Indian Ideas of Freedom

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).