The iconic Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is synonymous with India's struggle for freedom. Despite the vast volume of literature that exists on him, many crucial questions remain unanswered, until now. In Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in History. Mushirul Hasan appraises the times in which Gandhi grew up and asks: How did he move millions with what seemed like so little effort? Why did he succeed in most cases and contingencies but not when it came to engaging with Muslim nationalism? Is it not ironic that the messenger of non-violence lived through Partition, one of the subcontinent's most violent events?
Hasan critically examines Gandhi's reading and interpretation of Islam, his relationship with the Muslim communities, and his strategy of dealing with them. He also compares and contrasts Gandhi with the leading Muslim political actors of the time. Similar attempts to compare Gandhi with B.R. Ambedkar and the Nehrus reveal the continuities and discontinuities in the Indian national movement.
Dealing with the landmark events for the birth of a modern India, the author attempts to deepen and enrich the shadows of the people in the Mahatma's life, insofar as they affected and shaped his politics. On India's Partition, he offers rare insights into Gandhi's opposition to the two-nation theory. and his conception of Unity in Diversity. He uncovers, moreover, the roots of his differences with M.A. Jinnah.
Faith and Freedom: Gandhi in History will help to stimulate and encourage the reader to explore the political heritage bequeathed upon us by one of one of the most epic, controversial and enigmatic figures in world history.
Professor Mushirul Hasan is an internationally renowned historian, prolific author and former Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He is presently the Director-General of the National Archives of India. Professor Hasan has published books on India's Partition, on communalism, and on the histories of Islam in South Asia. He has authored Partners in Freedom: Jamia Millia Islamia (2006); The Avadh Punch:Wit and Humour in Colonial North India (2007) and Wit and Wisdom: Pickings from the Parsee Punch (2012); and edited Mutiny Memoirs (2009); Sarojini Naidu: Her Way with Words (2012). He is also editor of the ongoing multi-volume history of the Indian National Congress, brought out by Niyogi Books starting in 2012.
Professor Hasan was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2007, and in 2010 the Ordre des Palmes Academiques was conferred upon him by the French Government. He was presented with the Al-Beruni Award by the Iran Cultural Centre (2011) and the Al-Farabi Award by the Government of Iran in 2012.
Thomas Jefferson's legacy is intact in Charlottesville, Virginia. Charles de Gaulle is a towering personality in France. In June 2011, the Macedonians placed a statue of Alexander the Great on a high pedestal in their capital, Skopje, to buttress the nation against the trauma of free market, political strife and independence. While Greece accuses Macedonia of stealing its history and national symbols.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk remains, notwithstanding the change in regime in the summer of 2011, Turkey's icon. Ayatollah Khomeini is venerated as the Imam in the Islamic Republic of Iran; his status unassailable. The mausoleums of Mohammad Iqbal, the Urdu poet, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's Qaid-i Azam, are pilgrimage sites in Lahore (Punjab) and Karachi (Sind) respectively. In 1948, Horace Alexander of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) attempted in vain to persuade the Nobel Prize Committee to award the Peace Prize posthumously to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. When he concluded his lecture in Oslo, a profound silence was followed by thunderous applause.
Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878-1955) of Delhi lived in an atmosphere of intense other-worldliness in the company of other Sufis. In close proximity were the shrines of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Chishti saint, Amir Khusro, his disciple and poet, and Ziauddin Barani, the historian of the early Turks. The Khwaja engaged in polemical debates with some of his contemporaries. Gandhi's asceticism and emphasis on the spiritual resonates with him, 'who likens him to a sort of modern day Kabir marked by a fundamental ambivalence with regards to his Muslimness and Hinduness. He appropriated Gandhi's thought in his witty fictional travelogue set in the year 2050. At the end of the journey, beginning 1 January, he discovers Gandhi's humanism: 'I saw Gandhi's followers throughout the world; specifically in America. If this travel narrative were true, one would have to agree that Gandhi's influence is now so universal that his fame will continue for centuries. 'During the last days, he continued, 'our Mohandas Gandhi has conquered Europe and America with his spiritualism even though the British have put him in jail near Poona, his spiritual ideas have caught the imagination of (the people) in the West, specially the democratic-loving people of Great Britain."
It used to be said in Oxford in 1925 that the mere mention of the word India emptied the city's smallest lecture-hall. Gandhi changed all of that. 'Like a colossus he [Gandhi] stands astride half a century of India's history, a colossus not of the body but of the mind and spirit, Jawaharlal Nehru, free India's first prime minister, declared on 2 February 1948 while announcing the assassination of the 'Father of the Nation. One assumed that such a person would remain constant and there would be, in line with other countries, a persistent interest in keeping alive his inheritance. In spite of this, as will be clear by now, the twenty-first century takes what it wants from Gandhi and neglects what it thinks it doesn't need. One must, therefore, rid oneself of the illusion that his ideas ring truer with each passing day or that he lives amongst us as a force. At most places his faded portraits are callously hung, making it all the more difficult to connect a bygone time with our present which is flitting away from us. They gather dust with every passing year. The Gandhian institutions have produced little of enduring value or quality.
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