Introduction by Demetra Kasimis

Thursday, 16th November

Classics 110

(1010 East 59^th Street)

4:00pm

Please note the slightly earlier start time of this lecture.

“Gandhi would have been Gandhi even without Thoreau and Tolstoy.” Albert Einstein’s quip
succinctly captures a persistent dilemma about tracking the intellectual origins of Gandhi’s
political ideas – especially the origins of satyagraha or nonviolent resistance. Scholars are not
only divided on how to weigh the “Western” versus “Indian” provenance of Gandhi’s ideas, but
the very question is saturated by assumptions about Gandhi’s intellectual sophistication and/or
originality as a thinker (or lack thereof). This lecture revisits the formative role of late Victorian
radicalism on Gandhi’s politics and political thought to track more precisely the influence and
legacy of movements like vegetarianism and thinkers like Tolstoy and Thoreau. In so doing, I
hope also to show that in Gandhi’s case especially, the origins/influence paradigm should give
way to a mode of reconstruction that foregrounds formative conjunctures of theory and practice.
Karuna Mantena specializes in political theory with research interests in the theory and history of
empire, South Asian intellectual history, and postcolonial democracy. Karuna holds a
B.Sc.(Economics) in International Relations from the London School of Economics (1995), an
M.A. in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex (1996), and a Ph.D. in
Government from Harvard University (2004). Her first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and
the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British
imperial ideology. She is currently finishing a book on M. K. Gandhi and the politics of
nonviolence, tentatively titled Gandhi’s Realism: Means and Ends in Politics. She is also co-
director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought