Rajmohan Gandhi, Book Talk, "ames Lawson: Teacher of Satyagraha"

Rajmohan Gandhi was born in 1935, has been a journalist, a professor in the U.S. and in India of history and politics, an author, a historian, a member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper chamber of India’s parliament), and part of CSAMES and the U of I community between 1997 and 2022. 

 He is the grandson of two architects of Indian independence: Mohandas Gandhi, whose 157th birthday we mark today, and C. Rajagopalachari, independent India's first Indian Governor-General. He has written more than fifteen books, among them Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (2008), Patel: A Life (1990), Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten (2013), Understanding the Founding Fathers (2016), and Modern South India (2018); his Rajaji: A Life won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002. He is no stranger to this room: he taught history and politics at Illinois almost continuously from 1997 to 2022, for many of those years as Research Professor here at CSAMES. Before the academy he was a journalist and a political actor: he founded and ran the Bombay weekly Himmat from 1964 to 1981, fighting for democratic rights during the Emergency, and edited the Indian Express in Madras from 1985 to 1987; he served in the Rajya Sabha from 1990 to 1992 and led India's delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in 1990. Associated since 1956 with Initiatives of Change (formerly Moral Re-Armament), he served as its international president in 2009 and 2010, and helped establish Asia Plateau, its center for dialogue and reconciliation in the mountains of western India.

James Lawson: Teacher of Satyagraha, published earlier this year, is his most recent biography. Also published early this year was Rajmohan’s book, Do You Know Your Hinduism? Notes for Modern-Day Hindus. 

Currently Rajmohan serves as editor-in-chief of the website www.weareonehumanity.org.