Dennis Dalton, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, is known for his classic study, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (2012). His lifelong relationship with South Asia started in 1960, living and teaching in the villages of Nepal and India, on a program coordinated by the US Department of Agriculture and local community organizations. As recounted in his memoir, included within this book, throughout this year he met several participants in the Indian independence movement, especially Nirmal Kumar Bose. At Bose's initiative, he returned to study Indian political thought, ancient and modern, at the University of Chicago, Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS). His MA thesis examined M.N. Roy's Radical Humanism(1962). From there, he pursued further graduate studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, under the supervision of professors Hugh Tinker and W.H. Morris-Jones. His dissertation on the idea of freedom in the thought of Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi and Tagore (1965), first published in book form in 1982, is republished here in a revised version. His university teaching career began at SOAS as Lecturer in South Asian Thought from 1965 to 1969 and continued at Barnard College until retirement in 2009. During this period, he participated in an international seminar on Gandhi in Delhi (1970), researched and taught as a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, supervised by Professor Bimal Prasad, and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Nepal (1994–95). In addition to many articles and lectures on modern Indian thought, he served as an editor of Sources of Indian Traditions (third edition, 2014).
<p><span style="color: rgb(74, 74, 74); font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Indian Ideas of Freedom is an illuminating study of the lens through which freedom was perceived by thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar, M.N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan. It examines how, for this ‘group of seven’, the pursuit of freedom was both individual and political; how their ideas and arguments, drawing heavily on indigenous cultural resources, were far from imitative and thus distinct. In that, it explores their contribution to an intellectual tradition that braced an extraordinary nationalist movement. And while the differences among these seven are apparent, their similarities are less recognized; they are presented here as parallel. Dennis Dalton’s reading of the extensive writings and speeches of these thinkers is critical but compassionate. Moreover, as James Tully observes in his Afterword to the book, Dalton ‘participates in the dialogue’ in which he places the theorists-a method of studying political thought Tully deems ‘as original and important as the tradition of freedom it brings to light’. This is an exemplary work about political thought for both the scholar and those interested in history and politics.</span><br></p>
