Draft:Sudarshan Kapur
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Sudarshan Kapur of Colorado is a Gandhian scholar and proponent of non-violence. He has retired from teaching, after spending many years at the Iliff School of Theology and Naropa University. His work centers around social change, political science, and history.
His most notable work is Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi.
Early life and education[edit]
Kapur was born on February 6, 1940 in Amritsar, India, and raised in Lahore (now in Pakistan) and New Delhi, India. Before going to England for higher studies, he attended Arya Samaj middle and high schools in New Delhi. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics (International Relations, Government) and a Master’s Diploma in Social Administration. He obtained a Master’s degree in Religion from the Iliff School of Theology. Kapur received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religion and Social Change from the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology, where he was advised by Vincent Gordon Harding.
Career[edit]
Early in his stay in England, he came under the influence of British Socialists. Lucy Middleton, former Labour M.P., and Frieda Laski, a leading British suffragette and the wife of the late professor Harold Laski were among his mentors. War on Want, an anti-poverty organization, provided the context. It was in this setting, that Kapur gained the passion for service to the poor. Upon returning home in 1967, over a period of next twelve years, he committed himself to anti-poverty programs, first with War on Want, and from 1968 to 1979, through the Quaker-inspired and funded Friends Rural Center Rasulia (FRCR). FRCR’s groundbreaking work in public health and decentralized irrigation was doing remarkably well; not so its efforts in education. An atrophied education program at FRCR lit the flame which led to the founding of the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program. At Kapur’s initiative, in 1972, FRCR launched a pilot program to revitalize science teaching public schools in middle schools. The creative genius of Anil Sadgopal that gave the program its form and content.
The years he spent with the poor in India are foundational to his teaching and scholarship. He has taught extensively at the Iliff School of Theology (1989-1993), the University of Denver (1993-1995), the University of Colorado, Boulder, (1995-1997) in the areas of religion and social change, peace and conflict studies, African American religion and history, and Gandhi studies. After a decade (2001-2010) of teaching at Naropa University, Boulder, where Kapur founded the Department of Peace Studies, he retired in 2010 as Professor of Peace Studies.
He was the first director of the Denver-based Gandhi-Hamer-King Center for the Study of Religion and Democratic Renewal (now The Veterans of Hope Project). As part of his directorship of the project, he interviewed on tape several nonviolent activists and scholars from the Modern African-American Freedom Movement. He is the producer of several educational videos.
Scholarship[edit]
Books[edit]
- Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi, (Beacon Press: Boston, 1992)[1]
- In 1992 Raising Up a Prophet named an outstanding book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.
- Nominated for PEN Center USA West Literary Awarding nonfiction 1993
Book chapters[edit]
- Gandhi and Hindutva: Two Conflicting Visions of Swaraj, in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule, ed., Anthony J. Parel, (New York: Lexington Books, 2000), 119-137.
Essays[edit]
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Liberation of Self and Society, Gandhi Marg, vol. 34, no. 1, (April-June 2012)
- Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Eradication of Untouchability, Gandhi Marg, vol. 32, no. 1, (April-June 2010)
- Satyagraha and Sarvodaya After Gandhi, Gandhi Marg, vol. 16, no. 4, January-March, 1995, 409-25.
- Prelude to Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Image of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Independce Movement, 1922-1934, Gandhi Marg, vol. 14, no. 3, October-December, 1992, 421-35.
- The Gandhian Concepts of Economic and Political Freedom, The Iliff Review, vol. xliii, no. 1, Winter 1986.
Articles Citing Kapur:
- "The Life & Legacy of Gandhi through Intergenerational Dialogue". Naropa University. May 9, 2018.
- "Satyagraha and Sarvodaya as keys to good governance and corporate management | Satyagraha - Civil Disobedience | Articles on and by Mahatma Gandhi". www.mkgandhi.org.
- "Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Liberation of Self and Society | Religion | Articles on and by Mahatma Gandhi". www.mkgandhi.org.
- ^ Cf., Talk:Sudarshan Kapoor.