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----- Original Message -----
From: "sandesh" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 6:34 PM
Subject: [AI] Fw: Recording from rare Gandhi speech
Hello all.
This maybe considered violation of rules but i wanted the recording to
reach large audience.
I posted this messege to sayeverything group, which consists about 200
members. but here on AI, i know, the list has already crossed membership
of 1000. both articles are given first to inform about the content of the
recording, and then the link to listen it online is provided. sorry for
off-topic post.
Here goes my messege to the above-mentioned list:
----- Original Message -----
From: sandesh
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 6:28 PM
Subject: Recording from rare Gandhi speech
First piece from Washington post:
Correction to This Article
This article misstated the date of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. Gandhi
was killed on Jan. 30, 1948.
Saying His Peace
Rare Recording of Speech by Gandhi Landed in Safe, if Unknowing, Hands
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Millions of people around the world think they have heard Mahatma Gandhi
speaking in English -- although it was actually Gandhi channeled through
the voice of actor Ben Kingsley in the famous 1982 movie by Richard
Attenborough.
But very few English speakers have heard Gandhi directly. That's because
there were only two occasions when he was recorded speaking in English,
according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi. One speech,
about religious issues, was recorded in the 1930s. The second, especially
historic because it was just a few months before Gandhi was assassinated,
was made on April 2, 1947.
For decades, this second speech has been largely lost to the world. A few
years ago, an Italian cellphone company made a commercial using excerpts,
and scattered fragments are available on the Internet.
Recently, however, the second speech surfaced in -- of all places --
downtown Washington. It had been lovingly preserved for 60 years by John
Cosgrove, a former president of the National Press Club. Cosgrove's copy
came from Alfred Wagg, a journalist who recorded the speech in New Delhi
and produced four 78-rpm LPs that included both Gandhi's voice as well as
Wagg's own commentary about the Indian independence leader. Cosgrove
discovered the significance of the recording during a chance encounter
with Rajmohan Gandhi, when the author came to the Press Club this past
spring to promote his new biography.
Gandhi's speech -- made with the uneven diction of an elderly man who
sounds as though he has lost most of his teeth -- had the same themes he
visited over and over throughout his life: the importance of nonviolence,
the eradication of the caste system in Hindu society, amity between South
Asia's Hindus and Muslims, and a world united against violence and
exploitation.
"A friend asked yesterday, did I believe in one world?" Gandhi says at one
point in the speech. "Of course I believe in World One. And how can I
possibly do otherwise? . . . You can redeliver that message now in this
age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of the poor."
Gandhi preferred to speak to Indian audiences in their own languages. He
regularly used Hindi, although his native tongue was Gujarati. This speech
was made to a gathering of Asian leaders, for whom English was a common
language.
The speech is especially poignant not only because we now know Gandhi had
barely 10 months left to live, but also because of something it does not
explicitly note. It was made precisely one day after Gandhi had set in
motion one of the most audacious political initiatives of his career.
On April 1, 1947, Gandhi proposed that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of
India's minority Muslim population and ardent champion of the creation of
a new state called Pakistan, be installed as the first prime minister of
India -- a united India. It was a staggering suggestion, roughly along the
lines of Abraham Lincoln inviting Jefferson Davis, president of the
Confederate States of America, to be president of the United States of
America -- in order to avoid the carnage of the Civil War.
Gandhi placed his radical idea before Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last
British viceroy of India. Mountbatten was floored, since Gandhi was
essentially saying he would ask his own Hindu-dominated Congress Party to
relinquish the power that was about to fall into its lap after decades of
struggle.
Jinnah proved intrigued by the offer, according to an account Mountbatten
wrote of the conversation, but Gandhi's colleagues in the Congress Party
were horrified. A few days after the speech, they rejected the plan.
India was divided and Pakistan born in August 1947, with millions of
people killed and displaced during the partition of the subcontinent.
Several wars have broken out between India and Pakistan in subsequent
decades, and the public acknowledgment of nuclear weapons on both sides 10
years ago has made this conflict between South Asian neighbors one of the
most dangerous standoffs in the world.
Despite Gandhi's success in persuading the British to leave, his ideas
about community amity deeply offended many Hindu nationalists unwilling to
accommodate India's Muslim minority. Even as Alfred Wagg was recording the
April speech, the emotional riptides that produced the conspiracy to
assassinate Gandhi were already swirling. On Jan. 31, 1948, a Hindu
extremist fired three bullets into Gandhi's chest at a public prayer
meeting in New Delhi.
The quiet idealism of Gandhi's speech -- along with his radical ideas
about love and nonviolence -- were consigned to the world of what-ifs.
Tough Love
There was much about Mohandas Gandhi that resembled a force of nature,
extraordinary to behold -- from a distance. To those in his immediate
presence and to those who saw politics in essentially pragmatic terms,
Gandhi often seemed equal parts tyrant and madman. He made extraordinary
demands of himself and those around him. He rarely told his audiences what
they wanted to hear.
"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West," Gandhi says at
one point in the April 1947 speech, possibly referring to the violence of
the recently completed Second World War and the anti-Semitism that led to
the Holocaust. "I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my feeling . .
. [the] West today is pining for wisdom. [The] West today is despairing of
multiplication of atom bombs, because a multiplication of atom bombs means
utter destruction, not merely of the West, but it will be a destruction of
the world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled, and
there is to be a perfect deluge."
Worries about violence were never far from Gandhi's mind: Two spates of
sectarian strife had erupted in India in the months before Gandhi's
speech. The first was in the eastern province of Bengal, where Muslims
killed Hindus. Weeks later, in Bihar, Hindus retaliated against Muslims.
In short order, the death toll climbed into the thousands.
Gandhi saw these blood baths not just as political setbacks but as
personal failings. In his mind, there was no clear line between the
personal and the political. "Sins" in the public sphere reflected
"personal sins" for Gandhi. Accordingly, he began to punish himself.
He cut back on his already meager supply of food and sleep. He began to
conduct tests of his own chastity -- taking breaks from prayer meetings
and politics to write public accounts about his experiments not just to
remain chaste, but to not even think about sex, even in his dreams. A
widower by now, Gandhi invited a niece to share his bed to test their
mutual commitment to chastity. If he could keep his mind completely pure,
Gandhi told his associates, he believed the violence would end.
Gandhi's "experiments" triggered knowing winks from skeptics and critics.
And his allies were horrified that he seemed to spend as much time trying
to cleanse his soul as solving political problems. Several tried to keep
the Mahatma's "experiments" hush-hush. But Gandhi held that secrecy was
another form of dishonesty. He announced his experiments in the press,
solicited feedback, and encouraged a colleague who was critical of him to
take his concerns public.
In the months before his April 1947 speech, Gandhi began rising at 4
o'clock each morning, and sometimes at 2, to pray. He was 77 years old,
but he undertook a walking tour from village to blood-soaked village in
Bengal, covering nearly four dozen villages in as many days. He discarded
footwear as one of his self-inflicted punishments, and ignored the cuts
and blisters on his feet. At each village, he sought out cobblers and
farmers and spent the night in their huts. If he was to speak on behalf of
the vast numbers of people who lived in poverty in India, Gandhi reasoned,
he had to live like a poor person himself.
"If you really want to see India at its best, you have to find it in the
Bhangi cottage, in a humble Bhangi home," Gandhi says at one point in the
1947 speech, referring to one of the lowest and poorest castes. "Of such
villages, so the English historians teach us, are 700,000. A few cities,
here and there; they don't hold 7 crores [70 million] of people but the
700,000 villages do hold nearly 40 crores [400 million] of people."
Gandhi's self-denial and tour of rural poverty was rooted in political
philosophy. The central reason people turn to violence, Gandhi believed,
was that they were afraid. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of
losing one's possessions and fortunes, fear of loss, fear of death --
these were the things that prompted people, groups and nations to seek
physical protection, to seek arms and armies. Fear was the root cause of
corruption and greed.
The way to destroy fear, Gandhi argued, was to give up the things that
people held precious in the first place. When you have no possessions, you
fear no thieves. So Gandhi gave up most of his possessions. He gave up
emotional ties to family and friends. Sacrificing food, sleep and sex were
only a way to show that the needs of his physical body -- and life
itself -- could be held lightly.
Even more than nonviolence, courage was Gandhi's central message: During
his "pilgrimage" to put an end to the sectarian strife, for example, he
sought out Muslim hosts during his nightly halts to demonstrate to his
fellow Hindus that most Muslims wanted to live in peace.
When grieving people caught up in the sectarian strife came to him for
solace, Gandhi offered little comfort. He asked them why they were not
braver, why they were not willing to welcome the blows of their
tormentors. Evil and violence, he counseled, quoting Jesus, could not be
overcome through resistance, but only through patient suffering -- "resist
not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him
the other also." To colleagues aghast at such coldness, Gandhi explained
his job was not to give people consolation, but to show them their own
hidden reserves of strength.
When Hindus retaliated against Muslims in the state of Bihar, Gandhi
inflamed angry Hindus when he demanded that state leaders protect Muslims.
He warned his colleagues in the Congress Party of dire political
consequences -- and a fast unto death -- if they did not protect
minorities.
Gandhi's interlocutors rarely enjoyed these interactions, because they
knew he was not bluffing. When the old man said he planned to fast unto
death, it was not a tactic. In his everyday actions, it was clear he
really did value his principles above his own life.
It is Gandhi's sincerity that gives his words in the April 1947 speech
their power. Many leaders have been far more articulate. If Gandhi is
compelling, it is because we know he is that rare person who actually
means what he says.
With the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima fresh in his mind, Gandhi
talked about finding a way to help the West turn away from violence.
"What I want you to understand -- if you can -- that the message of the
East, the message of Asia, is not to be learned through European
spectacles, through Western spectacles, not by imitating the tension of
the West, the gunpowder of the West, the atom bomb of the West," Gandhi
told his listeners.
"If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of
love; it must be a message of truth; there must be a conquest -- "
Gandhi's words are cut off at this point by a rousing cheer.
Characteristically, Gandhi stops the applause: "Please, please, please,"
he says. "That will interfere with my speech and that will interfere with
your understanding also. I want to capture your hearts, and don't want to
receive your claps. Let your hearts clap in unison with what I am saying,
and I think I shall have finished my work."
Now, the second article:
Recording of rare Gandhi speech surfaces in US
Taken from redif
July 02, 2008 21:36 IST
A rare speech of Mahatma Gandhi, dwelling on non-violence, communal amity
and the horrors of a multiplication of atom bombs, has surfaced in
America, bringing out of oblivion one of the only two recorded addresses
by him in English.
The speech recorded on April 2, 1947, just 10 months before the father of
the nation was assassinated, was largely lost to the world, except for
some excerpts available on internet.
A few years back, an Italian cellphone firm made a commercial using some
parts of it.
During a recent US trip, Gandhi's grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi
came across the recording of the full speech, preserved for 60 years by
John Cosgrove, a former president of the National Press Club who got it
from Alfred Wagg, a journalist. Wagg had recorded the address in New Delhi
[ Images ].
According to Rajmohan, there were only two occasions when Gandhi was
recorded speaking in English, The Washington Post reported. The other
speech, about religious issues, was recorded in the 1930s.
The speech visits the same themes that Gandhi is identified with -- the
importance of nonviolence, the eradication of the caste system, amity
between Hindus and Muslims and a world united against violence and
exploitation.
"A friend asked yesterday, did I believe in one world?" Gandhi says at one
point. "Of course I believe in one world .
And how can I possibly do otherwise? ... You can redeliver that message
now in this age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of
the poor."
Against the backdrop of the just-concluded second world war, atom bomb
attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the holocaust of the Jews, Gandhi
also talked about finding a way to help the West turn away from violence.
"What I want you to understand -- if you can -- that the message of the
East, the message of Asia, is not to be learned through European
spectacles, through Western spectacles, not by imitating the tension of
the West, the gunpowder of theWest, the atom bomb of the West," Gandhi
said.
"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West," Gandhi says. "I
am sorry to have to say that, but that is my feeling ... the West today is
pining for wisdom.
"The West today is despairing of multiplication of atom bombs, because a
multiplication of atom bombs means utter destruction, not merely of the
West, but it will be a destruction of the world, as if the prophecy of the
Bible is going to be fulfilled, and there is to be a perfect deluge,"
Gandhi said.
"If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of
love; it must be a message of truth," The Mahatma said.
Here, both the articles conclude.
Now comes the interesting part. all (especially, blind members of the
list) will enjoy this. what is that? any guess?
You can listen to it on:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2008/06/27/VI2008062703016.html
I heard it, and there is voice of Sarojini Naidu also, introducing Mr.
Gandhi.
Regards.
Sandesh
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