gandhi

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Thu Apr 25 14:11:42 PDT 2002


Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> Everything I know about Gandhi I learned at the movies,
> but I would guess that the Mahatma would never go for the
> line about 'do what I demand or these other dudes will shoot
> you' either, assuming you are being fair to MLK in this regard.
>

if by the movies you mean the attenborough film "gandhi", i am afraid attenborough did not quite follow nehru's alleged advice to not paint the man as a saint. while some of the criticisms levelled against gandhi (the man, not the movie; for excessive criticism of both see any of the rants by grenier) has been excessive and patronizing (naipaul qualifies eminently in both categories), there is more than a grain of truth to the notion that gandhi was a shrewd politician and adept at pointing out the alternative ([10,000] britishers cannot keep [100] million indians under control, to quote roughly).

expanding the scope a bit, a quick search on the net yielded a couple of pieces (one by ashish nandy and another by george orwell):

http://www.littlemag.com/nandy.htm http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/ghandi.htm

perhaps something by ambedkar would also be informative.

http://www.ambedkar.org/research/GandhiAmbedkar.htm

--ravi



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