Draft:Sudarshan Kapur

Sudarshan Kapur is a Gandhian scholar and proponent of non-violence. He taught many years at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, and Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Now in retirement, 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
Kapur was born on February 6, 1940 in Amritsar, India, and raised in Lahore (now in Pakistan) and in New Delhi, India. He attended Arya Samaj middle and high schools in New Delhi, before leaving for England to continue his studies.

A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics (International Relations, Government), he also obtained a Master’s Diploma in Social Administration. Transferring to America, he entered the Iliff School of Theology, a Methodist institution in Denver, where he received a Master's degree in Religion. Kapur then earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religion and Social Change from the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. He was advised by the pastor, author, and professor Vincent Gordon Harding.

Career
In England he had first come under the influence of activists learned in the British socialist heritage. Among his early mentors were Lucy Middleton, former Labour M.P., and Frieda Laski, a leading British suffragette (and wife of Harold Laski). The anti-poverty organization War on Want provided the context, where Kapur gained the passion for service to the poor.
 * As activist

Returning home to India in 1967, over the next twelve years he kept his committment to anti-poverty programs. First with War on Want, he then served from 1968 to 1979 in the Quaker-inspired and funded Friends Rural Center Rasulia (FRCR). FRCR’s groundbreaking work in public health and decentralized irrigation did 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. In 1972 at Kapur’s initiative FRCR launched a pilot program to revitalize the teaching of science in public middle schools. The creative genius of Anil Sadgopal gave the program its form and content.

These years spent with the poor in India are foundational to Kapur's teaching and scholarship. At the Iliff School of Theology (1989-1993), the University of Denver (1993-1995), the University of Colorado, Boulder, (1995-1997) he taught in the areas of religion and social change, peace and conflict studies, African American religion and history, and Gandhi studies. During the decade 2001-2010, he taught at Naropa University in Boulder, where Kapur founded the Department of Peace Studies. In 20110 he retired as Professor of Peace Studies.
 * As professor

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.

Raising Up a Prophet
In his 1992 book, Kapur begins with how the African-American community first came to learn about Mohandas Gandhi and his teaching of Satyagraha. Here, W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey were instrumental (page 4). Both oriented the African-American freedom movement to worldwide anti-colonial struggles, e.g., in India, Ireland, Egypt (pages 13, 17, 20, 30, 61). Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association was in essence international (16-23). Yet "coverage of the Indian independence movement in the African-American newspapers" was the most constant source of news about Gandhi's struggles (5 quote, 208).

Beginning in the 1920s The Crisis carried a steady stream of articles, many written by Du Bois, on the strategy and tactics Gandhi was then putting into action (24-28). The journal of the A. M. E. Church was also keeping its attention on the India's struggle for independence (28-29). Although many African-Americans were favorable to Gandhi's spirituality and his movement, there were critics. The journalist George Schuyler once in 1930 wrote that the Bolshevik use of violence would be more effective than Gandhi's methods (44). However, the "possibility of raising up a Gandhi-type leader in the African-American community" continued to be discussed and debated in the following decades (49 quote, cf. 40, 50, 66, 100, 146, 156-157).

In 1935-1936 Prof. Howard Thurman led a Christian delegation to India for six months. They met with Gandhi, and listened as he invited them to a life of satyagraha. The two movements traded hard-won insights from their struggles. Gandhi admired the Spirituals of the visiting Americans; when they were sung Gandhi began to pray (81-83, 87-90). By 1943 an African American of the 'Quaker team' in India was marching with Gandhi (133-134).

In 1950 Martin Luther King Jr. then a seminary student near Philadelphia became inspired to study Gandhi (1869-1948) and satyagraha during a guest lecture by Mordecai Johnson, long-time President of Howard University (2, 146-147). Since the late 1920s Johnson had been promoting Gandhi (144-145,147). In India in 1949 Gandhi's son Manilal told Johnson that only a leader with "unparalleled purity of heart" might inspire others to embody satyagraha in action, and so initiate its transformative power (145-146). King later wrote (147 quote), "His message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi's life and works."

"As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi... I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. ¶ Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction of individuals to a powerful and effective social force."

The secular Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, was inspired by Gandhi's principles (117-123). Although influential, it remained an elite organization. Movement leader James Farmer told the author in a 1986 interview (195n37, 208) that "it was not till King brought non-violence into the heart of the religious community through the church that black Americans applied a Gandhian methodology of resistance on a mass scale" (123 quote). King "provided a bridge between two eras", between the Gandhi-inspired and the followers of Jesus, fusing generations of activists, to "set in motion energy [to] transform the nation" (165 quotes).

The difficult, year-long Montgomery bus boycott concluded successfully, 20 December 1956. King published in 1958 his book Stride toward Freedom, in which he acknowledged Gandhi as a major influence. In February the next year he and his wife took a 5-week trip to India, meeting with key figures in Gandhi's movement. Upon landing he said, "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim".
 * Nota Bene.

"Gandhi and Hindutva"
In his 2000 essay, "Gandhi and Hindutva: Two conflicting visions of Swaraj", Kapur follows the competitive struggle in India between two emerging, rival religious ideologies. From the early 19th-century, the Indian cultural orientation began to include a strong surge in national awareness, the founding of several popular, revivalist societies, and the birth of political views leading to the independence movement, the struggle for Swaraj.

Scholarship

 * Books
 * Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press 1992).
 * Book chapters
 * Gandhi and Hindutva: Two Conflicting Visions of Swaraj, at pp. 119-137, in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule (New York: Lexington Books, 2000), edited by Anthony J. Parel.
 * Essays
 * Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Liberation of Self and Society, in Gandhi Marg, vol. 34, no. 1 (April-June 2012).
 * Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Eradication of Untouchability, in Gandhi Marg, vol. 32, no. 1 (April-June 2010).
 * Satyagraha and Sarvodaya After Gandhi, in Gandhi Marg, vol. 16, no. 4 (January-March 1995), pp. 409-25.
 * Prelude to Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Image of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Independce Movement, 1922-1934, in Gandhi Marg, vol. 14, no. 3 (October-December 1992), pp. 421-35.
 * The Gandhian Concepts of Economic and Political Freedom, in The Iliff Review, vol. xliii, no. 1 (Winter 1986).