Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy
Practicing Food, Justice, and Sustainability in India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v7i1.65Keywords:
Gandhi, India, intentional community, agriculture, Hinduism, nonviolence, foodAbstract
M.K. Gandhi’s social and environmental thought continues to shape the contemporary practices of Brahma Vidya Mandir, an intentional community in Paunar, Maharashtra. Since its founding in 1959, members have wrestled with the practical implications of translating Gandhian values such as self-sufficiency, non-violence, voluntary simplicity, and public service into specific practices of food production and consumption. Members of Brahma Vidya Mandir and associated farmers imagine and enact their responses to contemporary agrarian failures in religiously inflected language drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita, a central Hindu text, and they use this text as a guide to develop agricultural practices that they deem non-violent. Brahma Vidya Mandir’s existence and the counternarrative prompt our imaginings of what it means to enact alternative agricultural and social practices and help us envision new possibilities of adapting and applying these ideas to other social and geographic contexts.
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Wirzba, Norman. 2004. The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Frankfort: University Press of Kentucky).
Alter, Joseph. S. 2000. Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press).
Amin, Shahid. 1984. ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press): 1-55.
Bhave, Vinoba. 2007 [1940]. Talks on the Gita (trans. Parag Cholkar; Wardha: Paramdham Prakashan).
Boffey, Philip M. 2012. ‘What if it Weren’t Called Pink Slime?’, The New York Times, 12 May. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/what-ifit-werent-called-pink-slime.html.
Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1972. Studies in Gandhism (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust).
Burcher, Sam. 2006. ‘Stem Farmers Suicides with Organic Farming’, Institute of Science Press Release. Online: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/farmersuicides.php.
Chapple, Christopher Key, and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds.). 2000. Hinduism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Clough, Bradley S. 2002. ‘Gandhi, Non-violence and the Bhagavad-Gita’, in Steven J. Rosen (ed.), Holy War Violence and the Bhagavad-Gita (Hampton, VA: Deepak Heritage Books): 59-80.
Dalton, Dennis. 1998. Gandhi’s Power: Nonviolence in Action (New York: Oxford University Press).
Esteva, Gustavo, and Madhu Prakash. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books).
Fukuoka, Masanobu. 1998. One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press).
Gandhi, M.K. 1927. An Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth (trans. Mahadev Desai; Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House).
———. 1962. Village Swaraj (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House).
———. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (ed. Anthony J. Parel; New Delhi: Cambridge University Press).
Guha, Ramachandra. 2006. How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan).
Haberman, David. 2006. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Hardiman, David. 2003. Gandhi in his Time and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black).
Hiralal, Mohan Hirabai. 1984. ‘Excerpt from the Speeches of Vinoba in the 1950s during his Bhoodan [Land-gift] Movement’, in Mohan Hirabai Hiralal (ed.), Consensus Decision-Making (Chandrapur, Maharasthra: Vrikshamitra): 28-29.
Khor, Martin, and Lim Li Lin. 2001. ‘Water-efficient Trench Irrigation for Horticulture’, in Martin Khor and Lim Li Lin (eds.), Good Practices and Innovative Experiences in the South. Vol. 2, Social Policies, Indigenous Knowledge and Appropriate Technology (London: Zed Books): 178-94.
Kirschenmann, Frederick. 2010. Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher (Frankfort: University Press of Kentucky).
Klenk, Rebecca. 2010. Educating Activists: Development and Gender in the Making of Modern Gandhians (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).
Kumar, Satish. 1997. ‘Gandhi’s Swadeshi: The Economics of Permanence’, in Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (eds.), The Case against the Global Economy: And for a Turn Toward the Local (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books): 418-24.
Lal, Vinay. 2000. ‘Too Deep for Deep Ecology: Gandhi and the Ecological Vision of Life’, in Chapple and Tucker 2000: 183-212.
Malik, Rajiv. 2001. ‘India’s Natural Farm Friend’, Hinduism Today, March/April. Online: http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3987.
Mansata, Bharat. 2010. The Vision of Natural Farming (Kolkata: Earthcare Books).
Mawdsley, Emma. 2006. ‘Hindu Nationalism, Neo-Traditionalism and Environmental Discourses in India’, Geoforum 37.3: 380-90. Doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.06.004.
McGinnis, Michael (ed.). 1998. Bioregionalism (New York: Routledge).
Mukherjee, Rudrangshu (ed.). 1993. The Penguin Gandhi Reader (Delhi: Penguin Books).
Mukherji, Anahita. 2006. ‘Gandhi of Organic Farming Honored’, Times of India, 4 September. Online: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2006-09-04/mumbai/27802150_1_organic-farming-coconut-development-boardfertiliser.
Nadkami, Vithal C. 1997. ‘My Natural Way of Farming Is the Sensible One’, Times of India, 18 October. Online: http://www.fukuokafarmingo.info/faindiatimes.html.
Nanda, Meera. 2003. Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press).
Pailoor, Anitha. 2001. ‘Treading the Gandhian Path’, The Hindu, 30 September. Online: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/30/stories/13300787.htm.
Pallava, Aparna. 2008. ‘What’s for Lunch, Mother?’, Hitavada: Section 3.1, 8 June.
Parajuli, Pramod. 2004. ‘Revisiting Gandhi and Zapata: Motion of Global Capital, Geographies of Difference and the Formation of Ecological Ethnicities’, in Mario Blaser and Harvey Feit (eds.), In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization (London: Zed Books): 235-55.
Peterson, Anna L. 2005. Seeds of the Kingdom: Utopian Communities in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press). Doi: 10.1093/0195183339.001.0001.
Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Schumacher, E.F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs).
Scoones, Ian. 2005. Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Policy: The Case of Biotechnology in India (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longsman).
Shinn, Larry. 2000. ‘The Inner Logic of Gandhian Ecoogy’, in Chapple and Tucker 2000: 213-44.
Sykes, Marjorie (trans.). 2006. Moved by Love: The Memoirs of Vinoba Bhave (Wardha: Gram-Seva Mandal).
Tendulkar, D.G. 1960. Mahatma, vol. 4 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 2nd edn).
Weber, Thomas. 1999. ‘Deep Ecology, Peace Research and Buddhist Economics’, Journal of Peace Research 36.3: 349-61. Doi: 10.1177/0022343399036003007.
Wirzba, Norman. 2004. The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Frankfort: University Press of Kentucky).
Published
2013-04-03
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Sanford, A. W. (2013). Gandhi’s Agrarian Legacy: Practicing Food, Justice, and Sustainability in India. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 7(1), 65-87. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v7i1.65
