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This event is open to:Gandhi's Politics of Service
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With Dr. Inder Marwah, McMaster University
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s political thought is commonly associated with his resistance to colonial injustice and with the concepts of satyagraha (truth-force) and ahimsa (nonviolence), but less attention has been paid to his constructive vision of a decolonized India. In this talk, Dr. Inder Marwah excavates Gandhi’s idealization of a postcolonial India as a federation of self-governing village democracies, rooted in the ideal of seva or service.
For Gandhi, service offered a distinctive political rationality that could supplant institutional politics. More strongly, Gandhi came to regard service as incompatible with politics. While an autonomous political sphere would inevitably develop self-regarding interests, Gandhi rooted the village republic in the other-regarding political logic of service. In this way, Marwah shows how Gandhi’s politics of service comprises a radically democratic, anticolonial, and nonviolent alternative to the modern state.