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Chapter 5 - The Grammar of the Gandhians: Jayaprakash Narayan and the Figure of Gandhi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

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Summary

The Gandhian sobriquet is widely deployed in the twentieth century by a variety of political and social actors with a range of interests. To give just three examples: Anna Hazare's movement against corruption in India in recent days has been termed a “Gandhian movement” and has earned Hazare the moniker of the “modern Gandhi,” even though many have found him to be an opportunist rather than a principled ahimsavadi; in the fight against the Indira Gandhi–led Emergency in 1975–77, Jayaprakash Narayan's movement for an end to authoritarian rule earned him the title of “Gandhian Socialist” (though he had been using “Gandhian Socialism” as an analytical term for some time) and his call for sampurna kranti (“total revolution”) was supposed to induce a moral regeneration in India; and as we have seen in this study, in the 1930s, Indian writers writing in English for largely European audiences came to be canonized as “Gandhian writers” because they depicted scenes from the movement for Indian independence in their novels and because Gandhi routinely appeared – as a character, as a trope, as a symbol, as a topic of discussion in their pages. There are, of course, others who have both self-identified as descendants of Gandhi (Vinoba Bhave, Martin Luther KingJr., etc.) and others who have been dubbed Gandhians by virtue of their heroic activism against greater powers (e.g. the Chipko movement in India).

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The Mahatma Misunderstood
The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India
, pp. 155 - 174
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2013

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