Can someone term me the differences and similarities between freedom struggle of India and south africa.
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
The term ‘South Asia’ was not in use before the 1950s, and did not therefore belong to Gandhi’s lexicon. In analysing how Gandhi (1869-1948), in South Africa, between 1893 and 1914, ‘thought India’, we may however be able to approach indirectly some of the problems raised by the political/spatial conceptualization of the region that we now call ‘South Asia’. Gandhi himself was certainly not interested in the question of naming that space, which for him, like for most of his contemporaries, was simply and un-problematically India, or Bharat. But in his own political practice, the question of spatiality occupied an important if somewhat unrecognized place, inasmuch as he started his public career in South Africa and relocated to India for good only at the age of 46 after having spent most of twenty years in Durban and Johannesburg. This is bound to raise interesting questions regarding Gandhi’s perception of India and Indianness. We might note in passing that his twenty-year stay in South Africa remains a relatively neglected episode in most accounts of his life1 and in the vast literature generated around his thought and political practice. There is, however, a growing body of texts coming out of South Africa that has tended to offer a view that differs from the dominant Indian view, less hagiographical in nature, and more attuned to the local context.2 I shall make use of this literature up to a point, but shall try to give precedence to Gandhi’s own writings. The latter fall into two distinct categories, on the one hand the texts he produced while in South Africa, mostly letters, newspaper articles, particularly those in his own Indian Opinion, and the occasional pamphlet, on the other hand the two narratives he penned in India in the 1920s, while in jail, of his South African experience, firstly the some two hundred pages devoted to it in the well-known Autobiography (representing approximately half the book),3 but also the more focused and detailed narrative entitled Satyagraha in South Africa written in 1924 in Gujarati and published in English in 1928.4 My focus here is not what these texts tell us about Gandhi, but the light they throw on perceptions of India from a location in the diaspora. I am not going to offer a narrative of Gandhi’s South African years, but I shall be attentive to the gradual evolution of his ideas over the twenty-year-period that extends from his arrival in Durban from India in 1893 to his departure from Durban to England in 1914 on his way to India.