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EXPONENT OF JAINISM TO THE WEST
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Gandhi. This committee immediately sent to India forty thousand rupees and a steamer full of corn. During this travel Virchand Gandhi delivered as many as 535 lectures. He had the command of fourteen languages including Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, English, Sanskrit and French.
Thus a young man of twenty-nine, he preached religion in foreign countries in the face of opposition from his own community who objected to travel abroad. He toured abroad thrice to spread the message of Jain Philosophy and he was equally a spokesman of Indian philosophy.
The short life span of Virchand Raghavji Gandhi is full of multifarious achievements. He was the first graduate of the Jain society to get his BA with Hons. in 1884. When his father died in 1890, he did not allow the primitive practices of wailing and breast-beating during mourning. At the age of twenty-one, as the secretary of 'Shri Jain Association of India' he worked for the abolition of poll-tax levied on pilgrims ot Palitana.
Annoyed by poll-tax and other forms of harassment, the Anandji Kalyanji firm had filed a suit against the ruler of Palitana. But Sursinghji, the ruler (Thakor) of Palitana, was a right-hand man of the Political Agent. The Political Agent did not give fair justice. Virchand Gandhi took up the problem. In those days to protest against the dictates of the ruler was to invite severe punishment and even death. He often went up from Mahuva to Palitana and prepared the ground for compromise. He met Lord Ray, the Governor of Bombay, and Colonel Watson, the Political Agent and made a strong representation and eventually forced the abolition of the poll-tax. An English man set up at Mt. Sametshikhar, a place of pilgrimage in Bihar, a factory for extracting pig's fat on order. Virchand Gandhi went all the way to Calcutta to have the work on the project stopped. He stayed in Calcutta for six months studying the papers regarding the case and learnt the Bengali language and ultimately got this verdict issued.
"Sametshikhar is a place of Jain pilgrimage and nobody else has any right to interfere there." He did not give up his fight until he achieved his objectives and got the factory closed down. He brought the dispute regarding the temple at Kavi to a happy
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