Table of Contents

Preface 1. Violence and Non-Violence Across Time: An Abiding Puzzle 2. The Negation of Violence in the Vedic Sacrifice 3. Is Violence Intrinsic to Religious Confrontation? The Case of Judeo-Christian Controversy, second to seventeenth Centuries 4. What Inspires Non-Violence and Violence in Islam? Some Religious and Historical Factors 5. Buddhism and ‘Violence’: Reading the Medieval War Chronicle The Tales of Heike 6. Between Military Strength and Non-Violence: Experience and Symbolic Use of Elephants in European Cultures 7. Violence in the Philosophy of Saint-Simon 8. Non-Violence, Identity, Sympathy: A Meditation 9. Some Unfashionable Observations on Non-Violence 10. Being the Object of Others: Social Distancing and Non-Violence: The Conditionalities of Dalits and Slums 11. Representations of Violence and Non-Violence in Palestinian Society 12. War against Disease without Violence to Clinical Trial Participants? 13. Being Truthful to ‘Reality’: Grounds of Non-Violence in Ascetic and Mystical Traditions

About the Author

Sudhir Chandra is a historian based in Delhi, India. He has been associated with several universities and centres of advanced learning, such as the Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies; Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh; Banaras Hindu University; Aligarh Muslim University; Jamia Millia Islamia; Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; Melbourne University; Bellagio Study and Conference Center; University of Chicago; Cornell University; Tokyo University of Foreign Studies; Indian Council of Historical Research; and Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi. Among his publications are Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility (2017), The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (2014/1992) and Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women’s Rights (1998). His works seek to understand the kind of social consciousness that developed in India under the colonial impact and the idea of non-violence.