Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

Page 6

GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
THE GREAT
VIKRAM
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
You have Abraham Lincoln... we have Vikram, the great. You have had your Abraham Lincoln who was the regenerator of your country, a second Washington. We had also our Abraham Lincoln, the victor of a great and patriotic war, the patron of reviving Hinduism, the center of all that is best and most beautiful in modern Sanskrit literature, and the subject of a hundred legends - Vikram the Great. He is to the Hindu what Charlemagne is to the French, what Alfred is to the English, and what Harun-Al-Rashid is to the Mohammedan. You Americans are living in the realization of the ancient dreams of the philosophers of India and the East. The means of the growth and human uplifting are great here. Our prophets and philosophers have laid the foundations of them and it is now for you to build on those foundations. This is the message of India, which she delivers to you and through you to the whole American nation