Dharampal

Who was Dharampal?

Dharampal, Gandhian thinker, historian and political philosopher from India. He authored The Beautiful Tree, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century and Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition, among other seminal works, which have led to a radical reappraisal of conventional views of the cultural, scientific and technological achievements of Indian society at the eve of the British conquest.

Dharampal was born on 19 February 1922 in Kandhala, a small town in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, and died on 24 October 2006 at Sevagram, near Wardha, Maharashtra, which had been his main abode since the early 1980s. He has been associated in various ways with the regeneration of India’s diverse people and the restoration of their decentralized social, political and economic organization manifested through their local communities.

Involvement in the Freedom Movement Dharampal was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi throughout his life; he received his first glimpse of Gandhiji at the age of seven, when he accompanied his father to attend the 1929 Lahore Congress. In March 1931, when Sardar Bhagat Singh and his colleagues were sentenced to death and executed by the British colonial authorities, Dharampal recalls that many of his friends took to the streets of Lahore, shouting slogans in protest. Yet remaining critical of this rebellious assertion, and despite the influence of his semi-westernized education at school and college, he was drawn towards the movement led by Mahatma Gandhi: soon he started wearing khadi, a practice he followed all his life. Mahatma Gandhi’s call for Individual Satyagraha in October 1940 marked the beginning of his involvement in national politics and the subsequent abandonment of his B.Sc. in Physics. In August 1942, he was present as a fervent spectator at the Quit India session of the Congress in Bombay, whereupon he joined the movement and was active as an under-ground member of the AICC group run by Sucheta Kriplani until his arrest in April 1943. After 2 months in police detention, he was released, but debarred from Delhi. A year later in August 1944, being interested in village community work, he was introduced to Mirabehn and joined her soon after at the Kisan Ashram, situated midway between Roorkee and Haridwar.