Professor Rajmohan Gandhi will give a talk on his latest book, Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to Our Times on Tuesday, February 26 at noon at the Lucy Ellis Lounge in the Foreign Languages Building at 707 S. Mathews Avenue in Urbana.
“My story starts when Europeans began to enter South India in a big way,” says Gandhi, a professor in Education Policy, Organization & Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “It provides a unified history of South India.”
Gandhi, who has published more than a dozen books, many of them receiving major awards, is the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, the world-renowned Indian activist who led the independence movement against British rule. Rajmohan Gandhi will also teach an online half-semester graduate course, “Learning from Gandhi,” beginning in March. The eight-week course examines crucial phases of Mohandas Gandhi’s life and their impact on his approach to education, to imperialism, and to the tensions between a colony’s diverse populations.
“The course ties in education, in the broadest sense, and current reality in a world where tribalism has become dominant,” Gandhi says. “By tribalism I mean people who are retreating to their own ethnic or religious tents. In recent years it’s become a global trend. But there has always been this push towards common humanity as well. So it is the clash between this trend towards tribalism and humanity’s longing to be understood as a common entity that provides the context for my course.”
Gandhi has written multiple books on his grandfather, including one—Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire—that won the prestigious Biennial Award from the Indian History Congress in 2007 for the best-researched history book.
