Views

Nationalist power to stir up discontent would be immensely increased if every cultivator could read.

—Bombay Governor

[in a private letter to the Viceroy (1911)]

The rising middle classes were politically inclined and were not so much in search of a religion; but they wanted some cultural roots to cling on to...that would reduce the sense of frustration and humiliation that foreign conquest and rule had produced.

—Jawaharlal Nehru

The dead and the buried are dead, buried and burnt once for all and the dead past cannot, therefore, be revived except by a reformation of the old materials into new organised forms.

—Mahadeo Govind Ranade

Unfortunately, no brahmin scholar has so far come forward to play the part of a Voltaire who had the intellectual honesty to rise against the doctrines of the Catholic church in which he was brought up...A Voltaire among the brahmins would be a positive danger to the maintenance of a civilisation which is contrived to maintain brahminic supremacy.

—B.R. Ambedkar

Untouchability question is one of life and death for Hinduism. If untouchability lives, Hinduism perishes, and even India perishes; but if untouchability is eradicated from the Hindu heart, root and branch, then Hinduism has a definite message for the world.

—M.K. Gandhi

I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave. —M.K. Gandhi