The Doctor and the Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste
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Satyagraha seemed to be a way of reassuring them, a way of saying: ‘You can trust us. Look at us. We would rather harm ourselves than harm you.’
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hair-shirt Christianity
Saurabh Nanda
Whay does this mean?
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semen retention
Saurabh Nanda
Retention where?
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Poverty is about having no power. As a politician, it was Gandhi’s business to accumulate power, which he did effectively.
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If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty.
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But Gandhi, like many successful godmen, was an astute politician.
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(Gandhi would eventually discard his Western suit and put on a dhoti in order to dress like the poorest of the poor. Ambedkar, on the other hand, born unmoneyed, Untouchable, and denied the right to wear clothes that privileged-caste people wore, would show his defiance by wearing a three-piece suit.)
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Gandhi’s genius was that he yoked his other-worldly search for moksha to a very worldly, political cause and performed both, like a fusion dance, for a live audience, in a live-in theatre.
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For Gandhi to extrapolate from the ‘results’ of sleeping with two (or three, or four) women that he had, or had not, conquered heterosexual desire suggests that he viewed women not as individuals, but as a category. That, for him, a very small sample of a few physical specimens, including his own grand-niece, could stand in for the whole species.
Saurabh Nanda
Unnecesarry intellectualiztion. How else is ann experiment to be condducted? Sleep with every female congress worker?
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They had to be obedient women who never challenged the traditional structures of patriarchy.
Saurabh Nanda
Reference? Seema ro be modern SJW nonsense being projected bckwards in time
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No questions seem to have arisen as to how one was to carry one’s husband with one. Nor any thoughts on whether satyagraha would be effective, for example, against the hoary tradition of marital rape.
Saurabh Nanda
Stop judjing by todays,s standards something tht happened fifty-plus yeara ago
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Hind Swaraj defines Gandhi in the way Annihilation of Caste defines Ambedkar.
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This message of tolerance and inclusiveness between Hindus and Muslims continues to be Gandhi’s real, lasting and most important contribution to the idea of India.
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Each followed his own occupation or trade. And charged a regulation wage.
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Gandhi’s valorization of the mythic village came at a point in his life when he does not seem to have even visited an Indian village.
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Though Gandhi later insisted that untouchability had troubled him since he was a boy,157 in Hind Swaraj he makes absolutely no mention of it.
Saurabh Nanda
To be validated when reading hind swaraj
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Did he really believe that it was the ‘negroes’ goodwill’ that allowed Indian merchants to ply their trade in South Africa, and not, despite its racist laws, British colonialism?
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‘We are in Natal by virtue of British Power. Our very existence depends on it.’
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The strike spread from the collieries to the sugar plantations. Non-violent satyagraha failed. There was rioting, arson and bloodshed.
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He added that Gandhi’s leadership over the previous two decades had ‘resulted in no tangible good to anyone’. On the contrary, Gandhi and his band of passive resisters had made themselves ‘an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa’.
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In all his years in South Africa, Gandhi maintained that Indians deserved better treatment than Africans.
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even expelled, like the Indians in Uganda were in 1972.
Saurabh Nanda
TBR
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That Gandhi is a hero in South Africa is as undeniable as it is baffling. One possible explanation is that after he left South Africa, Gandhi was reimported, this time as the shining star of the freedom struggle in India.
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The young Reverend Charles Freer Andrews travelled to South Africa and fell on his knees when he met Gandhi at the Durban dock.164 Andrews, who became a lifelong devotee, went on to suggest that Gandhi, the leader of the ‘humblest, the lowliest and lost’, was a living avatar of Christ’s spirit. Europeans and Americans vied with each other to honour him.
Saurabh Nanda
Seems like an episode out of Netflix's preacher
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He became Gandhi’s chief patron and sponsor and paid him a generous monthly retainer to cover the costs of running his ashrams and for his Congress party work.
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In addition to mills and other businesses, G.D. Birla owned a newspaper, Hindustan Times, where Gandhi’s son, Devdas, eventually worked as managing editor.
Saurabh Nanda
Nepotism pro.max
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So the Mahatma who promoted homespun khadi and the wooden charkha was sponsored by a mill-owner. The man who raged against the machine was kept afloat by industrialists. This arrangement was the precursor to the phenomenon of the corporate-sponsored NGO.
Saurabh Nanda
Hmm... Arundhati roy taking a dig at ngo's
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‘It is a fact that from 1918 onwards, after Gandhi had left and the planters’ influence had begun to fade away, the hold of the rural oligarchy grew stronger than ever.’
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Whilst we will not hesitate to advise kisans when the moment comes to suspend payment of taxes to Government, it is not contemplated that at any stage of non-cooperation we would seek to deprive the zamindars of their rent. The kisan movement must be confined to the improvement of the status of the kisans and the betterment of the relations between the zamindars and them. The kisans must be advised scrupulously to abide by the terms of their agreement with the zamindars, whether such agreement is written or inferred from custom.
Saurabh Nanda
Kya chutiyaapa hai?
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Carnegie writes in The Gospel of Wealth (1889): This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer, in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus ...more
Saurabh Nanda
Wow! Almost verbatim to wht is written in thr NKB book. TBR
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‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, the historian Shahid Amin
Saurabh Nanda
TBR
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Swadesh, a Gorakhpur newspaper, that had published rumours about the miracles that surrounded Gandhi: he had made fragrant smoke waft up from a well, a copy of the Holy Quran had appeared in a locked room, a buffalo that belonged to an Ahir who refused money to a sadhu begging in the Mahatma’s name had perished in a fire, and a Brahmin who had defied Gandhi’s authority had gone mad.173
Saurabh Nanda
WTF is happening?
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didn’t seem to matter that unlike Gandhi, who was from a well-to-do family (his father was the prime minister of the princely state of Porbandar), Jesus was a carpenter from the slums of Jerusalem who stood up against the Roman Empire instead of trying to make friends with it. And he wasn’t sponsored by big business.
Saurabh Nanda
MKG's father was PM of Porbandar!!
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Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being.
Saurabh Nanda
Horseshit title
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(It was the Peshwas who forced Mahars to hang pots around their necks and tie brooms to their hips.)
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Koregaon,
Saurabh Nanda
Is this the sme koregaon?
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The British subsequently raised a Mahar Regiment, which is still part of the Indian Army.
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fourteenth
Saurabh Nanda
?!
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‘Krishna believed in fraud. His life is nothing but a series of frauds.
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Thanks to a new British legislation,182 he was allowed to go to a Touchable school, but he was made to sit apart from his classmates, on a scrap of gunnysack, so that he would not pollute the classroom floor.
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Satara’s barbers would not cut his hair, not even the barbers who sheared goats and buffaloes.
Saurabh Nanda
This is stil happening
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In 1907, Ambedkar matriculated, the only Untouchable student in Elphinstone High School.
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Sayajirao Gaekwad, the progressive maharaja of Baroda.
Saurabh Nanda
Read more about gaekwad
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Morley–Minto reforms, which advocated a separate electorate for Muslims,
Saurabh Nanda
TBR
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1923 wrote Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?)
Saurabh Nanda
TBR - VD Savarkar book
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Afraid of even accidentally touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office would fling files at him.
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‘It was then for the first time I learnt that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu is also Untouchable to a Parsi.’
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They passed the All-India Anti-Untouchability Manifesto, which was signed by all of them (except Tilak, who managed to find a way around it).
Saurabh Nanda
TBR - why did tilak not sign
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How were African slaves forced to work on American cotton fields? By being flogged, by being lynched, and if that did not work, by being hung from a tree for others to see and be afraid.
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Why are the murders of insubordinate Dalits even today never simply murders but ritual slaughter? Why are they always burnt alive, raped, dismembered and paraded naked?