Since Jesus first gave his Sermon on the Mount, very few if any have devoted more years to practicing and teaching others to practice its precepts than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy's take on the Sermon on the Mount stands apart in the history of Sermon on the Mount interpretation and has had enormous influence on others and other countries. Yet, often Gandhi gets the glory, or others. Tolstoy is remembered as a great writer, but his religious and philosophical works are by and large unknown or disparaged, even in Tolstoyan scholarly circles. It remains his contribution is substantially underappreciated and misunderstood. This project seeks to capture the particulars and dynamics of Tolstoy's interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount from a deliberately sympathetic vantage point. Underlying this project is shared belief with Tolstoy that the Sermon on the Mount is liveable and to be lived. This project assumes that from the vantage point of traditional orthodoxy Tolstoy got much wrong but there remains a lack of consideration of and appreciation for what he got right, radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus. After a careful overview of Tolstoy's post-conversion period, and his subsequent writings which constitute a Second Tolstoy corpus of literature, his hermeneutic is explored and his teachings treated generously. Tolstoy's interpretive adversaries and allies are given voice with the intention of better comprehending his interpretations and their perceived implications and failings. A new vocabulary is proposed to more precisely capture Tolstoyan lived theology, namely the political and social expressions of Tolstoyan Christianity, with the intention these theories and practices will gain a wider consideration, understanding and following.

Cosmopolitanism has become highly influential in political theory, philosophy, sociology and other disciplines over the past several decades. In political theory, cosmopolitans have given strong emphasis to universal moral principles and relatively strong duties which cross national boundaries. Thus, many cosmopolitan prescriptions would require some significant changes in attitude and actions from the status quo. Because of this, one of the persistent challenges to the practical application of cosmopolitan principles has been in identifying ways to motivate support for them. This thesis develops a possible answer to the problem of cosmopolitan motivation, in the form of a rooted cosmopolitanism which gives emphasis to the roles that ‘cosmopolitan ambassadors’ could play. The Ambassadorial Cosmopolitan approach presented here emphasizes ways in which support for domestic policy consistent with cosmopolitanism could be generated through (a) highlighting and reinforcing the cosmopolitan strains within existing national traditions and (b) by demonstrating how the ideas of revered national figures connect in significant ways with cosmopolitan principles. The theory is applied in the context of policy action to combat harmful climate change. The exemplar state is India, and the exemplar ambassador is Mahatma Gandhi. The thesis establishes important connections between cosmopolitan theory and Gandhi’s highly influential thought on social change and ethical life practices. It shows how such connections could be used in the Indian context. The final chapter indicates some other contexts where Ambassadorial Cosmopolitanism could also be applied.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 81-82). / In my thesis, I study systems of governance, and actors, involved in the implementation of social audits and digitized wage payments in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Andhra and Telangana, India. Theoretically, I begin by looking at Stoker's propositions of the characteristics of a governance system, Ostrom's idea of a socio-ecological system, within which governance actors perform, and Marks and Hooghe's comments on multi-level governance. I then use the prism of Tendler's and Grindle's work to lay out positive and negative repercussions of the current literature on governance systems, especially for developing countries, and why we must build the body of research on case-specific successes. My findings suggest that there seem to have been three possible influencers: political background, a strong and committed bureaucracy at the state level, and prior history of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and grassroots work. Probing further, deeper motivations and reasons emerge for the behavior of bureaucrats and implementers, organized civil society, and political actors. These instances seem to argue for an ideal case where having strategic ties with multiple actors can help implementers be more effective and proactive even in adverse and unfavorable implementation environments. Actors performed well in flexible environments, but with clear roles and accountability structures. / by Soumya Pasumarthy. / M.C.P.

This study attempts to develop an understanding of the iterative and multi-scaled process involved in transforming the state from below by examining the relationship between two of the most politicised rights-based legislations in India: the Right to Information Act (RTI) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Based on one and a half years of ethnographic and interview based research, and five years of working with the RTI campaign, I examine the reciprocal relationship between the rights to information and work, and the multi-scaled activism necessary to instantiate both. First, I trace different phases of the struggle for the right to information, beginning with the creation of alternative public spheres, Jan sunwais (or rural public hearings) that responded to demands for the right to work in rural Rajasthan. Second, as this demand culminated in a broad-based advocacy network, I examine the role of actors from diverse institutional arenas that succeeded in passing the national RTI legislation. I also look at how the same national network of activists introduced the public accountability mechanism of social audits, inspired by the Jan sunwai, into the new right to work law or NREGA. Finally, bringing the process full circle, I look at the ongoing efforts of the MKKS and the Suchna Evum Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan (The Right to Information and Work Campaign) to implement the right to work on the ground in rural Rajasthan. In contrast to existing studies, I provide a more comprehensive analysis of the interdependent struggle for rights to information and work as one long iterative process to transform the state from below. I conclude with some reflections on the different vision of “transparency” and “accountability” emerging from rural grassroots struggles and what the RTI and NREGA experiences teach us about the possibilities for their realisation.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were branded as the most dangerous and deadly extremists in the world by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in January of 2008. The Tamil Tigers are held responsible for perfecting the use of suicide bombers, inventing the suicide belt, being the first to use women in suicide attacks, and killing nearly 4,000 people in the one year prior to 2008. The LTTE is the only terrorist organization to have assassinated two world leaders, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. They were also the first to acquire air power and their strike on Sri Lanka’s World Trade Center was the largest terrorist assault before the September 11 attacks in 2001. It took the government of Sri Lanka over thirty years to rid the country of this powerful terrorist group. This paper will investigate what caused the fall of the Tamil Tigers. In my second chapter, I will evaluate the policies and military strategies adopted by the government. My third chapter will look at the role of international actors in the conflict and their effects. Lastly, in my fourth chapter, I will examine key mistakes made by the LTTE that may have led to its own demise. In chapter five, I will analyze three possible causes for the defeat of the LTTE and what was the most significant in bringing its fall. It will also include its potential for replication in other countries and effects on foreign policy moving forward.

The broad purpose of ‘In A City Like Delhi’ is to make an argument in favour of the positive link between spirituality and sustainability. Sustainability, at its core, requires an ethical commitment, and the thesis proposes that spirituality may be that vital means through which sustainability may be truly animated, in theory and in practice. The thesis is particularly preoccupied with considering the yet fully unrealised competence of spirituality to enrich the understanding and practise of sustainability in the urban space. To this end, it uses a very particular case study to make a modest exploration of such a conceptual association – the city of Delhi. The concept of sustainability, as articulated in the West, is primarily a secular notion. While international religious and spiritual organisations have taken up the sustainability challenge, the reverse is less true – sustainability planning is rarely conducted in a dialogue with religious or spiritual institutions and resources. In this context the case study of an Indian megacity to examine the relationship between religion, spirituality, secularism and development, is particularly interesting. The thesis explores, as one example of the potential interface, how Hindu spirituality as interpreted by Mahatma Gandhi, may usefully inform a spiritual philosophy to enliven a sustainability consciousness in Delhi. The theoretical speculations of the thesis are grounded in the local context by seeking the perspectives of twenty primary informants from Delhi who are all associated with various levels of planning and implementing development in the city. I specifically chose my interviewees from secular development backgrounds (rather than religious and spiritual representatives) because this would enrich critical understanding of how spirituality may be viewed within a secular sustainability discourse. I use their views on spirituality, sustainable development, and any affinities between the two notions to balance my own perspective, derived from both my research and my personal experience of the city of my birth. The interviews gave added depth to the environmental, economic and social challenges confronting the city of Delhi, which were already evident in the literature review. Additionally however, the interviews confirmed the hypothesis that sustainable development and spirituality together could have a productive, coherent and an even inseparable grounding union in Delhi and that spirituality may be vital in facilitating that essential shift in consciousness that a sustainable mindset requires. These findings are crucial to any study or strategy considering comprehensive sustainable development for Delhi.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

This dissertation explores the presence of the divine feminine in Indic river myths of the Ganga, the Narmada, and the Meenachil as represented in the three novels: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It challenges masculinist nationalistic narratives, and identifies itself as a feminist revisionist work by strategically combining Indian debates on religious interpretations with Western phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspectives to open up productive lines of critical enquiry. I argue that the three postcolonial novelists under survey resurrect the power of the feminine by relocating this power in its manifestation as the turbulent and indomitable force of three river goddesses. In their myths of origin, the goddesses are “unchaste,” uncontainable, and ambiguous. Yet, Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian patriarchy manipulated and coerced women for their political purposes. They denied female agency in order to promote a brand of nationalism bordering on religious zeal and subjugation through imposed paradigms of chastity. The patriarchy conflated the imaginary chastity of the mother goddess in her multiple manifestations--including but not limited to the River Ganga--with the exalted position forced upon the young Indian widow. Popular art of the colonial period in India dismantled the irrepressible sexual ambiguity of the divine feminine for the Indian population, and reinvented her as a chaste, mother figure (Bharat Mata, or Mother India), desexualized her, and held her up as an iconic, pervasive figurehead of the Motherland. Ironically though, the makeover of the uncontrollable, “chaotic” feminine into this shackled entity during and after the Indian freedom struggle is just the kind of ambiguity that appears in discourses of nation building. By reaffirming the archaic myths of the feminine, Ghosh, Mehta, and Roy dislodge the colonial project and the patriarchal Indian independence movement that sought to “chastise” the divine feminine. I suggest that in these three novels pre-colonial images of the river goddesses--presented in all their ambiguous, multiple, and fluid dimensions--are a challenge to the Indian nationalist project that represents the goddesses one dimensionally as an iconic figure, unifying the geo-body of India and symbolically projecting her as the pure, homogenous Bharat Mata.

Nonviolent mass movements have played a significant role in bringing about change in the 20th century. They stood up to the very powers that oppressed them and helped those forces see a reality they were once blind to. Their strength in numbers and moral positioning helped “the other” empathize with their plight and in some cases join their cause for change. Two such movements were the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the first Palestinian Intifada in the 1980s. These two movements mobilized masses and transformed communities. While in many respects, they were very different; there are strands of similarity that weave through both movements. These commonalities began with a connection to nonviolence that preceded the movements themselves and proved essential foundations and building blocks for what was yet to come. Influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and others in India, both African Americans and Palestinians sought guidance from the East. Of major significance, is the inspirational role African American civil rights played in influencing the Palestinian Intifada. Palestinian leaders were drawn to the success and example of black leaders who helped motivate a discontent base. Through a side-by-side comparison, the similarities are apparent; whether they are in mass demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, conversions of the other, or the struggle for education. The examination of these different elements in both movements through writings, newspaper coverage, opinion pieces, and personal accounts demonstrates just how much the 1960s black civil rights era impacted the Palestinian Intifada of the 1980s. / Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.