10-08-2004, 11:10 PM
rajesh:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The present effort is intended to serve as a corrective in this stifling atmosphere. It seeks to initiate a fresh debate about Gandhi and his contributions by focusing on two areas in which his role has remained all but unchallenged over the past fifty years: nationalism and the freedom movement. In reexamining these, I have drawn my material from two little known sources â Gandhi and Anarchy by C. Sankaran Nair, and the three volume History of the Freedom Movement by R.C. Majumdar. The former is a contemporary account by a leading Congressman from an earlier generation, while the latter is a magisterial account by one of modern Indiaâs greatest historians. It is a telling commentary on the intellectual and political climate in independent India that the Congress Government made a serious effort to suppress Majumdarâs great work; Majumdar himself in an Appendix gave an account of it. (Majumdarâs books are published by Firma KLM of Calcutta; Nairâs book is out of print.)
The present work makes no claims to being a scholarly study; it may in fact be seen as an extended summary of the two works cited above, especially Volume III of Majumdarâs trilogy. <b>Several generations of Indians â including my own â have grown up on a diet of history that serves only the interests of a narrow clique. In addition, it ignores the enormous contribution made by the Swadeshi movement before Gandhi arrived on the scene â by leaders like Surendra Nath Bannerji, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, and, above all, Sri Aurobindo and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. It can be argued that this Swadeshi movement was the real national movement, and the Congress after the death of Tilak fell into the hands of careerists and opportunists who happened to reap the benefits of historical events â like World War II and its fallout. </b>Even this they botched with timid policies and unprincipled compromises leading to the holocaust of the Partition and the Kashmir problem. This, even more than independence, is the legacy of the Congress Party; independence would probably have come, but lack of both vision and strength of purpose led to problems that have remained unresolved even after fifty years.
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Read A fable agreed upon
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The present effort is intended to serve as a corrective in this stifling atmosphere. It seeks to initiate a fresh debate about Gandhi and his contributions by focusing on two areas in which his role has remained all but unchallenged over the past fifty years: nationalism and the freedom movement. In reexamining these, I have drawn my material from two little known sources â Gandhi and Anarchy by C. Sankaran Nair, and the three volume History of the Freedom Movement by R.C. Majumdar. The former is a contemporary account by a leading Congressman from an earlier generation, while the latter is a magisterial account by one of modern Indiaâs greatest historians. It is a telling commentary on the intellectual and political climate in independent India that the Congress Government made a serious effort to suppress Majumdarâs great work; Majumdar himself in an Appendix gave an account of it. (Majumdarâs books are published by Firma KLM of Calcutta; Nairâs book is out of print.)
The present work makes no claims to being a scholarly study; it may in fact be seen as an extended summary of the two works cited above, especially Volume III of Majumdarâs trilogy. <b>Several generations of Indians â including my own â have grown up on a diet of history that serves only the interests of a narrow clique. In addition, it ignores the enormous contribution made by the Swadeshi movement before Gandhi arrived on the scene â by leaders like Surendra Nath Bannerji, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, and, above all, Sri Aurobindo and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. It can be argued that this Swadeshi movement was the real national movement, and the Congress after the death of Tilak fell into the hands of careerists and opportunists who happened to reap the benefits of historical events â like World War II and its fallout. </b>Even this they botched with timid policies and unprincipled compromises leading to the holocaust of the Partition and the Kashmir problem. This, even more than independence, is the legacy of the Congress Party; independence would probably have come, but lack of both vision and strength of purpose led to problems that have remained unresolved even after fifty years.
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Read A fable agreed upon