Amardeep Singh has been busy lately. I had been checking his blog every day and then things got busy, and now look at the result – I have to catch up!

There is for instance this very interesting post on Gandhi, in which Amardeep partly agrees but partly takes issue with Meera Nanda. He is reviewing her book for a journal, which will be something to look forward to.

I’ve been reading Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backwards this week (and even last week — it’s been slow). It’s an excellent book, which I would recommend to anyone thinking about questions of the history of science, secularism (in India and elsewhere), or postmodernism. I’m planning to write a proper review of it for a journal, so I’ll spare you detailed analysis for now. But one interesting problem comes up in the question of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — aka the Mahatma. For Nanda, Gandhi’s influence is the source of much of the nativist resistence to ‘western’ rationality amongst recent Indian social scientists like Partha Chatterjee and Ashis Nandy.

Amardeep thinks the question of Gandhi’s modernity is a complicated one, and goes on to explain why. Very interesting subject and also a very important one. Scrolling up, there’s a link to a story on ‘honor’ killings and a brief comment, and up again, a fascinating post on the BJP, Naipaul, and a controversy over both. Read ’em.