View allAll Photos Tagged Devdas
Suchitra Sen .. legendary actor of Indian cinema.
Been a big big fan of Suchitraji from the day I saw her movie "Bambai ka Babu".
Very few actors have left indomitable mark on viewers mind and heart with their performances .. Suchitraji is one such actor.
She ruled Bengal cinema.
In terms of Hindi cinema .. she did just handful of movies .. one can count on fingers.
Devdas, Musafir, Champakali, Bambai ka Babu, Mamta and Aandhi but what tour de performances in all of them.
There can be a debate on this but apart from Nutanji, Nargisji, Meenaji and Waheedaji .. i don't see anyone being on par with this legendary actor.
You take any of the above movies and her character is different in all 5 movies.
Each role is like a bench mark .. a text book in acting.
I wanted to make photograph of hers with texture or even do a painting of her's (like how i did with Meenaji's photograph) but alas couldn't find a high resolution photograph of hers on the entire net.
Max size I got was the above pic which is 56 kb.
How can one work in such low size pic but still I managed.
The photograph was in a bad shape with marks and lots of lines on the face ... worked on PS and tried to restored as much as I can.
I hope so I did justice to her photograph of the most beautiful lady of Indian Cinema.
Texture courtesy: JoesSistah's photostream
if that makes you happy!
the century old question is: to be in a relationship or not to be in a relationship!
It gets harder to decide when we already know the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side :-(
Happy Valentines Day!
7/52
Press L to see the Loner :-)
Press F to fave the photo:-)
Please help me - this is the background in the beginning of the movie Devdas - does anyone know the name/author of it? Is it a painting or a tapestery? Thank you!
This photo was taken back in 2004. This captivating snapshot captures two individuals savoring tea outdoors, against the backdrop of a tailor shop in North Kolkata. The poster adorning the right side features the renowned Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan, portraying a scene from the iconic movie Devdas.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan or Aishwarya Bachchan(Birthname: Aishwarya Rai; Tulu: ಐಶ್ವರ್ಯಾ ರೈ; born November 1, 1973) is an internationally renowned Indian actress. Before starting her acting career, she worked as a model, and gained fame after winning the Miss World contest in 1994.
Often touted as the most beautiful woman in the world,Rai made her movie debut in Mani Ratnam's Tamil film, Iruvar (1997). She had her first commercial success in the Tamil movie Jeans (1998), and came to the attention of Bollywood in the Hindi movie, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Her performance in the film won her the Filmfare Best Actress Award, and she successfully performed in Bhansali's next project, Devdas (2002), for which she won her second Best Actress Award at the Filmfare. Since then, she has acted in over forty movies in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and English
here is the original pic.
laish chi 7elwa !!! .... mashala ... shay mo 6be3ey =P
“O Pardesi” is a song from “Dev D” which can be translate by ‘hey stranger”.
This new and creative movie is a modern-day interpretation of the classic novel "Devdas" by Sarat Chandra, it is written and directed by Anurag Kashyap.
Dev, Paro and Chanda of Dev D reflect the sensibilities, conflicts aggression, and independence.
Free thought, exuberance and recklessness of the youth of today.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PGqwLNjius
This picture was shot recently along the Ganges in Varanasi (Benaras).
The heat has became unbearable at this time of year and for many the only way to find some freshness is to take a deep in the holy waters.
Join the photographer at www.facebook.com/laurent.goldstein.photography
© All photographs are copyrighted and all rights reserved.
Please do not use any photographs without permission (even for private use).
The use of any work without consent of the artist is PROHIBITED and will lead automatically to consequences.
From the Kathakali performance based on "Dhuryodhana Vadham" from the epic Mahabharatha performed by Janabheri Kathakali Kendram and Kottaikal Devdas playing the role of Roudra Bheema.
Kathakali is a highly stylised classical Indian dance-drama noted for its attractive make-up of characters, their elaborate costumes, detailed gestures and well-defined body movements presented in tune with the anchor playback music and complementary percussion. It originated in the country's southern state of Kerala during the 16th century AD, approximately between 1555 and 1605, and has been updated over the years with improved looks, refined gestures and added themes besides more ornate singing and precise drumming.
Kathakali requires elaborate make-up and preparations by self as well as by others and the preparations start atleast 3 hours before the show.
I'm back from 3 of the most chilled out days I've had in recent times, from the crazy little village in the middle of nowhere, Pilani. And was it tough tearing myself away from it when the time came to leave. Its only in Pilani that you can gift someone the stars. Its only in Pilani that you can laze around in the sky from morning till night. Only here can you be high, without being high. Only here can I be at peace.
Do listen to the music of Dev.D. It has the power to tear your heart out, to play with your mind, to take you higher, to put you at peace. To drive you insane.
The photo: Two zoom bursts merged into one.
Title Dedication : Dev.D, Anurag Kashyap, Bonnie Chakraborty
Full video here : youtu.be/ZIhR8sxal08
Inspired by the story of Devdas. One of the most mainstream, widely adapted novels. 20 known feature film adaptations to be precise. And a dozen songs. This story, already dissected so much, with so many adaptation, made me wonder what new could anyone say at all about this character.
That's when I remembered one of my many favorite radiohead songs. Motion Picture Soundtrack. I imagined a modern day devdas, being a radiohead fan, walking into an empty bar that just opened. Being a regular at the bar, he fetches a bottle of spirit, trying to consume it to fill the lack of spirit inside him. And then he sings this song thinking about his childhood sweetheart Paro, who is long gone.
The song gets over, and the day passes by. Yet another glass of wine gets consumed.
Thank you for reading up to this.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (from Sanskrit 'great-souled, venerable'), first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi trained in the law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the bar in June 1891, at the age of 22. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years. There, Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India and soon set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against discrimination and excessive land-tax.
Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving swaraj or self-rule. Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with India's rural poor. He began to live in a self-sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate homeland for Muslims within British India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Abstaining from the official celebration of independence, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress. In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence. The last of these was begun in Delhi on 12 January 1948, when he was 78. The belief that Gandhi had been too resolute in his defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims spread among some Hindus in India. Among these was Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune, western India, who assassinated Gandhi by firing three bullets into his chest at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948.
Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is considered to be the Father of the Nation in post-colonial India. During India's nationalist movement and in several decades immediately after, he was also commonly called Bapu (Gujarati endearment for "father", roughly "papa", "daddy"[
Gandhi's father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi (1822–1885), served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state. His family originated from the then village of Kutiana in what was then Junagadh State. Although he only had been a clerk in the state administration and had an elementary education, Karamchand proved a capable chief minister.
During his tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, and his third marriage was childless. In 1857, he sought his third wife's permission to remarry; that year, he married Putlibai (1844–1891), who also came from Junagadh, and was from a Pranami Vaishnava family. Karamchand and Putlibai had four children: a son, Laxmidas (c. 1860–1914); a daughter, Raliatbehn (1862–1960); a second son, Karsandas (c. 1866–1913). and a third son, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar (also known as Sudamapuri), a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula and then part of the small princely state of Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the British Raj.
In 1874, Gandhi's father Karamchand left Porbandar for the smaller state of Rajkot, where he became a counsellor to its ruler, the Thakur Sahib; though Rajkot was a less prestigious state than Porbandar, the British regional political agency was located there, which gave the state's diwan a measure of security. In 1876, Karamchand became diwan of Rajkot and was succeeded as diwan of Porbandar by his brother Tulsidas. His family then rejoined him in Rajkot.
As a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears." The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he states that they left an indelible impression on his mind. He writes: "It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." Gandhi's early self-identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic characters.
The family's religious background was eclectic. Mohandas was born into a Gujarati Hindu Modh Bania family. Gandhi's father Karamchand was Hindu and his mother Putlibai was from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family. Gandhi's father was of Modh Baniya caste in the varna of Vaishya. His mother came from the medieval Krishna bhakti-based Pranami tradition, whose religious texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, and a collection of 14 texts with teachings that the tradition believes to include the essence of the Vedas, the Quran and the Bible. Gandhi was deeply influenced by his mother, an extremely pious lady who "would not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers... she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her."
Gandhi (right) with his eldest brother Laxmidas in 1886
At age 9, Gandhi entered the local school in Rajkot, near his home. There, he studied the rudiments of arithmetic, history, the Gujarati language and geography. At the age of 11, he joined the High School in Rajkot, Alfred High School. He was an average student, won some prizes, but was a shy and tongue tied student, with no interest in games; his only companions were books and school lessons.
In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Gokuldas Kapadia (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged marriage, according to the custom of the region at that time. In the process, he lost a year at school but was later allowed to make up by accelerating his studies. His wedding was a joint event, where his brother and cousin were also married. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was the prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.
Writing many years later, Mohandas described with regret the lustful feelings he felt for his young bride: "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He later recalled feeling jealous and possessive of her, such as when she would visit a temple with her girlfriends, and being sexually lustful in his feelings for her.
In late 1885, Gandhi's father Karamchand died. Gandhi, then 16 years old, and his wife of age 17 had their first baby, who survived only a few days. The two deaths anguished Gandhi. The Gandhi couple had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.
In November 1887, the 18-year-old Gandhi graduated from high school in Ahmedabad. In January 1888, he enrolled at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar State, then the sole degree-granting institution of higher education in the region. However, he dropped out, and returned to his family in Porbandar.
Gandhi had dropped out of the cheapest college he could afford in Bombay. Mavji Dave Joshiji, a Brahmin priest and family friend, advised Gandhi and his family that he should consider law studies in London. In July 1888, his wife Kasturba gave birth to their first surviving son, Harilal. His mother was not comfortable about Gandhi leaving his wife and family, and going so far from home. Gandhi's uncle Tulsidas also tried to dissuade his nephew. Gandhi wanted to go. To persuade his wife and mother, Gandhi made a vow in front of his mother that he would abstain from meat, alcohol and women. Gandhi's brother Laxmidas, who was already a lawyer, cheered Gandhi's London studies plan and offered to support him. Putlibai gave Gandhi her permission and blessing.
On 10 August 1888, Gandhi, aged 18, left Porbandar for Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Upon arrival, he stayed with the local Modh Bania community whose elders warned him that England would tempt him to compromise his religion, and eat and drink in Western ways. Despite Gandhi informing them of his promise to his mother and her blessings, he was excommunicated from his caste. Gandhi ignored this, and on 4 September, he sailed from Bombay to London, with his brother seeing him off. Gandhi attended University College, London, where he took classes in English literature with Henry Morley in 1888–1889.
He also enrolled at the Inns of Court School of Law in Inner Temple with the intention of becoming a barrister.[38] His childhood shyness and self-withdrawal had continued through his teens. He retained these traits when he arrived in London, but joined a public speaking practice group and overcame his shyness sufficiently to practise law.
He demonstrated a keen interest in the welfare of London's impoverished dockland communities. In 1889, a bitter trade dispute broke out in London, with dockers striking for better pay and conditions, and seamen, shipbuilders, factory girls and other joining the strike in solidarity. The strikers were successful, in part due to the mediation of Cardinal Manning, leading Gandhi and an Indian friend to make a point of visiting the cardinal and thanking him for his work.
Gandhi's time in London was influenced by the vow he had made to his mother. He tried to adopt "English" customs, including taking dancing lessons. However, he did not appreciate the bland vegetarian food offered by his landlady and was frequently hungry until he found one of London's few vegetarian restaurants. Influenced by Henry Salt's writing, he joined the London Vegetarian Society, and was elected to its executive committee under the aegis of its president and benefactor Arnold Hills. An achievement while on the committee was the establishment of a Bayswater chapter. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to join them in reading the Bhagavad Gita both in translation as well as in the original.
Gandhi had a friendly and productive relationship with Hills, but the two men took a different view on the continued LVS membership of fellow committee member Thomas Allinson. Their disagreement is the first known example of Gandhi challenging authority, despite his shyness and temperamental disinclination towards confrontation.
Allinson had been promoting newly available birth control methods, but Hills disapproved of these, believing they undermined public morality. He believed vegetarianism to be a moral movement and that Allinson should therefore no longer remain a member of the LVS. Gandhi shared Hills' views on the dangers of birth control, but defended Allinson's right to differ. It would have been hard for Gandhi to challenge Hills; Hills was 12 years his senior and unlike Gandhi, highly eloquent. He bankrolled the LVS and was a captain of industry with his Thames Ironworks company employing more than 6,000 people in the East End of London. He was also a highly accomplished sportsman who later founded the football club West Ham United. In his 1927 An Autobiography, Vol. I, Gandhi wrote:
The question deeply interested me...I had a high regard for Mr. Hills and his generosity. But I thought it was quite improper to exclude a man from a vegetarian society simply because he refused to regard puritan morals as one of the objects of the society
A motion to remove Allinson was raised, and was debated and voted on by the committee. Gandhi's shyness was an obstacle to his defence of Allinson at the committee meeting. He wrote his views down on paper but shyness prevented him from reading out his arguments, so Hills, the President, asked another committee member to read them out for him. Although some other members of the committee agreed with Gandhi, the vote was lost and Allinson excluded. There were no hard feelings, with Hills proposing the toast at the LVS farewell dinner in honour of Gandhi's return to India.
Gandhi, at age 22, was called to the bar in June 1891 and then left London for India, where he learned that his mother had died while he was in London and that his family had kept the news from him. His attempts at establishing a law practice in Bombay failed because he was psychologically unable to cross-examine witnesses. He returned to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants, but he was forced to stop when he ran afoul of British officer Sam Sunny.
In 1893, a Muslim merchant in Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah contacted Gandhi. Abdullah owned a large successful shipping business in South Africa. His distant cousin in Johannesburg needed a lawyer, and they preferred someone with Kathiawari heritage. Gandhi inquired about his pay for the work. They offered a total salary of £105 (~$4,143.31 2023 money) plus travel expenses. He accepted it, knowing that it would be at least a one-year commitment in the Colony of Natal, South Africa, also a part of the British Empire.
In April 1893, Gandhi, aged 23, set sail for South Africa to be the lawyer for Abdullah's cousin. He spent 21 years in South Africa, where he developed his political views, ethics and politics.
Immediately upon arriving in South Africa, Gandhi faced discrimination because of his skin colour and heritage. He was not allowed to sit with European passengers in the stagecoach and told to sit on the floor near the driver, then beaten when he refused; elsewhere he was kicked into a gutter for daring to walk near a house, in another instance thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg after refusing to leave the first-class. He sat in the train station, shivering all night and pondering if he should return to India or protest for his rights. He chose to protest and was allowed to board the train the next day. In another incident, the magistrate of a Durban court ordered Gandhi to remove his turban, which he refused to do. Indians were not allowed to walk on public footpaths in South Africa. Gandhi was kicked by a police officer out of the footpath onto the street without warning.
When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, according to Herman, he thought of himself as "a Briton first, and an Indian second". However, the prejudice against him and his fellow Indians from British people that Gandhi experienced and observed deeply bothered him. He found it humiliating, struggling to understand how some people can feel honour or superiority or pleasure in such inhumane practices. Gandhi began to question his people's standing in the British Empire.
The Abdullah case that had brought him to South Africa concluded in May 1894, and the Indian community organised a farewell party for Gandhi as he prepared to return to India. However, a new Natal government discriminatory proposal led to Gandhi extending his original period of stay in South Africa. He planned to assist Indians in opposing a bill to deny them the right to vote, a right then proposed to be an exclusive European right. He asked Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, to reconsider his position on this bill. Though unable to halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the grievances of Indians in South Africa. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and through this organisation, he moulded the Indian community of South Africa into a unified political force. In January 1897, when Gandhi landed in Durban, a mob of white settlers attacked him and he escaped only through the efforts of the wife of the police superintendent. However, he refused to press charges against any member of the mob.
During the Boer War, Gandhi volunteered in 1900 to form a group of stretcher-bearers as the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps. According to Arthur Herman, Gandhi wanted to disprove the British colonial stereotype that Hindus were not fit for "manly" activities involving danger and exertion, unlike the Muslim "martial races". Gandhi raised eleven hundred Indian volunteers, to support British combat troops against the Boers. They were trained and medically certified to serve on the front lines. They were auxiliaries at the Battle of Colenso to a White volunteer ambulance corps. At the battle of Spion Kop Gandhi and his bearers moved to the front line and had to carry wounded soldiers for miles to a field hospital because the terrain was too rough for the ambulances. Gandhi and thirty-seven other Indians received the Queen's South Africa Medal.
In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling registration of the colony's Indian and Chinese populations. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg on 11 September that year, Gandhi adopted his still evolving methodology of Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or nonviolent protest, for the first time. According to Anthony Parel, Gandhi was also influenced by the Tamil moral text Tirukkuṛaḷ after Leo Tolstoy mentioned it in their correspondence that began with "A Letter to a Hindu". Gandhi urged Indians to defy the new law and to suffer the punishments for doing so. Gandhi's ideas of protests, persuasion skills and public relations had emerged. He took these back to India in 1915.
Gandhi focused his attention on Indians and Africans while he was in South Africa. He initially was not interested in politics. This changed, however, after he was discriminated against and bullied, such as by being thrown out of a train coach because of his skin colour by a white train official. After several such incidents with Whites in South Africa, Gandhi's thinking and focus changed, and he felt he must resist this and fight for rights. He entered politics by forming the Natal Indian Congress. According to Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Gandhi's views on racism are contentious in some cases, but that changed afterward.[further explanation needed] Gandhi suffered persecution from the beginning in South Africa. Like with other coloured people, white officials denied him his rights, and the press and those in the streets bullied and called him a "parasite", "semi-barbarous", "canker", "squalid coolie", "yellow man", and other epithets. People would spit on him as an expression of racial hate.
While in South Africa, Gandhi focused on the racial persecution of Indians before he started to focus on racism against Africans. In some cases, state Desai and Vahed, his behaviour was one of being a willing part of racial stereotyping and African exploitation. During a speech in September 1896, Gandhi complained that the whites in the British colony of South Africa were "degrading the Indian to the level of a raw Kaffir". Scholars cite it as an example of evidence that Gandhi at that time thought of Indians and black South Africans differently. As another example given by Herman, Gandhi, at the age of 24, prepared a legal brief for the Natal Assembly in 1895, seeking voting rights for Indians. Gandhi cited race history and European Orientalists' opinions that "Anglo-Saxons and Indians are sprung from the same Aryan stock or rather the Indo-European peoples", and argued that Indians should not be grouped with the Africans.
Years later, Gandhi and his colleagues served and helped Africans as nurses and by opposing racism. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela is among admirers of Gandhi's efforts to fight against racism in Africa. The general image of Gandhi, state Desai and Vahed, has been reinvented since his assassination as though he was always a saint, when in reality his life was more complex, contained inconvenient truths, and was one that changed over time.[68] Scholars have also pointed the evidence to a rich history of co-operation and efforts by Gandhi and Indian people with nonwhite South Africans against persecution of Africans and the Apartheid.
In 1906, when the Bambatha Rebellion broke out in the colony of Natal, the then 36-year-old Gandhi, despite sympathising with the Zulu rebels, encouraged Indian South Africans to form a volunteer stretcher-bearer unit. Writing in the Indian Opinion, Gandhi argued that military service would be beneficial to the Indian community and claimed it would give them "health and happiness". Gandhi eventually led a volunteer mixed unit of Indian and African stretcher-bearers to treat wounded combatants during the suppression of the rebellion.
The medical unit commanded by Gandhi operated for less than two months before being disbanded.[72] After the suppression of the rebellion, the colonial establishment showed no interest in extending to the Indian community the civil rights granted to white South Africans. This led Gandhi to becoming disillusioned with the Empire and aroused a spiritual awakening with him; historian Arthur L. Herman wrote that his African experience was a part of his great disillusionment with the West, transforming him into an "uncompromising non-cooperator".
By 1910, Gandhi's newspaper, Indian Opinion, was covering reports on discrimination against Africans by the colonial regime. Gandhi remarked that the Africans are "alone are the original inhabitants of the land. … The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the land forcibly and appropriated it to themselves."
In 1910, Gandhi established, with the help of his friend Hermann Kallenbach, an idealistic community they named Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg. There he nurtured his policy of peaceful resistance.
In the years after black South Africans gained the right to vote in South Africa (1994), Gandhi was proclaimed a national hero with numerous monuments.
At the request of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, conveyed to him by C. F. Andrews, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He brought an international reputation as a leading Indian nationalist, theorist and community organiser.
Gandhi joined the Indian National Congress and was introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation, and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took Gokhale's liberal approach based on British Whiggish traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian.
Gandhi took leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began escalating demands until on 26 January 1930 the Indian National Congress declared the independence of India. The British did not recognise the declaration but negotiations ensued, with the Congress taking a role in provincial government in the late 1930s. Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in September 1939 without consultation. Tensions escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate independence in 1942 and the British responded by imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress leaders. Meanwhile, the Muslim League did co-operate with Britain and moved, against Gandhi's strong opposition, to demands for a totally separate Muslim state of Pakistan. In August 1947 the British partitioned the land with India and Pakistan each achieving independence on terms that Gandhi disapproved.
In April 1918, during the latter part of World War I, the Viceroy invited Gandhi to a War Conference in Delhi. Gandhi agreed to actively recruit Indians for the war effort. In contrast to the Zulu War of 1906 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he recruited volunteers for the Ambulance Corps, this time Gandhi attempted to recruit combatants. In a June 1918 leaflet entitled "Appeal for Enlistment", Gandhi wrote "To bring about such a state of things we should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them... If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible despatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army." He did, however, stipulate in a letter to the Viceroy's private secretary that he "personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe."
Gandhi's war recruitment campaign brought into question his consistency on nonviolence. Gandhi's private secretary noted that "The question of the consistency between his creed of 'Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and his recruiting campaign was raised not only then but has been discussed ever since."
In July 1918, Gandhi admitted that he couldn't persuade even one individual to enlist for the world war. "So far I have not a single recruit to my credit apart," Gandhi wrote. He added: "They object because they fear to die."
Gandhi's first major achievement came in 1917 with the Champaran agitation in Bihar. The Champaran agitation pitted the local peasantry against largely Anglo-Indian plantation owners who were backed by the local administration. The peasants were forced to grow indigo (Indigofera sp.), a cash crop for Indigo dye whose demand had been declining over two decades, and were forced to sell their crops to the planters at a fixed price. Unhappy with this, the peasantry appealed to Gandhi at his ashram in Ahmedabad. Pursuing a strategy of nonviolent protest, Gandhi took the administration by surprise and won concessions from the authorities.
In 1918, Kheda was hit by floods and famine and the peasantry was demanding relief from taxes. Gandhi moved his headquarters to Nadiad, organising scores of supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the most notable being Vallabhbhai Patel. Using non-co-operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of revenue even under the threat of confiscation of land. A social boycott of mamlatdars and talatdars (revenue officials within the district) accompanied the agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for the agitation across the country. For five months, the administration refused, but by the end of May 1918, the Government gave way on important provisions and relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection and released all the prisoners.
In 1919, following World War I, Gandhi (aged 49) sought political co-operation from Muslims in his fight against British imperialism by supporting the Ottoman Empire that had been defeated in the World War. Before this initiative of Gandhi, communal disputes and religious riots between Hindus and Muslims were common in British India, such as the riots of 1917–18. Gandhi had already supported the British crown with resources and by recruiting Indian soldiers to fight the war in Europe on the British side. This effort of Gandhi was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I. The British government had offered, instead of self-government, minor reforms instead, disappointing Gandhi. Gandhi announced his satyagraha (civil disobedience) intentions. The British colonial officials made their counter move by passing the Rowlatt Act, to block Gandhi's movement. The Act allowed the British government to treat civil disobedience participants as criminals and gave it the legal basis to arrest anyone for "preventive indefinite detention, incarceration without judicial review or any need for a trial".
Gandhi felt that Hindu-Muslim co-operation was necessary for political progress against the British. He leveraged the Khilafat movement, wherein Sunni Muslims in India, their leaders such as the sultans of princely states in India and Ali brothers championed the Turkish Caliph as a solidarity symbol of Sunni Islamic community (ummah). They saw the Caliph as their means to support Islam and the Islamic law after the defeat of Ottoman Empire in World War I. Gandhi's support to the Khilafat movement led to mixed results. It initially led to a strong Muslim support for Gandhi. However, the Hindu leaders including Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they were largely against recognising or supporting the Sunni Islamic Caliph in Turkey.
The increasing Muslim support for Gandhi, after he championed the Caliph's cause, temporarily stopped the Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It offered evidence of inter-communal harmony in joint Rowlatt satyagraha demonstration rallies, raising Gandhi's stature as the political leader to the British. His support for the Khilafat movement also helped him sideline Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had announced his opposition to the satyagraha non-co-operation movement approach of Gandhi. Jinnah began creating his independent support, and later went on to lead the demand for West and East Pakistan. Though they agreed in general terms on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving this. Jinnah was mainly interested in dealing with the British via constitutional negotiation, rather than attempting to agitate the masses.
In 1922 the Khilafat movement gradually collapsed following the end of the non-cooperation movement with the arrest of Gandhi. A number of Muslim leaders and delegates abandoned Gandhi and Congress. Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts reignited. Deadly religious riots re-appeared in numerous cities, with 91 in United Provinces of Agra and Oudh alone.
With his book Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and swaraj (Indian independence) would come.
In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he would appeal to Indians to start civil disobedience. The British government ignored him and passed the law, stating it would not yield to threats. The satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with people assembling to protest the Rowlatt Act. On 30 March 1919, British law officers opened fire on an assembly of unarmed people, peacefully gathered, participating in satyagraha in Delhi.
People rioted in retaliation. On 6 April 1919, a Hindu festival day, he asked a crowd to remember not to injure or kill British people, but to express their frustration with peace, to boycott British goods and burn any British clothing they owned. He emphasised the use of non-violence to the British and towards each other, even if the other side used violence. Communities across India announced plans to gather in greater numbers to protest. Government warned him to not enter Delhi. Gandhi defied the order. On 9 April, Gandhi was arrested.
On 13 April 1919, people including women with children gathered in an Amritsar park, and British Indian Army officer Reginald Dyer surrounded them and ordered troops under his command to fire on them. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre (or Amritsar massacre) of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu civilians enraged the subcontinent, but was supported by some Britons and parts of the British media as a necessary response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticise the British and instead criticised his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using 'love' to deal with the 'hate' of the British government. Gandhi demanded that the Indian people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting.
The massacre and Gandhi's non-violent response to it moved many, but also made some Sikhs and Hindus upset that Dyer was getting away with murder. Investigation committees were formed by the British, which Gandhi asked Indians to boycott.[109] The unfolding events, the massacre and the British response, led Gandhi to the belief that Indians will never get a fair equal treatment under British rulers, and he shifted his attention to swaraj and political independence for India. In 1921, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress. He reorganised the Congress. With Congress now behind him, and Muslim support triggered by his backing the Khilafat movement to restore the Caliph in Turkey, Gandhi had the political support and the attention of the British Raj.
Gandhi expanded his nonviolent non-co-operation platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian men and women, rich or poor, to spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, and to forsake British titles and honours. Gandhi thus began his journey aimed at crippling the British India government economically, politically and administratively.
The appeal of "Non-cooperation" grew, its social popularity drew participation from all strata of Indian society. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He began his sentence on 18 March 1922. With Gandhi isolated in prison, the Indian National Congress split into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favouring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move. Furthermore, co-operation among Hindus and Muslims ended as Khilafat movement collapsed with the rise of Atatürk in Turkey. Muslim leaders left the Congress and began forming Muslim organisations. The political base behind Gandhi had broken into factions. Gandhi was released in February 1924 for an appendicitis operation, having served only two years.
After his early release from prison for political crimes in 1924, over the second half of the 1920s Gandhi continued to pursue swaraj. He pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of non-cooperation with complete independence for the country as its goal. After his support for World War I with Indian combat troops, and the failure of Khilafat movement in preserving the rule of Caliph in Turkey, followed by a collapse in Muslim support for his leadership, some such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh questioned his values and non-violent approach. While many Hindu leaders championed a demand for immediate independence, Gandhi revised his own call to a one-year wait, instead of two.
The British did not respond favourably to Gandhi's proposal. British political leaders such as Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill announced opposition to "the appeasers of Gandhi" in their discussions with European diplomats who sympathised with Indian demands. On 31 December 1929, an Indian flag was unfurled in Lahore. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of India's Independence Day in Lahore. This day was commemorated by almost every other Indian organisation. Gandhi then launched a new Satyagraha against the British salt tax in March 1930. Gandhi sent an ultimatum in the form of a letter personally addressed to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, on 2 March. Gandhi condemned British rule in the letter, describing it as "a curse" that "has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration...It has reduced us politically to serfdom." Gandhi also mentioned in the letter that the viceroy received a salary "over five thousand times India's average income." In the letter, Gandhi also stressed his continued adherence to non-violent forms of protest.
This was highlighted by the Salt March to Dandi from 12 March to 6 April, where, together with 78 volunteers, he marched 388 kilometres (241 mi) from Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws. The march took 25 days to cover 240 miles with Gandhi speaking to often huge crowds along the way. Thousands of Indians joined him in Dandi. On 5 May he was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in anticipation of a protest that he had planned. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without him see. A horrified American journalist, Webb Miller, described the British response thus:
In complete silence the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches and approached the barbed wire stockade... at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shot lathis [long bamboo sticks]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.
This went on for hours until some 300 or more protesters had been beaten, many seriously injured and two killed. At no time did they offer any resistance.
This campaign was one of his most successful at upsetting British hold on India; Britain responded by imprisoning over 60,000 people. Congress estimates, however, put the figure at 90,000. Among them was one of Gandhi's lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru.
According to Sarma, Gandhi recruited women to participate in the salt tax campaigns and the boycott of foreign products, which gave many women a new self-confidence and dignity in the mainstream of Indian public life. However, other scholars such as Marilyn French state that Gandhi barred women from joining his civil disobedience movement because he feared he would be accused of using women as a political shield. When women insisted on joining the movement and participating in public demonstrations, Gandhi asked the volunteers to get permissions of their guardians and only those women who can arrange child-care should join him. Regardless of Gandhi's apprehensions and views, Indian women joined the Salt March by the thousands to defy the British salt taxes and monopoly on salt mining. After Gandhi's arrest, the women marched and picketed shops on their own, accepting violence and verbal abuse from British authorities for the cause in the manner Gandhi inspired.
Indian Congress in the 1920s appealed to Andhra Pradesh peasants by creating Telugu language plays that combined Indian mythology and legends, linked them to Gandhi's ideas, and portrayed Gandhi as a messiah, a reincarnation of ancient and medieval Indian nationalist leaders and saints. The plays built support among peasants steeped in traditional Hindu culture, according to Murali, and this effort made Gandhi a folk hero in Telugu speaking villages, a sacred messiah-like figure.
According to Dennis Dalton, it was Gandhi's ideas that were responsible for his wide following. Gandhi criticised Western civilisation as one driven by "brute force and immorality", contrasting it with his categorisation of Indian civilisation as one driven by "soul force and morality". Gandhi captured the imagination of the people of his heritage with his ideas about winning "hate with love". These ideas are evidenced in his pamphlets from the 1890s, in South Africa, where too he was popular among the Indian indentured workers. After he returned to India, people flocked to him because he reflected their values.
Gandhi also campaigned hard going from one rural corner of the Indian subcontinent to another. He used terminology and phrases such as Rama-rajya from Ramayana, Prahlada as a paradigmatic icon, and such cultural symbols as another facet of swaraj and satyagraha. During his lifetime, these ideas sounded strange outside India, but they readily and deeply resonated with the culture and historic values of his people.
The government, represented by Lord Irwin, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The Gandhi–Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931. The British Government agreed to free all political prisoners, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. According to the pact, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London for discussions and as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists. Gandhi expected to discuss India's independence, while the British side focused on the Indian princes and Indian minorities rather than on a transfer of power. Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, took a hard line against India as an independent nation, began a new campaign of controlling and subduing the nationalist movement. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government tried and failed to negate his influence by completely isolating him from his followers.
In Britain, Winston Churchill, a prominent Conservative politician who was then out of office but later became its prime minister, became a vigorous and articulate critic of Gandhi and opponent of his long-term plans. Churchill often ridiculed Gandhi, saying in a widely reported 1931 speech:
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace....to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
Churchill's bitterness against Gandhi grew in the 1930s. He called Gandhi as the one who was "seditious in aim" whose evil genius and multiform menace was attacking the British empire. Churchill called him a dictator, a "Hindu Mussolini", fomenting a race war, trying to replace the Raj with Brahmin cronies, playing on the ignorance of Indian masses, all for selfish gain. Churchill attempted to isolate Gandhi, and his criticism of Gandhi was widely covered by European and American press. It gained Churchill sympathetic support, but it also increased support for Gandhi among Europeans. The developments heightened Churchill's anxiety that the "British themselves would give up out of pacifism and misplaced conscience".
During the discussions between Gandhi and the British government over 1931–32 at the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of colonial British rule, and begin the self-rule by Indians. The British side sought reforms that would keep the Indian subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion model that established separate electorates based on religious and social divisions. The British questioned the Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of India. They invited Indian religious leaders, such as Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along religious lines, as well as B. R. Ambedkar as the representative leader of the untouchables. Gandhi vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring people together but divide them, perpetuate their status, and divert the attention from India's struggle to end the colonial rule.
The Second Round Table conference was the only time he left India between 1914 and his death in 1948. He declined the government's offer of accommodation in an expensive West End hotel, preferring to stay in the East End, to live among working-class people, as he did in India. He based himself in a small cell-bedroom at Kingsley Hall for the three-month duration of his stay and was enthusiastically received by East Enders. During this time he renewed his links with the British vegetarian movement.
After Gandhi returned from the Second Round Table conference, he started a new satyagraha. He was arrested and imprisoned at the Yerwada Jail, Pune. While he was in prison, the British government enacted a new law that granted untouchables a separate electorate. It came to be known as the Communal Award. In protest, Gandhi started a fast-unto-death, while he was held in prison. The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise Poona Pact.
In 1934 Gandhi resigned from Congress party membership. He did not disagree with the party's position but felt that if he resigned, his popularity with Indians would cease to stifle the party's membership, which actually varied, including communists, socialists, trade unionists, students, religious conservatives, and those with pro-business convictions, and that these various voices would get a chance to make themselves heard. Gandhi also wanted to avoid being a target for Raj propaganda by leading a party that had temporarily accepted political accommodation with the Raj.
Gandhi returned to active politics again in 1936, with the Nehru presidency and the Lucknow session of the Congress. Although Gandhi wanted a total focus on the task of winning independence and not speculation about India's future, he did not restrain the Congress from adopting socialism as its goal. Gandhi had a clash with Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected president in 1938, and who had previously expressed a lack of faith in nonviolence as a means of protest. Despite Gandhi's opposition, Bose won a second term as Congress President, against Gandhi's nominee, Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Gandhi declared that Sitaramayya's defeat was his defeat. Bose later left the Congress when the All-India leaders resigned en masse in protest of his abandonment of the principles introduced by Gandhi.
Gandhi opposed providing any help to the British war effort and he campaigned against any Indian participation in World War II. The British government responded with the arrests of Gandhi and many other Congress leaders and killed over 1,000 Indians who participated in this movement. A number of violent attacks were also carried out by the nationalists against the British government. While Gandhi's campaign did not enjoy the support of a number of Indian leaders, and over 2.5 million Indians volunteered and joined the British military to fight on various fronts of the Allied Forces, the movement played a role in weakening the control over the South Asian region by the British regime and it ultimately paved the way for Indian independence.
Gandhi's opposition to the Indian participation in World War II was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India itself. He also condemned Nazism and Fascism, a view which won endorsement of other Indian leaders. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his demand for independence, calling for the British to Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai. This was Gandhi's and the Congress Party's most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from India. The British government responded quickly to the Quit India speech, and within hours after Gandhi's speech arrested Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee. His countrymen retaliated the arrests by damaging or burning down hundreds of government owned railway stations, police stations, and cutting down telegraph wires.
In 1942, Gandhi now nearing age 73, urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government. In this effort, he urged that they neither kill nor injure British people, but be willing to suffer and die if violence is initiated by the British officials. He clarified that the movement would not be stopped because of any individual acts of violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" of "the present system of administration" was "worse than real anarchy." He urged Indians to karo ya maro ("do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms.
Gandhi's arrest lasted two years, as he was held in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. During this period, his long time secretary Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack, his wife Kasturba died after 18 months' imprisonment on 22 February 1944; and Gandhi suffered a severe malaria attack. While in jail, he agreed to an interview with Stuart Gelder, a British journalist. Gelder then composed and released an interview summary, cabled it to the mainstream press, that announced sudden concessions Gandhi was willing to make, comments that shocked his countrymen, the Congress workers and even Gandhi. The latter two claimed that it distorted what Gandhi actually said on a range of topics and falsely repudiated the Quit India movement.
Gandhi was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage the nation. He came out of detention to an altered political scene – the Muslim League for example, which a few years earlier had appeared marginal, "now occupied the centre of the political stage" and the topic of Jinnah's campaign for Pakistan was a major talking point. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence and the two men met several times over a period of two weeks in September 1944 at Jinnah's house in Bombay, where Gandhi insisted on a united religiously plural and independent India which included Muslims and non-Muslims of the Indian subcontinent coexisting. Jinnah rejected this proposal and insisted instead for partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a separate Muslim homeland (later Pakistan).These discussions continued through 1947.
While the leaders of Congress languished in jail, the other parties supported the war and gained organisational strength. Underground publications flailed at the ruthless suppression of Congress, but it had little control over events. At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to Indian hands. At this point Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.
Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the British to Quit India. However, the All-India Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India". Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority.
Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now Bangladesh and West Bengal, gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day. The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict. The British government did not order its army to move in to contain the violence. The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed. Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres.
Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harbouring the single minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician. Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it.
The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi".
The partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.
Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on 15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses. Gandhi's fasting and protests are credited for stopping the religious riots and communal violence.
At 5:17 pm on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was with his grandnieces in the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), on his way to address a prayer meeting, when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, fired three bullets into his chest from a pistol at close range. According to some accounts, Gandhi died instantly. In other accounts, such as one prepared by an eyewitness journalist, Gandhi was carried into the Birla House, into a bedroom. There he died about 30 minutes later as one of Gandhi's family members read verses from Hindu scriptures.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed his countrymen over the All-India Radio saying:
Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me, but for millions and millions in this country.
Godse, a Hindu nationalist, with links to the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, made no attempt to escape; several other conspirators were soon arrested as well. The accused were Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Narayan Apte, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Shankar Kistayya, Dattatraya Parchure, Vishnu Karkare, Madanlal Pahwa, and Gopal Godse.
The trial began on 27 May 1948 and ran for eight months before Justice Atma Charan passed his final order on 10 February 1949. The prosecution called 149 witnesses, the defense none. The court found all of the defendants except one guilty as charged. Eight men were convicted for the murder conspiracy, and others were convicted for violation of the Explosive Substances Act. Savarkar was acquitted and set free. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death by hanging and the remaining six (including Godse's brother, Gopal) were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Gandhi's death was mourned nationwide. Over a million people joined the five-mile-long funeral procession that took over five hours to reach Raj Ghat from Birla house, where he was assassinated, and another million watched the procession pass by. Gandhi's body was transported on a weapons carrier, whose chassis was dismantled overnight to allow a high-floor to be installed so that people could catch a glimpse of his body. The engine of the vehicle was not used; instead four drag-ropes held by 50 people each pulled the vehicle. All Indian-owned establishments in London remained closed in mourning as thousands of people from all faiths and denominations and Indians from all over Britain converged at India House in London.
Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition. His ashes were poured into urns which were sent across India for memorial services. Most of the ashes were immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad on 12 February 1948, but some were secretly taken away. In 1997, Tushar Gandhi immersed the contents of one urn, found in a bank vault and reclaimed through the courts, at the Sangam at Allahabad. Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, and a memorial plaque marks the event. On 30 January 2008, the contents of another urn were immersed at Girgaum Chowpatty. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune (where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944) and another in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.
The Birla House site where Gandhi was assassinated is now a memorial called Gandhi Smriti. The place near Yamuna river where he was cremated is the Rāj Ghāt memorial in New Delhi. A black marble platform, it bears the epigraph "Hē Rāma" (Devanagari: हे ! राम or, Hey Raam). These are said to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot.
New York, often called New York City or simply NYC, is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a respective county. It is a global city and a cultural, financial, high-tech, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care, scientific output, life sciences, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy, and is sometimes described as the world's most important city and the capital of the world.
With an estimated population in 2022 of 8,335,897 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), the city is the most densely populated major city in the United States. New York has more than double the population of Los Angeles, the nation's second-most populous city. New York is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban area. With more than 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York City is one of the world's most populous megacities. The city and its metropolitan area are the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. In 2021, the city was home to nearly 3.1 million residents born outside the U.S., the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world.
New York City traces its origins to Fort Amsterdam and a trading post founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island by Dutch colonists in approximately 1624. The settlement was named New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam) in 1626 and was chartered as a city in 1653. The city came under English control in 1664 and was renamed New York after King Charles II granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. The city was temporarily regained by the Dutch in July 1673 and was renamed New Orange; however, the city has been named New York since November 1674. New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. The modern city was formed by the 1898 consolidation of its five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island, and has been the largest U.S. city ever since.
Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the world's premier financial and fintech center and the most economically powerful city in the world. As of 2022, the New York metropolitan area is the largest metropolitan economy in the world with a gross metropolitan product of over US$2.16 trillion. If the New York metropolitan area were its own country, it would have the tenth-largest economy in the world. The city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by market capitalization of their listed companies: the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. New York City is an established safe haven for global investors. As of 2023, New York City is the most expensive city in the world for expatriates to live. New York City is home to the highest number of billionaires, individuals of ultra-high net worth (greater than US$30 million), and millionaires of any city in the world
The written history of New York City began with the first European explorer, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524. European settlement began with the Dutch in 1608 and New Amsterdam was founded in 1624.
The "Sons of Liberty" campaigned against British authority in New York City, and the Stamp Act Congress of representatives from throughout the Thirteen Colonies met in the city in 1765 to organize resistance to Crown policies. The city's strategic location and status as a major seaport made it the prime target for British seizure in 1776. General George Washington lost a series of battles from which he narrowly escaped (with the notable exception of the Battle of Harlem Heights, his first victory of the war), and the British Army occupied New York and made it their base on the continent until late 1783, attracting Loyalist refugees.
The city served as the national capital under the Articles of Confederation from 1785 to 1789, and briefly served as the new nation's capital in 1789–90 under the United States Constitution. Under the new government, the city hosted the inauguration of George Washington as the first President of the United States, the drafting of the United States Bill of Rights, and the first Supreme Court of the United States. The opening of the Erie Canal gave excellent steamboat connections with upstate New York and the Great Lakes, along with coastal traffic to lower New England, making the city the preeminent port on the Atlantic Ocean. The arrival of rail connections to the north and west in the 1840s and 1850s strengthened its central role.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, waves of new immigrants arrived from Europe dramatically changing the composition of the city and serving as workers in the expanding industries. Modern New York traces its development to the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898 and an economic and building boom following the Great Depression and World War II. Throughout its history, New York has served as a main port of entry for many immigrants, and its cultural and economic influence has made it one of the most important urban areas in the United States and the world. The economy in the 1700s was based on farming, local production, fur trading, and Atlantic jobs like shipbuilding. In the 1700s, New York was sometimes referred to as a breadbasket colony, because one of its major crops was wheat. New York colony also exported other goods included iron ore as a raw material and as manufactured goods such as tools, plows, nails and kitchen items such as kettles, pans and pots.
The a
Explored!
Emotional Attyachar by Abhinay Omkar AKA abhiomkar
Inspired by Dev D Movie Poster
Post-Processing
Adobe Lightroom 2.0
Adobe Photoshop CS4
Camera Used:
Nokia N95 Mobile 5 Mpx
Photography, Processing and Experiement by
Abhinay Omkar AKA abhiomkar
(Self-Portrait)
Model:
Abhinay Omkar AKA abhiomkar
This is HWS # 2 - Weekend Homework - COPYCAT - 25, 26 Apr 2009
© A B H I O M K A R ' S P H O T O G R A P H Y
Please do not copy/use this Image without permission. Thanks!
www.youtube.com/channel/UCTWHJN4C_SWS-PLPDFt9LDg/featured... ift.tt/2gHOOF4 ift.tt/2fB3QQM ift.tt/2gHI89M twitter.com/Bollywoodmoviet ift.tt/2fH2Bzv ift.tt/2gNlWeE ift.tt/2fRKfac ift.tt/2gNcYxQ ift.tt/2fGZ8B8 ift.tt/2gNlLjp ift.tt/2fQ1TQa "Raees ❂ Watch Trailer on 7 Dec ❂ Shah Rukh Khan ❂ Mahira Khan ❂ Nawazuddin Siddiqui"-"Raees ❂ Watch Trailer on 7 Dec ❂ Shah Rukh Khan" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shahrukh Khan - The "King Khan" Of Bollywood By [ift.tt/2dZTWbg Khandel Shahrukh Khan is a prominent Bollywood actor, who is not only loved in India, but also has a huge fan following overseas. With his hard work and dedication, he has earned the title of 'King Khan'. He is considered as one of the most successful actors in Bollywood. His fans eagerly wait for his new releases. Shahrukh Khan was born on November 2, 1965 in New Delhi. Also known as SRK, he is considered as the King of Romance. His father was in the transport business and his mother was a social worker. He also has a sister, Shehnaz. He married Gauri Khan in 1991 and they have two children, namely, Aryan Khan and Suhana Khan. Shahrukh Khan and Gauri also have a third child named Abram, who was born through a surrogate mother. "Raees ❂ Watch Trailer on 7 Dec ❂ Shah Rukh Khan ❂ Mahira Khan" He began his acting career on Television. His first movie was a romantic-drama Deewana, in which he played a supporting role. He gained immense popularity for his romantic role in the movie Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, where he starred opposite Kajol. This movie became the longest running Indian film of all time. After this movie, he continued to establish his reputation as a romantic hero by doing movies like Dil To Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Devdas, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Chalte Chalte and Veer Zaara. He has appeared in more than 80 Bollywood movies and earned numerous accolades, including 14 Filmfare Awards. For his contribution to the film industry, the Government of India honored him with the Padma Shri. The Government of France awarded him both the Ordes des Arts et des Lettres and the Legion d'honneur. He is co-chairman of a production company and the co-owner of the IPL cricket team, Kolkata Knight Riders. "Raees ❂ Watch Trailer on 7 Dec ❂ Shah Rukh Khan ❂ Mahira Khan" Shahrukh Khan is ruling the Indian film industry for over two decades now, and his popularity sees no decline. There is a huge craze in India for every Shahrukh Khan movie. People eagerly wait for all his new movie releases. You can get an idea of the popularity of Shahrukh Khan and his success by the fact that all his last six movies have made a business of more than 100crores. His upcoming movies include, Fan and Raees. These films have already created a lot of interest among his followers and traders have started making predictions about their box office collections. Shahrukh Khan is undoubtedly the number one actor in Bollywood. [ift.tt/2dBHFXx box office collection can be found online. You can visit our site for [ift.tt/2dBHFXx movie collection. Article Source: [ift.tt/2dZT85S] Shahrukh Khan - The "King Khan" Of Bollywood ✮✮✮✮Please Subscribe & Share And Like Comment Please✮✮✮✮
我想我是開始害怕一個人待在房內的寂靜無聲。在一連數個月都有你體溫或電話鈴聲陪伴的夜晚之後。
原本我就是屬於這裡的，為何現在竟會感覺如此陌生。
我點選了同一首歌讓它重覆播放，不斷。桌面白紙上排列的是我畫滿的正字標記，次數仍在增加。
螢幕上Excel檔案内是密密麻麻的文字記錄，分門別類精準地緊緊黏在過去的每一天。
「對你而言或許只是幾天，但對我是十年六個月四天又六個鐘頭。」
印度電影與《芝加哥》、《紅磨坊》同被列為新世紀影史上最絢麗的三大歌舞片──《寶萊塢生死戀(Devdas)》──女主角帕羅以「數字上無限誇張」的印式思維，經量化數字地來形容抽象感受，表達她對男主角德阜達遠赴重洋求學的思念。
《把愛找回來(August Rush)》道述從小生長於孤兒院，遺傳自雙親音樂才華的August，以說著「11年又16天…我一直在算著」如斯的時間流逝來表達對未來將與父母再度相會的期待與希望。
August的母親更在11年2個月又15天地持續算數，只想知道她一生下就被送走的兒子是否活著。
精確算數著日子，對於手邊握有遺憾乃至對未來存有那麼多重要期盼的人來說，它們是有著必須存在的意義。
我曾那樣喜歡一個三十好幾的男孩，天天傳送著簡訊問候他在南方的消息，以及我於北國為他浮動的心情。偶爾他冷冷回應可以搭上的內容便足以讓我充飽了電力，再繼續每天的功課，send上a message。
第一百天的夜晚，他那「連續100則簡訊，好感人」的回應。有點口是心非般地抗議。
直到123天，我終於放他自由如也放我自由般地，不再按打每每湊滿70字的簡訊。我告訴自己我已試過我已盡力。
答案並不會因我的文字有所轉機。
「寂寞感冒全都可以好的，愛多甜傷多痛都釋放。」這已經是第304遍重覆，為了說服自己而播放。但我仍然懷疑這是不實廣告。
在這累積了105184秒的歌聲內，我從腦海中點閱了我們相處7296小時的畫面，只有日益膠著的根生思念。
夏綠蒂在《慾望城市》影集內教導我，與情人分手後的心情療傷歲月，最多只會是兩人在一起日子的二分之一。
對於並沒有在一起，尚稱不上分手情人的我來說，也是適用？
醫生也曾告訴我，已被截去單腳的患者仍會感到腿腳在痛，他經歷的是「幻想之痛」。是由截掉的腿產生的現實痛感，這很正常。這種情況會持續多久？他輕鬆地說，也許六個月。也許，一輩子。
那對於已經失去一顆心的人來說呢。那種一顆心血淋淋被撕裂的心痛會持續到什麼時候。只有一半的152天？全額的304天？還是直到永久閤眼入眠。
或許，我真應該慷慨地讓記憶長出祂該有的翅膀，任祂自由飛翔離去。
徹底地將心放空。沒有你。然後寂寞就會好了。
是嗎。是會好的吧，寂寞。
【攝於/ 台北‧內湖】
.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule. He inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (from Sanskrit 'great-souled, venerable'), first applied to him in South Africa in 1914, is now used throughout the world.
Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi trained in the law at the Inner Temple in London, and was called to the bar in June 1891, at the age of 22. After two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years. There, Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India and soon set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against discrimination and excessive land-tax.
Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving swaraj or self-rule. Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with India's rural poor. He began to live in a self-sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate homeland for Muslims within British India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Abstaining from the official celebration of independence, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress. In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence. The last of these was begun in Delhi on 12 January 1948, when he was 78. The belief that Gandhi had been too resolute in his defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims spread among some Hindus in India. Among these was Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune, western India, who assassinated Gandhi by firing three bullets into his chest at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948.
Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. Gandhi is considered to be the Father of the Nation in post-colonial India. During India's nationalist movement and in several decades immediately after, he was also commonly called Bapu (Gujarati endearment for "father", roughly "papa", "daddy"[
Gandhi's father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi (1822–1885), served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state. His family originated from the then village of Kutiana in what was then Junagadh State. Although he only had been a clerk in the state administration and had an elementary education, Karamchand proved a capable chief minister.
During his tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, and his third marriage was childless. In 1857, he sought his third wife's permission to remarry; that year, he married Putlibai (1844–1891), who also came from Junagadh, and was from a Pranami Vaishnava family. Karamchand and Putlibai had four children: a son, Laxmidas (c. 1860–1914); a daughter, Raliatbehn (1862–1960); a second son, Karsandas (c. 1866–1913). and a third son, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar (also known as Sudamapuri), a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula and then part of the small princely state of Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the British Raj.
In 1874, Gandhi's father Karamchand left Porbandar for the smaller state of Rajkot, where he became a counsellor to its ruler, the Thakur Sahib; though Rajkot was a less prestigious state than Porbandar, the British regional political agency was located there, which gave the state's diwan a measure of security. In 1876, Karamchand became diwan of Rajkot and was succeeded as diwan of Porbandar by his brother Tulsidas. His family then rejoined him in Rajkot.
As a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about. One of his favourite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears." The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he states that they left an indelible impression on his mind. He writes: "It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." Gandhi's early self-identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic characters.
The family's religious background was eclectic. Mohandas was born into a Gujarati Hindu Modh Bania family. Gandhi's father Karamchand was Hindu and his mother Putlibai was from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family. Gandhi's father was of Modh Baniya caste in the varna of Vaishya. His mother came from the medieval Krishna bhakti-based Pranami tradition, whose religious texts include the Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavata Purana, and a collection of 14 texts with teachings that the tradition believes to include the essence of the Vedas, the Quran and the Bible. Gandhi was deeply influenced by his mother, an extremely pious lady who "would not think of taking her meals without her daily prayers... she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching. To keep two or three consecutive fasts was nothing to her."
Gandhi (right) with his eldest brother Laxmidas in 1886
At age 9, Gandhi entered the local school in Rajkot, near his home. There, he studied the rudiments of arithmetic, history, the Gujarati language and geography. At the age of 11, he joined the High School in Rajkot, Alfred High School. He was an average student, won some prizes, but was a shy and tongue tied student, with no interest in games; his only companions were books and school lessons.
In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Gokuldas Kapadia (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged marriage, according to the custom of the region at that time. In the process, he lost a year at school but was later allowed to make up by accelerating his studies. His wedding was a joint event, where his brother and cousin were also married. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was the prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.
Writing many years later, Mohandas described with regret the lustful feelings he felt for his young bride: "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He later recalled feeling jealous and possessive of her, such as when she would visit a temple with her girlfriends, and being sexually lustful in his feelings for her.
In late 1885, Gandhi's father Karamchand died. Gandhi, then 16 years old, and his wife of age 17 had their first baby, who survived only a few days. The two deaths anguished Gandhi. The Gandhi couple had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.
In November 1887, the 18-year-old Gandhi graduated from high school in Ahmedabad. In January 1888, he enrolled at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar State, then the sole degree-granting institution of higher education in the region. However, he dropped out, and returned to his family in Porbandar.
Gandhi had dropped out of the cheapest college he could afford in Bombay. Mavji Dave Joshiji, a Brahmin priest and family friend, advised Gandhi and his family that he should consider law studies in London. In July 1888, his wife Kasturba gave birth to their first surviving son, Harilal. His mother was not comfortable about Gandhi leaving his wife and family, and going so far from home. Gandhi's uncle Tulsidas also tried to dissuade his nephew. Gandhi wanted to go. To persuade his wife and mother, Gandhi made a vow in front of his mother that he would abstain from meat, alcohol and women. Gandhi's brother Laxmidas, who was already a lawyer, cheered Gandhi's London studies plan and offered to support him. Putlibai gave Gandhi her permission and blessing.
On 10 August 1888, Gandhi, aged 18, left Porbandar for Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Upon arrival, he stayed with the local Modh Bania community whose elders warned him that England would tempt him to compromise his religion, and eat and drink in Western ways. Despite Gandhi informing them of his promise to his mother and her blessings, he was excommunicated from his caste. Gandhi ignored this, and on 4 September, he sailed from Bombay to London, with his brother seeing him off. Gandhi attended University College, London, where he took classes in English literature with Henry Morley in 1888–1889.
He also enrolled at the Inns of Court School of Law in Inner Temple with the intention of becoming a barrister.[38] His childhood shyness and self-withdrawal had continued through his teens. He retained these traits when he arrived in London, but joined a public speaking practice group and overcame his shyness sufficiently to practise law.
He demonstrated a keen interest in the welfare of London's impoverished dockland communities. In 1889, a bitter trade dispute broke out in London, with dockers striking for better pay and conditions, and seamen, shipbuilders, factory girls and other joining the strike in solidarity. The strikers were successful, in part due to the mediation of Cardinal Manning, leading Gandhi and an Indian friend to make a point of visiting the cardinal and thanking him for his work.
Gandhi's time in London was influenced by the vow he had made to his mother. He tried to adopt "English" customs, including taking dancing lessons. However, he did not appreciate the bland vegetarian food offered by his landlady and was frequently hungry until he found one of London's few vegetarian restaurants. Influenced by Henry Salt's writing, he joined the London Vegetarian Society, and was elected to its executive committee under the aegis of its president and benefactor Arnold Hills. An achievement while on the committee was the establishment of a Bayswater chapter. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to join them in reading the Bhagavad Gita both in translation as well as in the original.
Gandhi had a friendly and productive relationship with Hills, but the two men took a different view on the continued LVS membership of fellow committee member Thomas Allinson. Their disagreement is the first known example of Gandhi challenging authority, despite his shyness and temperamental disinclination towards confrontation.
Allinson had been promoting newly available birth control methods, but Hills disapproved of these, believing they undermined public morality. He believed vegetarianism to be a moral movement and that Allinson should therefore no longer remain a member of the LVS. Gandhi shared Hills' views on the dangers of birth control, but defended Allinson's right to differ. It would have been hard for Gandhi to challenge Hills; Hills was 12 years his senior and unlike Gandhi, highly eloquent. He bankrolled the LVS and was a captain of industry with his Thames Ironworks company employing more than 6,000 people in the East End of London. He was also a highly accomplished sportsman who later founded the football club West Ham United. In his 1927 An Autobiography, Vol. I, Gandhi wrote:
The question deeply interested me...I had a high regard for Mr. Hills and his generosity. But I thought it was quite improper to exclude a man from a vegetarian society simply because he refused to regard puritan morals as one of the objects of the society
A motion to remove Allinson was raised, and was debated and voted on by the committee. Gandhi's shyness was an obstacle to his defence of Allinson at the committee meeting. He wrote his views down on paper but shyness prevented him from reading out his arguments, so Hills, the President, asked another committee member to read them out for him. Although some other members of the committee agreed with Gandhi, the vote was lost and Allinson excluded. There were no hard feelings, with Hills proposing the toast at the LVS farewell dinner in honour of Gandhi's return to India.
Gandhi, at age 22, was called to the bar in June 1891 and then left London for India, where he learned that his mother had died while he was in London and that his family had kept the news from him. His attempts at establishing a law practice in Bombay failed because he was psychologically unable to cross-examine witnesses. He returned to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants, but he was forced to stop when he ran afoul of British officer Sam Sunny.
In 1893, a Muslim merchant in Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah contacted Gandhi. Abdullah owned a large successful shipping business in South Africa. His distant cousin in Johannesburg needed a lawyer, and they preferred someone with Kathiawari heritage. Gandhi inquired about his pay for the work. They offered a total salary of £105 (~$4,143.31 2023 money) plus travel expenses. He accepted it, knowing that it would be at least a one-year commitment in the Colony of Natal, South Africa, also a part of the British Empire.
In April 1893, Gandhi, aged 23, set sail for South Africa to be the lawyer for Abdullah's cousin. He spent 21 years in South Africa, where he developed his political views, ethics and politics.
Immediately upon arriving in South Africa, Gandhi faced discrimination because of his skin colour and heritage. He was not allowed to sit with European passengers in the stagecoach and told to sit on the floor near the driver, then beaten when he refused; elsewhere he was kicked into a gutter for daring to walk near a house, in another instance thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg after refusing to leave the first-class. He sat in the train station, shivering all night and pondering if he should return to India or protest for his rights. He chose to protest and was allowed to board the train the next day. In another incident, the magistrate of a Durban court ordered Gandhi to remove his turban, which he refused to do. Indians were not allowed to walk on public footpaths in South Africa. Gandhi was kicked by a police officer out of the footpath onto the street without warning.
When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, according to Herman, he thought of himself as "a Briton first, and an Indian second". However, the prejudice against him and his fellow Indians from British people that Gandhi experienced and observed deeply bothered him. He found it humiliating, struggling to understand how some people can feel honour or superiority or pleasure in such inhumane practices. Gandhi began to question his people's standing in the British Empire.
The Abdullah case that had brought him to South Africa concluded in May 1894, and the Indian community organised a farewell party for Gandhi as he prepared to return to India. However, a new Natal government discriminatory proposal led to Gandhi extending his original period of stay in South Africa. He planned to assist Indians in opposing a bill to deny them the right to vote, a right then proposed to be an exclusive European right. He asked Joseph Chamberlain, the British Colonial Secretary, to reconsider his position on this bill. Though unable to halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the grievances of Indians in South Africa. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and through this organisation, he moulded the Indian community of South Africa into a unified political force. In January 1897, when Gandhi landed in Durban, a mob of white settlers attacked him and he escaped only through the efforts of the wife of the police superintendent. However, he refused to press charges against any member of the mob.
During the Boer War, Gandhi volunteered in 1900 to form a group of stretcher-bearers as the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps. According to Arthur Herman, Gandhi wanted to disprove the British colonial stereotype that Hindus were not fit for "manly" activities involving danger and exertion, unlike the Muslim "martial races". Gandhi raised eleven hundred Indian volunteers, to support British combat troops against the Boers. They were trained and medically certified to serve on the front lines. They were auxiliaries at the Battle of Colenso to a White volunteer ambulance corps. At the battle of Spion Kop Gandhi and his bearers moved to the front line and had to carry wounded soldiers for miles to a field hospital because the terrain was too rough for the ambulances. Gandhi and thirty-seven other Indians received the Queen's South Africa Medal.
In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling registration of the colony's Indian and Chinese populations. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg on 11 September that year, Gandhi adopted his still evolving methodology of Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or nonviolent protest, for the first time. According to Anthony Parel, Gandhi was also influenced by the Tamil moral text Tirukkuṛaḷ after Leo Tolstoy mentioned it in their correspondence that began with "A Letter to a Hindu". Gandhi urged Indians to defy the new law and to suffer the punishments for doing so. Gandhi's ideas of protests, persuasion skills and public relations had emerged. He took these back to India in 1915.
Gandhi focused his attention on Indians and Africans while he was in South Africa. He initially was not interested in politics. This changed, however, after he was discriminated against and bullied, such as by being thrown out of a train coach because of his skin colour by a white train official. After several such incidents with Whites in South Africa, Gandhi's thinking and focus changed, and he felt he must resist this and fight for rights. He entered politics by forming the Natal Indian Congress. According to Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Gandhi's views on racism are contentious in some cases, but that changed afterward.[further explanation needed] Gandhi suffered persecution from the beginning in South Africa. Like with other coloured people, white officials denied him his rights, and the press and those in the streets bullied and called him a "parasite", "semi-barbarous", "canker", "squalid coolie", "yellow man", and other epithets. People would spit on him as an expression of racial hate.
While in South Africa, Gandhi focused on the racial persecution of Indians before he started to focus on racism against Africans. In some cases, state Desai and Vahed, his behaviour was one of being a willing part of racial stereotyping and African exploitation. During a speech in September 1896, Gandhi complained that the whites in the British colony of South Africa were "degrading the Indian to the level of a raw Kaffir". Scholars cite it as an example of evidence that Gandhi at that time thought of Indians and black South Africans differently. As another example given by Herman, Gandhi, at the age of 24, prepared a legal brief for the Natal Assembly in 1895, seeking voting rights for Indians. Gandhi cited race history and European Orientalists' opinions that "Anglo-Saxons and Indians are sprung from the same Aryan stock or rather the Indo-European peoples", and argued that Indians should not be grouped with the Africans.
Years later, Gandhi and his colleagues served and helped Africans as nurses and by opposing racism. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela is among admirers of Gandhi's efforts to fight against racism in Africa. The general image of Gandhi, state Desai and Vahed, has been reinvented since his assassination as though he was always a saint, when in reality his life was more complex, contained inconvenient truths, and was one that changed over time.[68] Scholars have also pointed the evidence to a rich history of co-operation and efforts by Gandhi and Indian people with nonwhite South Africans against persecution of Africans and the Apartheid.
In 1906, when the Bambatha Rebellion broke out in the colony of Natal, the then 36-year-old Gandhi, despite sympathising with the Zulu rebels, encouraged Indian South Africans to form a volunteer stretcher-bearer unit. Writing in the Indian Opinion, Gandhi argued that military service would be beneficial to the Indian community and claimed it would give them "health and happiness". Gandhi eventually led a volunteer mixed unit of Indian and African stretcher-bearers to treat wounded combatants during the suppression of the rebellion.
The medical unit commanded by Gandhi operated for less than two months before being disbanded.[72] After the suppression of the rebellion, the colonial establishment showed no interest in extending to the Indian community the civil rights granted to white South Africans. This led Gandhi to becoming disillusioned with the Empire and aroused a spiritual awakening with him; historian Arthur L. Herman wrote that his African experience was a part of his great disillusionment with the West, transforming him into an "uncompromising non-cooperator".
By 1910, Gandhi's newspaper, Indian Opinion, was covering reports on discrimination against Africans by the colonial regime. Gandhi remarked that the Africans are "alone are the original inhabitants of the land. … The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the land forcibly and appropriated it to themselves."
In 1910, Gandhi established, with the help of his friend Hermann Kallenbach, an idealistic community they named Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg. There he nurtured his policy of peaceful resistance.
In the years after black South Africans gained the right to vote in South Africa (1994), Gandhi was proclaimed a national hero with numerous monuments.
At the request of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, conveyed to him by C. F. Andrews, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He brought an international reputation as a leading Indian nationalist, theorist and community organiser.
Gandhi joined the Indian National Congress and was introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation, and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took Gokhale's liberal approach based on British Whiggish traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian.
Gandhi took leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began escalating demands until on 26 January 1930 the Indian National Congress declared the independence of India. The British did not recognise the declaration but negotiations ensued, with the Congress taking a role in provincial government in the late 1930s. Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in September 1939 without consultation. Tensions escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate independence in 1942 and the British responded by imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress leaders. Meanwhile, the Muslim League did co-operate with Britain and moved, against Gandhi's strong opposition, to demands for a totally separate Muslim state of Pakistan. In August 1947 the British partitioned the land with India and Pakistan each achieving independence on terms that Gandhi disapproved.
In April 1918, during the latter part of World War I, the Viceroy invited Gandhi to a War Conference in Delhi. Gandhi agreed to actively recruit Indians for the war effort. In contrast to the Zulu War of 1906 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he recruited volunteers for the Ambulance Corps, this time Gandhi attempted to recruit combatants. In a June 1918 leaflet entitled "Appeal for Enlistment", Gandhi wrote "To bring about such a state of things we should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them... If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible despatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army." He did, however, stipulate in a letter to the Viceroy's private secretary that he "personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe."
Gandhi's war recruitment campaign brought into question his consistency on nonviolence. Gandhi's private secretary noted that "The question of the consistency between his creed of 'Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and his recruiting campaign was raised not only then but has been discussed ever since."
In July 1918, Gandhi admitted that he couldn't persuade even one individual to enlist for the world war. "So far I have not a single recruit to my credit apart," Gandhi wrote. He added: "They object because they fear to die."
Gandhi's first major achievement came in 1917 with the Champaran agitation in Bihar. The Champaran agitation pitted the local peasantry against largely Anglo-Indian plantation owners who were backed by the local administration. The peasants were forced to grow indigo (Indigofera sp.), a cash crop for Indigo dye whose demand had been declining over two decades, and were forced to sell their crops to the planters at a fixed price. Unhappy with this, the peasantry appealed to Gandhi at his ashram in Ahmedabad. Pursuing a strategy of nonviolent protest, Gandhi took the administration by surprise and won concessions from the authorities.
In 1918, Kheda was hit by floods and famine and the peasantry was demanding relief from taxes. Gandhi moved his headquarters to Nadiad, organising scores of supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the most notable being Vallabhbhai Patel. Using non-co-operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of revenue even under the threat of confiscation of land. A social boycott of mamlatdars and talatdars (revenue officials within the district) accompanied the agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for the agitation across the country. For five months, the administration refused, but by the end of May 1918, the Government gave way on important provisions and relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection and released all the prisoners.
In 1919, following World War I, Gandhi (aged 49) sought political co-operation from Muslims in his fight against British imperialism by supporting the Ottoman Empire that had been defeated in the World War. Before this initiative of Gandhi, communal disputes and religious riots between Hindus and Muslims were common in British India, such as the riots of 1917–18. Gandhi had already supported the British crown with resources and by recruiting Indian soldiers to fight the war in Europe on the British side. This effort of Gandhi was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I. The British government had offered, instead of self-government, minor reforms instead, disappointing Gandhi. Gandhi announced his satyagraha (civil disobedience) intentions. The British colonial officials made their counter move by passing the Rowlatt Act, to block Gandhi's movement. The Act allowed the British government to treat civil disobedience participants as criminals and gave it the legal basis to arrest anyone for "preventive indefinite detention, incarceration without judicial review or any need for a trial".
Gandhi felt that Hindu-Muslim co-operation was necessary for political progress against the British. He leveraged the Khilafat movement, wherein Sunni Muslims in India, their leaders such as the sultans of princely states in India and Ali brothers championed the Turkish Caliph as a solidarity symbol of Sunni Islamic community (ummah). They saw the Caliph as their means to support Islam and the Islamic law after the defeat of Ottoman Empire in World War I. Gandhi's support to the Khilafat movement led to mixed results. It initially led to a strong Muslim support for Gandhi. However, the Hindu leaders including Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they were largely against recognising or supporting the Sunni Islamic Caliph in Turkey.
The increasing Muslim support for Gandhi, after he championed the Caliph's cause, temporarily stopped the Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It offered evidence of inter-communal harmony in joint Rowlatt satyagraha demonstration rallies, raising Gandhi's stature as the political leader to the British. His support for the Khilafat movement also helped him sideline Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had announced his opposition to the satyagraha non-co-operation movement approach of Gandhi. Jinnah began creating his independent support, and later went on to lead the demand for West and East Pakistan. Though they agreed in general terms on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving this. Jinnah was mainly interested in dealing with the British via constitutional negotiation, rather than attempting to agitate the masses.
In 1922 the Khilafat movement gradually collapsed following the end of the non-cooperation movement with the arrest of Gandhi. A number of Muslim leaders and delegates abandoned Gandhi and Congress. Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts reignited. Deadly religious riots re-appeared in numerous cities, with 91 in United Provinces of Agra and Oudh alone.
With his book Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and swaraj (Indian independence) would come.
In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he would appeal to Indians to start civil disobedience. The British government ignored him and passed the law, stating it would not yield to threats. The satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with people assembling to protest the Rowlatt Act. On 30 March 1919, British law officers opened fire on an assembly of unarmed people, peacefully gathered, participating in satyagraha in Delhi.
People rioted in retaliation. On 6 April 1919, a Hindu festival day, he asked a crowd to remember not to injure or kill British people, but to express their frustration with peace, to boycott British goods and burn any British clothing they owned. He emphasised the use of non-violence to the British and towards each other, even if the other side used violence. Communities across India announced plans to gather in greater numbers to protest. Government warned him to not enter Delhi. Gandhi defied the order. On 9 April, Gandhi was arrested.
On 13 April 1919, people including women with children gathered in an Amritsar park, and British Indian Army officer Reginald Dyer surrounded them and ordered troops under his command to fire on them. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre (or Amritsar massacre) of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu civilians enraged the subcontinent, but was supported by some Britons and parts of the British media as a necessary response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticise the British and instead criticised his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using 'love' to deal with the 'hate' of the British government. Gandhi demanded that the Indian people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting.
The massacre and Gandhi's non-violent response to it moved many, but also made some Sikhs and Hindus upset that Dyer was getting away with murder. Investigation committees were formed by the British, which Gandhi asked Indians to boycott.[109] The unfolding events, the massacre and the British response, led Gandhi to the belief that Indians will never get a fair equal treatment under British rulers, and he shifted his attention to swaraj and political independence for India. In 1921, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress. He reorganised the Congress. With Congress now behind him, and Muslim support triggered by his backing the Khilafat movement to restore the Caliph in Turkey, Gandhi had the political support and the attention of the British Raj.
Gandhi expanded his nonviolent non-co-operation platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian men and women, rich or poor, to spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, and to forsake British titles and honours. Gandhi thus began his journey aimed at crippling the British India government economically, politically and administratively.
The appeal of "Non-cooperation" grew, its social popularity drew participation from all strata of Indian society. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He began his sentence on 18 March 1922. With Gandhi isolated in prison, the Indian National Congress split into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favouring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move. Furthermore, co-operation among Hindus and Muslims ended as Khilafat movement collapsed with the rise of Atatürk in Turkey. Muslim leaders left the Congress and began forming Muslim organisations. The political base behind Gandhi had broken into factions. Gandhi was released in February 1924 for an appendicitis operation, having served only two years.
After his early release from prison for political crimes in 1924, over the second half of the 1920s Gandhi continued to pursue swaraj. He pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of non-cooperation with complete independence for the country as its goal. After his support for World War I with Indian combat troops, and the failure of Khilafat movement in preserving the rule of Caliph in Turkey, followed by a collapse in Muslim support for his leadership, some such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh questioned his values and non-violent approach. While many Hindu leaders championed a demand for immediate independence, Gandhi revised his own call to a one-year wait, instead of two.
The British did not respond favourably to Gandhi's proposal. British political leaders such as Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill announced opposition to "the appeasers of Gandhi" in their discussions with European diplomats who sympathised with Indian demands. On 31 December 1929, an Indian flag was unfurled in Lahore. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of India's Independence Day in Lahore. This day was commemorated by almost every other Indian organisation. Gandhi then launched a new Satyagraha against the British salt tax in March 1930. Gandhi sent an ultimatum in the form of a letter personally addressed to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, on 2 March. Gandhi condemned British rule in the letter, describing it as "a curse" that "has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration...It has reduced us politically to serfdom." Gandhi also mentioned in the letter that the viceroy received a salary "over five thousand times India's average income." In the letter, Gandhi also stressed his continued adherence to non-violent forms of protest.
This was highlighted by the Salt March to Dandi from 12 March to 6 April, where, together with 78 volunteers, he marched 388 kilometres (241 mi) from Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws. The march took 25 days to cover 240 miles with Gandhi speaking to often huge crowds along the way. Thousands of Indians joined him in Dandi. On 5 May he was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in anticipation of a protest that he had planned. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without him see. A horrified American journalist, Webb Miller, described the British response thus:
In complete silence the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches and approached the barbed wire stockade... at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shot lathis [long bamboo sticks]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.
This went on for hours until some 300 or more protesters had been beaten, many seriously injured and two killed. At no time did they offer any resistance.
This campaign was one of his most successful at upsetting British hold on India; Britain responded by imprisoning over 60,000 people. Congress estimates, however, put the figure at 90,000. Among them was one of Gandhi's lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru.
According to Sarma, Gandhi recruited women to participate in the salt tax campaigns and the boycott of foreign products, which gave many women a new self-confidence and dignity in the mainstream of Indian public life. However, other scholars such as Marilyn French state that Gandhi barred women from joining his civil disobedience movement because he feared he would be accused of using women as a political shield. When women insisted on joining the movement and participating in public demonstrations, Gandhi asked the volunteers to get permissions of their guardians and only those women who can arrange child-care should join him. Regardless of Gandhi's apprehensions and views, Indian women joined the Salt March by the thousands to defy the British salt taxes and monopoly on salt mining. After Gandhi's arrest, the women marched and picketed shops on their own, accepting violence and verbal abuse from British authorities for the cause in the manner Gandhi inspired.
Indian Congress in the 1920s appealed to Andhra Pradesh peasants by creating Telugu language plays that combined Indian mythology and legends, linked them to Gandhi's ideas, and portrayed Gandhi as a messiah, a reincarnation of ancient and medieval Indian nationalist leaders and saints. The plays built support among peasants steeped in traditional Hindu culture, according to Murali, and this effort made Gandhi a folk hero in Telugu speaking villages, a sacred messiah-like figure.
According to Dennis Dalton, it was Gandhi's ideas that were responsible for his wide following. Gandhi criticised Western civilisation as one driven by "brute force and immorality", contrasting it with his categorisation of Indian civilisation as one driven by "soul force and morality". Gandhi captured the imagination of the people of his heritage with his ideas about winning "hate with love". These ideas are evidenced in his pamphlets from the 1890s, in South Africa, where too he was popular among the Indian indentured workers. After he returned to India, people flocked to him because he reflected their values.
Gandhi also campaigned hard going from one rural corner of the Indian subcontinent to another. He used terminology and phrases such as Rama-rajya from Ramayana, Prahlada as a paradigmatic icon, and such cultural symbols as another facet of swaraj and satyagraha. During his lifetime, these ideas sounded strange outside India, but they readily and deeply resonated with the culture and historic values of his people.
The government, represented by Lord Irwin, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The Gandhi–Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931. The British Government agreed to free all political prisoners, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. According to the pact, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London for discussions and as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists. Gandhi expected to discuss India's independence, while the British side focused on the Indian princes and Indian minorities rather than on a transfer of power. Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, took a hard line against India as an independent nation, began a new campaign of controlling and subduing the nationalist movement. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government tried and failed to negate his influence by completely isolating him from his followers.
In Britain, Winston Churchill, a prominent Conservative politician who was then out of office but later became its prime minister, became a vigorous and articulate critic of Gandhi and opponent of his long-term plans. Churchill often ridiculed Gandhi, saying in a widely reported 1931 speech:
It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace....to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.
Churchill's bitterness against Gandhi grew in the 1930s. He called Gandhi as the one who was "seditious in aim" whose evil genius and multiform menace was attacking the British empire. Churchill called him a dictator, a "Hindu Mussolini", fomenting a race war, trying to replace the Raj with Brahmin cronies, playing on the ignorance of Indian masses, all for selfish gain. Churchill attempted to isolate Gandhi, and his criticism of Gandhi was widely covered by European and American press. It gained Churchill sympathetic support, but it also increased support for Gandhi among Europeans. The developments heightened Churchill's anxiety that the "British themselves would give up out of pacifism and misplaced conscience".
During the discussions between Gandhi and the British government over 1931–32 at the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of colonial British rule, and begin the self-rule by Indians. The British side sought reforms that would keep the Indian subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion model that established separate electorates based on religious and social divisions. The British questioned the Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of India. They invited Indian religious leaders, such as Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along religious lines, as well as B. R. Ambedkar as the representative leader of the untouchables. Gandhi vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring people together but divide them, perpetuate their status, and divert the attention from India's struggle to end the colonial rule.
The Second Round Table conference was the only time he left India between 1914 and his death in 1948. He declined the government's offer of accommodation in an expensive West End hotel, preferring to stay in the East End, to live among working-class people, as he did in India. He based himself in a small cell-bedroom at Kingsley Hall for the three-month duration of his stay and was enthusiastically received by East Enders. During this time he renewed his links with the British vegetarian movement.
After Gandhi returned from the Second Round Table conference, he started a new satyagraha. He was arrested and imprisoned at the Yerwada Jail, Pune. While he was in prison, the British government enacted a new law that granted untouchables a separate electorate. It came to be known as the Communal Award. In protest, Gandhi started a fast-unto-death, while he was held in prison. The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise Poona Pact.
In 1934 Gandhi resigned from Congress party membership. He did not disagree with the party's position but felt that if he resigned, his popularity with Indians would cease to stifle the party's membership, which actually varied, including communists, socialists, trade unionists, students, religious conservatives, and those with pro-business convictions, and that these various voices would get a chance to make themselves heard. Gandhi also wanted to avoid being a target for Raj propaganda by leading a party that had temporarily accepted political accommodation with the Raj.
Gandhi returned to active politics again in 1936, with the Nehru presidency and the Lucknow session of the Congress. Although Gandhi wanted a total focus on the task of winning independence and not speculation about India's future, he did not restrain the Congress from adopting socialism as its goal. Gandhi had a clash with Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected president in 1938, and who had previously expressed a lack of faith in nonviolence as a means of protest. Despite Gandhi's opposition, Bose won a second term as Congress President, against Gandhi's nominee, Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Gandhi declared that Sitaramayya's defeat was his defeat. Bose later left the Congress when the All-India leaders resigned en masse in protest of his abandonment of the principles introduced by Gandhi.
Gandhi opposed providing any help to the British war effort and he campaigned against any Indian participation in World War II. The British government responded with the arrests of Gandhi and many other Congress leaders and killed over 1,000 Indians who participated in this movement. A number of violent attacks were also carried out by the nationalists against the British government. While Gandhi's campaign did not enjoy the support of a number of Indian leaders, and over 2.5 million Indians volunteered and joined the British military to fight on various fronts of the Allied Forces, the movement played a role in weakening the control over the South Asian region by the British regime and it ultimately paved the way for Indian independence.
Gandhi's opposition to the Indian participation in World War II was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India itself. He also condemned Nazism and Fascism, a view which won endorsement of other Indian leaders. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his demand for independence, calling for the British to Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai. This was Gandhi's and the Congress Party's most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from India. The British government responded quickly to the Quit India speech, and within hours after Gandhi's speech arrested Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee. His countrymen retaliated the arrests by damaging or burning down hundreds of government owned railway stations, police stations, and cutting down telegraph wires.
In 1942, Gandhi now nearing age 73, urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government. In this effort, he urged that they neither kill nor injure British people, but be willing to suffer and die if violence is initiated by the British officials. He clarified that the movement would not be stopped because of any individual acts of violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" of "the present system of administration" was "worse than real anarchy." He urged Indians to karo ya maro ("do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms.
Gandhi's arrest lasted two years, as he was held in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. During this period, his long time secretary Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack, his wife Kasturba died after 18 months' imprisonment on 22 February 1944; and Gandhi suffered a severe malaria attack. While in jail, he agreed to an interview with Stuart Gelder, a British journalist. Gelder then composed and released an interview summary, cabled it to the mainstream press, that announced sudden concessions Gandhi was willing to make, comments that shocked his countrymen, the Congress workers and even Gandhi. The latter two claimed that it distorted what Gandhi actually said on a range of topics and falsely repudiated the Quit India movement.
Gandhi was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage the nation. He came out of detention to an altered political scene – the Muslim League for example, which a few years earlier had appeared marginal, "now occupied the centre of the political stage" and the topic of Jinnah's campaign for Pakistan was a major talking point. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence and the two men met several times over a period of two weeks in September 1944 at Jinnah's house in Bombay, where Gandhi insisted on a united religiously plural and independent India which included Muslims and non-Muslims of the Indian subcontinent coexisting. Jinnah rejected this proposal and insisted instead for partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a separate Muslim homeland (later Pakistan).These discussions continued through 1947.
While the leaders of Congress languished in jail, the other parties supported the war and gained organisational strength. Underground publications flailed at the ruthless suppression of Congress, but it had little control over events. At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to Indian hands. At this point Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.
Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the British to Quit India. However, the All-India Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India". Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority.
Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now Bangladesh and West Bengal, gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day. The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict. The British government did not order its army to move in to contain the violence. The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed. Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres.
Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harbouring the single minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician. Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it.
The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi".
The partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.
Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on 15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses. Gandhi's fasting and protests are credited for stopping the religious riots and communal violence.
At 5:17 pm on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was with his grandnieces in the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), on his way to address a prayer meeting, when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, fired three bullets into his chest from a pistol at close range. According to some accounts, Gandhi died instantly. In other accounts, such as one prepared by an eyewitness journalist, Gandhi was carried into the Birla House, into a bedroom. There he died about 30 minutes later as one of Gandhi's family members read verses from Hindu scriptures.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed his countrymen over the All-India Radio saying:
Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me, but for millions and millions in this country.
Godse, a Hindu nationalist, with links to the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, made no attempt to escape; several other conspirators were soon arrested as well. The accused were Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Narayan Apte, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Shankar Kistayya, Dattatraya Parchure, Vishnu Karkare, Madanlal Pahwa, and Gopal Godse.
The trial began on 27 May 1948 and ran for eight months before Justice Atma Charan passed his final order on 10 February 1949. The prosecution called 149 witnesses, the defense none. The court found all of the defendants except one guilty as charged. Eight men were convicted for the murder conspiracy, and others were convicted for violation of the Explosive Substances Act. Savarkar was acquitted and set free. Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to death by hanging and the remaining six (including Godse's brother, Gopal) were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Gandhi's death was mourned nationwide. Over a million people joined the five-mile-long funeral procession that took over five hours to reach Raj Ghat from Birla house, where he was assassinated, and another million watched the procession pass by. Gandhi's body was transported on a weapons carrier, whose chassis was dismantled overnight to allow a high-floor to be installed so that people could catch a glimpse of his body. The engine of the vehicle was not used; instead four drag-ropes held by 50 people each pulled the vehicle. All Indian-owned establishments in London remained closed in mourning as thousands of people from all faiths and denominations and Indians from all over Britain converged at India House in London.
Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition. His ashes were poured into urns which were sent across India for memorial services. Most of the ashes were immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad on 12 February 1948, but some were secretly taken away. In 1997, Tushar Gandhi immersed the contents of one urn, found in a bank vault and reclaimed through the courts, at the Sangam at Allahabad. Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, and a memorial plaque marks the event. On 30 January 2008, the contents of another urn were immersed at Girgaum Chowpatty. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune (where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944) and another in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.
The Birla House site where Gandhi was assassinated is now a memorial called Gandhi Smriti. The place near Yamuna river where he was cremated is the Rāj Ghāt memorial in New Delhi. A black marble platform, it bears the epigraph "Hē Rāma" (Devanagari: हे ! राम or, Hey Raam). These are said to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot.
Had I been a bollywood film-maker .Guess I would have made movies like Sanjay leela bhansali. I relate to the guy in some way , his artistic approach in every frame ,his love for detailing, his play with light and color.For me he has it in him!! He has a soul of an artist !!
He is brilliant and a true genius and no where I am near him ,You can call me fan of his work or may be my soul thinks like his soul..( I seriously think so.. not from today but right from the first day I saw his work in Devdas ,Black ,Saawariyaan etc etc ;) but if he is 10 ,I scale myself to 4 coz I believe technically i have to learn a lot..creativity no probs :)
I too attempt to do creative work in my own little ways be it in my designing (garments) or in photography ....rather it comes naturally !
Thanks for all your love and support ,appreciating mails and encouragements.Thanks for liking my portrait work so much.This is for people who think that I have a different approach in portrait photography .
Just few things below what I see while clicking portraits :
I like to get soul of the character than just pictures .
Raw things appeals to me than made up ones..and so are the expressions.
I like grace than glamor.
I like beautiful than hot..
I like the real people ,the way they are ...or they want to be... (hidden ambitions sometimes ;) )....than made ups..
I like simplicity than trying hard to get attention sorts.
Minimalism over loud and flashy...(excluding exceptions where it is required to avoid other distractions )
Most of the times people I click are either friends or family and trust me I have never tried to make someone look like someone else which that person is not rather have tried to know that person and have made frames accordingly.
And sometimes I click them the way I SEE THEM which they themselves dont knw about them..You knw what I mean !!! ;P
:D
posted at FB
Of my family
A drinker
A boozard
An Alcoholic
When I got high
It was the Demon
In the bottle I got
My kicks.
I drank
No I did not
say Map Karo
Malik I did not
Walk with the help
Of a stick..
Even as an
Alcoholic
A Bevda
Devdas of
Yacht
Asses I did
Not lick
I caused
Pain to my
Wife kids
I lived in
A glass house
People threw
Bricks
On the scale
Of my choice
Between
The Bottle
My family
It was the bottle
I picked
It was my
Fucked
Cosmic
Fate
I got tricked
20 years now
Never touched a dop
Never took a drink
The bottle and me
No more in sync
Ashwarya Rai
by Safdar Ali
A pencil drawing of Bollywood Actress Ashwarya Rai’s portrait on a creamy textured paper.
© Todos los derechos reservados.
Captura de pantalla de televisor de la película Devdas
Devdas (en hindú देवदास) es una película del cine de la India de 2002 hindi basada en la novela de Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay Devdas. Devdas fue dirigida por Sanjay Leela Bhansali e interpretada por Shahrukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan , Madhuri Dixit, Jackie Shroff, Kiron Kher, Smita Jayka.
Nominaciones [editar]Mejor actriz por Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Ganadora de 8 Zee Cine Awards 2002.
Ganadora de 11 Annual Stars Screen Awards 2003.
Nominada al mejor film de lengua no inglesa en los BAFTA del 2003.
Fue la película seleccionada por la India para los Oscars del 2003.
Theme: iSphere wallpaper
Subject: celebrity backgrounds
Description: celebrity backgrounds,
from all countries, all industries, whether HollyWood or BollyWood, film or music, arts, politics etc.,
with both landscape (horizontal) + portrait (vertical) orientation versions
from drawing, painting, photo or photo retouching…
art work:
Star background, Aishwarya Rai, red hair face floating in black background @ bottom center, Gurulicious Life type 3D gold green
Format: 10124 x 768 pixels (iPad HD), 150dpi, RGB, landscape
© 2007-2011 iGuru / the graphicJungle
Actress History
===========
Aishwarya Rai
born in Mangalore, Karnataka, India 1973 Nov 1, aged 37 in 2010,
living in Mumbai, married 2007 to son actor Abhishek of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan)
has 1 older brother, Aditya, engineer in merchant navy, produced her 2003 film Dil Ka Rishta
Hindu + deeply religious
mother tongue: Tulu but speaks 4 more languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, English
Bollywood star (over 40 movies by 2010)
+ model (often quoted as world's most beautiful woman)
+ Miss World 1994 (won 2nd place Miss India, prior to MW contest same year, losing to Sushmita Sen who won 1994 Miss Universe and acts mainly in Bollywood)
planned to be architect but moved to modeling thanks to win in Miss World, living 1 yr in London
modeling lead to acting
AWARDS:
double Filmfare Best Actress winner (1999+2002)
2009 Padma Shri Indian Gov. Honour (4th highest civilian award)
2009 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order Of France) (only 4th Indian actor, refused award as dad ill)
2009 Female Star of The Decade @ 10th International Indian Film Academy Awards, Macau
2010 Actress of the Decade @ BIG Star Entertainment Awards
2003 The most attractive woman of 2003 @ Hello mag, UK
2003 Hot List @ Rolling Stone mag annual
2004 + 2010 100 Most Influential People @ Times mag
2003 L'Oreal Global Brand Ambassador (previous winners: Andie Macdowell, Eva Longoria, Penelope Cruz)
2004 Madame Tussaud wax museum, London (6th Indian, 2nd Bollywood star to be awarded a Tussaud statue)
2005 The World's Most Beautiful Woman ('at least according to thousands of Web sites, Internet polls and even Julia Roberts') interview on CBS 60 Minutes Jan 2
2005 special tulip named after her in the Netherlands
2005 Barbie doll
2005 1st Bollywood star on Oprah's 'Women Across the Globe'
2005 '10 Most Beautiful Women in The World' #9 on Harpers and Queen's list
2006 World's Most Beautiful People @ American People mag
2006 Asia's Sexiest Women @ Eastern Eye mag, UK Sep
2007 1st Bollywood star in Madame Tussaud, NY
2009 387 out of 1411 actors as most bankable Indian star in Hollywood @ Forbes list
2011 Vogue cover thrice
famous ROLES:
1st role Iruvar (1997),
then…
Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) (Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Taal (1999) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Josh (2000)
Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai (2000) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Mohabbatein (2002) (nominated, Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award)
Devdas (2002) (Cannes Film Festival entry 2002, 2002's highest grossing film worldwide, highest gross in India @ Rs390M, winner of 10 Filmfare Best Actress Awards + int'l awards)
Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Raincoat (2004) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Mistress of Spices (2005) (with Dylan McDermott)
Umrao Jaan (2006)
Dhoom 2 (2006) (highest gross in India @ Rs770M) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Guru (2007) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Provoked (2007) (British film with Naveen Andrews)
The Last Legion (2007) (with Sir Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth)
Jodhaa Akbar (2008) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
Guzaarish (2010) (nominated for Filmfare Best Actress Award)
CHARITY:
2004 tsunami earthquake: part of Bollywood starts for HELP! Telethon Concert 2005 Feb
2008 founded underprivilged girl school in her name in Daulatpur village, Uttar Pradesh
2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Closing Ceremony showcasing Indian culture
© 2007-2011 iSphere / the graphicJungle
Theme: iSphere wallpaper
Subject: celebrity backgrounds
Description: celebrity backgrounds,
from all countries, all industries, whether HollyWood or BollyWood, film or music, arts, politics etc.,
with both landscape (horizontal) + portrait (vertical) orientation versions
from drawing, painting, photo or photo retouching…
art work:
Star background, Aishwarya Rai, red hair face floating in black background @ top right
Format: 10124 x 768 pixels (iPad HD), 150dpi, RGB, landscape
© 2007-2011 iGuru / the graphicJungle
Actress History
===========
Aishwarya Rai
born in Mangalore, Karnataka, India 1973 Nov 1, aged 37 in 2010,
living in Mumbai, married 2007 to son actor Abhishek of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan)
has 1 older brother, Aditya, engineer in merchant navy, produced her 2003 film Dil Ka Rishta
Hindu + deeply religious
mother tongue: Tulu but speaks 4 more languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, English
Bollywood star (over 40 movies by 2010)
+ model (often quoted as world's most beautiful woman)
+ Miss World 1994 (won 2nd place Miss India, prior to MW contest same year, losing to Sushmita Sen who won 1994 Miss Universe and acts mainly in Bollywood)
planned to be architect but moved to modeling thanks to win in Miss World, living 1 yr in London
modeling lead to acting
AWARDS:
double Filmfare Best Actress winner (1999+2002)
2009 Padma Shri Indian Gov. Honour (4th highest civilian award)
2009 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order Of France) (only 4th Indian actor, refused award as dad ill)
2009 Female Star of The Decade @ 10th International Indian Film Academy Awards, Macau
2010 Actress of the Decade @ BIG Star Entertainment Awards
2003 The most attractive woman of 2003 @ Hello mag, UK
2003 Hot List @ Rolling Stone mag annual
2004 + 2010 100 Most Influential People @ Times mag
2003 L'Oreal Global Brand Ambassador (previous winners: Andie Macdowell, Eva Longoria, Penelope Cruz)
2004 Madame Tussaud wax museum, London (6th Indian, 2nd Bollywood star to be awarded a Tussaud statue)
2005 The World's Most Beautiful Woman ('at least according to thousands of Web sites, Internet polls and even Julia Roberts') interview on CBS 60 Minutes Jan 2
2005 special tulip named after her in the Netherlands
2005 Barbie doll
2005 1st Bollywood star on Oprah's 'Women Across the Globe'
2005 '10 Most Beautiful Women in The World' #9 on Harpers and Queen's list
2006 World's Most Beautiful People @ American People mag
2006 Asia's Sexiest Women @ Eastern Eye mag, UK Sep
2007 1st Bollywood star in Madame Tussaud, NY
2009 387 out of 1411 actors as most bankable Indian star in Hollywood @ Forbes list
2011 Vogue cover thrice
famous ROLES:
1st role Iruvar (1997),
then…
Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) (Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Taal (1999) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Josh (2000)
Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai (2000) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Mohabbatein (2002) (nominated, Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award)
Devdas (2002) (Cannes Film Festival entry 2002, 2002's highest grossing film worldwide, highest gross in India @ Rs390M, winner of 10 Filmfare Best Actress Awards + int'l awards)
Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Raincoat (2004) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Mistress of Spices (2005) (with Dylan McDermott)
Umrao Jaan (2006)
Dhoom 2 (2006) (highest gross in India @ Rs770M) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Guru (2007) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Provoked (2007) (British film with Naveen Andrews)
The Last Legion (2007) (with Sir Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth)
Jodhaa Akbar (2008) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
Guzaarish (2010) (nominated for Filmfare Best Actress Award)
CHARITY:
2004 tsunami earthquake: part of Bollywood starts for HELP! Telethon Concert 2005 Feb
2008 founded underprivilged girl school in her name in Daulatpur village, Uttar Pradesh
2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Closing Ceremony showcasing Indian culture
© 2007-2011 iSphere / the graphicJungle
Theme: iSphere wallpaper
Subject: celebrity backgrounds
Description: celebrity backgrounds,
from all countries, all industries, whether HollyWood or BollyWood, film or music, arts, politics etc.,
with both landscape (horizontal) + portrait (vertical) orientation versions
from drawing, painting, photo or photo retouching…
art work:
Star background, Aishwarya Rai, red hair face floating in black background @ bottom right
Format: 10124 x 768 pixels (iPad HD), 150dpi, RGB, portrait
© 2007-2011 iGuru / the graphicJungle
Actress History
===========
Aishwarya Rai
born in Mangalore, Karnataka, India 1973 Nov 1, aged 37 in 2010,
living in Mumbai, married 2007 to son actor Abhishek of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan)
has 1 older brother, Aditya, engineer in merchant navy, produced her 2003 film Dil Ka Rishta
Hindu + deeply religious
mother tongue: Tulu but speaks 4 more languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, English
Bollywood star (over 40 movies by 2010)
+ model (often quoted as world's most beautiful woman)
+ Miss World 1994 (won 2nd place Miss India, prior to MW contest same year, losing to Sushmita Sen who won 1994 Miss Universe and acts mainly in Bollywood)
planned to be architect but moved to modeling thanks to win in Miss World, living 1 yr in London
modeling lead to acting
AWARDS:
double Filmfare Best Actress winner (1999+2002)
2009 Padma Shri Indian Gov. Honour (4th highest civilian award)
2009 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order Of France) (only 4th Indian actor, refused award as dad ill)
2009 Female Star of The Decade @ 10th International Indian Film Academy Awards, Macau
2010 Actress of the Decade @ BIG Star Entertainment Awards
2003 The most attractive woman of 2003 @ Hello mag, UK
2003 Hot List @ Rolling Stone mag annual
2004 + 2010 100 Most Influential People @ Times mag
2003 L'Oreal Global Brand Ambassador (previous winners: Andie Macdowell, Eva Longoria, Penelope Cruz)
2004 Madame Tussaud wax museum, London (6th Indian, 2nd Bollywood star to be awarded a Tussaud statue)
2005 The World's Most Beautiful Woman ('at least according to thousands of Web sites, Internet polls and even Julia Roberts') interview on CBS 60 Minutes Jan 2
2005 special tulip named after her in the Netherlands
2005 Barbie doll
2005 1st Bollywood star on Oprah's 'Women Across the Globe'
2005 '10 Most Beautiful Women in The World' #9 on Harpers and Queen's list
2006 World's Most Beautiful People @ American People mag
2006 Asia's Sexiest Women @ Eastern Eye mag, UK Sep
2007 1st Bollywood star in Madame Tussaud, NY
2009 387 out of 1411 actors as most bankable Indian star in Hollywood @ Forbes list
2011 Vogue cover thrice
famous ROLES:
1st role Iruvar (1997),
then…
Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) (Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Taal (1999) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Josh (2000)
Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai (2000) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Mohabbatein (2002) (nominated, Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award)
Devdas (2002) (Cannes Film Festival entry 2002, 2002's highest grossing film worldwide, highest gross in India @ Rs390M, winner of 10 Filmfare Best Actress Awards + int'l awards)
Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Raincoat (2004) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Mistress of Spices (2005) (with Dylan McDermott)
Umrao Jaan (2006)
Dhoom 2 (2006) (highest gross in India @ Rs770M) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Guru (2007) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Provoked (2007) (British film with Naveen Andrews)
The Last Legion (2007) (with Sir Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth)
Jodhaa Akbar (2008) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
Guzaarish (2010) (nominated for Filmfare Best Actress Award)
CHARITY:
2004 tsunami earthquake: part of Bollywood starts for HELP! Telethon Concert 2005 Feb
2008 founded underprivilged girl school in her name in Daulatpur village, Uttar Pradesh
2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Closing Ceremony showcasing Indian culture
© 2007-2011 iSphere / the graphicJungle
Theme: iSphere wallpaper
Subject: celebrity backgrounds
Description: celebrity backgrounds,
from all countries, all industries, whether HollyWood or BollyWood, film or music, arts, politics etc.,
with both landscape (horizontal) + portrait (vertical) orientation versions
from drawing, painting, photo or photo retouching…
art work:
Star background, Aishwarya Rai, red hair face floating in black background @ bottom right, Gurulicious Life type 3D gold green
Format: 10124 x 768 pixels (iPad HD), 150dpi, RGB, portrait
© 2007-2011 iGuru / the graphicJungle
Actress History
===========
Aishwarya Rai
born in Mangalore, Karnataka, India 1973 Nov 1, aged 37 in 2010,
living in Mumbai, married 2007 to son actor Abhishek of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan)
has 1 older brother, Aditya, engineer in merchant navy, produced her 2003 film Dil Ka Rishta
Hindu + deeply religious
mother tongue: Tulu but speaks 4 more languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, English
Bollywood star (over 40 movies by 2010)
+ model (often quoted as world's most beautiful woman)
+ Miss World 1994 (won 2nd place Miss India, prior to MW contest same year, losing to Sushmita Sen who won 1994 Miss Universe and acts mainly in Bollywood)
planned to be architect but moved to modeling thanks to win in Miss World, living 1 yr in London
modeling lead to acting
AWARDS:
double Filmfare Best Actress winner (1999+2002)
2009 Padma Shri Indian Gov. Honour (4th highest civilian award)
2009 Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order Of France) (only 4th Indian actor, refused award as dad ill)
2009 Female Star of The Decade @ 10th International Indian Film Academy Awards, Macau
2010 Actress of the Decade @ BIG Star Entertainment Awards
2003 The most attractive woman of 2003 @ Hello mag, UK
2003 Hot List @ Rolling Stone mag annual
2004 + 2010 100 Most Influential People @ Times mag
2003 L'Oreal Global Brand Ambassador (previous winners: Andie Macdowell, Eva Longoria, Penelope Cruz)
2004 Madame Tussaud wax museum, London (6th Indian, 2nd Bollywood star to be awarded a Tussaud statue)
2005 The World's Most Beautiful Woman ('at least according to thousands of Web sites, Internet polls and even Julia Roberts') interview on CBS 60 Minutes Jan 2
2005 special tulip named after her in the Netherlands
2005 Barbie doll
2005 1st Bollywood star on Oprah's 'Women Across the Globe'
2005 '10 Most Beautiful Women in The World' #9 on Harpers and Queen's list
2006 World's Most Beautiful People @ American People mag
2006 Asia's Sexiest Women @ Eastern Eye mag, UK Sep
2007 1st Bollywood star in Madame Tussaud, NY
2009 387 out of 1411 actors as most bankable Indian star in Hollywood @ Forbes list
2011 Vogue cover thrice
famous ROLES:
1st role Iruvar (1997),
then…
Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) (Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Taal (1999) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Josh (2000)
Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai (2000) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Mohabbatein (2002) (nominated, Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award)
Devdas (2002) (Cannes Film Festival entry 2002, 2002's highest grossing film worldwide, highest gross in India @ Rs390M, winner of 10 Filmfare Best Actress Awards + int'l awards)
Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Raincoat (2004) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Mistress of Spices (2005) (with Dylan McDermott)
Umrao Jaan (2006)
Dhoom 2 (2006) (highest gross in India @ Rs770M) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Guru (2007) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
Provoked (2007) (British film with Naveen Andrews)
The Last Legion (2007) (with Sir Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth)
Jodhaa Akbar (2008) (nominated, Filmfare Best Actress Award)
The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
Guzaarish (2010) (nominated for Filmfare Best Actress Award)
CHARITY:
2004 tsunami earthquake: part of Bollywood starts for HELP! Telethon Concert 2005 Feb
2008 founded underprivilged girl school in her name in Daulatpur village, Uttar Pradesh
2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Closing Ceremony showcasing Indian culture
© 2007-2011 iSphere / the graphicJungle
Bete ke dhadhakte dil ke liye
hum hindusatan ki kismat nahi badal sakte
These were a filmi dialogues on a passing ricksha that I shot…
(Tanslated from Urdu it means ..
For the heart beats of a sons love I cannot change the destiny of Hindustan…
The son was Prince Salim the father Emperor Akbar in the film Moghul E Azam, the son was besotted by Anrakali a coourtean, or Tawaif, wanted to marry her and make her the Queen of his Heart and his Kingdom..)
Its a famous dialogue written in hindi on the rickshah, I craned and took the shot.The film was a yester year block buster Moghul E Azam..Emperor Akbars son Salim falls in love with a dancing girl or Tawaif , and is completely besotted by her wants to make her his wife , Emperor Akbar says to his Queen Jodha Bai, that he will not allow the thumping of a fickle Princes heart to change the destiny of India.. Hindustan.How can the future of the great Moghul Empire , be tied down in history with Ghungroos ..on the feet of a great country.
Women of such backgrounds were not part of the ruling hierarchy, many a kingdom was ruined by the love of a scion to the Tawaif.In Lucknow where Tawaifs were patronised by the reignning Nawabs of Avadh , this Tawaif culture was an Art Form.. of Tehzeeb and Adab, etiquette and culture.
Noble men sent their children to these Kothas , or to the Kothewalis to learn cuture ,etiqutte, deportment.. collectively known as Adab Tahzeeb…
Romance took place , a lot of Hindi pictures were made on this theme, illicit love of the nobleman and the courtesan..
Pakeezah a Kamal Amrohi film..
Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam..A Guru Dutt Film..
Beautiful old time charm, old sets of Havelis, tantalising eternal lilting music…
Abhi Na Jao Chodkar Ke Dil Abhi Bhara Nahi…
Enhi logon ne …
Sheer cinematic nostalgia…
I lived in an extensin of the opulent house of the great thespian actor Late Nawab Kashmiri.. whose wife was from the royal family of Avadh, though Nawab Saab and his wife were dead, his mother in law Ammi.. the daughter in law of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah.. was the head of the family.. that consisted of her grandchildren, Akthar Baji, Anwar and Munnawar..Anwar Bhai died sometime back,, he used to wear all kinds of scary masks give my paternal grandmother Khurshed Baji a very hard time..
We grew up as kids in their house, our room was their servants quarters given as rent to my migrant father from lucknow..it was no ordinary servants quarters.. 3 rooms.. all at Khatau Mansions Wode House Road, the otherside of the extension lived a very rich modern family Dossabhai Kanga his wife Gwendolyn their son Keith Kanga.. with his grandmother.. all dead and gone..
Keith Kanga was the pioneer of the Rock scene early 60s in Bombay.. he died unsung…unremembered by the very fraternity of musicians that he promoted .. in their hard days.Nandu Bhende, Neil Chatophadya, so many… just names ..
This was not part of my earlier post.,.. but Adab and Tehzeeb.. is what you transplant .. wherever you go and relocate…Nawab Saabs family let it rub off on us…though my mothers side of Daroga Nabban saab.. took its ancestry from Mir Anis..
Now back too my topic on Tawaifs..
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Historically, a tawaif was a courtesan who catered to the Muslim nobility of South Asia, particularly during the Mughal era. They were skilled singers (North Indian classical music), dancers (usually Kathak), and poets (Urdu poetry). They were generally highly educated and refined. High-class tawaifs could often pick and choose between the best of their suitors.
The tawaif is celebrated in the Bollywood films Pakeezah (1972), Umrao Jaan (1981), and Devdas (2002
UMRAO JAAN
www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/umraojaan.html
Muzaffar Ali’s adaptation of the first great modern Urdu novel, Umrao Jan Ada by Mirza Ruswa (1905), makes cinematic adjustments and compromises, but is a gem all the same. Whereas Ruswa interwove his fictional memoir of a 19th century tawayaf (courtesan or public woman) of Lucknow with a lively dialogic frame-narrative, in which the courtesan and author, both grown old, reminisce, tease one another, and quote copious ghazal poetry, the director presents a linear account of Umrao’s early life from childhood on, ending soon after the Rebellion of 1857 (a.k.a., the “Sepoy Mutiny”). Where the novel’s heroine is said to be plain, though blessed with a good voice and sharp mind, the film’s is…well, Rekha, here further endowed with the voice of Asha Bhosle singing ghazals that have all become famous. Where the literary Umrao admits to “never having really loved a man,” the cinematic Umrao has one great and lingering romance. The chronology of events is drastically altered as well, and of course a great deal is omitted. Nevertheless, Ali’s film is lovely in its own right, and apart from offering fine performances by renowned actors and gorgeous songs and dances, it succeeds remarkably well in capturing (through lovely cinematography and accurate period sets) much of the atmosphere of the novel, which both celebrates and problematizes the world of the chowk—the prostitute’s quarter of old Lucknow. It also conveys some of Ruswa’s surprisingly radical subtext: his meditation on the plight of upper-class women, whether begums (respectable but housebound wives) or tawayafs (alluring and educated but socially-disapproved courtesans), as birds equally caged by patriarchal double standards. It thus invites comparison with Kamal Amrohi’s PAKEEZAH (1971), which explores some of the same themes in a more allegorical register.
The setting is Lucknow, capital of the northeastern kingdom of Oudh (a.k.a. Awadh), which broke away from the crumbling Mughal Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. After the cultural and economic decline of Delhi, many poets and artists moved eastward, seeking the patronage of the heterodox Shi’ite Muslim rulers of Oudh. Their capital became renowned for the refinement and exaggerated elegance of its Persianized Urdu, as well as for the decadence of its lifestyle, which revolved around the Nawab’s court and the prostitutes’ chowk. The British East India Company’s forceful annexation of Oudh and deposition of its last king in 1856 helped to precipitate the outbreak, the following year, of widespread rebellion against their rule.
As the credits roll, we see the child Ameeran (Umme Farwa), a middle-class Muslim girl of Faizabad, being adorned, at roughly age twelve, for her engagement ceremony while women sing a traditional song. We soon learn that a neighbor of the family, Dilawar Khan, has a grudge against Ameeran’s father (whose testimony in a court case once sent him to prison); the vengeful Khan lures Ameeran from her house, then abducts her at knifepoint. Though he plans to kill her, a companion proposes instead taking her to Lucknow and selling her. After spending several days with a family who deal in stolen children, Ameeran and another frightened girl, Ram Dei, are both sold—the latter to a wealthy family (in the novel we learn that she is meant to be a sex-education toy for a young nawab or aristocrat). As the less attractive of the two, Ameeran is taken to Lucknow and sold to Madame Khanum (Shaukat Kaifi), the keeper of a high-class brothel where dandified gentlemen, wrapped in costly brocaded shawls and fortified by tobacco and opium, pass their evenings engaging in (for starters) witty conversation, musical recitals, and the chewing of paan (a mildly-addictive spiced betel preparation). But to the child, whom Khanum promptly renames Umrao and who understands nothing of the brothel’s commodity culture, it seems a magical and luxurious place, especially after her horrific ordeal. She has no hope of returning to her family (many days journey away) and is “adopted” by kindly Auntie Husaini (Dina Pathak), Khanum’s matronly servant.
Soon she begins her schooling in music, dance, and poetry—a world of art and learning that would have been barred to her had she remained with her family. As she and Khanum’s own daughter Bismillah practice their kathak dance, they are transformed into beautiful young women (Rekha and Prema Narayan). Umrao soon acquires an in-house paramour in the mischievous Gauhar Mirza (Naseeruddin Shah), the son of a prostitute and himself a sometime pimp. She also acquires a poetry teacher, Maulvi Saheb (Gajanan Jagirdar), who is also Hussaini’s lover. Once she begins performing (represented by the ghazal “Dil cheez kya hai” (“Never mind my heart, take my life”) she attracts the attention of a dashing and cultured young nawab, Sultan Sahab (Farouque Shaikh), who shares her taste for poetry. Several scenes are wonderfully evocative of the poetry-smitten world of 19th century Islamicate urban culture, in which all educated people were aspiring Urdu poets, and evenings were spent in mehfils or poetic gatherings at which a candle was passed around the room, and each person before whom it rested had to recite a poem, ideally of his own composition. The performances of ghazals attributed to Umrao Jaan (who composed under the pen-name “Ada”—“the flirtatious one”—which was artfully worked into the final or “signature” couplet of each poem) are likewise memorable (e.g., the haunting “In aankhon ki masti,” “The intoxication of these eyes”). Although Rekha lacks the grace of a classically-trained dancer, the music and opulent mise-en-scene (not to mention her intoxicating eyes) more than compensate.
Umrao’s romantic idyll with Nawab Sultan occupies much more of the film than it does of the novel, but in both it is repeatedly frustrated by a series of misfortunes that remind her of her status as a public woman who can never truly claim a man. These blows fall thick and fast after Intermission, and as a result the film gets a bit confusing. Frustrated in her love for Sultan (who is shortly to be married) and sick of her madam’s greed, Umrao decides to flee Khanum’s establishment with a darkly handsome admirer (Raj Babbar) who proves to be one Faiz Ali, a notorious daku or highwayman. When he is slain by rural police, Umrao makes her way to the commercial town of Kanpur and briefly (though in fact this compresses several years) sets up on her own, performing for the appreciative provincial gentry. This leads to an engagement at the home of a wealthy begum who proves to be none other than Ram Dei, the Hindu girl who was kidnapped and sold at the same time as Ameeran—by a quirk of fate, she has become the legal wife of a certain powerful Nawab. Discovered by Husaini and Gauhar Mirza, Umrao is brought back to her “home” in Lucknow, where Mirza (at Khanum’s urging, to prevent any future escape) harasses her with a lawsuit alleging that she married him. Just then the Rebellion breaks out, the British lay siege to Lucknow, and amid much confusion the denizens of the chowk escape the city. When the refugees pause overnight in Faizabad, Umrao again slips away from Khanum and eventually (more compression here) takes a flat in the very town in which she was born. Here too she receives invitations to perform in private homes, and the strange familiarity of one of these elicits the beautiful ghazal “Yeh kya jagah hai doston” (“What place is this, friends?”), that leads to a heartrending reunion.
Despite its uneven and sometimes confusing pace—familiarity with the novel (which is readily available in translation; see below), and with a bit of North Indian history certainly helps—this film gets high marks for its strong cast, beautifully written screenplay, and wonderful atmospherics. The exquisite locations never look like sets, and the shimmering costumes (of dazzling brocade and gauziest muslin) seem to be the work of master weavers. The beautiful songs are accompanied by traditional instruments (such as the plaintive-voiced sarangi) appropriate to the period. The director’s loving attention to visual detail is constantly evident, in carpets, hookahs, silver paan boxes, crystal lamps, and the Vermeer-like mirrors that confront the melancholy Umrao at every turn in her eventful journey.
April 21st, 2007
A pub just north of Euston, which closed in 2018, then reopened as more of a hotel in 2019 with a smaller pub area. (More recent photo from 2025, older photo of it from 2015, and before that as Elixir Bar in 2012 and as Rowley's in 2008.)
Address: 162 Eversholt Street (formerly Seymour Street and before that Upper Seymour Street).
Former Name(s): Elixir Bar; Rowley's; Carriage's; The Seymour Arms.
Owner: Macneil Devdas; Taylor Walker (former).
Links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Sami
Adnan Sami Khan (Urdu: عدنان سمیع خان; born 15 August 1973), popularly known simply as Adnan Sami, is a British born singer, musician pianist[1][2], actor and composer[3][4] of Pakistani origin from Canada[5][6]. His style merges Asian and Western styles and instrumentation and ranges from classical to jazz to modern pop-rock.
Early life and education
Sami was born, reared and educated in London, United Kingdom[7][8]. His father, Arshad Sami Khan was a decorated fighter pilot and war hero of the Pakistan Air Force, and a proud alumnus of PAF College Sargodha. [9], a Pathan[7] who was born in Pakistan[citation needed] and lived in India[citation needed], was a Pakistani diplomat[10] and had training in composing classical and jazz music.[11] His mother belonged to an Indian Muslim family. Sami attended Rugby School[12][13]. He went on to graduate from King's College[citation needed] and became the first person to play Indian/Pakistani classical music on the electric piano. He had played the piano since the age of five[11][14]. Sami began taking lessons from Pandit Shivkumar Sharma when visiting India during his school vacations.[7] Indian singing legend Asha Bhosle spotted talent in a ten-year-old Sami at an R D Burman concert in London, and encouraged him to take up music as a career.[15][16]
As a teenager, Sami, when performing on the keyboard at a programme in Stockholm, was noticed by Keyboard Magazine as being the fastest man on keyboard in Asia.[7]
Sami then went on to learn Indian classical music from Mahraj Khatak[citation needed], a Pakistani classical singing teacher and dancer.
At the age of sixteen, Sami was approached to write a song for famine-hit Ethiopia for which he won a special award from UNICEF.[2]
[edit] Career
Adnan had begun playing the piano at the age of five and was an accomplished concert pianist having performed in several countries such as Sweden and UAE.[17]
He had his first solo album RAAG Time in 1991-92.The song from his lastest album Kisi Din 'Teri Yaad' was the title track'Jab Chandani Barh Kar' of his first album. In 1994, he composed music for a film for the first time. The Pakistani film, in which Adnan was the lead with his wife Zeba and famous Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle did the playback, Sargam, was a blockbuster.[18] However, the authorities banned Asha's voice from the soundtrack which disappointed Adnan. He then had to re-record these songs with Hadiqa Kiyani.[18] After unsuccessfully trying to make it to the competitive Pakistani pop scene in 1997, in 2000, Asha Bhosle teamed up with him to release a collection of love songs named Kabhi to Nazar Milao[19]. The music was also composed by Adnan. According to Adnan, this was a "dream come true" for him.[7] The album became an instant rage[20] and topped the Indipop charts[5] for most of 2001[21][22]. According to BusinessWeek, the album sold 2 million copies in India.[23]
Songs Kabhi to Nazar milao whose music video featured model Aditi Gowitrikar[24] and Lift karaa de whose music video starred the popular Bollywood star Govinda from the album became immensely popular at this time. The videos were shot by Anil Mehra who had shot popular Hindi movies Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Lagaan.[16] Looking at the immense success of this album, Magnasound and Adnan released an album Always yours which is a remix version of numbers from this album[25].
He soon became a "sensation" which led Hindi filmmaker Boney Kapoor to invite him to give music for his film.[20] This was the beginning for him composing and singing songs for Hindi films very successfully of even the top Hindi film producers of the time like Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai. Due to the immense popularity of his music videos and live performances, he had even begun getting acting offers at this time.[16][26]
The song, Tu sirf mera mehboob, from the Hindi movie Ajnabee (2001) sung by Adnan also "became a rage"[27] and was a superhit[22].
Screen called him the pop personality of the year 2001[22] and even says that the success of his album Kabhi to Nazar milao "kept the Indian pop music industry alive and breathing" in 2001.
In 2002, Pepsi Foods made Adnan its brand ambassador in India, a contract which involved hosting a series of live music concerts across cities as well as Adnan featuring in ads for Pepsi products.[28] According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, no Pakistani artist had managed to gain as much popularity in India as Sami had.[29] According to an article in the Indian newspaper The Times of India, Sami was the most successful face in non-film music in India at that time.[16]
His second studio album, Tera Chehra, was released in October 2002[17] to critical eulogies even as his first album was still selling.[16] The music videos for this album were shot by Binod Pradhan who had shot the popular Hindi movie Devdas, directed by Bela Sehgal[30] (director of Devdas Sanjay Leela Bhansali's sister) and featured popular Bollywood stars Rani Mukerji in the title track, Amitabh Bachchan in the track Kabhi nahi who also sang the duet with Adnan[16][17] and actress Mahima Chaudhry in another song[30]. The title track was written by famous Hindi movie lyricist Sameer.[17] According to Screen, it was the only successful pop album of the year.[31]
Saathiya (2002) brought the opportunity to work with maestro A. R. Rahman in the form of Aye Udi Udi which he was looking forward to. According to Screen, the song was the highlight of the album.[32] rediff.com called him the "reigning king of Indipop" in early 2003 based on the sales of his albums in the past two years.[30]
His most successful albums have been Kabhi To Nazar Milao (with Asha Bhosle) and Tera Chehra,[33] and his music videos usually have had a host of Bollywood stars in them, including Namrata Shirodkar ("Bheegi Bheegi Raat"), Mahima Chaudhry, Raveena Tandon, Rani Mukerji ("Tera Chehra"), Govinda, Fardeen Khan, Amisha Patel ("O Meri Jaan"), Bhumika Chawla ("Maahiya"), Dia Mirza ("Pal Do Pal") and most famously, Amitabh Bachchan ("Kabhi Nahi").[33][34] and in 2007 the soundtrack from the hit Salaam-e-Ishq: A Tribute to Love.
Since 2003, he has sung for a few Tamil movies like Boys, Aayutha Ezhuthu composed by A.R. Rehman. The songs,"Boom Boom" from Boys[35] and "Nenjamellam Kadhal" for Aayitha Ezhuthu, were hits. He also sang for the Tamil and Telugu versions besides the Hindi version of songs fromthe movie Yuva (2004) whose music was also composed by A. R. Rahman. Besides Rahman, he also worked together with composer Yuvan Shankar Raja, singing hit Tamil songs "Oh Intha Kadhal" from Satham Podathey and the very recently released "Oru Kal" from Siva Manasula Sakthi, which got very popular and widely noticed.
He has also sang for a Kannada film song. His first Kannada song, "Don't Worry Madabeda" for the film Super Star starring Upendra was a big hit.
In 2006, he took a sabbatical, and reportedly lost over 70 kg,[36] to make a comeback in April 2007 with a new album Kisi Din.
His latest film music composition was for Shaurya (2008).[37]
Indian Barbie - Chandramukhi - The Courtesan from Devdas,The Movie. A much more beautiful version than your typical everyday barbie doll. This was found on a rather amazing website that just got these in. They cost around 200.00 and well worth the price. The artistry is simply amazing. Check out their website: www.dollsofindia.com/read/barbie_doll.htm
Kalki Koechlin (French: Listeni/ˌkəlkiˈkeɪklɑː/) (born 10 January 1984[1]) is an Indian film actress of French descent who debuted in Anurag Kashyap's critically acclaimed Hindi film Dev.D (2009). She played the character of Chandramukhi in the film, a modern take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Bengali novella Devdas, and won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal.
Aryan Khan
Hero of Martial Arts Teakwondo 2000
Name: Aryan Khan
Father: Ebadullah Khan (Passed away 2003)
Birth Date: March 7, 1980 (age 28)
Birth Place: Jalalabad City, Afghanistan
Height: 5’9
Weight: approx 75 kg
Religion: Muslim
Native Language: Pashto
Profession: Acting & Martial arts
Hobbies: Singing
Reside in: Kabul Shar-e-Naw.
Eyes: brown
Hairs: brown
Success secret: self confidence
First Martial Arts Academy: Universal Karate Center, John High School Peshawar City 1992
First TV Appearance: PTV Peshawar Center from Program Stoore
First TV Commercial: Anti-Narcotics
First Award in Martial Arts: Best fighter 1st Position Universal Teakwondo Federation 1994
First Drama: IZHAR
First Film: Kyon tum se itna pyar hai
First Afghani Film: Eshq-e-Khamosh
First Album: Dosti
First Song: Wakhtona Janana Sanga Teregi?
First TV Show in Afghanistan: New Year Show
First Award in Acting: Best performance (Beauty and Entertainment Grand Musical Show), Pakistan
First Award in singing: Best Singer of the year 2007 Ariana Television Network, Afghanistan
Best Co-Artists: Najiba Faiz, Masoud Akhter, Nasir Khan
Best Friend:
Greatest Achievement:
One talent he would like to have most: Acting
Happiest Moment:
Saddest Moment: When his father passed away
Likes:
Listen to old Music
Natural Beauty
Desert
Beach
Traveling in Boat/ship
Honesty
Humanity
Professionalism
Physical Fitness/Martial Arts
Painting
He likes antique stuff such as sward, martial cloth, kerosene lamp etc.
Favorites:
Favorite word: Haq-Allah
Favorite Indian Actor: Amithab Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna, SRK, Aamir khan
Favorite Afghani Actor: Haji Kamran, Mamnoon Maqsoodi
Favorite Indian Actress: Rekha, Sushmitta Sen, Puja Bhatt
Favorite Afghani Actress:
Favorite Indian Movie: Babu, Zangeer, Deewar, Naam, sar frosh, Devdas
Favorite Afghani Movie:
Favorite Indian Director: Yash Chopra, Mahesh Bhatt, Karan Johar
Favorite Afghani Director: Sediq Barmak
Favorite Personality: My Father (Ebadullah Khan)
Favorite foreign poet: Alama Eqbal
Favorite Afghani Poet: Sylab, Tameez Shinwari
Favorite Indian Singer: Nasrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishor Kumar
Favorite Afghani Singer: Ustad Awal Meer, Ahmad Zahir
Favorite food: Chicken Curry & Afghani Dishes
Favorite Fruit: Banana, pomegranate, Water Malone
Favorite place: Kabul
Favorite game: Buzkashe, Basket Ball
Favorite color: Black & White
Favorite moment: Evening time
Favorite topic: History
Favorite Perfumes: David Beckham
Favorite Author:
Favorite Music: POP
Favorite Indian Song: Zandagi ke safar main guzar jaty hai jo muqam
Favorite Afghani song:
Favorite Role: romantic
Favorite Martial Artist: Bruce Lee
Shreya Ghoshal or Shreya Ghosal (श्रेया घोषाल) born March 12, 1984 in Kota, Rajasthan is an Indian playback singer. She has sung several songs in Bollywood and regional films. and also for indian soaps like Kasturi.
Besides Hindi, she has also sung songs in Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
Awards and recognitions:
2002: National Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer for Bairi Piya (Devdas)
2002: Filmfare Best Female Playback Award (with Kavita Krishnamurthy) for Dola Re (Devdas)
2003: Filmfare RD Burman Award for New Music Talent
2003: IIFA Award Best Female Playback Singer (with Kavita Krishnamurthy) for Dola Re (Devdas)
2003: Filmfare Best Female Playback Award for Jaadu Hai Nasha Hai (Jism)
2003: Zee Cine Award Best Female Playback Singer (with Kavita Krishnamurthy) for Dola Re (Devdas)
2004: IIFA Award Best Female Playback Singer for Jadu Hai Nasha Hai (Jism)
2005: Andhra Pradesh State Award Best Female Playback Singer for Pillagaali Allari (Athadu) & Neeke Nuvvu (Modati Cinema)
2006: Zee Cine Award Best Female Playback Singer for Piyu Bole (Parineeta)
2006: Star Screen Award Best Female Playback for Piyu Bole (Parineeta)
2007: Filmfare Awards South Best Female Playback Singer for Munbe Vaa (Sillunu Oru Kaadhal) (Tamil)
2007: Tamil Nadu State Award Best Female Playback Singer for Munbe Vaa (Sillunu Oru Kaadhal)
2006: National Film Award Best Female Playback Singer for Apne Aansoo Peene Ke Liye (Paheli) (Distributed in 2007)
2008: Star Screen Award Best Female Playback Singer for Barso Re (Guru)
2008: Filmfare Award Best Female Playback Singer for Barso Re (Guru)
2008: Apsara Award Best Female Playback Singer for Barso Re (Guru)
2008: Zee Cine Award Best Female Playback Singer for Barso Re (Guru)
2008: GPBA - German Public Bollywood Award Best Singer (Female) for Yeh Ishq Haaye (Jab We Met)
2008: IIFA Best Female Playback Award for Barso Re (Guru)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shreya_Ghoshal
photo: SANJIB GANGULY
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town which was then part of the Bombay Presidency, British India. He was born in his ancestral home, now known as Kirti Mandir, Porbandar. His father, Karamchand Gandhi (1822–1885), who belonged to the Hindu Modh community, served as the diwan (a high official) of Porbander state, a small princely state in the Kathiawar Agency of British India. His grandfather was Uttamchand Gandhi, fondly called Utta Gandhi. His mother, Putlibai, who came from the Hindu Pranami Vaishnava community, was Karamchand's fourth wife, the first three wives having apparently died in childbirth. Growing up with a devout mother and the Jain traditions of the region, the young Mohandas absorbed early the influences that would play an important role in his adult life; these included compassion for sentient beings, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance among individuals of different creeds.
In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged child marriage, according to the custom of the region. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." However, as was also the custom of the region, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband. In 1885, when Gandhi was 15, the couple's first child was born, but survived only a few days, and Gandhi's father, Karamchand Gandhi, had died earlier that year. Mohandas and Kasturba had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900. At his middle school in Porbandar and high school in Rajkot, Gandhi remained an average student. He passed the matriculation exam for Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, Gujarat, with some difficulty. While there, he was unhappy, in part because his family wanted him to become a barrister.
On 4 September 1888, Gandhi travelled to London, England, to study law at University College London where he studied Indian law and jurisprudence and to train as a barrister at the Inner Temple. His time in London, the Imperial capital, was influenced by a vow he had made to his mother in the presence of the Jain monk Becharji, upon leaving India, to observe the Hindu precepts of abstinence from meat, alcohol, and promiscuity. Although Gandhi experimented with adopting "English" customs—taking dancing lessons for example—he could not stomach the bland vegetarian food offered by his landlady, and he was always hungry until he found one of London's few vegetarian restaurants.
Such a stunning shot of Shahrukh Khan as the iconic Devdas--I just had to miniaturize it. Once he had bottle in hand, my SRK doll took over and the angst poured out.
Devdas 2002 izle, Devdas 2002 HD izle, Devdas 2002 720p izle, Devdas 2002 Full izle, Devdas 2002 Türkçe Altyazılı izle
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’nin yazıp yönettiği efsanevi filmin başrollerinde Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit ve Aishwarya Rai Bachchan yer alırken Müzikal, Romantik türündedir ve IMDb’den 7.6 gibi sağlam bir puan almıştır. Genel olarak filmin konusuna bakacak olursak; dillere destan olan hikayelerimizin olduğunu herkes bilir bkz; Leyla ile Mecnun – Aslı ile Kerem gibi. Devdas da bu hikayelerdeki gibi birbirini deliler gibi seven iki aşığın hikayesini anlatmaktadır. Fakat ailelerin uyuşmazlığı üzerine daha çocukluktan birbirlerine aşık olan Devdas ve Paro’nun sonu bellidir, hüsran. Yıllar geçse de aralarındaki aşk hiç sönmemiştir. Devdas onu unutamamıştır, Paro da evlenmiş olsa bile ..
İzleyen arkadaşlardan yorumlarını rica eder, iyi seyirler dileriz.
www.hintfilmiizlesene.com/devdas-2002-izle-hd-izle-720p-i...