Gandhi Before Gandhi

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

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GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
"This is my country, that is your country, these are the conceptions of narrow souls, to the liberal minded the whole world is a family."
For your inventions, and for whatever is just in your methods of industry, for whatever is humane and wise in your forms of education, and for whatever is pure and useful in your government and in your civilization we would offer you in exchange the sublime teachings of our prophets and our poets and for all the people, cordial fraternity and perfect reciprocity.
These prayers were composed before the birth of Jesus or Buddha had they lived before these compositions; their name would have been added to this prayer.
I concede, my brothers and sisters, that in India as elsewhere, men may combine together for wrong doing, and have done so, but when they did so it was, in contravention of the sacred truths, ignorantly interpreted and ignorantly applied, and not in accordance with the dogma of religion, nor the inspiration of philosophy or civilization. Under the highest forms of the Christian religion, you will bear me witness, these things also have been done, but do we hold Christianity responsible for the cruelty, injustice and wrong? Some may, but we do not. No more can you hold our philosophy and our religion responsible for any abnormal conceptions and perpetration in our society.
You know, my brothers and sisters, that we are not an independent nation, we are subjects of her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, the defender of the faith," but if we were free nation in all that with our own government and our own rulers with our laws and institutions controlled by us free and independent, I affirm that we should seek to establish and for ever maintain peaceful relations with all the nations of the world. We would seek neither to lesson your dignity nor to encroach upon your right or domain, and we would ask for that recognition in the family of nations which you already concede to us in the family of men. The Sanskrit poet says: "This is my country, that is your country, these are the conceptions of narrow souls, to the liberal minded the whole world is a family."
I have learned since I came here in this country why it is that in my own country different missionaries and Christian teachers antagonize one another. It is because the disciples are no better than their masters; because I find in this country many Christianities and the multiplied disagreements amounting to mutual oppression and excommunication, teach me that, either there be many Christs or that the one Christ is dismembered and torn and
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