Rethinking Gandhi in Contemporary India

Uday Singh Mehta is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and is a political theorist whose work encompasses a wide spectrum of philosophical traditions. He has worked on a range of issues including the relationship between freedom and imagination, liberalism’s complex link with colonialism and empire, and more recently with issues of war, peace, and non-violence. He is the author of two books, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992), and Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999). In 2002, he was named a Carnegie Foundation scholar. He is currently completing a book on war, peace, and nonviolence, which focuses on the moral and political thought of M. K. Gandhi. He was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University. He has taught at Princeton University, Cornell University, MIT, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Karuna Mantena is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2004 and has previously taught at Cornell University. Her research interests include modern political thought, modern social theory, the intellectual history of empire, the theory and history of imperialism, South Asian politics and history, and theories of race and culture. Her book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010), explored the transformation of nineteenth-century imperial ideology. Her current research focuses on political realism and the political theory of M. K. Gandhi.

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