Showing posts with label Half-Naked Fakir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Half-Naked Fakir. Show all posts

Monday, October 30, 2017

MK Gandhi's most 'indelicate' gift for Queen Elizabeth

MK Gandhi's most 'indelicate' gift for Queen Elizabeth
(and other stories about Khadi)

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called him 'a seditious middle temple lawyer' posing as a 'half-naked fakir'.

Pramod Kapoor

Gandhi and Charkha

The most iconic image of Mohandas Gandhi shows him bare-chested, clad in a loincloth, and reading a newspaper while seated next to a spinning wheel or charkha. That picture, taken by legendary American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, was shot for the now defunct Time Life Magazine. It was taken in 1946, when Bourke-White arrived in Poona (now Pune), where Gandhi had been imprisoned by the British. Gandhi had taken up spinning to inspire fellow Indians to boycott British goods and buy local produce, including homespun cotton. The photograph went on to become an indelible image, the slain civil disobedience crusader with his most potent weapon.

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called Gandhi a “half-naked fakir”. He had disparagingly remarked: “Ít is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace… to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.” The statement was made in 1931, a decade after Gandhi discarded stitched clothes for the loincloth (dhoti) and shawls he sometimes spun himself. It was the year he was invited for tea with Queen Mary and King George V at Buckingham Palace during a visit to London. Dressed in his customary dhoti, a loincloth loosely draped over his naked torso and wearing homemade sandals, he must have been the oddest looking visitor to Buckingham Palace. When the meeting was over, he was walking out of the palace gates when a journalist asked if he thought he was wearing enough. Gandhi’s reply: “But the King was wearing enough for the both of us.”

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Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Gandhi Journal Article-II (July 2015) : Half-naked Fakir

Gandhi Journal Article-II (July 2015) : Half-naked Fakir

By Emmo Tarlo
 
Of course, one can never fully know Gandhi’s ‘intention’ in wearing a loin-cloth, for what he actually wrote and declared in his speeches may have differed to some extent from his personal reflections. Yet through analyzing content of his expressed intention, one can gain considerable insight into how he tried to construct the meaning of his loincloth publicly. It is suggested here that Gandhi wrote and spoke so much about his dress because he wanted people to understand it and because he realized that it could easily be misinterpreted. Misinterpreted it was, but this does not mean that the misinterpretations were necessarily detrimental to Gandhi, or that Gandhi did not to some extent enjoy the ambiguity of his own sartorial gesture.

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Friday, October 10, 2014

Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill

By Vishwanath Tondon



Most students of India’s fight for independence may only be aware of Churchill’s famous 1931 remarks on Gandhi, when he went to meet the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in his usual dress. Churchill had said: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle [Inner] Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”1
One may also be aware that while in London to attend the Round Table Conference, Gandhi wanted to meet Churchill but the latter had refused to see him, though his son Randolph met Gandhi. And then later in July 1944, Gandhi had written to Churchill a letter saying, “Dear Prime Minister, You are reported to have a desire to crush the simple ‘naked fakir’ as you are said to have described me. I have been long trying to be a fakir and that [too] naked - a more difficult task. I, therefore, regard the expression as a compliment though unintended. I approach you then as such and ask you to trust and use me for the sake of your people and mine and through them those of the world.”2

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