The Seven Sages

Selected Essays

01 August, 2015

Ramchandra Gandhi

Edited by A Raghuramaraju

Penguin India, 450 pages, Rs. 499

In these essays, the philosopher and writer Ramchandra Gandhi, who passed away aged 70, in 2007, reflects on themes ranging from non-violence and karma to swaraj, brahmacharya and modern Indian spirituality. Bridging the moral, religious and social worlds, this book offers many original insights: on how the nineteenth-century mystics Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi’s catholic vision of religion annihilated exclusivism; on how brahmacharya transcends celibacy in a joyous renunciation of sex; and on swaraj as a struggle for the autonomy of the self, and not mere political independence.