The book under review, written in Hindi, is a compilation of research papers that were presented as part of a two-day national seminar held to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi at the M.P. Institute of Social Science Research. Titled, ‘Mahatma Gandhi: 21vi Sadi ka Bharatiya evam Vaishvik Pariprekshya’, the seminar was held in Ujjain. There are twenty essays in this book written by various Gandhi scholars. Each article focuses on a particular facet related to Gandhi and his world view. Rather than studying Gandhi and his ideas in their own time, the scholarly pieces in the monograph have tried to study the relevance of the man and his socio-economic, political and religious understanding in the present times.
The first section, ‘Gandhi Vaicharika evam Samyiki’, contains six articles written by Nandkishore Acharya, Raghu Thakur, Naresh Dadhich, Anil Dutt Mishra and Arvind Mohan, respectively. All the articles in this section have tried to understand Gandhi, not just as a man, but also as a concept. And they have tried to explore the ways in which this concept may be used to address many of the socio-economic and political problems affecting people in the contemporary period. The writers argue that there is still a part of Gandhi that has not been understood satisfactorily.