Word: brahmans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...disciple and spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi, frail and wispy Acharya Vinoba Bhave, born to India's Brahman caste, came to love the Untouchables. Like the Mahatma, he called them harijans, or "children of God." As he tramped across India's countryside, exhorting landowners to give up part of their holdings to landless peasants, the respected Bhave would visit the Untouchables in their outcast dwellings, and accept food from their hands. Slowly chipped at over the years, the Hindu practice of untouchability was declared illegal in the constitution which free India adopted in 1949. But Bhave, like Gandhi...
...handsome Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, with her brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, fought for her country's dignity against what she called "the indignities imposed in the name of a white civilization." Yet she was brought up amid the regalia of the society she grew to fight. At her Brahman father's palatial Allahabad home, there were English governesses and gardens, dogs and Dresden, pony carts, and even porridge in the morning. Vijaya Lakshmi, who was born in August 1900, could write English before she was five, but she could not speak her own Hindi until she was nine...
Eyes Like Almonds. Jamini Roy is as different from most of his fellow Indian artists as curry from ice cream. Most young Indians who go to Europe to study art turn out either politely classic or dutifully modern work. Other Indian painters stick to the brutally, sensuous Brahman school of temple art or turn out dreamy, idealized mythological figures. But almost all ignore India's primitive, bold village art. Not so Jamini Roy, who has drawn much inspiration from it and combined it with a slick modernity. His tempera panels show village girls, Bengali dancers, mothers and children, such...
Lifelong Celibacy. Vinoba Bhave was born 57 years ago to a Brahman (high-caste) family in Gangoda, a village in western India. His given name was Vinayak, but Gandhi changed it to Vinoba in later years, and the disciple accepted it as his name. At ten the boy began his career of holy man: he made a resolution of lifelong celibacy, gave up sweets and started going barefoot. Gandhi, who in young manhood was a lawyer and a comfortably married man, admired Vinoba's untarnished virginity. The Mahatma frequently said that his only regret in life was that...
...early 20s, Ida Scudder went back to India to help her ailing mother. One night, as she sat alone in the mission bungalow at Tindivanam, a Brahman came to the door with a tale of woe. His child wife was in labor, and the midwives had given up hope of saving her. Would Miss Scudder come to the rescue? Ida said that she was not a doctor, but that her father would be glad to help. The Brahman, shocked at the idea of violating purdah, bridled: "Your father come into my caste home and take care of my wife...