Memory and mutual understanding for Ba-Bapu 150-151 between friends of India and USA .

Philadelphia-Seattle
In a sermon he gave on March 22, 1959, just a few days after his trip to India, or the “Land Of Gandhi,” as he put it, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded his home congregation at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama of the Mahatma’s invaluable contributions to the progress of humanity and civilization. The church is significant because Dr. King, who served as pastor between 1954-1960, led the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott against racial segregation from his basement office. His movement, he always said, was patterned on the Gandhian ideals of Satyagraha (seeking truth in the soul force) and Ahimsa (non-violent resistance to evil), The Kings had just completed a three-week tour and study of India, which was at its heart, a Gandhian pilgrimage in search of the truth, and in defense of the honor of the disinherited. The King Embassy visited with multiple officials of independent India, including Jawaharlal Nehru, in addition to paying homage at Gandhiji’s gravesite.

The occasion for Dr. King’s sermon was Palm Sunday, a holy day in the Christian tradition. Palm Sunday  marks the arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:1–9), when the  branches of a palm tree were strewn along his arduous path, shortly before his arrest on Holy Thursday and his crucifixion on Good Friday. On their way back from India, the Kings had stopped to visit the Holy Land, so the sacrifice of Jesus remained freshly coupled in their minds with the example of Gandhiji, whose deliverance of his people, Rev. King regularly compared to the works of Jesus Christ himself. For Dr. King, “it was the time in the year when we think of the love of God breaking forth into time out of eternity.” It was also a “time of the year when we come to see that the most powerful forces in the universe are not those forces of military might but those forces of spiritual might,” he sagely opined sixty years ago.

And yet, sixty years later in the year 2019 of our Prince Of Peace, humanity seems to remain hopelessly wedded to the forces of military might rather than those of love and truth, which guided great souls such as Rev. King and Gandhiji. We have drifted horribly from their vision of peace. It is at the verge of collapse that we must remember the teachings of Gandhiji today, which are none other than those of the Buddha and Christ. And it it is at this juncture of destiny that we must take up the sweet burden of which Gandhiji was so abruptly shorn. Hey Ram.

I met with Mr. Ram Mohan Rai and Mrs. Krishna Kanta at Seattle, Washington on behalf of the Year of Gandhi initiative being undertaken here in Philadelphia by the Saturday Free School, an organization established by Dr. Anthony Monteiro, based in the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia. North Philly is presently a place of immense oppression and yet people continue to strive for the truth with grace and beauty every day. It is the seedbed of Jazz, that great music of the African-American people, having produced numerous legends, including the inimitable John Coltrane, whose wife, Alice Coltrane, was a disciple of Swami Satchidananda. We are organizing here a year in tribute to the contributions of Mahatma Gandhi, to shed light on his ideas, for they are truly nourishing to the aching human spirit. Moreover, In the course of our celebrations last year, when we honored the 150th birth anniversary of Dr. W.E.B Du Bois, we rediscovered the ocean of memories shared by Indian and  African-American people in their quest for peace and freedom. A gift was presented by me to Mr. Rai on behalf of the Saturday Free School (design by Serafina Harris) as well as a small drawing I made of Gandhiji, Abha, and Manuben. Mr. Rai in turn gifted me with a copy of the Nityanatoon magazine, which calls upon us to follow to murmurs of our “inner voice,” the voice of conscience, originally started by Mrs. Nirmala Deshpande, who mentored Mr. Rai. She was herself a disciple of the great Vinobha Bhave, a Gandhian who led the Bhoodan movement. He also presented me with his book on  Nirmala ji, titled In the Shadow of My Sister.

When Dr.  King visited India, he was fascinated by the Bhoodan, which was to him an example of how Land might be gotten by peaceful means and ends. The unity of ends and means was of prime importance for Gandhiji, Vinobha ji, as well as Dr. King. Mr. Rai made an very important suggestion, that we continue the work of Nityanatoon, which has unfortunately been discontinued in the past few years. He recommended that it be printed (as a biannual or quarterly) in India and distributed in several languages, including English. Arrangements would be made for shipments to the U.S.

We had a chance to visit the towering Vladimir Lenin statue in Fremont and we spoke with several of Mr. Rai’s friends like Dr Shankar lal and others. We together reflected on Gandhiji’s many satyagrahas and peregrinations through India, Bangladesh, South Africa, at which point Mr. Rai invited us to visit Gandhian ashrams in India, noting that he would make arrangements for our stay for the 151st birth anniversary celebration in India. He told me: we Indians always add one more to multiples of 10 as a mathematical tradition of sorts. Immediately I thought of my mother for when she gave Dakshina for archana at the temple, she would always round up the number one more. So, if the donation was for 100 rupees it would become 101. In this vein, we pledged to undertake Gandhi 151 in India, as a joint undertaking to learn more about the sacrifices of Mahatma Gandhi and the fruits of his labor today, which may be our only salvation in such grave times.

As August 15, 2019, the 72nd birthday of India, dawns upon us, the imperial order is decaying reigniting in the masses of people throughout the world, including Those in America and Europe, the great hope of peace and truth at long last. At this time, we mutually recognize that we are indeed wrapped in a single garment of destiny. Quite literally, we should remember that the Khadi woven by the Indian masses in a general strike under the leadership of Gandhiji was spun in objection to the vast slave kingdoms of cotton ruled by Southern slavemasters who were defeated in the American Civil War by the general strike led by the black worker of the American South, where I went to high school and which Dr. King died to free. His martyrdom, like Gandhiji’s, remains a fresh wound in the American psyche, a crack deeper than that in the Liberty Bell housed in Philadelphia.

And so, “Gandhi said to his people,” Rev. King preached to his black congregation in the Deep South on Palm Sunday, 1959, “If you are hit, don’t hit back; even if they shoot at you, don’t shoot back; if they curse you, don’t curse back (Yes, Yes), but just keep moving. Some of us might have to die before we get there; some of us might be thrown in jail before we get there, but let us just keep moving. And they kept moving, and they walked and walked, and millions of them had gotten together when they finally reached that point.”
By, R. Divya Nair
(For Year of Gandhi in USA/ The Saturday Free school, Philadelphia (USA)
 & Ram Mohan Rai