Political Thought in Action
Political Thought in Action
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The Bhagavad Gita's philosophical and political significance remains forever contemporary. In this volume a group of leading historians reflect on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical thinking in modern India and beyond. These essays contribute new perspectives to historical, contemporary and global political ideas. Violence and nonviolence, war, sacrifice, justice, fraternity and political community were constitutive of India's political modernity, and it was to these questions that Indian public figures turned their attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Oriented towards the future, these commentaries and interpretations of a text that locates war as the central problem of human life have detached the Gita from antiquity and made it foundational for India's modernity. The book would be of interest to academic researchers as well as general readers interested in South Asian history, Indian philosophy and religion.
- Aims to revise perspectives on violence, war and sacrifice
- Traces the conversion of the Gita into a travelling-text of 'spiritualism' both within and beyond the confines of India
- Charts anew the power of ideas and text in making the modern world
- Discusses radical reformulation of the political in relation to the ethical
Product details
March 2013Hardback
9781107033955
220 pages
236 × 160 × 18 mm
0.52kg
Unavailable - out of print August 2020
Table of Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji
- 1. India, the Bhagavad Gita and the world C. A. Bayly
- 2. The transnational Gita Mishka Sinha
- 3. The transfiguration of duty in Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita Andrew Sartori
- 4. Gandhi's Gita and politics as such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar
- 5. Gandhi on democracy, politics and the ethics of everyday life Uday S. Mehta
- 6. Morality in the shadow of politics Faisal Devji
- 7. Ambedkar's inheritances Aishwary Kumar
- 8. Rethinking knowledge with action: V. D. Savarkar, the Bhagavad Gita, and histories of warfare Vinayak Chaturvedi
- 9. A history of violence Shruti Kapila
- Index.
