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A book titled Gandhi and the Champaran Satyagraha: Select Readings , which has been edited by Jadavpur University Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das, was released on Saturday.
At the virtual book launch event, Prof. Das thanked the West Bengal government and the Netaji Institute for Asian Studies for sponsoring the research.
Speaking during a panel discussion, Faisal Devji, Professor of History in the University of Oxford, said the book would immediately become an indispensable resource for those who wanted to look at Mahatma Gandhi’s journey at its very beginning in India with respect to the Champaran satyagraha.
Prof. Devji said during the satyagraha, Mahatma Gandhi quite deliberately refused to abide by the inherited conventional standard categorisations of national politics that had existed till then. “I am, in particular, referring to the distinction between social reform on one hand and political freedom on the other, which also maps on to another distinction between moderates on the one hand and extremists on the other,” he said.
As the Congress party was said to have been divided between moderates and extremists, “Gandhi being Gandhi, of course, refuses to abide by these tenets and these terms of debate and you already see this in Champaran. What he does in Champaran, in my view, is he explicitly refuses to engage in formal political manoeuvres and he achieves political ends as it were through their opposite, the social”, Prof. Devji remarked.
