On Wednesday, 10/18 from 2-4pm, the Nicholson Center for British Studies will host an information session for the Fall Quarter’s cycle of graduate and undergraduate research grants. The event will feature a panel of former grant recipients who will discuss the application process, the opportunities and challenges of doing work in British archives, and field questions from prospective applicants.

“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.