In News
- Recently, the Prime Minister of India paid tributes to Acharya Vinoba Bhave on his Jayanti, 11th September.
Acharya Vinoba Bhave
- Original name: Vinayak Narahari Bhave
- Birth: September 11, 1895, in a Chitpavan Brahmin family at Gagoda village of the Konkan area of Maharashtra.
- Personal Life:
- He is regarded as the National Teacher of India.
- Bhave took the vow for celibacy and followed it all his life.
- He dedicated his life to religious work and the freedom struggle.
- Polyglot:
- He learnt various regional languages and Sanskrit along with reading the scriptures.
- Vinoba Bhave called the “Kannada” script as “Queen of World Scripts” – “Vishwa Lipigala Raani”.
- Some of his works:-
- The essence of Quran
- The essence of Christian teachings
- Thoughts on education
- Swarajya Sastra
- Role in Freedom Struggle:
- Instead of appearing for an exam in Bombay in 1918, Bhave threw away his books in the fire. This happened after he read an article by Mahatma Gandhi.
- He was an ardent follower of Gandhi.
- In 1940, Bhave was selected as the ‘First Individual Satyagrahi’ against the British Raj by Gandhi in India.
- Bhave played an important role in the Quit India Movement.
Political Efforts
- Bhoodan Movement:
- In 1951, Vinoba Bhave started his land donation movement at Pochampally in Telangana, the Bhoodan Movement.
- He took donated land from land owner Indians and gave it away to the poor and landless, for them to cultivate.
- Gramdan:
- Then after 1954, he started to ask for donations of whole villages in a programme he called Gramdan.
- He got more than 1000 villages by way of donation. Out of these, he obtained 175 donated villages in Tamil Nadu alone.
- Brahma Vidya Mandir:
- It is one of the ashrams that Bhave created.
- It is a small community for women that was created in order for them to become self-sufficient and non-violent in a community.
- This group farms to get their own food, but uses Gandhi’s beliefs about food production, which include sustainability and social justice, as a guide.
- Sarvodaya Movement:
- Vinoba observed the life of the average Indian living in a village and tried to find solutions for the problems he faced with a firm spiritual foundation. This formed the core of his Sarvodaya movement.
- Sarvodaya is Gandhi’s most important social political movement. Like Satyagraha, it too is a combination of two terms, Sarva meaning one and all, and Uday meaning welfare or uplift. The conjunction thus implies Universal uplift or welfare of all as the meaning of Sarvodaya.
- Although Sarvodaya was a social ideology in its fundamental form, India’s immediate post independence requirement demanded that it be transformed into an urgent political doctrine.
Source: PIB
