whoosh

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Ugh.

woh-battameez:

thesavagesalad:

bantamblarg:

juthikaforpresident:

Gandhi is not India.

Gandhi was not a perfect man. He tried to freed India, but he wasn’t the only one.

The Indian uprising was filled with tons of bloody revolts, outright massacres (Jallanwalia Bagh, anyone?), and it was not only non-violence that got freedom from India. Gandhi succeeded where others failed because of his status in India, not essentially because of his politics.

It irritates me when people say I have to idolize Gandhi because he freed me as a Bangladeshi citizen from British colonialism, because no, he wasn’t the only one. Nehru, Mujib, Bhagat Singh, Tagore, Udham Singh, many other brown men and women stood together and fought a bloody fucking battle to get our independence. Not only that, but a lot of the conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims was because of the British trying to pin blame on either side to gain control of Colonial India.

Gandhi was a good man, yes, but he had his faults. I don’t agree with his non-violent stance on things such as the Holocaust and other conflicts that he had no place in. He promoted anti-black values as well. I’m not saying this to discredit the man. I’m telling you this because I’m sick of being told that Gandhi was the only man that saved India. I haven’t even touched the politics between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan that tore the country apart and sent millions and millions of innocents to their deaths. There is so much more to Indian history than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

THANK YOU.

TY FOR THIS POST

Gandhi was a good man? For who? And, while I completely get where OP is coming from, there’s something else to this, “He did racist [x] and [y] but let’s not discredit his role” because his face is on our currency today/the legacy his work carries? This isn’t a comprehensive list, but I’m too furious to not say anything.

Let’s get some shit straight:

— Gandhi didn’t just promote anti-black values, he *was* anti-black, the two are quite different things. He bought into the whole hierarchy of races promoted by Whiteness.

— Gandhi’s leadership only took shape in most of North and East India, South India was working with a huge anti-caste movement under Periyar and so was West India, under Ambedkar. So no, even *while* the freedom struggle was on, his leadership wasn’t a unified force. Nor was his vision of India seen as the only one.

— Gandhi, a product of his times, was a deeply casteist and sexist man. For him, women were the ideal feminine, and caste was an “attitude”. So you start eating with the ‘ex-untouchable’ castes, you start seeing women as someone’s mothers, wives and sisters, so you don’t ill-treat them. Structures of patriarchy and caste, in Gandhian philospophy can all be overcome.

— Technically speaking, there’s nothing “wrong” about Gandhi. He had his faults, many, many of them as far I am concerned. These wouldn’t matter so much today if we say Gandhi as a dude who was *one* part of the Indian freedom struggle, who did promote some sort of brotherhood, understood colonialism as an economic bind, and then was assassinated. What we have instead is, the Ideal Gandhi, who was perfect at all times and who single-handedly drove the British out.

Gandhi, when actually situated in the contexts he belongs in, is quite ordinary, let’s hold on to that, instead of immortalising a racist, sexist and casteist man, and pretending that his contribution to the Indian Freedom Struggle somehow obliterates all the baggage he comes with.

reblogging because yes good.