Nationality British Role Historian Name Kathryn Tidrick | Occupation Historian Alma mater London University Education University of London | |
Books Gandhi: A Political and Spirit, Empire and the English character, Heart Beguiling Araby, Gandhi: A Political & Spiritual | ||
Kathryn Tidrick is an English historian, psychologist and writer. She is a specialist in British colonial history and the history of political institutions in Asia. Her works have received praises from other historians. William Dalrymple called her "the author of two witty studies of British orientalism" in the Financial Times.
Contents
Tidrick was born and grew up in Britain. She studied psychology at university, not history, pursuing research. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of London
She has written articles for the London Review of Books, and for the New York Times
Gandhi - A Political and Spiritual Life
Tidrick's work on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's life has received much attention. In her book Tidrick argues that Gandhi's student life in London was his decisive and formative period where he acquired the ideas which would be put to use till his death. This point of view differs from more conventional understandings of Gandhi's intellectual inheritance that locates his ideas in Ancient India.
William Dalrymple called her work "Brilliant" and remarked that her research brought certain unexplored dimensions of Gandhi's intellectual life to light such as the influence of occultists of London "she locates the roots of Gandhi’s thought in the lunatic spiritualist fringe of late-Victorian England, among the occultists, high fibre-ists and mediums who flourished in late 19th-century London". Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan remarked that Tidrick reversed the trend of treating Gandhi's thought system as an effect of his experiments with life in The Economic and Political Weekly. Gandhi's political actions and even aging process were the result of putting in practice the ideas gathered during his time in London, "Tidrick discovers a recursive genetic order which explains why certain books were the mute canons of the thinker and why certain events of life continued to discharge these thoughts: an archival placenta that never leaves Gandhi". Francis Robinson, Professor of the History of South Asia at the University of London, remarked that her study brought to the front the experimental aspects of Gandhi's life in its milieu which was Victorian.