IEA

Fellowship from October 2010 to June 2011

Research project:

"Gandhi: An Inquiry into a Recessive Discourse"

"While working on upper caste conversion to Christianity I came across a tantalizing citation of Gandhi’s prayer meeting discourses. As I went through the cited pages, the power of Gandhi’s austere oral enunciation so seized me that I decided to read the entire work (in two volumes). The tragic reflections and revelations Gandhi candidly made in those discourses compelled a new perspective on his life. Further, as he famously put it, his life is his message, that perspective also demanded a re-consideration of the limits - indeed, the very possibility - of non-violence. Non-violence not as any eschewing of violence, but in the Gandhian sense of satyagraha. In his last days, the discourses revealed, Gandhi was convinced that the freedom struggle he had led was not non-violent. It was passive resistance. And passive resistance, being the non-violence of the weak, is actually a preparation for violence. That long-repressed violence it was, he asserted, that had in all its insane brutality overtaken the country on the eve of Independence. The discourses also revealed how completely helpless Gandhi felt during those last critical days. The extent of his ineffectuality put in a new light the well-known pattern of Gandhi’s now-on-now-off relationship with the Indian National Congress. Yet, and this is no less compelling, even in the midst of his deepening despondency his faith in non-violence remained unshaken. What had failed, he maintained, was human agency, not non-violence. This ostensibly simple statement, too, raises basic questions about the conditions that, apart from individual human volition, can incline human agency towards or away from non-violence."

Biographical elements:

A historian by training, Sudhir Chandra has been primarily engaged in understanding the nature of modern Indian social consciousness as it began to shape as a consequence of colonial intervention. The first fruit of this engagement was ’Dependence and Disillusionment:
Emergence of National Consciousness in Later Nineteenth Century India’
(1975). Moving away from received historiographic wisdom that privileged binary oppositions, this book shows how the same person, group of persons or movement tended to be both progressive and reactionary, driven by stirring ideals as well as narrow material interests. This was followed by ’The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India’ (1992). Examining those contradictory impulses more closely through literature in a number of Indian languages, this work offers ’ambivalence’ as the defining characteristic of that emergent social consciousness. Then came ’Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women’s Rights’ (1998).
Studying a cause celebre (1884-88), in which an ordinary Indian woman had simultaneously defied organised orthodoxy and the colonial legal dispensation by refusing to live with a husband she ’disliked’, this book shows the applicability of ambivalence even in the examination of immediate responses to a single ’event’.
Currently Sudhir Chandra is working on the interplay of religion, culture, and nationalism by focusing on upper caste converts to Christianity, and on the last days of Gandhi.
He has been associated with a number of universities and research institutions in India, the USA , Europe, and Japan.