The Gandhi-King Community

For Global Peace with Social Justice in a Sustainable Environment

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229

E-mail- dr.yadav.yogendra@gandhifoundation.net;

dr.yogendragandhi@gmail.com

Mailing Address- C- 29, Swaraj Nagar, Panki, Kanpur- 208020, Uttar Pradesh, India

 

Bihar Vidyapeeth and Mahatma Gandhi

 

Bihar Vidyapeeth was played an important role in Freedom movement of India. It had done a lot of constructive work. Mazhar-ul-Haq was a great patriot, a good Mussalman and a philosopher. Fond of ease and luxury, when Non-co-operation came he threw them off as we throw superfluous scales off the skin. He grew as fond of the ascetic life as he was of princely life. Growing weary of our dissentions, he lived in retirement, doing such unseen services as he could, and praying for the best. He was fearless both in speech and action. The Sadakat Ashram near Patna is a fruit of his constructive labours. Though he did not live in it for long as he had intended, his conception of the Ashram made it possible for the Bihar Vidyapith to find a permanent habitation. It may yet prove a cement to bind the two communities together. Such a man would be missed at all times; he will be the more missed at this juncture in the history of the country. I tender my condolences to Begum Mazhar-ul-Haq and her family. Mahatma Gandhi delivered his opening ceremony speech on Feb 6, 1921. Speech was published in The Searchlight Newspaper on dated Feb 9, 1921.

Mahatma Gandhi spoke sitting. He was ashamed to say that he had forgotten that Maulana Mazharul Haq and he were together in England and that they returned to India by the same boat. He remembered the fact when he was reminded of it. But he was glad that ever since his return to India from South Africa his friendship with Maulana Haq had gone or increasing and in fact he regarded his house in Patna as his home. If it was true, as he had told them, that in the matter of Khilafat he had raised his voice before others, he had but done his duty. As he was a staunch Hindu and wanted to live his religion he had realized that he must be friends with Mussulmans, stand by their religion and defend it as if it was his own. He wanted to assure them again that he would not rest satisfied till the Khilafat wrong was satisfactorily settled even though he had to give his life in the attempt. Maulana Haq had told them that in opening the National College they were laying the foundation of swaraj. The college had been already opened by his friend Mr. Haq and he was there to perform but the formal ceremonial. When he saw the students that morning praying in solemn earnestness the question came to his mind if they had anything of the kind in any Government college and he thought that the right kind of feeling was coming over them. He had to open both the National College and the National University. The Vidyapith would be their National University, it would be the machinery which would regulate the teaching in the National institutions in the province, prescribe the syllabus and would generally control national education. They had selected Maulana Haq as Chancellor, Babu Braja Kishore Prasad as the Vice-chancellor and Babu Rajendra Prasad as their Principal and Registrar. The members of the Provincial College Education Committee would be the senators and out of them they would constitute a syndicate. He wanted all of them to realize their great cause in which they were working and he was glad to find that all the professors and others connected with their institutions were genuine, earnest Bihar workers. Babu Braja Kishore and Babu Rajendra Prasad were as brothers to him and he had lived with them and worked with them for months in Champaran a time when not many were willing to go and join them. He was sure that with them at the helm, the work of their institution would be carried on with enthusiasm, for he was certain that they were men who would gladly give their lives for the work. To the professors he wanted to say that they must live up to the ideal of their old rishis, in consonance with their great ancient civilization, and if they did that they might rest assured that the foundation of swaraj had been truly laid in the founding of their institution. Referring to students he said that Kalidas had once observed that a guru could give only as much as the neophyte could take. Education was a manifestation of the enlightenment they received within and it was the function of the guru to bring out what was within the student, and he hoped that the students in the College would so live and learns at the hands of their teachers that the institution might be an example to the country. In the prayer read out to them by Pandey Jagannath Prasadjee he had seen the key of the work they were doing to get into truth, into light from darkness, into life from a sort of death. This was non-co-operation and the attainment by them of swaraj was the sign of their emerging into the light. By co-operating with their present hypocritical Government they had become as it were contaminated and had become partners in its crimes. They had done so so far because they were equally sinful, but even then they had believed in and feared God. And the conviction having at last dawned on them that the Government was wrong and its system vicious, they had come to the decision that they could not co-operate with it till it was completely transformed. He hated neither the Empire nor those who sustained it; he was out to uproot the system. He had hatred for none and entertained for them nothing but sentiments of love. But even if his father and his brother had acted in the manner the Government had done he would have felt it his duty to have nothing to do with them. If a son lived with a Satanic father he became by that fact partner of his sire’s guilt and no religion sanctioned this partnership even between a father and his son. The divine injunction was clear and imperative-to cease co-operation even with their near and dear ones if they were sinful. The first mission of the University therefore would be to teach the ideal of non-co-operation and to emphasize its basic principle, absolute non-violence. The speaker then referred to the picketing by students in Calcutta and other similar forms of pressure brought by them on their friends who did not like to join them. He said he had been pained to hear of the treatment meted out to men like Messrs Shastri and Paranjapye Bombay, who, he wanted to tell them, were real, sincere patriots. If they were enemies of India, he (Mr. Gandhi) could not be its friend. They honestly believed that the future of the country would be advanced by co-operation with the Government and were convinced that he (Mr. Gandhi) was misleading the country. Such differences of opinion were bound to exist but these could never mean that they were not patriots but enemies of the country. It was none of the business of the students to cry shame on them and refuse to give them a respectful hearing. It would have been in keeping with their ancient culture to listen to their advice with respect and attention. It was an English practice to obstruct meetings, howl down speakers and even throw stones at them. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill had been in their time howled down and stoned. But this was a habit foreign to their culture and their civilization and they must give it up if they were really earnest in carrying on the non-co-operation movement to a successful end. Cries of “shame” could never win friends, make their opponents their supporters. They could transform them into their friends in time only if they loved and treated them with respect. He hoped the University would not devote its energy merely to adding to the store of their literary knowledge, but that its principal function would be to inculcate in the minds of the young men the principles of their civilization, to inspire them with an earnest and genuine aspiration for freedom. The first thing they had to do was to unlearn a great deal of what they had hither to learn and seek to live up to their great ancient culture. If one of their lawyer friends refused to give up his practice it was not for them to call upon him to explain why he had not done what Mr. Haq has done. There was a vakil in Jharia, whom he asked in joke to give up his practice. Mr. Mahomed Ali repeated the request and the result was that by then he would have given up his practice. But if he did not, he was by no means the enemy of the country. His heart was as genuine as theirs. If out of honest difference of opinion or for want of sufficient courage any of their friends were unable to join them that day they could not be regarded as objects of their hate. Referring to the charkha he said that its significance should not be minimized. With the spinning of the charkha was bound up the solution of the Punjab and the Khilafat wrongs and they could be true soldiers of the country only when they took to spinning in right earnest. Even the uneducated could do so but he wanted the educated among them to take to it, and realize for themselves that the greater the quantity of the thread they produced, the greater would be the advance of the country. So far they had loosened their tongue; he wanted them now to stretch their hands, not, however, with the sword but for the charkha. If they could see to it that not one Indian used any cloth manufactured in foreign countries and of yarn made in foreign lands they could begin to realize their strength and feel that they were going to win swaraj. The speaker then referred to some jewellery presented to him by little girls and said many ladies had promised to spin in Bengal. The daughters of Mr. Justice P. R. Das had taken to spinning and to wearing khaddar cloth. Girls and young married women in Bengal had come to him and told him that they could not use jewellery for they were at present in a state of widowhood without swaraj. He wanted to realize the present situation even as these girls and young ladies had realized it. The speaker then announced that during his recent visit to Jharia he was able to secure Rs. 60,000 for their National University mostly from Gujaratis, Bengalis and Marwaris, and Rs. 2,000 for the same purpose from a Bengali zemindar of Katras. The donors were mostly non-Biharees and yet they had given him the magnificent sum because they had begun to realize that the National University, though founded in Bihar, would work for the nation. He almost wept though he suppressed it as they had to be brave at the present moment when little girls came to him with their jewellery and he hoped they would make themselves as pure as these girls. He prayed to God that their National University would flourish and prosper and remain an everlasting monument of the enthusiastic labour of all those who worked for it. With an appeal for funds the speaker concluded his speech.

The Searchlight, 9-2-1921 

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Comment by Birendra Kumar on May 1, 2013 at 9:41pm
Thank you for this great information

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