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October 23 - October 26, 2024
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.’
Poverty is about having no power. As a politician, it was Gandhi’s business to accumulate power, which he did effectively.
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.
But Gandhi, like many successful godmen, was an astute politician.
(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.)
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.
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.
Unnecesarry intellectualiztion. How else is ann experiment to be condducted? Sleep with every female congress worker?
Hind Swaraj defines Gandhi in the way Annihilation of Caste defines Ambedkar.
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.
Each followed his own occupation or trade. And charged a regulation wage.
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.
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?
‘We are in Natal by virtue of British Power. Our very existence depends on it.’
The strike spread from the collieries to the sugar plantations. Non-violent satyagraha failed. There was rioting, arson and bloodshed.
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’.
In all his years in South Africa, Gandhi maintained that Indians deserved better treatment than Africans.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.’
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.
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
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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
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.
(It was the Peshwas who forced Mahars to hang pots around their necks and tie brooms to their hips.)
The British subsequently raised a Mahar Regiment, which is still part of the Indian Army.
‘Krishna believed in fraud. His life is nothing but a series of frauds.
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.
In 1907, Ambedkar matriculated, the only Untouchable student in Elphinstone High School.
Afraid of even accidentally touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office would fling files at him.
‘It was then for the first time I learnt that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu is also Untouchable to a Parsi.’
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.
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?