Sarvodaya (1908), his Gujarati paraphrase of Ruskin's Unto This Last
Sarvodaya
In October 1904 Mahatma Gandhi took the overnight train from Johannesburg to Durban. At the railway station, his friend Henry Polak, a young English journalist, handed him a book by John Ruskin called Unto This Last. Gandhiji opened it in his carriage and read it through the night. The book kept him awake until morning. He decided before the train pulled into Durban that he had to change his life. Within weeks he bought a hundred acres at Phoenix, fourteen miles outside Durban, and moved the printing press of Indian Opinion, his paper in South Africa, out to the soil.
In 1908 Gandhiji paraphrased Ruskin's book in Gujarati for the readers of Indian Opinion. He titled the work Sarvodaya (sur-VOH-duh-yuh), which means the welfare or rising of all. Most economists in his day argued for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Gandhiji believed that formula left the minority to suffer. He insisted that a community is healthy only when the weakest person in it eats and thrives. A lawyer and a barber do different jobs, but both need breakfast, and both have an equal right to earn a living.
Therefore
Do not judge a plan only by how many people it pleases. Look at who gets left behind, and ask if they can bear the cost.
Indian Opinion, May to July 1908
The series ran across nine weeks in Indian Opinion, between May and July 1908. That was a hard year for Gandhiji. In January the Transvaal authorities jailed him for refusing to carry permits, and in February an attacker beat him on a Johannesburg street. Yet he spent that summer translating Ruskin on the settlement at Phoenix. British colonial officials feared the Gujarati booklet enough to ban it in India in 1919. Decades later, Vinoba Bhave took the name for his land gift movement across Indian villages. What began on an overnight train became Gandhiji's name for his entire economics.
A small reminder, on the desk or the toolbox, that an economy only works when it lifts the person at the very bottom.
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Related patterns
pairs with
Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Printing Press
His name for the politics, made at the same printing press.
extends to
Gandhi's Talisman Compassion Quote
The practical test he gave decades later to judge any policy.
contrasts with
Mahatma Gandhi Sacred Mantra
An emergency cry for one night, not an order for daily living.