South African Gandhi

[Janaki Jambunathan]

Share:

Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn WhatsApp Email Share Link

Ghana to remove Gandhi statue from University


Was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the revered leader of India’s freedom movement, a racist?


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hat-did-mahatma-gandhi-think-of-black-people/

 

[renuka]

Good...it seems he never liked Africans and thought that since he was educated he woud be accepted by the Whites..only after he was kicked off the train did realization dawn upon him that a racist white would just see him as a colored person and nothing more.

So fair enough if Africans remove his statue.

 

[Janaki Jambunathan]

Gandhi before India by Ramachandra Guha is an exclusive narration about him in Africa I spent a week.reading that book in Bangalore when I visited my son 3 months back It is over 800 pages of authentic records

A review of that in the link



Gandhi Before India is a work of vivid social history as well as biography. It largely follows the authorised, conservative version of Gandhi: when there is a doubt, he is given its benefit. The indigenous people who formed the overwhelming majority of the population of South Africa remain nearly invisible in Gandhi's life. He regarded them as barbarians who lived in "indolence and nakedness". On a rare occasion when he used the word "Africans", rather than "natives" or "kaffirs", it was while speaking to a white audience at the Johannesburg YMCA. Guha deals with this subject gingerly, describing Gandhi's extraordinary capaciousness as being "constrained in one fundamental sense" because he had no professional or social interaction with black people during the two decades or more he lived in Africa. The point is not that someone born in the 19th century should be expected to have 21st-century racial attitudes: it is that, even by the reformist standards of his own time, he was regressive. Gandhi's blanking of Africans is the black hole at the heart of his saintly mythology.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/09/gandhi-before-india-ramachandra-guha-review

Interestingly the book on Mohandoss . Gandhi. was gifted by Mohandoss Pai.to to my son on. his birthday!