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Amid the massive riots that followed Partition, Gandhi urged Hindus and Muslims to live peacefully together, and undertook a hunger strike until riots in Calcutta ceased. In January , Gandhi carried out yet another fast, this time to bring about peace in the city of Delhi.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. On March 12, , Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.
Cripps was a gifted student with a background in such diverse disciplines as chemistry and law.
In an event that would have dramatic repercussions for the people of India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer working in South Africa, refuses to comply with racial segregation rules on a South African train and is forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg. Born in India and A leader in the Indian campaign for home rule, Gandhi worked all his life Although faced with the challenge of uniting a vast population diverse in culture, language and religion, he During the march, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from his religious retreat near Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea The Birth of Passive Resistance In , after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years.
The Hindu brigade, overcompensating for their provincialism and feelings of guilt, have included Gandhi in their overly long salutation to Indian greats in the Ek Mata Stotra their unity hymn. In all this we ignore the fact that many people quarrelled with Gandhi.
Many were troubled by his idiosyncratic ways, which we now know included sexually aberrant behaviour. Besant told Durga Das , a well-known and influential journalist, that she thought Gandhi was leading the country to anarchy. Gandhi's peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies drove quite a few people up the wall.
He was considered by many to be a "difficult person," as he insisted that those around him and the people of India follow him in his peculiar "ascetic" ways. Alas, very few people knew about his dangerous experiments to test his willpower and ability to withstand sexual temptation. One of those "experiments" included sleeping naked with his teenage grand-nieces, Manu and Abha. Some of the tests of will were neither new nor strange in some of the esoteric ascetic and spiritual traditions of India.
The idea of nonviolent resistance is still as essential and almost as radical today as it was when Mahatma Gandhi (–) first pioneered in India the. Editorial Reviews. Review. “This short book provides a perceptive and reliable introduction to Gandhi's life and thought. It offers a new way of looking at Gandhi .
But such practices were usually taught and carefully monitored by teachers, and were barred to those in the secular world. Because he was assassinated, we now ignore the frailties and the follies of the Mahatma.
Gandhi's transition from the medieval to the modern without the understanding of the ancient led to his incomplete view of Indian history, culture and mores. For Gandhi, however, truth was the ultimate value and life only its indirect consequence.
He spoke of protecting truth at the cost of life, and made its sacrifice the very essence of non-violence. In his autobiography the Mahatma even downplays the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of , when Reginal Dyer ordered his troops to mow down hundreds of unarmed men and women in Amritsar, and claims to be more horrified by the humiliation and therefore untruth willingly borne by Indians elsewhere in the city: Before this outrage the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy paled into insignificance in my eyes, though it was this massacre principally that attracted the attention of the people of India and of the world.
The more salacious story about Gandhi involves his experiments, late in life, of sleeping naked with young women in order to test his chastity. This was the only way he could shake off the solitude of his saintliness to become human and so fallible again. Most important seem to be the impressions of westerners, an audience both represented in the book and addressed by it. In an anecdote revealing of the importance to him of a middle-class, Euro-American readership, Guha is surprised that a Dominican waiter serving him in New York could recognise a photograph of the great man.
Left unreconciled are the Hindu nationalists whose ideological descendants rule India today, and against whom Guha appears to have written his biography. Gandhi and the Temptations of Violence is published by Hurst.