Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues (And Other Essays)

Language: English
Pages: 224


About The Book

Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues and other essays, explores M K Gandhi's bilingual modes of thought. The essays collected here draw upon the Ashramic intellectual tradition of understanding Gandhi by placing his politics, his spiritual strivings, his constructive work and his practices of fasting, of brahmacharya and his desire to be a satyagrahi and sthitapragyna at the centre of his key texts. This act of reading Gandhi is akin to telling the beads, comforting and meditative in its repetitiveness.

 

About The Author

Tridip Suhrud is the author of Writing Life: Three Gujarati Thinkers, Hind Swarj Vishe, Hind Swaraj: Ek Anushilan (forthcoming), Kavi Ni Choki (forthcoming) and An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments With Truth: A Table of Concordance. He has edited and translated (with Suresh Sharma) a bilingual edition of M K Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, and edited (with Peter Ronald deSouza), Speaking of Gandhi's Death. He has translated Ashis Nandy and Ganesh Devy into Gujarati and Narayan Desai's My Life Is My Message and C B Dalal's Harilal Gandhi: A Life into English for which he was given the Sahitya Akademi Award for translation.

 

Prefece

Reading Gandhi for me has been akin to telling the beads; a daily practice, comforting in its repetitiveness, sometimes meditative. Telling beads is necessary for those who have no direct, unmediated access to the light they seek.

The journey of understanding Gandhi for me has been in and through the Gujarati language. Modern Gujarati prose has been chiselled and enriched by some of Gandhi's closest associates and fellow ashramites: Swami Anand, Kakasaheb Kalelkar, Mahadev Desai, Kishorela