Gandhi: A Player of Infinite Games. By Vinay Lal
Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life - politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a player of infinite games with a vision of life as play... The African American activist, Bayard Rustin, is acknowledged by scholars as one of the principal figures in the Civil Rights Movement of the United States and the chief architect of the famous March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. mesmerised the large gathering with his “I Have a Dream” speech, an oracular demonstration of his rhetorical gifts.
Lesser known, at least to the general public, is the fact
that Rustin was a lifelong student of the life and work of Gandhi who had a
large hand in shaping King’s understanding of satyagraha and bringing nearly the
entire arsenal of Gandhian ideas of mass nonviolent resistance to the fore in
the struggle for civil and political rights. His most prominent biographer,
John D’Emilio, says unhesitatingly that “more than anyone else, Rustin brought
the message and methods of Gandhi to the United States.”
Rustin’s eyes were turned upon the anti-colonial struggle in
India and he was firmly of the view that “no situation in America has created
so much interest among negroes as the Gandhian proposals for India’s freedom.”
King was but a schoolboy when Rustin had already established a reputation as a
“one-man nonviolent army” working on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR), an international religious organisation that advocated radical pacifism
and that in the US sought a distinctive and revolutionary approach to the race
problem. He single-handedly sought to desegregate lunch counters in the Deep
South and on a bus ride from Louisville to Nashville in 1942 moved to the
section reserved, by both law and custom, for whites: when he refused to vacate
his seat, the police were summoned and he was verbally abused and pummelled
with blows....
Anil Nauriya: The making of Gandhi in South Africa and after
Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: "My Pilgrimage to
Nonviolence", September 1958
Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?
ANIL NAURIYA: Manufacturing Memory
The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS
The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)
Rabindranath Tagore's essay on the cult of the
nation
