This book investigates the communicative power of Mahatma Gandhi's style of dressing and use of home-spun cloth for staging a revolution involving over 300 million people.
The study is situated in the context of Gandhi's communication skills: his verbal output, his linguistic capacity, his journalistic and letter-writing style, his peace communication in conflict, his Organisational ability and the international repercussions of his mass mediated messages, his non-verbal communication through silence, his fasting, his personal presence and charisma.
The author uses the theories of Ronald Barthes, Victor Turner and Erving Goffman as the framework for a deeper communication analysis which brings to light Gandhi's unique sartorial strategy for India's liberation: the creation of a 'fashion system' through the laborious unfolding of the Swadeshi 'social drama' while he remained the undisputed 'performance manager' of the thirty-year-long freedom struggle.
The book ends with the articulation of a Gandhian approach to symbolisation for socio-political change. Photographs highlight and confirm the arguments in the text. It will were as an immensely insightful resource for students of communication studies, politics, history, semiotics, and cultural studies.
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