In this paper, that has two different, though mutually constitutive parts, I wish to think about the sites from where we ask the question: ‘what is the University for’? This mutual constitutiveness - that of the intersection of state policies on higher education with students politics - may seem somewhat counter intuitive yet is, I would argue, integral to understanding one of the most significant contemporary sites of crises today, i.e., the steady erosion of the public university. This is because the university is a paradoxical space – at once intimate and embattled – and because teaching is both exciting as it is hierarchical, conducted in classrooms that are often deeply stratified, and sometimes fraught, spaces, where the mismatch between desire and actualization is always present as an undercurrent. The university is often imagined by many of us in the teaching profession as a crucible for critical thought, autonomy, and democratic practices, even as the reality of our intellectual and professional existence in such spaces may belie such ideas. A new biography of Gokhale that brings into consideration current questions within historiographical debates, this book is a timely and welcome addition to the fields of intellectual history, the history of political thought, Colonial history and Indian and South Asian history. The book provides new enriching dimensions to the understanding of Gokhale, whose ideas remain relevant in contemporary India. The author analyses Gokhale’s thinking on a range of issues such as nationhood, education, citizenship, modernity, caste, social service, cosmopolitanism, and the ‘women’s question’, which historians have either overlooked or inserted in a rigid nation-bounded historical narrative.
Using liberalism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and citizenship as the four main thematic foci, the book illuminates the entanglement of Gopal Krishna Gokhale's political ideas and action with broader social, political, and cultural developments within and beyond the Indian national frame. This book analyses the political thought and practice of Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), preeminent liberal leader of the Indian National Congress who was able to give a ‘global voice’ to the Indian cause.
0 kommentar(er)
