The period 1931-34 marked a most important crossroad both in Gandhi’s own life as well as in the annals of the Indian national movement. Coming shortly after the high-water mark of mass participation attained by the Salt Satyagraha, his year-long campaign against untouchability (1933-34) was not only perhaps the most intensely and passionately carried out of all his campaigns, but one which also provided the occasion for Gandhi to work out his wider economic and constructive programmes. Apart from recording Gandhi’s critique as well as his praxis against what was the most decadent and exploitative in the traditional Indian social reality, these accounts from the Raj’s own secret official reports provide irrefutable evidence of Gandhi’s heroic struggle and at the same time of the failure of his contemporaries to take up the challenge of the time–during the years of the depression.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Baren Ray
Baren Ray has been an old political activist and a well-known Communist scholar since many decades. He had been to prison both before and shortly after Independence for his political work. He was particularly active in mobilizing student volunteers (united front of the Students Federation and the Students Congress) against the outbreak of large scale riots in Delhi in September 1947. Later he was active in the Indian and international Peace and Solidarity movements for many years since the inception of these movements. He represented India at the Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (headquartered in Cairo) twice, from 1969 to 1973 and from 1978 to 1981, serving as the Deputy Secretary-General of the organization during his second term. He has traveled very widely, having visited most European as well as Afro-Asian and other developing countries. Since 1981, he has been devoting himself entirely to research and has been a Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research for 1988-90 and 1992-93. He writes frequently and has several publications to his credit.
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