Abstract
According to Bidyut Chakrabarty, the goal of Confluence of Thought is to seek ‘to support the argument that the moral politics of redemptive love and non-violence that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. consistently pursued represents an appealing vision for the present century’ (p. 189). Although this support is not explicitly unfolded in a substantive manner, Chakrabarty does offer an informative survey that brings the careers of Gandhi and King into conversation in a manner that implicitly supports his stated goal. Chakrabarty's focus is on his two protagonists’ systems of non-violent thought and action, with a particular concentration on what he characterises as the ideological features of those systems. The confluences that the author references in the title are the commonalities that remain between Gandhi's and King's ideologies after their quite different socio-political contexts are taken into account. Through these means, the readers of Confluence of Thought learn of the social, political and ideological underpinnings of key moments in the two men's lives, such as the salt satyagraha to Dandi and the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. These and other events are presented in a manner that supports a conclusion that Chakrabarty returns to on a number of occasions in the present volume – namely that King selectively draws on Gandhi's non-violence and mixes it with Christian ethics informed by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, with potent effect and resonance in the struggle for racial equality in the US of the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a distracting number of breakdowns in editing and fact-checking in this volume. Additionally, the prose is at points somewhat convoluted. More substantively, the language used in Confluence of Thought is inconsistent. For example, reference is made at points to ‘the blacks’, ‘blacks’ and ‘black people’. These variations are about more than grammar because the third term in this series represents an acknowledgement of the humanity of people belonging to minority groups that was central to the projects of both Gandhi and King. Additionally, it is somewhat surprising that Chakrabarty does not examine in any depth the influence of Christian ethics on Gandhi, which is undoubtedly a point of confluence that aided King in his adaption of the Gandhian method of non-violence aimed at positive social change. Such tensions noted, it must be emphasised that Confluence of Thought is overall a fine, creative and informative volume that will be of interest to political scientists and peace studies scholars working in a number of sub-fields.