Prof. Sudarshan Iyengar, Ph.D. in Economics; former Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapith, Ahmedabad (2005-14) founded by Mahatma Gandhi; former Director, Centre for Social Studies, Surat (2004-05), and Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad (1999-2004); Professor & Chair, Gandhian Philosophy, IIT, Mumbai (2016-18).
His research areas include decentralised planning, welfare of the commons, Gandhian thought and practice, natural resource development and management, as well as people-centric and civil society institutions. He has served on committees of the Government of India and Gujarat, and has been a trustee and board member of several national and regional institutions.
Prof. Iyengar is currently a working Trustee with Action Research in Community Health and Development (ARCH), along with being a proactive member of the Board of Directors, Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra. He has contributed more than 70 research articles and written 9 books. He lives in Dharampur, Valsad, Gujarat and works amongst tribal people.
E-mail: sudarshan@gandhifoundation.net
Douglas Allen served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine, USA, for 46 years (1974-2020) and became Professor Emeritus of Philosophy in September 2020. He served as Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy (1979-1982, 1998- 2003) and as the President of the international Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (2001-2004) and now is the Editor of the Lexington Books Series of Studies in Comparative Philosophy and Religion.
Author and Editor of 18 books and more than 150 book chapters and scholarly journal articles, he has been the recipient of Fulbright (1963-1964, 2009-2010) and Smithsonian (1992) grants to India, the Maine Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award, and the Distinguished Maine Professor Award (given to the outstanding professor in teaching, research, and service).
Prof. Allen is often recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars in the phenomenology of religion and the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. His major focus in recent decades has been on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi (violence and nonviolence, war and peace, terrorism, truth, Vedanta, Hind Swaraj and the Bhagavad-Gita, marginality, technology, economic and environmental sustainability).
He has authored and edited six Gandhi-informed books, including The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2008), Mahatma Gandhi (Reaktion Books, 2011), Gandhi after 9/11: Creative Nonviolence and Sustainability (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Special Issue on the Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, Co-edited with Yarran Hominh, and A. Minh Nguyen.
Prof. Allen has been active in the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam/Indochina Antiwar Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and many other struggles resisting violence, war, class exploitation, imperialism, racial and gender oppression, and environmental destruction. He was a founder and has been an active member of the Maine Peace Action Committee (1974-present) and served as Education Coordinator of the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine (1988-2017). He has been the recipient of the “Hands of Peace Award” in Maine and the “Scroll of Peace International Award for Peace Research” in India.
E-mail: dallen@maine.edu
Prof. Manoranjan Mohanty was a Professor of Political Science and Director, the Developing Countries Research Centre at the University of Delhi. He is a social scientist, China scholar, and a peace and human rights activist with a research interest in studying the Political Economy of China, India, and global transformation. He is an Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies, its founding member, and former Chairperson. He is also the Emeritus Chairperson, of the Development Research Institute, Bhubaneswar, the research wing of Gabeshana Chakra of which he was the founder-president.
He has had academic assignments in many institutions abroad, including California, Beijing, Moscow, Lagos, Copenhagen, and Oxford. He has extensively researched modern China and India, including the Chinese Revolution, the Political Economy of China, People’s Movements in India, and Poverty in Odisha. He has been a part of a number of national and international research projects and academic initiatives leading to research papers and edited or coauthored volumes such as Chinese Revolution: Comparative Perspectives (1993); People’s Rights: Social Movements and the State in the Third World (1998); Class, Caste, and Gender (2004); Grass-roots Democracy in India and China (2007); Weapon of the Oppressed: An Inventory of People’s Rights in India (2009); India: Social Development Report 2010 (2010); A Fistful of Dry Rice: Land, Equity & Democracy: Essays in Honour of D Bandyopadhyay (2012); Building a Just World: Essays in Honour of Muchkund Dubey (2015); Exploring Emerging Global Thresholds: Towards 2030 (2017); China at a Turning Point: Perspectives after the Nineteenth Party Congress (2019); and Migration, Workers and Fundamental Freedoms: Pandemic Vulnerabilities and States of Exception in India (2021).
He has been an active member of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi since its inception and also of Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy. He is part of the Bandung Spirit Network and a founding member of the Global University of Sustainability.
E-mail: mmohantydu@gmail.com
Prof. Ashis Nandy (Bengali আশিস নন্দী; born 13 May 1937) is an Indian political psychologist, social theorist, and critic. A trained clinical psychologist, Nandy has provided theoretical critiques of European colonialism, development, modernity, secularism, Hindutva, science, technology, nuclearism, cosmopolitanism, and utopia. He has also offered alternative conceptions relating to cosmopolitanism and critical traditionalism. In addition to the above, Nandy has offered an original historical profile of India’s commercial cinema as well as critiques of state and violence.
He was Senior Fellow and Former Director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for several years. He continues to serve as a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Centre and apart from being the Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, also in New Delhi. He received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007. In 2008 he appeared on the list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll of the Foreign Policy magazine, published by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Prof. Nandy is an intellectual who identifies and explores numerous and diverse problems. He has written extensively in last two decades. His 1983 book, titled The Intimate Enemy; Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, talked about the psychological problems posed at a personal level by colonialism, for both colonizer and colonized. Nandy argues that the understanding of self is intertwined with those of race, class, and religion under colonialism and that the Gandhian movement can be understood in part as an attempt to transcend a strong tendency of educated Indians to articulate political striving for independence in European terms.
Through his prolific writing and other activities supported by his belief in non-violence, Professor Nandy has offered penetrating analysis from different angles of a wide range of problems such as political disputes and racial conflicts, and has made suggestions about how human beings can co-exist globally, irrespective of national boundaries.
E-mail: ashis@nnmc.edu
Prof Ramin is a political philosopher. He is recently the Executive Direcctor of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the Vice -Dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, Delhi, India. He received his B.A. and M.A/ in Philosophy, History and Political Science and later his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Sorbonne University. In 1993 he taught at the Academy of Philosophy in Tehran. He has been a researcher at the French Institute for Iranian studies and a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Ramin Jahanbegloo taught in the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran and 2006-07, was Rajni Kothari Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India.
Prof Ramin is a political philosopher. He is recently the Executive Direcctor of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the Vice -Dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, Delhi, India. He received his B.A. and M.A/ in Philosophy, History and Political Science and later his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Sorbonne University. In 1993 he taught at the Academy of Philosophy in Tehran. He has been a researcher at the French Institute for Iranian studies and a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Ramin Jahanbegloo taught in the Department of Contemporary Studies of the Cultural Research Centre in Tehran and 2006-07, was Rajni Kothari Professor of Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India.
He was also an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethics at University of Toronto from 2008-2012 and at York University in Toronto from 2012-2015. He is also a member of the Advisory Board in PEN Canada. He is the winner of the Peace Prize from the Uniter Nations Association in Spain (2009) for his extensive academic works in promoting dialogue between cultures and his advocacy for non-violence and more recently the winner of the Josep Palau i Fabre International Essay Prize.
Among his twenty-seven books in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Persian are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (Peter Halban, 1992), Gandhi: Aux Sources de la Nonviolence (Felin, 1999), Penser la Nonviolence (UNESCO, 2000), Civil Society and Democracy in Iran (Lexington Press, 2011), The Gandhian Moment (forthcoming at Harvard University Press) among many others and very recently The Decline of Civilization(Aleph Books 2017).
E-mail: rj59@st-andrews.ac.uk
Charles Busch is the founder of Peace Village Inc., and Fields of Peace. He is an ordained Minister in the United Church of Christ and served 20 years as a Parish Minister. A former U.S Marine and partner in a New York City Engineering firm, he is a graduate of Trinity University and Harvard University.
E-mail: buschcharlesp@gmail.com
Served Banaras Hindu University for 44 years in different capacities, Prof. and Head Department of Political Science; Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences; and Director, Center for Women’s Studies and Development. In between, she also served as Vice Chancellor, MGS University, Bikaner, Rajasthan (State University) Chairperson, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Niwas, Shimla.
She has been visiting Professor to many Universities abroad. Delivered 18 Invited Lectures abroad on the invitation of prestigious universities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Nebraska (US), Toronto, McMaster, Calgary (Canada), Stockholm (Sweden), Pedagogical (Poland), Maison des Sciences de I’Homme, (France), Leiden, Amsterdam (Netherlands). She has been an acclaimed feminist and has immensely contributed to the concept of Indian Feminism and has made herculean efforts to make it a part of mainstream. Served as Chairperson, UGC Standing Committee on Women’s Studies.
She has delivered 43 invited lectures in India including prestigious Foundation Day Lectures, Memorial Lectures, Keynote and Valedictory Addresses etc. at the Universities at Sikkim, Shillong, Guwahati, Itanagar, Srinagar, Bhadarwah Campus of Jammu Univ., Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikaner, Ladnu, New Delhi, Sultanpur, Lucknow, Unchahar, Varanasi, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Motihari, Bombay, Wardha, Pune, Ujjain, Chandigarh, Nainital, Almora, Goa, Shimla, Trivendram, Cochin, Kottayam, Madras, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Calcutta, Midnapor, Kharagpur etc.
Recipient of many coveted awards to name a few, US Fulbright Award, US Award for Women Administrators in South Asia, US Salzburg Award, Indo-French Fellowship, Shastri Indo Canadian Fellowship, D.P. Mukherjee Award, UGC Career Award, and Higher Education Leadership Award. Authored 4 books, and edited 10 books and has published 9 research papers in International and 62 research papers in national journals. Chaired 45 sessions in national and 18 sessions international seminars/conferences/workshops.
Presented 70 papers in international and 184 papers in national seminars. Organized 16 international and 86 national conferences. Resource Person in 128 MHRD-UGC Refresher-Orientation Courses. Played a key role in promoting value education by delivering lectures in all India seminars/workshops on Value Education, to name a few, Pacific Academy of Higher Education and Research University, Udaipur, in 2010 and 2015, University Educators Conference at Mount Abu organized by Brahma Kumari, 2014; and workshops organized by USIS, BCI, IGNOU, MCVE, NTPC, NML, RRL etc. besides being a core member of Malviya Center of Value Education, BHU where she delivered several lectures on Value Education since 2006 onwards. Plays a monumental role in disseminating knowledge about India’s Rich Cultural and Intellectual Tradition. Published one book to this effect and delivered several lectures under the auspices of Rashtriya Samaj Vigyan Parishad, Prajna Pravaha, Malaviya Center for Value Education etc.
Email: chandrakala.padia@gmail.co
Madhu Khanna was Formerly, Professor of Indic Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations (CSCRC), Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. She is founder Chairperson of Tantra Foundation, New Delhi. She is a mentor and co-creator of the Centre for Indic and Agamic Studies in Asia (CIASA). An Eminent Scholar, editor, Curator, Truth-Seeker, and visionary. She is currently agore National Fellow at the National Museum, New Delhi.
She has been Bina and Haridas Choudhary’s Visiting Distinguished Fellow (2013 – 2014) in Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. She received her doctoral degree from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University, where she specialized in Hindu Shakta Tantra. An author and editor of ten books. she has conceptualized and executed the award-winning pioneer project of the Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum Exhibit at the Gandhi Smriti, New Delhi. She was conferred the Mahavir Mahatma Award by Times Foundation.
E-mail: tantrashree@yahoo.co