Join the conversation
Posted by Watsonblogs on November 17, 2009
Join the conversation, on the Year of India blog...
What would Mahatma Gandhi say to President Obama? His grandson, the public intellectual Rajmohan Gandhi, was on campus this week. And he told Radio Open Source that the conversation would go something like this: Mahatma Gandhi would “say to the Americans what he said to the British: who asked you to be the guardians of the whole wide world? And why do you think you know better than the local people what is best for them? Relax! Trust those people. Yes, they may make mistakes, but they’re entitled to their freedom, to their independence.”
Rajmohan Gandhi’s remarks on campus seem like a good way to launch the Year of India blog. Some students were inspired by his public lecture, on the practice of nonviolence by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Others wanted the discussion to go further. Here is the opportunity.
Throughout the year, we are inviting bloggers and other commentators to use this space to discuss Year of India lectures, cultural events and other sources of inspiration – academic or otherwise – that reflect on India’s people, culture, economy, politics – and their growing impact around the world. Beyond campus, as well, we are hoping this blog can track the news of India and comment on what makes the headlines and what lies behind them.
Read about Gandhi’s lecture, listen to the Open Source interview, and tell us what you think.
Comments (1)
"In all humility I may say that I have come here also as a friend of the capitalists -- a friend of the Tatas. And here it would be ungrateful on my part, if I do not give you a little anecdote about how my connection with the Tatas began. In South Africa when I was struggling along with the Indians in the attempt to retain our self-respect and to vindicate our status it was Sir Ratan Tata who first came forward with assistance." -- Extract from Mahatma Gandhi's speech delivered at Jamshedpur on August 8, 1925.
The world today could certainly use Gandhi's robust challenges to power and dominant conceptualizations of political economy. In listening to the interview with Rajmohan Gandhi, I was most struck by his intimations of what his grandfather would say to India's rapid economic growth since the liberalization reforms of the early 1990s. The Tata whom Gandhi cited above was one of India's greatest industrialists and philanthropists. Sir Ratan Tata had wired a check for 25,000 Rs. to the non-cooperation movement in South Africa, which Gandhi had led. The family-owned Tata Group that Sir Ratan Tata left behind is today a multinational conglomerate that acquired two signature British automobile lines, Land Rover and Jaguar, and engineered the world's cheapest car, the Nano.
And so, while Gandhi would attack the "worship of money" in India and elsewhere, he would most likely do so in his characteristic fashion of separating money from its holders. Seven years after his Jamshedpur speech, Gandhi was interviewed by the French journalist Charles Petrasch and offered another signature quote: “If I come to power I shall certainly abolish capitalism, but I shall not abolish capital, and it follows that I shall not abolish the capitalists. I am convinced that the coordination of capital and labour is perfectly possible. I have seen it realised with success in certain cases, and what is true in one case can become true for all. I do not consider capital in itself as an evil, no more than I consider the machine system in itself as an evil.”
Posted by Christopher Hardy | November 22, 2009 09:54 PM