Skip to main content

The Sabarmati will weep

The Sabarmati Ashram


Now that India has proved its might to the world by flexing her muscles on its pet enemy’s national borders as well as TV screens, she can get on with regular affairs like rewriting history. One of the places where history is going to be reshaped is Mahatma Gandhi’s own beloved Sabarmati Ashram. A sum of INR1200 crore (12,000 million) has been allocated for the purpose.

The Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, has filed a petition against the project in the court saying that “the proposed project will alter the topography of the century-old ashram … and corrupt its ethos.” Some 200 buildings in the place will be destroyed or rebuilt. In other words, Sabarmati won’t have anything to do with Mahatma Gandhi’s spirit after the project is completed.

In other words, the project aims at evacuating Gandhi from his own home.

Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon is preserved as a museum and tourist destination. All efforts have been made to maintain and restore the historic buildings and artifacts. 


Russia maintains Tolstoy’s legacy at his birthplace through the Yasnaya Polyana estate which is now a museum and cultural centre dedicated to the writer. 

The Yasnaya Polyana estate

The above are two examples from pre-Gandhi history. Gandhi may lose his soul from his own beloved Sabarmati when the new project will be completed in two years from now because the project doesn’t intend to keep the old buildings. New and ostentatious ones will come up. Gandhi’s ideals of simplicity, austerity, and non-materialism will be taken over by a sanitised, tourist-friendly monument. Gandhian minimalism and self-reliance will be cast into the Sabarmati River.

Gandhian scholars and the ashram associated have not been taken into confidence while the project was planned by the Modi government. Instead people associated with the Ashram as well as families who have lived and worked at the ashram for generations face eviction and loss of their traditional roles in the place.

Well-known Malayalam writer Gracy opines in her brief article in a periodical that the project is part of a political conspiracy to replace Mahatma Gandhi as the national father-figure with someone else. She doesn’t say who will occupy the position. Let’s hope it won’t be Mahatma’s assassin. 

Source: India Today

Post-Script

The state of Gujarat, where this gargantuan project is being enforced, is grappling with significant issues of poverty and malnutrition, particularly affecting children under five. A substantial number of children in the state are underweight and a significant percentage of women face anaemia. For details: Gujarat Among Worst In Child Nutrition And Hunger: NITI Aayog. Recall that the Mahatma was a person who viewed poverty as a moral collapse of society, stemming from what he called ‘seven social evils,’ including wealth without work and commerce without morality.

 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    I had not heard of this plan - and am gobsmacked (though on some levels, unsurprised, given the pattern of such choices already executed by Modi et al). The song choice on my blog this morning fits this nonsense so well! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hope the sites are documented as history before being rewritten.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We are bad with all these things. We know how to mess such things up. I don't know why history can't be left to itself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Messing up history is what's going on now. Every chaiwalla wants a 10 second place in history.

      Delete
  4. Fascism survives on rewritten histories, doublespeak, culture of construction of alternative facts and Post-Truth.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sadly, this sort of thing has been done all throughout history. It's definitely a rewriting of what came before, by those that want history to reflect what they believe it should be.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Impact of Your Deed

Illustration by Copilot Designer Thirteen-year-old Briony makes a terrible mistake. She falsely accuses Robbie of raping Lola. Robbie is arrested. Cecilia is heartbroken. Briony herself regrets her act, but too late. All the painful harms have already been done. Atonement can be meaningless sometimes. Briony, Robbie, Cecilia, all belong to Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). Why did Briony make a false charge against Robbie? First of all, there was a serious misunderstanding. Briony presumed that Robbie’s romantic interest in Cecilia, Briony’s elder sister, was lust with a mask. Secondly, Briony was probably jealous of the relationship between her sister and Robbie. As a little child, Briony had jumped into a river merely to be saved by Robbie. When asked why she did such a dangerous thing, her answer was, “Because I love you.” Robbie is accused of raping Lola, Briony’s cousin. It was Paul Marshall who actually violated Lola, not once but twice. Briony did not see the man who r...