ABSTRACT
The old to Basanta Kumar Mallik was the community-oriented way of life that Asian traditional societies once followed, but which was India's present, until the first half of the twentieth century. Madhuri Santhanam Sondhi, one of the few scholars to have engaged seriously with Mallik, calls it 'a mediation on the significance of Gandhi's death and the new direction to which it pointed both for India and the world'. Mallik is drawn into an inquiry of the historical implications of Gandhi's death. Secondly, according to Mallik, in the present condition of the world, it was impossible to solve the conflicts between major worldviews and types of civilization, of which there were primarily three types: the humanistic-individualistic, founded in ancient Greece, one version of which was Western-style modernity. The final significance of the death of Gandhi to Mallik was the persistence of suffering for individuals as well as societies.
