Kumar

“While economics played a role, so did individuals, and one individual in particular. The official history underestimated the personal charisma of Mohandas K. Gandhi. His name, and his methods, fired the popular imagination. It was he who conceived of and led the campaign against the Rowlatt Act, he who conceived and led non-cooperation, he, who, by making common cause with the Muslims on the Khilafat, brought India’s two major communities together against the Raj.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“In the third week of January, a massive earthquake hit Bihar. When the news reached Gandhi, he was in the town of Tirunelveli. Speaking at a public meeting, he saw ‘a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the untouchability campaign. The Bihar calamity is a sudden and accidental reminder of what we are and what God is; but untouchability is a calamity handed down to us from century to century. It is a curse brought upon ourselves by our own neglect of a portion of Hindu humanity.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“As an upper-caste reformer, Gandhi was motivated by a sense of guilt, the desire to make reparation for past sins, whereas as one born in an ‘untouchable’ home, Ambedkar was animated by the drive to achieve a position of social equality and human dignity for his fellows.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

“On 14 August, Gandhi met B.R. Ambedkar in Bombay. This was the first meeting between the two men, one for more than a decade the most important political leader in India, the other, younger by twenty-two years, and seeking to represent his own, desperately disadvantaged community of so-called ‘untouchables’. Both men knew of each other, of course; Ambedkar had been inspired by Gandhian ideas during his ‘Mahad Satyagraha’ of 1927, which Gandhi had praised in the columns of Young India.”
― Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World