INDIA - Prospects in Central Europe
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Dr. Claudia Preckel Premium Member Group moderatorThe company name is only visible to registered members.Kulturtipp Februar 08 // Gandhi-Biographien / Gandhi Biographies
Taking up the motto of the Gandhi year, I would like to introduce some Gandhi biographies to you.
Nachdem ich leider den Kulturtipp im Januar ausfallen lassen musste, möchte ich nun - gemäß des Mottos des Gandhis-Jahrs - einige Gandhi Biographien vorstellen.
Let's start with the biography written by the famous Indian psychologist and essayist Sudhir Kakar.
He wrote a biography called Mira and the Mahatma, in which he focused on the person of Madeline Slade, called Mira, and her (unhappy) love to Gandhi:
Madeleine Slade, the daughter of British Admiral, sets her heart on becoming Bapu's greatest disciple, who embraces her into the fold of his ashram, and renames her Mira after a devotee of Krishna.
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In German: Die Frau, die Gandhi liebte. Es gibt eine brandneue Edition im dtv vom Januar 2008.
Mahatma Gandhi und die Britin Madeline Slade verband das vielleicht passionierteste platonische Liebesverhältnis aller Zeiten.' (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
Im Jahr 1925 machte sich eine junge Engländerin auf den Weg nach Indien. Ihr Ziel: Der Ashram Mahatma Gandhis, um ihn in seinem Freiheitskampf zu unterstützen, nach seiner Lehre zu leben, vor allem aber, um ihrem 20 Jahre älteren Idol ganz nahe zu sein. Doch Gandhi lebte ganz seinen Zielen, wollte von seiner Umgebung möglichst unabhängig sein und entzog sich ihrer Liebe. Madeline Slade verliebte sich dann in einen jungen Mitstreiter, aber auch diese Beziehung blieb unerfüllt. Resigniert kehrte sie nach Europa zurück.
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Enjoy it!
CP
- 01 Feb 2008, 10:09 pm
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Dr. Claudia Preckel Premium Member Group moderatorThe company name is only visible to registered members.
Kulturtipp Februar 08 // Gandhi-Biographien / Gandhi Biographies
The French scientist Claude Markovits wrote the following interesting Gandhi biography: "The UnGandhian Gandhi", in which he stressed the sometimes contradictory characteristics of Gandhi. The biography was published in Delhi with Permanent Black (2004)
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This major study reconsiders the creation of the Gandhian legend through the myriad texts and images that helped spread it through both India and the Western world.
In revealing how the picture of the Mahatma as saint-as-politician was founded on Indian nationalistic selectivity and limited Western representations of Gandhi, Claude Markovits shows how Gandhi's legend has obscured the facts of his public career. Gandhi's professional role in the public sphere, Markovits argues, was heavily influenced by his long and critical phase of maturation in South Africa, a period often dismissed as the precursor to his celebrated work in India. Markovits proposes that Gandhi's later Indian career, marked by his meteoric rise to prominence, was the result of his own radical self-reinvention as he negotiated the pitfalls of political life in order to create his influential political manifesto.
In reevaluating critical stages of Gandhi's career, and his sometimes ambivalent ideological positions, Markovits confronts the discrepancies between his early and late careers, closely rereading the Mahatma's varying intellectual positions as described both within his own writings and in those by commentators and biographers. Rather than seeing Gandhi as an upholder of traditional Indian values, Markovits stresses the paradoxical modernity of Gandhi's anti-modernism.
The picture of Gandhi that emerges from "The Un-Gandhian Gandhi" is of a contradictory, multifaceted figure, whose peculiar modernity, and susceptibility to varying appropriations, makes him of enduring significance for
future generations.
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(Book description AMAZON)
- 11 Feb 2008, 1:24 pm
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Dr. Claudia Preckel Premium Member Group moderatorThe company name is only visible to registered members.
Re^2: Kulturtipp Februar 08 // Gandhi-Biographien / Gandhi Biographies
Dear Roland,
good to hear that you are going to read the book! Hope you will like it!
Here is another Gandhi-Biography:
Mohandas : A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire
Author: Gandhi, Rajmohan
Year: 2007
ISBN : 0670999326
[ 24 cm., pp. 760, b/w photos 24 ]
[ Price: RS. 650.00, US$ 16.67 ]
Main Features »
A candid recreation of one of the most influential lives of recent times, Mohandas finally answers questions long asked about the timid youth from India’s west coast who became a century’s conscience and led his nation to liberty: What was Gandhi like in his daily life and in his closest relationships? In his face-offs with an Empire, with his own bitterly divided people, with his adversaries, his family and—his greatest confrontation—with himself?
Answering these and other questions, and releasing the true Gandhi from his shroud of fame and myth, Mohandas, authored by a practised biographer who is also Gandhi’s grandson, does more than tell a story.
With its sweep, its swings between glory and tragedy, the profusion and richness of its characters—and the stamina and resilience of the chief among them— Mohandas tells the great history of an Asian nation’s interaction with a European empire.
But this historical account addresses today’s issues as well. After the violence the world has witnessed in recent times—in Bombay and in Gujarat, in New York and Washington, the American attacks that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the horrors of the conflict involving Lebanon and Israel—the world awaits the reconciliation between Muslims and non-Muslims which constituted one of the compelling passions of Gandhi’s life.
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Sonds very interesting!
CP
- 20 Feb 2008, 5:45 pm
