View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CU Scholar Institutional Repository University of Colorado, Boulder CU Scholar Undergraduate Honors Theses Honors Program Spring 2015 The aG ndhian Ashram and its Contemporaries Charles Bower
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.colorado.edu/honr_theses Part of the Asian History Commons, and the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Bower, Charles, "The aG ndhian Ashram and its Contemporaries" (2015). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 784. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Honors Program at CU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of CU Scholar. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Gandhian Ashram and its Contemporaries: A Global Study of the Communal Reaction to Modernity Defense Copy Charles Bower Advisor: Mithi Mukherjee, History Committee: Fred Anderson, History Carole McGranahan, Anthropology April 2015 1 ABSTRACT This paper explores the Gandhian Ashram as a reaction to the forces of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Its deviation from the existing historiography is primarily in its exploration of the Ashram as one of many incidents of communal experiments at the time, which have an interesting geographic connection in London. I note Gandhi’s readings of John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, his interactions with dietetic and communal experiments in London, and some of the local precedents for the Ashram in arguing that these communal living experiments can be seen as a reaction to the forces of modern nation-building, especially as an anticolonial reaction.