UNCONDITIONAL EQUALITY GANDHI’S RELIGION OF RESISTANCE

Ajay Skaria

Ajay Skaria, a historian, examines Mohandas Gandhi’s approach to the issues of freedom and equality. Sometimes working against the grain of Gandhi’s explicit formulations, Skaria reconceives satyagraha as a politics that strives for the absolute equality of all beings. Liberal concepts of equality, Gandhi argued, often exclude those presumed to lack reason, such as animals or the colonised. He professed instead a politics organised around dharma, which involves a freely offered surrender of autonomy.

Permanent Black and University of Minnesota press, 406 pages, Rs 895