Booker wwinner Arundhathi Roy’s remarks on Father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi triggered a new row in India .
During a speech in India, Roy accused Gandhi of discrimination and called for institutions bearing his name to be renamed, The Guardian reported.
She was addressing students at Kerala University in Thiruvananthapuram,
Roy, 52, described the generally accepted image of Gandhi as a lie.
She said: “It is time to unveil a few truths about a person whose doctrine of nonviolence was based on the acceptance of a most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system … Do we really need to name our universities after him?”
The caste system is thousands of years old but still defines the status of hundreds of millions of people in India. So-called untouchables, or Dalits, continue to suffer discrimination.
The author’s comments provoked immediate outrage from descendants and some scepticism from historians.
“Being outspoken is one thing but being so blase about your ignorance is quite another,” said Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of the world-renowned thinker and activist. “It’s just an attempt to get publicity.”
Prof Mridula Mukherjee, an expert in modern Indian history at Jawaharlal University in Delhi, said Roy’s criticism was misplaced. “Gandhi devoted much of his life to fighting caste prejudice. He was a reformer not a revivalist within the Hindu religion. His effort was in keeping with his philosophy of nonviolence and bringing social transformation without creating hatred,” Mukherjee said.
Roy’s comments are part of a long-running historical argument over Gandhi’s views on caste.
Gandhi’s stance is sometimes contrasted by commentators with that of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit who grew up in poverty but went on to become a prominent independence leader and India’s first law minister, with responsibility for much of the country’s constitution. Roy recently wrote a new introduction to Ambedkar’s undelivered 1936 speech, The Annihilation of Caste, in which she called Gandhi “the saint of the status quo”.
Mukherjee said Gandhi and Ambedkar “represented different understandings of how to solve problems of caste oppression in India, but each was equally sincere”.
The British government recently announced that a statue of Gandhi would be placed in Parliament Square.