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Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and Mechanisms of Change

Online ISBN:
9780199085279
Print ISBN:
9780199452668
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and Mechanisms of Change

Mary Elizabeth King
Mary Elizabeth King
Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies for the UN-affiliated University for Peace, main campus, Costa Rica, and Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK
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Published online:
19 March 2015
Published in print:
27 January 2015
Online ISBN:
9780199085279
Print ISBN:
9780199452668
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

In the 1920s, in the south Indian village of Vykom, a nonviolent struggle sought to open to everyone the roads surrounding the Brahmin temple there. For centuries, any person or animal could walk those roads but not the so-called untouchable Hindus, whose use of the roads would “pollute” the high castes. From April 1924 to November 1925, Mohandas K. Gandhi waged a satyagraha to gain access for excluded groups to these routes encircling the temple compound. (From Sanskrit satya [truth] and agraha [insistence], satyagraha has come to mean a campaign of nonviolent civil resistance.) As the 604-day campaign under Gandhi’s leadership persisted, it gripped British India and beyond, while revealing extreme forms of discrimination practiced by the upper castes: untouchability, unapproachability, and unseeability. Authors writing for Western readers from the 1930s onward offered romanticized accounts of the campaign, which spread the belief that a solution was reached to this particular conflict that stemmed from conversion of the high-caste Brahmins, whose hearts and minds were touched. The book substantiates a narrative of what actually happened at Vykom, including its controversial settlement. It also examines Gandhi’s concept of conversion through self-imposed suffering—the way that he insisted that social change would occur—as a dangerous presumption. Correcting misunderstandings, it addresses the rarity of conversion as a mechanism of change, and evaluates shortcomings of Gandhi’s leadership, which in this instance were based on certain faulty principles.

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