Delhi University’s Ramjas College provides a short term course on Gandhigiri.
Gone are the days of gundagiri, everyone is embracing Gandhigiri. The term, made so popular by the Munnabhai, has been welcomed and adopted with open arms. Be it anti-corruption movement with Anna Hazare or protest on India Gate for the brave heart of India, people resorted to Gandhigiri.
The modern take on Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence is gradually entering into popular imagination and academic discourses too. His writing, running into more than one hundred volumes contains wide range of views on different issues. In the nearly six decades since his death a large and diverse range of writings – comparative, expository, biographical, hagiographical and dialogical – has appeared on Gandhi.
Delhi University’s Ramjas College offers a short term ‘add on’ course on Gandhigiri.
The course focuses attention on issues of continuing relevance – tradition, modernity, nation, women, caste, race and environment – thereby giving the course a contemporary flavour. The leitmotif of the course promises and promotes a fruitful dialogue with a creative and original thinker whose ideas and practices deserve far more than either adoration or dismissal.
Every generation re-examines the past, trying to understand it anew. It may be a difference in perspective, or the knowledge of new facts, which alter the picture – sometimes superficially, sometimes totally. India today is clearly reassessing the legacy of Gandhi, and his continuing relevance.
This course closely examines different interpretations of Gandhi’s view and ideas on myriad issues, and in doing so, it moves beyond existing scholarship.
It provides an essential new reference for students and scholars of politics, history, philosophy as well as general readers, activist and admirers of Gandhi.
The topics included in this course are:
1. Philosophical and Intellectual Sources of Gandhi’s ideas
2. Satyagraha
3. Gandhi, Admbedkar and Untouchability
4. Gandhi and Women Empowerment
5. Communal Harmony
6. Gandhigiri and Conflict Resolution
7. Gandhi’s Contemporary Relevance
8. Gandhi and Postmodernism
9. Film shows on Gandhi
