man from a small princely state in Gujarat become a Mahatma?
The 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth is distant in both time and space from not just 1869 but also 1948. The Age of Empires is a thing of the past. The India in which Gandhi died too has changed. Staying within the matrix of time, what also needs to be evaluated, re-evaluated, is the role Gandhi played in the socio-economic growth of India. With so sudden and quick a death of Gandhi, India never really had a chance to become Gandhian. Nehru’s socio-economic policies were at odds with Gandhi’s aversion to industrialization. Gandhi has remained enshrined on India’s currency notes but India’s economic policies during the socialist period and then the capitalist, global era has nothing in common with Gandhi’s ideals of small-scale, village level development.
The generation of Indians who were alive during the years when Gandhi had brought an empire to a standstill with satyagraha and ahimsa as his weapons is now gone. Even those born in Nehruvian India are now senior citizens. What resonance does Gandhi have with the generations born at the end of the Twentieth century and the beginning of the new Millennium?
The present day Dalits might be aware of the disagreements between Gandhi and Ambedkar
but do they know of the role that Gandhi had played in the uplift of this community. The 1920s and 1930s were the decades that saw women in the West fighting for franchise and a role in the public spaces.Gandhi might be considered a misogynist by some feminist critics today but he pulled Indian women out into the political fray and at the head of his several movements, be it the Dandi March or the Quit India movement. He might have had rather puritanical views about sexuality and advocated celibacy even within marriage for his followers, but does that make him a male chauvinist?
What also needs to be remembered is that Gandhi spent 21 long years outside India when he at first worked as a lawyer in South Africa and then lead the Indians there into many long drawn out civic battles with the racist, colonial regime. How does South Africa remember him today? There are many in South Africa and other parts of that continent, who are extremely critical of Gandhi. They think that he did not do anything for the Africans themselves. Yet the leaders of the African freedom struggle such as Nelson Mandela were inspired by him as were the Black Civil Rights leaders in America.
This 150th anniversary of his birth is an opportunity not just to bow our heads in hagiographic remembrance to this man who became a Mahatma, but to also re-evaluate his philosophy, politics, economics and social messages. This conference therefore seeks to remember and re-evaluate Gandhi in all these aspects. We also need to remember his wife Kasturba Gandhi who also has a 150th birth anniversary this year.
The keynote/plenary speakers from India and Africa are invited but papers are welcome for parallel sessions from young faculty members and research scholars in the following areas:
- Relevance of Gandhi 150 years after his birth
- Gandhi’s philosophy of Ahimsa in the 21st Century
- Gandhi’s economic policies and global capitalization
- Racism and Gandhi
- Women and Gandhi
- Kasturba and Gandhi
- Relevance of Gandhi in Africa today
- Influence of Gandhi around the world
- Dalits and Gandhi
- Young Millennials and Gandhi
- Gandhi and Science
- Gandhi and Alternative Medical Therapies