Editorial Note, Nov-Dec, 2023
The current number of Social Scientist is a special issue on Mahatma Gandhi on the seventy-sixth anniversary of his martyrdom. We are grateful to Sucheta Mahajan for helping us prepare this issue.
Gandhi on the Wider Significance of Science
It is well-known that in his major work Hind Swaraj as well as a vast number of dispatches, letters and speeches, Gandhi (2010 [1909]) expressed a recoil from the various elements of modernity that he detected in the last two-and-a-half…
Our Fear of Knowing Gandhi
Here is more of the same. The same with additional information, different illustrations, other arguments. And, of course, with a greater sense of urgency and desperation. It is more of the same that five years back I had written for…
Gandhi’s Murder: Nathuram Godse’s Arguments Deconstructed
India’s freedom struggle has been the biggest ever mass movement in the world. With the British enslaving the country, they brought in many changes leading to the change in composition of social classes. They established the railways, improved communication (with…
Who Killed Gandhi?
On 30 January 1948, at 17 minutes past 5 pm, Nathuram Godse shot Bapu thrice at point-blank range and killed him, as he arrived to conduct his daily evening prayer meeting. But this person who was a chronic failure was…
Godse Never Left the RSS
In the three-quarters of a century since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) tried to obfuscate its links with the assassin, Nathuram Vinayak Godse. It claimed that Godse had left the organisation…
The Killing of Gandhi, the Tales Told Thereafter: A Scrutiny of the Sectarian Narrative
Nearly a month after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in India on 30 January 1948, Sardar Patel, the then Home Minister, wrote to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on 27 February 1948 pointing to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his group: ‘It was a…
Whose Heroes and Whose Villains? ‘Rewriting’ the History of the Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
The terrain of this paper, the writing and rewriting of history, is much traversed and contested. When we speak of the contested imaginings of the nation, history writing generally comes to mind. This is where the battle for the minds…
Book Review: The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba
Tushar Gandhi, The Lost Diary of Kastur, My Ba, Harper Collins: Gurugram, 2023, ix+299 pages, Rs 399 ‘I have already said that Kasturbai was illiterate. I was very anxious to teach her, but lustful love left me no time. For…