"Gandhi and Palestine" The Public Lecture by Prof. Vinay Lal at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 18th November 2011
Time : 3:00 pm
Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Event Details : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library presents ‘Gandhi and Palestine’ The Public Lecture by Prof. Vinay Lal, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Gandhi had a life-long engagement with Jews. Some of his closest friends in South Africa were Jews, among them his assistant, Sonia Schlesin, and Herman Kallenbach, an architect of Lithuanian German stock who took a fancy to Gandhi’s ideas for communal living and became a keen supporter of the idea of Indian emancipation. Several decades later, on 26 November 1938 more precisely, Gandhi went on to pen an article simply entitled, “The Jews”. In the immediate aftermath of its publication in Harijan, Gandhi’s article evoked considerable attention, including responses from many of the leading Jewish theologians of the day, such as Martin Buber and Hayim Greenberg. However, in the circumstances of World War II and the holocaust perpetrated upon the Jews, Gandhi’s article was largely forgotten. It would go on to have a fugitive existence until quite recently. The intractability of the “Palestine question” has given it a second lease of life; indeed, it would be not inaccurate to suggest that Gandhi’s views on Palestine are now seen by many commentators as almost prescient.
Gandhi’s article of November 1938 constitutes the centrepiece of my exploration of Gandhi’s views on Palestine, Jewish history, and far-reaching questions about what we mean by the idea of home. I review Gandhi’s relations with Jews, and then cast a glance at the origins, as Gandhi understood them, of the conflict over Palestine. Some commentators have viewed Gandhi as a person who was not particularly learned, but his scattered writings on Jewish history, Judaism, and contested claims over Palestine suggest a deep and earnest engagement with the question of how justice could be best done to both Jews and Arabs. While Gandhi’s outlook may not have been particularly scholarly, it is more than likely that his perspective was shaped by the singularity of the Jewish experience in India.
Many commentators have described the supposed exchange between Gandhi and Buber as “the definitive text” of this conversation on the future of Palestine. (There was no exchange as such: Buber addressed a long letter to Gandhi in response to the article in Harijan, but this letter does not appear to have reached him; there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Gandhi ever saw Buber’s letter.) Martin Buber, perhaps the most distinguished Jewish theologian of the day, venerated Gandhi; and it is all the more reason why he was profoundly shocked by what he took to be Gandhi’s ignorance both about the genuine claims of the Jews over Palestine and their brutalization by the Nazis. I try to suggest, however, that Gandhi had an exceedingly nuanced view of the respective claims of both Jews and Arabs to Palestine, and in some ways his distinction between political and spiritual Zionism was akin to Buber’s own conceptions of Zionism. Gandhi drew on some parallels, for example in his understanding that Jews were to Christians as Dalits were to Hindus, that will certainly strike many readers as tendentious at best. However, Gandhi did not even remotely subscribe to a modern arithmetic of minority and majority, and consequently the most obvious readings must be disavowed.
Gandhi’s life has not ordinarily been viewed in relation to what might be described as the politics of home, exile, and dispossession. In the concluding pages of my paper, I move beyond the question of Palestine to a larger philosophical engagement with the question of what it is that we mean by home. Gandhi lived in England and subsequently in South Africa for over twenty years before his return to India shortly after the onset of the First World War. For the remaining three decades of his life, he remained squarely grounded in India, even choosing, in the 1930s, a remote spot in central India as his home. He was more attuned to the conditions of life in India than any of his contemporaries, and his peregrinations, whether by foot or on train, took him to nearly every part of the country. But there is a much more profound way in which his life gives the distinct impression of being unsettled –– we might say, in effect, that Gandhi perhaps never fully felt himself at home. He was at sea at in this world; and when independence arrived, its chief architect was to be found nowhere near the seat of celebrations. However one might look at his life, the paper argues that we can move beyond Gandhi’s thoughtful deliberations on Jewish history and the question of Palestine to consider how Gandhi sought to position himself between worldliness and otherworldliness.
Prof. Vinay Lal most recently was Professor of History at University of Delhi (2010-11). He has taught history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He writes widely on Indian history and culture, Gandhi, American politics, the Indian diaspora, and the politics of knowledge systems. Some of his latest writings include Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (HarperCollins, 2011); Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (ed., Oxford, 2009); He has co-edited with Ashis Nandy three books, including Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema (Oxford, 2006) and The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin, 2005). His work has been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Korean, and Persian. His fifteen minutes of fame may stem from his inclusion in David Horotwitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
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Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)
Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library ( NMML ), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Gandhi had a life-long engagement with Jews. Some of his closest friends in South Africa were Jews, among them his assistant, Sonia Schlesin, and Herman Kallenbach, an architect of Lithuanian German stock who took a fancy to Gandhi’s ideas for communal living and became a keen supporter of the idea of Indian emancipation. Several decades later, on 26 November 1938 more precisely, Gandhi went on to pen an article simply entitled, “The Jews”. In the immediate aftermath of its publication in Harijan, Gandhi’s article evoked considerable attention, including responses from many of the leading Jewish theologians of the day, such as Martin Buber and Hayim Greenberg. However, in the circumstances of World War II and the holocaust perpetrated upon the Jews, Gandhi’s article was largely forgotten. It would go on to have a fugitive existence until quite recently. The intractability of the “Palestine question” has given it a second lease of life; indeed, it would be not inaccurate to suggest that Gandhi’s views on Palestine are now seen by many commentators as almost prescient.
Gandhi’s article of November 1938 constitutes the centrepiece of my exploration of Gandhi’s views on Palestine, Jewish history, and far-reaching questions about what we mean by the idea of home. I review Gandhi’s relations with Jews, and then cast a glance at the origins, as Gandhi understood them, of the conflict over Palestine. Some commentators have viewed Gandhi as a person who was not particularly learned, but his scattered writings on Jewish history, Judaism, and contested claims over Palestine suggest a deep and earnest engagement with the question of how justice could be best done to both Jews and Arabs. While Gandhi’s outlook may not have been particularly scholarly, it is more than likely that his perspective was shaped by the singularity of the Jewish experience in India.
Many commentators have described the supposed exchange between Gandhi and Buber as “the definitive text” of this conversation on the future of Palestine. (There was no exchange as such: Buber addressed a long letter to Gandhi in response to the article in Harijan, but this letter does not appear to have reached him; there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Gandhi ever saw Buber’s letter.) Martin Buber, perhaps the most distinguished Jewish theologian of the day, venerated Gandhi; and it is all the more reason why he was profoundly shocked by what he took to be Gandhi’s ignorance both about the genuine claims of the Jews over Palestine and their brutalization by the Nazis. I try to suggest, however, that Gandhi had an exceedingly nuanced view of the respective claims of both Jews and Arabs to Palestine, and in some ways his distinction between political and spiritual Zionism was akin to Buber’s own conceptions of Zionism. Gandhi drew on some parallels, for example in his understanding that Jews were to Christians as Dalits were to Hindus, that will certainly strike many readers as tendentious at best. However, Gandhi did not even remotely subscribe to a modern arithmetic of minority and majority, and consequently the most obvious readings must be disavowed.
Gandhi’s life has not ordinarily been viewed in relation to what might be described as the politics of home, exile, and dispossession. In the concluding pages of my paper, I move beyond the question of Palestine to a larger philosophical engagement with the question of what it is that we mean by home. Gandhi lived in England and subsequently in South Africa for over twenty years before his return to India shortly after the onset of the First World War. For the remaining three decades of his life, he remained squarely grounded in India, even choosing, in the 1930s, a remote spot in central India as his home. He was more attuned to the conditions of life in India than any of his contemporaries, and his peregrinations, whether by foot or on train, took him to nearly every part of the country. But there is a much more profound way in which his life gives the distinct impression of being unsettled –– we might say, in effect, that Gandhi perhaps never fully felt himself at home. He was at sea at in this world; and when independence arrived, its chief architect was to be found nowhere near the seat of celebrations. However one might look at his life, the paper argues that we can move beyond Gandhi’s thoughtful deliberations on Jewish history and the question of Palestine to consider how Gandhi sought to position himself between worldliness and otherworldliness.
Prof. Vinay Lal most recently was Professor of History at University of Delhi (2010-11). He has taught history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He writes widely on Indian history and culture, Gandhi, American politics, the Indian diaspora, and the politics of knowledge systems. Some of his latest writings include Deewaar: The Footpath, the City, and the Angry Young Man (HarperCollins, 2011); Political Hinduism: The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (ed., Oxford, 2009); He has co-edited with Ashis Nandy three books, including Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema (Oxford, 2006) and The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (Viking Penguin, 2005). His work has been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Kannada, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Korean, and Persian. His fifteen minutes of fame may stem from his inclusion in David Horotwitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
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"Gandhi and Palestine" The Public Lecture by Prof. Vinay Lal at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 18th November 2011
!["Gandhi and Palestine" The Public Lecture by Prof. Vinay Lal at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 18th November 2011]()
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