Mahatma Gandhi’s Campaign against Untouchability in Karnataka

It gives me pleasure to write a brief forward to Dr. G.A. Biradar’s monograph on ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Campaign against Untouchability in Karnataka’. The subject remains of great contemporary significance; and our historiography continues urgently to require work such as these, which are based on first-hand research in the archives.

Sixty years after Gandhi’s untimely death, his legacy to the new nation he so profoundly shaped remains complex, controversial and, above all, elusive. His pioneering campaign for the rights of so-called ‘Untouchables’ was fiercely criticised by B.R. Ambedkar and his followers for keeping dalits within the Hindu fold, which, in their opinion, was the root cause of their disabilities. Dr. Biradar’s book takes a fresh look at this important, and still enormously relevant, debate, by exploring Gandhi’s campaigns in the Karnataka. Not only does this book bring fresh material to light, it also forwards a striking conclusion: that Gandhi’s campaigns against untouchability took firmest root and flourished where his initiatives built on pre-existing and powerful traditions of social and religious reform, as was the case in Karnataka.

It is a matter of particular gratification that the archival heritage of our country is in the hands of scholars such as Dr. Biradar, who is not only a skilled archivist but a considerable scholar with a feel for the enormous value of the records held at the National Archives of India.

Dr. Joya Chatterji

Reader in Modern South Asian History,

University of Cambridge;

and Fellow of Trinity College.