Tuesday, November 5, 2013
5 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum
OP Jindal Lecture
"Arguments with Gandhi I: The Diasporic Roots of Gandhi's Pluralism," with historian
Ram Guha.
Gandhi was a Hindu who befriended Muslims, Christians and Jews; a Gujarati speaker who came to admire all the languages of the Indian sub-continent (and spoke and wrote beautiful English too); a man who advocated equal rights for women; and an upper caste individual who rejected the prejudices of the caste system. This lecture will argue that the roots of Gandhi’s pluralist, inclusive vision lie in his largely forgotten years in London and South Africa. It was his decades in the diaspora that allowed him to more deeply understand what divides, and what unites, humans in general and Indians in particular.