gandhi and his casteism : a thread

although historians assume that gandhis views on caste changed/ evolved with time, they were never exclusively anti casteist in any sense, the whitewashed history of gandhi's apparent strife for the harijans doesn't overpower his casteist stances, gandhi in a 1916 conference said

"The vast organisation of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagers managed their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers"

in 1921, he wrote
"i believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system - To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is

the soul of the caste system" he further wrote and i quote - I have no use for a Brahmin if i cannot call him a Brahmin for my life. It will be chaos if every day a Brahmin is changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin

gandhi believed there should be no hierarchy between castes and that the shudras should be brought into the caste system, the flaw in this belief was that an outcaste remains a byproduct of the caste system, as argued by ambedkar

in 1921, he wrote explicitly after explaining what caste was - "i am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system"

now it is argued that towards the end of his life, he changed his views and agreed that inter marriage and inter dining should be allowed in castes, he moved to citing that the four thousand different castes should fuse themselves into the four varnas

he argued that a person's varna ought to be decided by his worth, now this again was flawed in the sense of how one could compel someone who has through the caste system acquired a higher status by birth, to vacate their status? - questioned and rightly so by ambedkar

history has a neat polished version of gandhi, the champion of the poor, the saint, the saviour of the untouchables, painted to be so, because of all those inter caste marriages he attended and the term he coined but it remains a lesser known fact

that even until his death, he did not oppose the chaturvarna, the sole reason as to why casteism and caste discrimination is carried out to this date, he rather condoned it and argued from his place of privilege that the caste system was necessary for a modern india

if that isn't turning a blind eye to casteism and further enabling it, i don't know what is, there can be no dalit liberation without the annihilation of caste and that's something gandhi explicitly condemned.

source : quite obviously AoC