Let me begin by sharing a story about hospitality. Nadav Lapid, a pro-Palestinian, Israeli filmmaker was part of a jury at the International Film Festival of India (Goa) last year. His opinion, and in fact his public comments, about Vivek Agnihotri’s film Kashmir Files was that it was a propaganda and vulgar film. Of course, this drew sharp criticism from many places, including Naor Gilon, Israeli Ambassador to India, who wrote/tweeted on X: ‘In Indian culture, they said that a guest is like God. You have abused in the worst way the Indian invitation to chair the panel of judges at IFFI Goa as well as the trust, respect and warm hospitality that they have bestowed on you.’
His statement not only cast light on the state of India–Israel relations, it also described what Gilon believes: the Indian practice of hospitality marked by trust, respect and warmth.
Our understanding of hospitality says a lot about not only our friends but also our enemies. To whom do we choose to extend our hospitality? Carl Schmitt reminds us about the centrality of the friend–enemy binary for politics.[i] When we talk of hospitality in India, invariably we have to talk about growing prejudices and hostilities towards the minorities, particularly Muslims. Can we think of hospitality beyond and outside of tolerance?
What is tolerance? Being tolerant means to accept the existence, occurrence or practice of likes and dislikes without interference. In other words, tolerance within a democracy is the recognition of a pluralist society. Tolerance, within a pluralist democracy, can be seen as distasteful but an unavoidable evil as Robert Paul Wolff once said.[ii] There are some basic problems with the idea of tolerance. Herbert Marcuse reminds us that tolerance today and at the beginning of the modern period was ‘a partition goal, a subversive, liberating notion and practice’.[iii] Why is it subversive? Marcuse says tolerance is an end in itself and strengthens the tyranny of the majority. In other words, tolerance doesn’t question the status quo—it only perpetuates it.
Award Wapsi might be a symbolic protest but it does nothing to eliminate or mitigate the social evils that grip us. The BJP is not the only enemy or obstacle in the way of achieving dignity, rights and justice. There are a lot of accumulated evils that oppress the minorities. Tolerance does not facilitate justice, there has to be something more. Here, I am reminded of a Zapatista slogan, which went something like this: ‘We need to learn to host the otherness of the other.’ So is hospitality beyond and outside of tolerance? I leave that for you to think.
Let me tell you another story, from my home state Assam. I deliberately use the word ‘home’ to emphasize the need for hospitality and the things it leads us to.
On 21 May 2020, Safiqul Islam, a poor fish trader from the Salnabari area of Nagaon district in central Assam was arrested by the state police. The police said he was drunk, though his family said otherwise. He was on his way to Sivsagar district for work when he arrested and subsequently taken to Batadrawa Police Station. His family also claims that the police demanded a duck and Rs 10,000 as a bribe for his release.
(While we are on food: at a restaurant near Guwahati Airport, at the bottom of the menu, there is a note with two points. The first: ‘Ethnic food only.’ The second: ‘We do not serve people of doubtful citizenship or illegal immigrants.’)
Back to the story of Safikul. Safikul’s family could get a duck but not the money. Then his wife somehow arranged for the money, but by then things had turned far worse—the family was informed that he had passed away in police custody. This brutal custodial murder obviously angered the family and agitated their kin and villagers. In retaliation, some of them allegedly burnt down a part of the Batadrawa Police Station. The next day, the police authorizing Safiqul’s family members and bulldozed their hearths and homes. There was no notice or order supporting the evictions or destruction. The police and administration completely misused their power and bypassed all legal procedures in carrying out the demolition the very next day after his death. On 30 May, a prime accused, Asiqul Islam, alleged to have incited the mob that burnt down the police station, died in an accident while trying to escape from police custody.
Let me draw a portrait of a Muslim person in Assam with the help of this story. Your husband is killed. The very next day your house is bulldozed. As you grieve the death, the surviving family members have no roof to live under. You are then called illegal, arrested and potentially charged with UAPA. By the way, Safiqul’s daughter was under-age when she was arrested and charged with UAPA.
Responding to this incident, the Assam Aam Aadmi Party released a statement where it called all Muslims in Assam ‘jihadi’ and said they should be severely punished. So we should have no disillusionment that BJP is the only enemy. Home is very critical to achieving a fulfilling life. Yet homes are being bulldozed with impunity and without any legal basis. It is mere wanton destruction of private property, at least that’s the case in Assam. It is the pinnacle of hostility to deny someone the right to their home.
Let me turn to my own discipline: social anthropology and sociology, and think of hospitality as a gift. Hospitality allows you to reciprocate, to give presents and receive. Marcel Mauss, who wrote The Gift, points us towards how every society has rights and duties to offer and receive. In those gifts, I believe hospitality is an essential thing that facilitates communication, morality and offers the possibility of society. Gift as hospitality or hospitality with the sensibilities of a gift can also be seen in sharing resources. Primo Levi offers more anthropological and moral possibilities:
When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed.
Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: ‘eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour,’ and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead.
It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Haftlinge to men again.[iv]
Resources can be shared, even when you are dying. Even in such a situation, you don’t turn against each other, and that human possibility is in us all. This is such a beautiful example of hospitality that is possible even in situations that seemingly appear impossible for you.
We all know how this Indian tradition of hospitality goes: a guest is being treated as God. But is it really so? An Israeli filmmaker was reminded of his responsibilities of being a guest. Now, if you read Ambedkar, he has said on many occasions that India might be a nation, but it is not a society. It is a profound sociological comment on the foundations of the Indian social structure. Now when we expand this idea, we will see that what he is talking about is the question of mobility between groups. Because of the persistence of caste, there will be/is no mobility between groups, theoretically speaking. In the absence of mobility, Ambedkar would say, we cannot have fraternity. And when fraternity is absent, how can there be hospitality?
And I pose this question to you, theoretically speaking of course: Can a Dalit ever become a guest of a Brahman? If the answer is No, then isn’t the idea of Indian hospitality a myth unto us?
We can also think of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the abrupt lockdown imposed in March 2020, millions of migrant workers were forced to undertake perilous journeys back home. Along their long routes, they experienced unimaginable traumas. Where was the hospitality of the Indian state then? When the police assaulted the weary travellers, where was India’s warmth towards its own? Where was India’s hospitality to her own? Similarly, India’s refusal to recognize and grant asylum to the Rohingyas speaks of its selective hospitality towards refugees. Is religion a criteria that India considers before she extends her hospitality? Even the legal framework set out in the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offers selective citizenship to persecuted people in India’s neighbouring state. Categorically leaving out Muslims from its purview.
We should demand a different kind of hospitality. Hospitality should not be only a ‘virtue of sociability’, a phenomenon extended solely to those of whom we approve. Hospitality, as Turkish–American philosopher Seyla Benhabib and Immanuel Kant remind us, is a ‘right’ that belongs to all human beings.[v]
Hospitality is a human foundation on which societies can be built. It can also point us towards the crises we face.
I want to turn to a much controversial point that Gandhi made:
I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus, the very right to live accrues to us and only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world. From this one fundamental statement, perhaps it is easy enough to define the duties of man and women and correlate every right to some corresponding duty to be first performed. Every other right can be shown to be usurpation hardly worth fighting for. I wonder if it is too late to revise the idea of defining the rights of man apart from his duty.[vi]
As a response to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Gandhi said that human rights was not a right—it was a duty that had to be earned. This has disturbed me a lot.
Let me share a second quote, perhaps things will become a bit more clear:
The conversation with some friends who had come on behalf of the Gita Press of Gorakhpur had more than an usual interest. They came with an offer of blankets worth a lac of rupees for distribution among the evacuees. [The context is of the partition of Bengal] But Gandhiji wished them to hold back the gift for the present. He said it was the duty of the Government to provide warm covering, and it was within the rights of the evacuees to press their demand. If the Government failed, and confessed that it had not resources enough, then only could private organizations step in to help the evacuees. Unless the people were conscious of their political rights and knew how to act in a crisis, democracy can never be built up.[vii]
Faisal Devji has written a book called The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (2012). I find the subtitle especially interesting. How do you deny help to the helpless and ask them to be political beings? I think it is a very violent idea. I want to turn this around to talk about hospitality. So, is Gandhi saying that if you are a refugee, you ought to ask for home, shelter, food? That it is not the duty of the government to offer but our duty to ask? Unless the destitute ask us for help, should we not help them? Should we not be hospitable to them at all? So many people died in this waiting who could have been saved. I leave it to you to think of, this debate of rights versus duties that Gandhi talks about and how it offers us an avenue to enter and think about this idea of hospitality.
Let me turn to the somewhat more familiar territory of my own interests: the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in Assam. I had earlier ignored the notion of time while thinking about this whole process. There is a nocturnal side to citizenship and I think the NRC splits this idea open very poignantly. As a Czech philosopher Jan Patočka once said, ‘Night is not a nothingness.’ Let me tell you how.[viii]
The NRC list was declared multiple times. The first list was declared on 31 December 2017 at midnight. Now, we should ask the question: Why midnight? Couldn’t it have been at any time during the day? In the morning, at noon? Why night? If you think of yourself as a guest in someone’s home, or about the general idea of hospitality itself, then no one throws out their guests in the middle of the night. To declare someone as stateless in the middle of the night, that’s a symbolic act. It says something about how the state perceives you and thinks about you.
Now as we have seen in the past, and it is happening again in Gurugram now, we find ‘Bangladeshi migrants‘ everywhere in India, including the city I come from—Bangalore. Now this term, it has its own genesis, travel and history. This word ‘Bangladeshi’, in Assam particularly, has its origin in the word ‘Bongal’, or migrants from East Bengal. Now if you go back to the Ahom lexicons, Bongal is someone who is an enemy of the home state. If you read the accounts of the astrologers— in Assamese, they were known as ganaks, who travelled with the Ahom army when Mir Jumla attacked Assam. Their accounts tell us that they are not described as Muslims—they are described indeed as Bongals. It did not mean Bengalis or Muslims at all. It meant anyone who hailed from the west of the territory of Assam.
Bongal enters the Assamese lexicon with a prefix and a suffix. As boga bongal, it means ‘white bongal’. In other words, the British or the local colonial bureaucracy in Assam. With the suffix gha—gha means wound—it means syphilis. It is only with the language movement in the 1960s, with the All Assam Students Union (AASU), that bongal became a direct reference to the outsiders: the Bengali and the Bangladeshi.
So, what do we do? What do we do with this problem that we have of profiling people so easily and without any thought of repercussions? What do we do when our home minister talks of these people as termites?
Yesterday, Prof. Apoorvanand mentioned how the Holocaust was reported in the US news. Newspaper articles in the US also compared Jews to termites. So we have animalistic metaphors used to represent minorities—Jews, Muslims and so on. In this context, I want to take you back to Assam, and mention one of the ways in which the colonial administration looked at migrants and the kind of profiling that profoundly influenced how the nationalists in Assam think of the ‘Bangladeshis’. This is a section from the Census Report by C. S. Mullan, Census Commissioner, 1931:
Wheresoever the carcase, there will the vultures be gathered together. Where there is waste land thither flock the Mymensinghias. In fact, the way in which they have seized upon the vacant areas in the Assam Valley seems almost uncanny. Without fuss, without tumult, without undue trouble to the district revenue staffs, a population which must amount to over half a million has transplanted itself from Bengal to the Assam Valley during the last twenty-five years. It looks like a marvel of administrative organization on the part of Government but it is nothing of the sort: the only thing I can compare it to is the mass movement of a large body of ants (CS Mullan 1931, Census of Assam Report, Volume 3, p 51).
I want you to remember the phrase ‘a large body of ants.‘ I was doing my doctoral fieldwork in 2018 and a lot of such phrases began showing up, scrawled on the city walls of Guwahati. I photographed them whenever I could.
Now, to some photographs. This first one is in front of the MLA Hostel in Assam’s Dispur. There were many such templates of a series of ants walking through walls. And the other profile is of crows scavenging. This is near Uzan Bazar. You can see they’re also portrayed as rats. Another artist came and drew the snake that is consuming the rats.
That is a cartoon from a famous cartoonist from Assam, Nituparna Rajbongshi. Many of you may be able to read some Assamese because of your knowledge of Bangla. The spider here is portrayed as Bangladeshi and the one that is trapped as Assamese. So they are scavenging ants. On the other panel, you have again an ant seemingly cut by a sword on which is written in Assamese: ‘Ache hengdangloanai lole hengdangrakhyanai’. There is a hengdang, or the sword which the Ahoms use. The hengdang is there but it hasn’t been taken up. If it is taken up, there will be no respite. I’m not even mentioning the songs which also project and profile them, and show how hostile even art can be towards migrants. I’m sure these few photos have been enough for you to get a sense of what I’m trying to say.
I want to end with some thoughts from Tagore. This is a poem that he wrote, called ‘Bharat Tirtha’. I’m sure many of you know it. I’ve used a translation of the poem
‘Bharat Tirtha’ or the Indian Pilgrimage:
None can tell, at whose beckoning, vast waves of humanity
In currents unstoppable, from the unknown here arrived,
To merge into the Great Sea!
Here Aryans, non-Aryans, Dravidians, Chinese
Sakas, Hunas, Pathans, Moguls in one body, lo, were united.
The doors today have opened in the West, bearing gifts, behold, they arrive—
All shall give and take, mingle and be mingled in, none shall depart dejected
From the shore of the sea of Bharata’s Great Humanity!
This is a poem he wrote on 2 July 1910. I want to stress that idea that ‘No one shall return.’ I think this is the epitome of hospitality that Tagore spoke of when we think of migrants. When we think of destitutes. I think this way of framing hospitality is critical at this moment in history. Perhaps we can think with Tagore about this concept that nourishes us all as humans and makes us all leaves of the same tree.
Question & Answer Session
Sohini: I’m a non-fiction writer. I want to congratulate you for your marvellous presentation. I just had an observation, or rather a response to your question: Can you think of a Dalit being a guest? I was just thinking that they’re very convenient political hosts at the time of elections—they’re forced to host leaders. I come from an upper-caste Bengali family, and grew up hearing ‘Atithi Devo Bhava’. But I think it refers to a very specific Brahmanic notion: the guest as a Brahman, that the Brahman also has to be fed. Hrking back to Ambedkar’s succinct quote ‘That India may be a nation not a society’: you just go to any government office that serves citizens and see the design. For instance, at a post office, there is never any place for citizens to sit. Most often there is not even shade. The Indian nation state seems to be continuing very much like the colonial state—it’s not serving the citizens but administering natives. These, really, are some observations that I wanted to share.
Audience member 1. We have something in common. I’m from Tinsukia, from a family of doctors. You have an interesting lens through which you look at issues. What I’ve seen growing up is quite different. Being a lingual as well as an ethnic minority, my experience has been that something as simple as being able to attend school throughout the year is a challenge. Our friends who spoke Assamese were the ones who identified us as people who should ‘go’ or ‘pay up’ to ‘stay there’, ‘work there’, or ‘have a business there’. Would you shed some light, or comment on that? And: what is the extent of hospitality? Do we always take minorities, as we call them, in or should there be some protocols for the offering of hospitality?
Shunanti: I’m a research fellow at Goldsmiths University, London. My question is with reference to the distinction rights that you spoke about. As we know, Tagore had a very profound critique of the Gandhian idea of duty—precisely because Tagore, in a way, predicated duty on this idea of habit. Which at least for Tagore is a problematic idea, because it essentially thwarts this impulse towards imagination. So my question is: Would you not think that this idea of duty predicated upon vow and habit—does it not have a constitutive possibility of postponing or deferring justice? Also Amartya Sen for example, in his ideas of justice, draws our attention to this distinction between the idea of duty and what it does to the idea of imagination for Tagore. So just that: distinction and what it does to justice.
Audience member 2. I wanted to ask you about Gandhi’s doctrine of trusteeship. He was very keen about the well-off sections of society taking care of the other half. But when it came to allowing the Gita Press people to distribute resources, he showed a very different side of himself. So do I take it to be a hypocritical aspect of Gandhi or was he true to his doctrine of trusteeship or not? And another observation, sir, if I may make it: you said that on 31 December 2017, NRC was declared at midnight. Did it symbolize that the new India would be a minority-less India? Because on 15 August 1947, it was midnight when India emerged into a new era in history, into freedom and independence.
Suraj Gogoi: Let me answer the part about Gandhi. I agree with Ambedkar in terms of how he reads Gandhi and his complaints about Gandhi. So I would definitely agree with you in that sense that this dichotomy or binary of rights versus duties is very interesting. Because if he’s indeed saying that you have to ask for hospitality, then the Dalits have been asking for equality, fraternity, justice. Why are those calls met with deafness and silence? There is certainly hypocrisy there, and I wouldn’t stop from calling it so.
The second question: if the time of 2017 and after is a separate time altogether for minorities. In the context of Assam, I would think that NRC is just one instrument, an additional instrument to target minorities and Muslims in particular. There won’t be a final NRC. This is not the only NRC, neither is this the only way in which they can be targeted. You have a lot of history to fall back upon and see how. This is another aspect of hospitality in that that it is conditional, which is what I was trying to say. When the migrants started to settle down in Assam, and that settling took a while . . . so many of the intellectuals, commentators and even people from the Congress started talking about how in order to become Assamese, you have to cut off all your roots in Bengal. You need to uproot your history, take up Assamese, speak Assamese and become Assamese. I think this is the beginning of the violence against them. And this is percolated through the language movement. You have the Assam agitation which lasted about six years, you have the Nellie Massacre in-between . . . To borrow from the likes of Deleuze and Guattari: they are rhizomatic, you know, they are like roots and keep growing. And this is just one node, the NRC is just one aspect of the attack on them. It is not the end. It is going to become even more precarious for them. That’s how I see it.
To return to the first question: I’m glad you brought it up. I’m from Sadiya, beyond Tinsukia. Sadiya is the last subdivision of Assam, the easternmost part of Assam. In my school back in Sadiya, I have interviewed my friends from the Mising community. After all these years, they told me that knowing how to speak Assamese determined who their friends were. And that they felt humiliated if they spoke incorrectly. You may or may not know that the tribals in Assam are often lampooned about how they speak Assamese in a certain tone. Maybe it is an act of violence again, to talk about this binary of tribals and non-tribals. So, from my experience, I can tell you that my friends felt alienated in a society so far away and removed even from all these politics. I think that language can become a very important way of thinking about hospitality itself. Do you accommodate multiple languages? Are you really plural in that sense? Or are you just using this multiplicity of ethnicities to say: look, look, we are exotic, we are different and so on. That’s often the excuse you get. That’s how I look at it.
The question on rights and duties and Tagore and Gandhi: I think there isn’t an easy answer. Which is why I quoted Levi. Because there are also duties to be performed, and Gandhi is right. I think it is both a duty and a right that must occur to either party. You may have heard about Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, who is in some sense a humanist. Both Tagore and Agarwala spoke about the human surplus: that there is a surplus in us, and that surplus is the ability to create beauty that makes us human. And I think that hospitality is beautiful in that sense. Agarwala would say we should worship that beautiful. I think it’s part of basic humanity—it cannot do without beauty and I think hospitality is part of that beauty.
Noyonika: I am a Masters student at Birkbeck, University of London, and I do have to come back to the point on Gandhi. We’ve just talked about the correlation or the precondition of duty to be able to access rights, and I think there’s been a slight disservice to Gandhi there. Because he has always been—and Shruti Kapila has written about it extensively, about Gandhi as a thinker of anti-reason, about his discussions on the access to rights to persons who have nothing to offer, by which he means persons with disabilities or other kinds of people who have nothing to offer in terms of their duty. So I feel that when we’re talking about the right to citizenship and the precondition to duty, that perhaps it is this that Gandhi had said. I’m trying to understand this contradiction, because Gandhi has gone on to say that you do not need to offer anything in order to be able to receive the rights of citizenship.
Meenakshi Gopinath: I have a question and a comment. Would you like to consider the idea of an act of coexistence as replacing something like tolerance, which seems somewhat of a passive idea within the framework of hospitality? Do you think if we were to give a contemporary connotation and reinfuse the idea of hospitality in the context of India, then you would have to look at reconciliation processes, something of the kind that Apoorvanand and Harsh Mander are involved with on a daily basis? My comment is: if we look at the conventional symbols of hospitality, they usually come from the marginalized. If it’s Shabari offering to Rama or if it was the boatman taking her across. Or if it’s Sujata offering water to Buddha or if it was Rahul Gandhi who eats with the farmers. So hospitality becomes the duty of the marginalized and the gift of those who patronize—so how do you feel about those symbols?
Audience member 4: This sort of extends this line of questioning a little further. I was picking up on the referential locus that’s being invoked in what you’re saying as well. I was thinking particularly of Emmanuel Levinas who thinks of hospitality as something so absolutely radical to the point that it is almost bordering on a figurative or even sometimes a literal annihilation of the self. And I was wondering how that idea of hospitality figures in what you’re thinking through.
Apoorvanand: I was confused about the first quote you took from Gandhi, where it said that Gandhi is expecting refugees to first demand and only then be accorded with hospitality. Am I wrong in getting what you were saying? Or Gandhi was in fact insisting that it was their right and they should demand it and only after that others will come? Like what we did during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the about rights of the migrants, and with that demand the people went to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court denied that. Civil society came in and started relief work but it was not treated as their right. So that’s what I want to understand. Second, the whole idea of hospitality also requires a kind of pedagogy, so what is that? Have you thought about it?
SG: I think there’s a kind of a crossover between these questions. I see hospitality as a right, not necessarily an ethical obligation. So the problem I have with Gandhi, or at least my interpretation of that particular quote and his response to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is: that minorities, destitutes, refugees, stateless people, sexual minorities, do not always have, nor are in a position to talk about their rights. If I look at the process of NRC, there were only two instances when the minorities opposed it. One: the All Assam Minorities Student Union in 2009, when the pilot project was carried out in a district and there was police firing and some people died. And two: when the dead bodies of relatives were sent home from detention centres. That was when the people opposed: saying, either give them citizenship or send the bodies back to the address in Bangladesh where you think that they come from. So, to demand something is not always possible. That’s why I have a problem in framing something like hospitality as a duty. You might be able to ask but you may not be able to ask. At least that’s my interpretation of rights versus duties.
On the question of active coexistence—one of the foundations of pluralist democracy in America was tolerance, the tolerance of differences, in religions, in people and backgrounds, in ethnicities and so on. But as I quoted earlier, it was seen as a necessary evil to maintain this tolerance, and it was not necessary that you agreed about the differences. So you were not really attending to the problem—you were hospitable simply because it was utilitarian, it worked for you. In that sense, I think in order to have a reconciliation, I would turn to the Zapatista slogan. That we need to start recognizing not the sameness but the differences. We have to become comfortable with the differences, be they sexual, political, religious and so on. Only then we will be in a place to truly host someone as our guest. Otherwise, even our neighbours have grown suspicious of us, and we of them. I don’t think that is a viable situation in the long-run. It might hold society for a while, which is why I am not negating tolerance. But I have doubts about tolerance is what I’m saying.
Regarding Gandhi’s position as an anti-reason thinker. Again: to repeat the answer I had given earlier, that if you’re talking about being asked for your rights, then all minorities have been asking for it including when Gandhi was alive. But he never negated the idea of the caste system itself. I mean it’s a process very different, so that I think itself is a comment on how he is perhaps complicit in this. At least, that’s my reading of thinking about how, if you don’t do away with the system itself, how can you think of justice? Because the caste system is going to perpetuate and we see it unfolding in so many different ways than even Ambedkar perhaps imagined. You have the Manipuris asking for ST status. Anand Teltumbde would say that is caste consciousness—why not ask for SC status within which you will get reservation as well? Why ask for ST status? Similarly, in Kashmir, in Chhattisgarh and so on, economically dominant groups are asking for ST status. So this system takes its own twists and turns and in that sense, I think, Gandhi doesn’t escape that reality.
[i] C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political Expanded Edition, trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
[ii] Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington, Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse (1969) A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Beacon Press: Boston.
[iii] ibid
[iv] Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (Stuart Woolf trans.) (New York: Orion Books, 1959), p. 189.
[v] See “Another Cosmopolitanism” by Seyla Benhabib was delivered as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley, 2004.
[vi] Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, ‘Letter to Julian Huxley, May 25, 1947’ in Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XCV (supplementary vol. 5) (New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1956–94), p. 142.
[vii] Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi (Calcutta, Nishana, 1953), p. 75.
[viii] See Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida (2000) Of Hospitality, Stanford University Press.
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