Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media publishes original, high quality research into the cultures of communication from the middle ages to the present day. The series explores the variety of subjects and disciplinary approaches that characterize this vibrant field of enquiry. The series will help shape current interpretations not only of the media, in all its forms, but also of the powerful relationship between the media and politics, society, and the economy.
Advisory BoardAdvisory Board: Professor Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Professor Nicholas Cull (University of Southern California), Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley (Macquarie University), Professor Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University), Professor Tom O’Malley (Aberystwyth University).
Professor Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)
Professor Nicholas Cull (University of Southern California)
Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley (Macquarie University)
Professor Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University)
Professor Tom O’Malley (Aberystwyth University)
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14578
M.K. Gandhi, Media, Politics and Society
New Perspectives
1st ed. 2020
Cover credit: Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock Photo
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To Mum and Radha for always being there for me
To commemorate Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary in October 2019, David Bulla and I organised an international conference in St Andrews and early versions of all but two of the chapters in this book were delivered as papers on that occasion. I am grateful to the School of History for the award of a conference grant and to David (University of Augusta) for putting the conference programme together. Lorna Harris played a stellar role in arranging the myriad practical details of the conference, Margaret MacDonald helped with the registration, and Emma Morris was an excellent researcher. I am very grateful for their assistance.
I would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for permission to use select material from my Chaps. 3 and 4 in Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience, Britain and India in the Twentieth Century (2014, 2017). I am deeply indebted to Tom O’Malley and Ed Hirschmann for their helpful suggestions on Chap. 6. My deep thanks to Dr Malcolm Dunstan for his support, and for permission to cite from E.C. Dunstan’s unpublished memoirs, as well as to Louise North for granting permission from the BBC Written Archives Centre. BBC copyright content is reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Last, but by no means least, I owe a massive thank you to Emily Russell and her assistant Joe Johnson at Palgrave Macmillan, for their prompt and unstinting support. The final stages of the research for these chapters were undertaken during the challenging circumstances of the international lockdown due to Covid-19. We would be grateful for the indulgence of you, the reader, for any errors of fact or shortcomings in interpretation.
- ABP
Ananda Bazar Patrika
- AIR
All India Radio
- AP
Associated Press of America
- API
Associated Press of India
- Autobiography
Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth
- BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation
- BELRA
British Empire Leprosy Relief Association
- BL
British Library, London
- Congress
Indian National Congress
- CW
Mahatma Gandhi Collected Works
- HJ
Harijan
- HS
Hind Swaraj
- IBC
Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd
- IO
Indian Opinion
- ISBS
Indian State Broadcasting Service
- KGT
Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust
- LI
Leprosy in India
- MGF
Mahatma Gandhi ka Faislah
- MSM
Maharogi Seva Mandal
- NAI
National Archives of India, New Delhi
- NYT
New York Times
- PHS
Presbyterian Historical Society
- RTC
Second Round Table Conference
- TLM
The Leprosy Mission
- ToI
Times of India
- UP
United Press of America
- WAC
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham
- YI
Young India
holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Italian from DePaul University, Chicago. She has presented her research at various conferences including at DePaul University, where she spoke about “Reading Gandhi in the Era of ‘Cancel Culture’: The Incomplete Portrayal of a ‘Mahatma’.”
is a research fellow at the Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She was educated at the Universities of Tokyo and Heidelberg and worked for five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the modern and contemporary history of South Asia and the British Empire, with a particular interest in media, science, technology and medicine. Her projects to date have explored the incorporation of “new” technologies of communication into journalism in the nineteenth century and the relationship between technology and public health/medical practice. Her first monograph, The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830–1900, was awarded the 2017 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book on the history of journalism in any area of the world.
is Professor of South Asian Religions, Grinnell College, Iowa, where he teaches courses on Hinduism, Bollywood and religion, Gandhi, Global Christianities and Religious Violence and Nonviolence. His research focuses on comparative religions, traditions of sainthood and asceticism and postcolonialism, pluralism, nonviolence and postsecular thought. His book about Hindu and Christian holy men (faqirs) of colonial north India came out with OUP in 2015. In 2017, he was awarded an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for his new research on Gandhi and Islam and worked on this project as Scholar in Residence at Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center during 2018–2019.
is Professor of Asian Literary and Cultural Studies in Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, Kolkata. Her main areas of research are Nationalism and Culture in colonial and post-colonial period. Among her publications are The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta and The Music of Nationhood: Dwijendralal Roy of Bengal, and a co-edited volume On Modern Indian Sensibilities: Culture, Politics, History. At present she is working on two books, Knowing Asia: Being Asian: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Bengali Periodicals (1860s–1940s) and Women’s Travel Narratives: East and West.
is Associate Professor at the University of Delhi in the College of Vocational Studies. His main areas of research are around leprosy in British India and Gandhian studies. He has published in Oral History, Medical History and Social Scientist and has participated in numerous seminars, including at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London and Oxford, and at the International Leprosy Association Global Project on the History of Leprosy (London, 2003). He also writes for media, mostly in the Times of India, on aspects of peace and non-violence; see especially “Agitation and Ahimsa” (28 August 2011) and “The Art of Peaceful Dissent” (15 April 2018).
is Reader in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her monographs include Reporting the Raj, the British Press and India (Studies in Imperialism series) and Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2014, 2017). Her edited and co-edited books include Media and the British Empire (Palgrave Macmillan 2006, 2013); Explorations in Modern Indian History and the Media (Media History 2009); International Communications and Global News Networks; News of the World and the British Press 1843–2011 (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); and Media and the Portuguese Empire (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Dr Kaul sits on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of the journals Media History (Routledge) and Twentieth Century British History (OUP).
founded the undergraduate Department of Sociology at India’s foremost liberal Arts College, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, in 1993. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence in 2006 at Chatham College for Women (now Chatham University), Pittsburgh. From 2010 to 2016, she served as founding Vice Chancellor, Nalanda University, entrusted with giving shape to the vision of establishing a new Nalanda for the twenty-first century. Gopa’s books include Ethnicity and Class: Social Divisions in an Indian City; The Indian Millennium- A.D.1000 to A.D.2000 and India Since 1947: The Independent Years. Her research interests focus on ethnic identities, everyday life in India, visual anthropology and the history of society.
(PhD, Penn State University) teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, and was Founding Dean, Academic Planning, Nalanda University (2011–2015). Her research interests span revolutionary print and visual culture, British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and questions of gender. Her representative works are The Autobiography of Desire: English Women Novelists of the 1790s (ed.), Frankenstein: Gender, Culture, and Identity, and (co-eds.) Agamemnon’s Mask: Greek Tragedy and Beyond. Two additional edited volumes include Civilizational Dialogue: Asian Interconnections and Cross Cultural Exchanges and Records, Recoveries, Remnants and Inter-Asian Interconnections: Decoding Cultural Heritage. She was the recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship in 2001 and was Senior Fellow, Nalanda Sriwijiya Center and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2016.