Unlike some other nationalists, Ranade was keenly aware of the humiliations that Indians were prepared to heap on their own kind. ‘Was this sympathy with the oppressed and down-trodden Indians,’ he wondered, ‘to be confined to those of our countrymen only who had gone out of India?’ Or would it be extended to a condemnation of the shameful manner in which low castes were treated within India? Ranade asked ‘whether it was for those who tolerated such disgraceful oppression and injustice in their own country to indulge in all that denunciation of the people of South Africa’.10
