Gandhi Across Disciplines: New Millennial Responses

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It may read cliché but Gandhi made immeasurable contributions to various academic disciplines, and his munificent contributions are deeply integrated into humanistic thoughts and actions to advocate that life must be based on 'love-force' or 'soul-force', evidently drawn through the quality of education. His discourses in humanities and social sciences are realistic, reasoned and effective. His political vision, his spiritual way of life, his futuristic views on nature, his ideas on environmental ethics and anthropocentrism have worked as stimuli for the country and society at large. The present volume entitled Gandhi Across Disciplines: New Millennial Responses, therefore, addresses a string of questions to explore and establish how Gandhi was undisputedly the guiding light for humanity through the previous century and how his life, values and missives remain pertinent in the contemporary times as well.

DR AJAY K CHAUBEY, (b.1979) formerly Assistant Professor (English) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, is now an Associate Professor, Department of English, Jananayak Chandrashekhar University, Ballia (Uttar Pradesh), India.

DR RENU B. DANGWAL (b.1979) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology. Uttarakhand, India.

DR PREETI BHATT (b.1969) is Associate Professor in English, Department of HSS, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, India.

DR SANTOSH KUMAR (b.1983) Yadav is an Assistant Professor (History) at the School of Social Sciences & Language, Lovely Professional vsity Punjab, India.

Gandhi returned to India on January 9, 1915, from South Africa and since then he actively participated in and led various movements, protests, and marches and even mark his protest peacefully and non-violently fasted to ma to set our nation free from the British subjugation. Because of his pacifist civil disobedience and leadership, the British Government always took him as a threat to its throne. Gandhi's political activism began in 1917-1918 when he took up the issues of Champaran farmers, the Ahmadabad textile workers, the Kheda peasants, etc These struggles witnessed his specific mode of agitation, widely known as Satyagrah, which he had earlier developed in the South African context and through which he was successful in achieving his socio-economic and political goals. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan calls him "the supreme religion, the essence of all religions and a symbol of communal unity and universal humanity." On a similar note, Shri Ram Nath Kovind, the Hon'ble President of India, once said to commence the 150th Birth Anniversary of Gandhi that, "[H]e was the inspiration for our largely non-violent, inclusive and democratic freedom struggle." Gandhi's thoughts, words, and activism, thus, continue to inspire and influence various forms of epistemologies and augment several streams of ontological tools. Many branches of the Humanities and Social Sciences are taught under the rubric of Gandhian theory and his philosophy of satya and ahimsa. Thus, we see that Gandhi has permeated himself into many disciplines of knowledge and the younger minds too need to be kindled by the veteran Gandhi scholars which is the need of the hour.

We, the editors of the volume, strived to bring both of the generations to a single dais by organising a two-day National Conference on "Gandhian Discourse in Humanities & Social Sciences which was funded by the TEQIP-III of National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand co-hosted with Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur during October 2-3, 2019. A plethora of papers was presented in the same but the selected papers have been chosen to publish in this volume, while some papers have been requested by the scholars of Gandhi, exclusively written for this volume.

We thank all the contributors of this volume in general and the veteran scholars like Professor Harish Trivedi, Professor Pradeep Trikha, and Dr. Prakash Joshi, in particular, who spared their precious time to address the participants as resource persons in the conference and contributed their essays to this volume. We express our gratitude to Professor Satish C. Aikant and Dr. Shubhneet Kaushik for their contribution to our request, after the aforementioned conference was over.

We gratefully acknowledge and dedicate this volume to Late Professor Shyam Lal Soni, the then Director of National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand who showcased his enthusiastic leadership to organise this conference magnificently and monumentally. Professor Udaykumar R. Yaragatti, the Director of MNIT, Jaipur is also thanked and acknowledged for his support and encouragement. Our thanks is due to Dr. Vinod Singh Yadav, the Coordinator, TEQIP-III, who amicably executed his roles and duties to organise the conference and offered his assistance in settling the glitches incurred the post-conference.

We shall be failing in our duties if we forget to thank our parents, teachers, colleagues, and family members for their peerless perseverance and cherubic love and trust in us.

**Contents and Sample Pages**