MAHATMA GANDHI’S VIEWS ON RACE, ESPECIALLY BLACKS
Why Some People Think Mahatma Gandhi Was Anti Black and Racist? Does Gandhi’s Own Writings Tell That About Him?
A contextual review of the book: How I Began to Dislike Gandhi: The Story of My Disillusionment With The Truth-God
Note: Gandhi’s quotes from the book are ‘highlighted like this’ with single inverted commas.
Among the statues that Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters are taking down, some are Gandhi’s.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more famously called Mahatma Gandhi, is a minor figure in the pantheon of anti-black historical figures. In fact, being the patron saint of non-violent, civil disobedience politics, he is even an unusual one to be there. He is the man who Martin Luther King Jr. called the little brown saint. Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) has inspired many including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Barack Obama.
So, like in every other occasion, this time too when BLM protesters are daubing with the word “racist” on Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in London’s Parliament Square or defacing his statue in Washington DC, there are questions yet again about whether Gandhi was really anti-black and racist.
The book I review here — Sabine von Herbert’s How I Began to Dislike Gandhi: The Story of My Disillusionment With The Truth-God (2016) — is a good source to find the answers on this question.
Why she began to dislike Mahatma Gandhi? An overview of the Book:
Written in an autobiographical format but without much biographical content, the book is an account of an intelligent teenage girl growing up in former West Germany in the 1980s. She became fascinated by Mahatma Gandhi and India early on; embraced Yoga in her late teens, and became a Vegan at the age of 22. As she got to know Gandhi more, she began to follow Gandhi in letter and spirit. Years went by solidifying her commitment to what she thought as Gandhi’s ideals.
She writes that eloquently:
(Gandhi) was all over my life: both in my body and spirit. I imitated even…
