Gandhi implicitly understood that to attain his social reform objectives and abate Hindu-Muslim antagonism aroused by the Partition of the subcontinent on religious lines, education of the population was a necessary precondition. Therefore he expended long years in ideating and developing his prescription of basic education – Dilip Thakore In grand-scale national celebrations orchestrated by the BJP-NDA government at the Centre which was re-elected to office in General Election 2019 of last summer, the nation is set to commemorate the sesquicentennial (150th) birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) for a whole year, starting October 2. Certainly, the proposed year-long nationwide celebrations to remember Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi who master-minded and led India’s unprecedented freedom struggle from the cruel and exploitative rule of imperial Great Britain, are warranted. Although with the passage of time public memory of British rule over India has dimmed, it’s useful to remember that the people of the independent Republic of India owe Mahatma Gandhi a huge debt. Right until the mid-19th century, the Indian subcontinent (as also imperial China) was the world’s richest region contributing an estimated 20 percent of global GDP. By the time the last British troops retreated in 1947 — almost two centuries after the Battle of Plassey (1757) in Bengal which marked the beginning of British Raj in India — the subcontinent had been reduced to the world’s poorest and most miserable region of the modern world. According to most indigenous historians, the struggle for Indian independence had begun with the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (aka the First War of Indian Independence) and acquired new momentum when the Indian National Congress party was established in 1885. But it was only when Gandhi returned to India in 1914 from British-ruled South Africa (to which he had gone in his capacity as a lawyer to settle a mercantile dispute) where he conceptualised and successfully tested the doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (self-sacrifice and truth) to attain political objectives, and transformed the genteel Indian National Congress into a mass-based political party, that India’s freedom struggle began in right earnest. In 33 years under the Mahatma’s moral and ethical leadership — he never held any official position in the Congress party — his goal of purna swaraj (complete independence) for India was attained. During his own lifetime and within the short span of three decades, almost 200 years of brutally oppressive British suzerainty over India collapsed and the mighty British Empire over which it was claimed the sun never set, unravelled soon after as colonised and subjugated people of the empire following the Indian example, demanded and wrested their independence from imperial Great Britain. Yet as Ramachandra Guha, contemporary India’s most well-known and respected historian who has written three deeply-researched and eminently readable biographies of Mahatma Gandhi — India after Gandhi (2007, a history of post-independence India), Gandhi Before India (2013, on the evolution of the Mahatma) and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-48 (2018) — highlights in his latest book, Gandhi was…
