Stanley Albert Wolpert (December 23, 1927 – February 19, 2019)[1] was an American historian, Indologist, and author on the political and intellectual history of modern India and Pakistan[2][3] and wrote fiction and nonfiction books on the topics.
[13][14][15][16][17] Participating scholars in the conference include Dilip K. Basu, Judith M. Brown, Basudev Chatterji, Walter Huser, Stephen Northrup Hay, Eugene Irschick, Raghavan N. Iyer, D. A.
Low, James Manor, Claude Markovits, John R. McLane, Thomas R. Metcalf, W. H. Morris Jones, V. A. Narain, Norman D. Palmer, Gyanendra Pandey, Bimal Prasad, Barbara N. Ramusack, Rajat Kanta Ray, Peter Reeves, Damodar Sardesai, Sumit Sarkar, Lawrence L. Shrader, William Vanderbok and Eleanor Zelliot.
By so passionately embracing suffering all his mature life and fearlessly following his inner voice wherever it led him, Gandhi lived the message of Love and Truth he believed to be twin faces of God.
He courted pain as most men did pleasure, welcomed sorrow as others greeted joy, and was always ready to face any opponent or his own death with a disarming smile of love.
He lived to the full his mantra, “Do or die!” Still, he failed to convert most of modern India to his faith in the ancient yogic powers of Tapas and Ahimsa as superior to the atom bomb.
He observed, "Wolpert's attempt is to demonstrate through a close reading of Gandhi's own voluminous writings the unique combination of yogic tapas and Christian passion (the suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross") that the Mahatma embodied in his body-polity.
"[19] The biography was severely criticised by columnist Swapan Dasgupta, who wrote in India Today, "Wolpert's biography is not the work of a professional historian.... it is essentially a sympathetic assessment, a study of Gandhi the saint that only tangentially — and with some glaring factual inaccuracies (like describing the Jallianwala Bagh meeting in Amritsar as a gathering of peasants 'celebrating their spring harvest') and sweeping over-generalisations takes into account the environment he operated in."
[22] Diplomat and author, Shashi Tharoor in his review for The Washington Post called it " a smooth, highly readable but flawed book."
He added, "Wolpert's narrative is rather bloodless; the characters on its pages are largely just names, with little physical description, social background or political context provided.
"[23] Published in 2006, Shameful Flight is a chronological study of the last days of the British Empire in India from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the Jammu and Kashmir war of 1947–48.
[24][25] Columnist Swapan Dasgupta in his review for The Times Of India criticised Wolpert's 'central argument' for mirroring 'the misgivings of the relics of the pre-War Conservative Party to the management of decolonization.'