Between 6 and 11 December in 1931, a meeting occurred between the French intellectual Romain Rolland; Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British Admiral; and Mahatma Gandhi. Rolland wanted Gandhianism to counter the excesses of both communism and fascism and fantasized that, in gaining the Mahatma’s aid in the fight against Western authoritarianism, a Eurasian collaboration would redeem the Occident from its suicidal violence. Gandhi disappointed in pursuing a radical course of nationalist revival and ‘passive resistance’, largely unconcerned with European ideological struggle. The men had come together through Slade, whom Rolland had ‘given’ to Gandhi to enhance East-West collaboration. Their triangular relations-and the tensions and paradoxes it threw up–provide a unique opportunity to explore spirituality, gender and subjectivity in global history, and to examine the connections between personal stories and world political systems, novel social experiments and individual spiritualities.
