Goodbye to Gandhi

This book Travels in the New India examines how the choices that India made as an independent nation have shaped the country's politics, its culture and its people.

SKU067008168
Goodbye to Gandhi

Overview

Goodbye to Gandhi
Travels in the New India by Bernard Imhasly


Gandhi did not survive even six months after India gained independence. Yet no other Indian in the twentieth century has had the kind of impact on India's destiny that he had. In more ways than one, Gandhi defined India's political, social, cultural and moral imagination. In his last years, and certainly after his assassination on 30 January 1948, India set itself on a course which was different from Gandhi's vision.


Bernard Imhasly, anthropologist, journalist and writer, journeys from Imphal to Cyberabad and Bangalore, and from Champaran to Porbandar, looking at a new India keeping Gandhi's ideas and values in mind. He finds a society where Gandhi is alive but his virulence is missing, a polity which worships him but easily forgets his guiding principles, and a morality which thrives on oppression rather than on the search for truth, a principle Gandhi held paramount. While many of his interlocutors decry Gandhi, there are a surprising number of people for whom he remains a yardstick of their life and work.


Goodbye to Gandhi?: Travels in the New India examines how the choices that India made as an independent nation have shaped the country's politics, its culture and its people. While India acquires a new-found confidence and optimism in its economic future, Bernard Imhasly, in his engaging travels through current-day India, listening for echoes of Gandhi's voice, finds a cacophony of voices-alluring, exciting and sometimes exasperating.

Bernard Imhasly, a linguist and anthropologist by profession, has been the South Asia correspondent for European newspapers since 1990, notably the Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
Born in Sierre, Switzerland, Imhasly studied at Zurich University, from where he did his doctorate. In 1972-73 he undertook anthropological fieldwork in Bangladesh, which resulted in a book, The Process of Modernisation in Bangladesh, co-authored with H.P. Müller and H. Grombach. He was subsequently appointed as lecturer in linguistics at Zurich University. In 1978, he joined the Swiss Foreign Service, with postings in London, Geneva, Berne and Delhi. Deciding to stay on in India, he then took up the assignment as a foreign correspondent.
Imhasly lives in Delhi, together with his wife Rashna, who is a Jungian psychologist. They have one daughter, Anisha, who is married and lives in Switzerland.


Author: Bernard Imhasly
ISBN: 067008168
Pages: 195
Price: Rs.425/-

Features

Packing Weight
0.75 kg
Author
Bernard Imhasly
Publisher
PENGUIN
Page count
195
Rs.382.50
Rs.425
067008168

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