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Arundhati Roy questions Gandhi’s 'Mahatma’ status05 MARCH 2014 - 10:47AM GMT

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Arundhati Roy

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NEW DELHI —  Writer and activist Arundhati Roy Tuesday questioned the association of the word ‘Mahatma’ with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.In a Walter Sisulu Memorial Lecture series organized by the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution of Jamia Millia Islamia university, Ms Roy raised questions on how Gandhi came to be called a Mahatma despite never having renounced caste 

“Did he began with the compassion and egalitarian instincts of a saint or they came to him along the way. How could a privileged-caste Bania (Gandhi) claim that he, in his own person, represented forty five million Indian untouchables unless he believed he actually was a Mahatma? Mahatmahood provided Gandhi with an amplitude that was not available to ordinary mortals. It allowed him to use his inner voice affectively, effectively and often,” she was quoted in Jamia Journal.

“It permitted him to contradict himself and then say, ‘my aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself,” she said, citing

examples of contradictions and inconsistencies in Gandhi’s own statements during the years of India’s freedom struggle against British colonial rule.

Speaking on the topic ‘The Doctor and The Saint: The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate’, Arundhati Roy in the conference hall of FTK- Centre for Information Technology of the varsity, the program was chaired by Prof SM Sajid, Vice-Chancellor JMI. The title of the lecture is also the title of the introduction to a recently published work on ‘Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition B.R. Ambedkar’ (2014) edited and annotated by S. Anand.

Arundhati Roy started her lecture with a backgrounder of Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” – a speech that was never delivered – and then went on to speak mainly of Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and his views on caste.“Gandhi’s views on race presaged his views on caste. He thought it below the dignity of the privileged castes to be sitting with blacks. He was trying his best to signal to the British that we are looking forward to an ‘imperial brotherhood’. He led the struggle of the passenger Indians bravely … And then his worst nightmares became a reality–the man who couldn’t bear to even share the entrance to a post office with ‘Kaffirs’ (blacks) now had to share a prison cell with them,” the journal reported.

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