2th February 2019
The renowned philosopher and Gandhian scholar, Margaret Chatterjee, who died last month, was known for her rigorous scholarship, the cross-cultural breadth of which was awe-inspiring. She rejected pigeonholing Gandhi into categories like traditional or modern and would say, “For Gandhi, tradition was not a repository of inviolable norms but a place of considered criticism, change and development. He was unfazed by otherness, in fact he was attracted to it.”
Born in Paddington on September 13, 1925, Margaret Gantzer, as she was known then, obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, where she was awarded an Exhibition at Somerville College. She married an Indian professor and moved to India in 1946, oscillating between angst and pleasure as she brought up her three children, completed her Master’s at Oxford and researched for a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Delhi while teaching at Miranda House…