What Gandhi is to India Jinnah is to Pakistan
What Aakar writes about Gandhi's lingering influence in India is equally applicable in Pakistan, albeit with a name change. A minor but far reaching point he missed about Gandhi (and Jinnah) is their portrait on large denomination currency notes - used to lubricate movement~~t
We know that Gandhi borrowed his three great political ideas from the west. He got non-violence from Tolstoy, civil disobedience from Thoreau and Sarvoday (the rise of all) from Ruskin.
He was better able to explain them to the world. He certainly deployed them better in India, and when the world now discusses these ideas they think of Gandhi rather than the men who thought them up first. But he lifted their ideas because he revered these men (in his correspondence with Tolstoy, Gandhi is particularly obsequious).
Why these three men? There is something common to them, and to Gandhi's maru jivan aej mari vani line. And that is physical self-sufficiency, Gandhi's primary message to Indians: work with your hands.
Tolstoy gave up his possessions, and even his writing, and began a life of labour. In his book Intellectuals, Paul Johnson noted that Tolstoy even cobbled his own shoes. Thoreau retreated to Walden and began growing his own food and building a house by himself. In Unto This Last, which got Gandhi fired up in South Africa, Ruskin stresses not just the dignity of manual labour, but its equality with all other work.
We know that Gandhi borrowed his three great political ideas from the west. He got non-violence from Tolstoy, civil disobedience from Thoreau and Sarvoday (the rise of all) from Ruskin.
He was better able to explain them to the world. He certainly deployed them better in India, and when the world now discusses these ideas they think of Gandhi rather than the men who thought them up first. But he lifted their ideas because he revered these men (in his correspondence with Tolstoy, Gandhi is particularly obsequious).
Why these three men? There is something common to them, and to Gandhi's maru jivan aej mari vani line. And that is physical self-sufficiency, Gandhi's primary message to Indians: work with your hands.
Tolstoy gave up his possessions, and even his writing, and began a life of labour. In his book Intellectuals, Paul Johnson noted that Tolstoy even cobbled his own shoes. Thoreau retreated to Walden and began growing his own food and building a house by himself. In Unto This Last, which got Gandhi fired up in South Africa, Ruskin stresses not just the dignity of manual labour, but its equality with all other work.
posted by temporal at 3/22/2009
2 Comments:
I think Gandhi did develop these ideas further and combined them with a mass movement in a way the others would not have thought of - since they saw these as individualist solutions. His addition of religion to the mix was less welcome imo.
I am may be 100% wrong but I think Gandhi's ideals were developed from childhood and his braistorming from seeing terrible situation, similar to what 'Buddha' felt.
His inspiration for non-violence is from Emporer Ashok, Satyagraha is from the epics of Ramayana and the great hindu verse
"Those forgive are the strongest than forgiven"
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