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(revenue and tax), intellectual (knowledge systems to learn, live, love and co-exist in peace with others. and texts through translation) and cultural/historical For him, exploitation/injustice was the worst sin, and (annexation of cultural and archival artefacts). labour, the true dharma ('right path'). To support this Gandhi called colonisers traders and stopped just view, I cannot resist the temptation of citing an short of pronouncing them as thieves. Along with eloquent extract from Ganhdi's letter dated 13 the 'external thieves, he did not spare those who October 1921 in Young India to Rabindranath did not work for their food, or 'internal thieves' - as Tagore, the Bard of Bengal. he referred to them in a letter to Rabindranath To a people famishing and idle, the only Tagore (cited later in this discussion). Moreover, acceptable form in which God can dare appear is Gandhi's rejection of colonial systems and work and promise of food as wages. God created processes was preceded by an understanding of man to work for his food and said those as wages. their true character. Colonisation systematically de- God created man to work for his food and said that systematises the native structures - religious, those who are without work were thieves. Eighty per judicial, financial, administrative and educational - cent of India is compulsory thieves half the year. Is it and replaces them with alien system and any wonder if India has become one wast prison? institutions. The British did the same in India. (Gandhi : 257) Gandhi's opposition to the British system of Returning to Hind Swaraj, It is congruous to education, railways, parliamentary system of state that it is among the first few texts that governance, modern medicine and judicial system, pronounced the end of ambivalence towards stems from the fact that they proved poor colonisation after the Freedom Struggle of 1857. alternatives to the long tradition of the native After the Struggle, Queen Victoria took over India systems. Apart from this, these systems were from the East India Company, and India came selectively used for servng colonial purpose - as directly under the colonial rule of the Crown. The was the case with the introduction of railways in failure of the Struggle was a jolt to the national India - or more for military than civilian purpose. As psyche, There were some who like Narmad, the a part of his tactics, Gandhi - in his unalloyed precursor of modern Gujarati literature, had seen criticism of civilisation/modernisation / machinery British rule as a blessing, and Mirza Ghalib, the and exploitation / materialism greed - made renowned Urdu poet, who had censured the freedom sweeping remarks against these for 'de- fighters (the 'mutineers' for the colonisers or the familiasring' and attracting attention towards them 'purbia' [easterners], as he called them) for the through as exaggerative mode of constructing destruction of Delhi. In the next phase, this was discourse. However, it is difficult to surmise that a replaced by ambivalence in the last quarter of the perspicacious person was oblivious of the 19th century. After the founding of Congress and weaknesses of Indians or of the uses of technology, activities of freedom fighters like Shyamji medicine or education that he himself had had. Krishnavarma and V.D. Savarkar, (who would fall Gandhi was against these because they led wo/men under what Gandhi called 'Indian school of violence to stray away from her/his nature and divorced her/ for ending India's occupation br Britain'), and B.K. him from labour. He rejected the clerk-spawning Gokhale and B.G. Tilak in India, the ambivalence education system, for it failed to make labour and had come to an end, but there was difference of value -oriented education an integral part of it. He opinion regarding the means of achieving freedom believed in empowering people with education, a through violent means, i.e. brute force, or peaceful humanistic education that would teach its pupil how means. Shyamji Krishnavarma and V.D. Sarvarkar
ઑકટોબર- ૨૦૧૮) પ્રબુદ્ધ જીવન : ગાંધી સાર્ધશતાબ્દી વિશેષાંક
'સત્ય-અહિંસા-અપરિગ્રહ) (૧૧)
