London celebrates the 100 Years of Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram

Tuesday 18th April 2017 06:16 EDT
 

The centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram was celebrated at the Nehru Centre in London with the screening of a documentary – ‘Sabarmati Ashram: The Home of Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth.'

Written and produced by the veteran NRI journalist Dr Vijay Rana, the film showed how Gandhi set up this ashram in 1917 on a 36-acre wasteland on the banks of Sabarmati River. It was full of snakes, and the first thing Gandhi said was that none of them was to be killed.

This was going to be Gandhi’s karmabhumi for next thirteen years. Many of his revolutionary ideas were conceived in this ashram - economic liberation through spinning wheel and the home-spun Khadi, fight against social evils like untouchability, a boycott of foreign goods, non-cooperation, peaceful civil disobedience and the defiance of the oppressive Salt Law.

Gandhi was an inventor of ideas. His ideas changed the course of history and gave hope to those who sought freedom, justice and human dignity across the world.

“Look at the sheer ingenuity, courage and perhaps the craziness of the man,” says Dr Vijay Rana, “a hundred years ago, Gandhi was thinking of mobilising the poor, virtually necked and starving, to fight the world’s mightiest Empire without arms.”

The film shows how pro-British newspapers, like the Statesman, ridiculed his idea of Salt March. People in England wondered what harm could be done to the powerful British Indian government by picking up some salt from a deserted seashore? Nobody could imagine that on Gandhi’s call millions of Indians would come out on streets to defy the Raj and break the Salt Law.

The films shed light on Gandhi's life in the Ashram. There was also an interesting eyewitness account of the famous Salt March by one of his disciples, Sumangal Prakash. He was one of the 78 Ashram residents whom Gandhi personally selected as his co-marchers.

Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram on the 6th March 1930, when he launched the Salt March. He also took a vow that he would only return to Sabarmati Ashram after India had achieved Purna Swaraj or complete independence. So he never returned to the Ashram.

After the film, A S Rajan, Minister Co-ordination at the Indian High Commission in London, said the film appropriately reflected the values such as non-violence, peace, love and harmony that Gandhi Ji preached.

CB Patel, the Publisher/Editor of Asian Voice and Gujarat Samachar, remembered his first visit to the Ashram in 1949 when he was a 12-year-old schoolboy. He told the audience that this Ashram, once neglected, has now become the centre of Ahmedabad's civic life and tourist scene.

“While celebrating 100 years of Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram, this small film is an attempt, in this age of social media when attention span is increasingly fractured, to retell Gandhi's story with some interesting visual elements to the Internet generation,” said the filmmaker, Dr. Vijay Rana.

==

Sabarmati Ashram: The Home of Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth

-Zsuzsanna Nemeth

I attended a film screening called Sabramati Ashram: The home of Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth on the 10th of April at the Nehru Centre (London, W1K 1HF). I can wholeheartedly say that I am a Gandhian. I am inspired by his idea of non-violence and I am in awe of how he led (with others) Bharat Mata to independence.

I read books, articles, anything available on the Mahatma: trying to understand where he got his strength from to fight and what shaped his way of thinking. By booking this event I thought I would get a little closer to Him.

After Mr. A. S. Rajan Minister (Coordination Indian High Commission) very enjoyable speech about his take on Gandhi’s philosophy, then Dr Vijay Rana introduced his documentary.

He spoke about his personal experience of the lack of education about Gandhi in remote Indian villages, which inspired him to make this film.

He reminded everybody the exemplary cleanliness of the Mahatma and his vision for villages and referred to the current state of India by saying that the Swatch Bharat is running out of steam and Modi ji should learn from Gandhi’s teachings. Somehow I hoped that current Indian politics won’t creep in or at least not like this.

The cleanliness of India is each and every citizen’s responsibility and the government needs to provide the right tools. "Let each do his duty, If I do my duty, that is, serve myself, I shall be able to serve others.” [M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj. Chap. XX]

To summarize it all, it was a lovely evening especially listening to Mr. C.B Patel’s anecdotes about Gandhi and the lovely bhajans of Vaishnava Jana and Ragupati Raghava sung by Ms Uttara S. Joshi and Mrs Kusum P. Joshi.


comments powered by Disqus



to the free, weekly Asian Voice email newsletter