The first Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Indian State and Indian nationalism.

I fin d this Gandhi difficult to gulp and so would have, I believe, Gandhi himself. But many people find only thi s Gandhi tolerable and live happily with him. The second Gandhi is the Gandhi of the Gandhians. He is at the moment suffering from an acute case of anaemia The third Gandhi is the Gandhi of the ragamuffins, eccentrics and the unpredicta ble The fourth Gandhi is usually not read. He is only heard, often second- or thirdhand. While a few like Martin Luther King carefully and critically assess and use his work, the rest do not even know what he wrote. The capacity for autonomous social action. Agency commonly refers to the ability of actors to operate independently of the determining constraints of social str ucture. The origins of the term lie in the legal and commercial distinction betw een principal and agent, in which the latter is granted the capacity to act auto nomously on behalf of the former. An agent in this sense may sign contracts or m anage property autonomously, while still bound to serve the interests of a princ ipal. The nature of such relationships continues to be a subject of considerable interest in sociology, economics, and political science, where it draws strongl y on rational choice models of individual and firm behavior and is generally ref erred to as agency theory. See also rational-choice theory. More generally, however, social science usage has shifted toward an emphasis on the problem of autonomy itself. In this context, agency raises questions about t he importance of human intentions, the nature and social construction of free wi ll, moral choice, and political capacity. In common usage, agency places the ind ividual at the center of analysis. However, collectivities may also be said to p ossess greater or lesser capacity to exercise agency or autonomous action. In bo th cases, agency suggests not merely the ability to act, but to act in ways that demand the recognition and/or response of others. This distinction is sometimes described as that of action from mere behavior (see action theory). Debates about agency commonly oppose it to social structure, although some schol ars also study the structural conditions for agency. A variety of schools of soc iological analysis have addressed the question of the extent to which individual s may operate autonomously from social structure. Much sociology and anthropolog y is structural in the sense that it attempts to explain the identity or behavio r of individuals on the basis of positions in social structure or culturally ass igned roles. In opposition to this approach, some symbolic interactionists (such as Herbert Blumer ) argue that social structures (or social systems) are abstra ctions that do not exist apart from human construction, and that individuals con sequently have a great deal of agency whether they recognize it or not. From thi s perspective, human agency is central and everything else in social life includin g social systems stems from it. Some critics have argued that such a notion does n ot adequately grasp agency because it presents individuals as determined by a co nstant, pervasive process of social construction. These critics place more empha sis on the capacity to reflect on one's social circumstances and self in order t o rise above the more general process of social construction. The agency-structure debate came to the fore in sociology in the 1970s and 1980s , in the context of increased attention to practice or action and an increased c

oncern for the analysis of power relations and conflict. The framing of this deb ate was influenced by French structuralism associated initially with the anthropol ogy of Claude Lvi-Strauss and later with the work of scholars who sought to pay g reater attention to practical action (notably Pierre Bourdieu ). Following this lead, Anthony Giddens argued that structure and agency should be seen as inextri cably linked, with neither altogether ascendant over the other. Other theorists of the middle ground between agency and structure include Peter Berger and Thoma s Luckmann , who argue for a dialectical relationship between the two. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi went to England when he was 19 to study law. Gandhi is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation; his birthday , 2 October, is commemorated there as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and wo rldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence. Mahatma literally translates to great soul in Sanskrit. Time Magazine, the famous U.S. publication, named Mahatma Gandhi the Man of the Year in 1930. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi led hundreds of followers on a 240-mile march to the sea, where they made salt from seawater in protest against the British salt law, whi ch made it illegal to possess salt not bought from the government. Mahatma Gandhi experimented with diets to see how cheaply he could live and rema in healthy. He started living principally on fruit and goats milk and olive oil. Mahatma Gandhi spoke English with an Irish accent, for one of his first teachers was an Irishman. On 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot and killed on the grounds of the Bir la Bhavan (Birla House) in New Delhi. Gandhi s policy of Satyagraha, based largely on Hinduism, was influenced by many d iverse sources, including Christ, Leo Tolstoy, and Henry David Thoreau.