‘History has always neglected Kasturba Gandhi’

Nagpur: Girls today must take a lesson or two from Kasturba Gandhi about being an independent and courageous woman. Being uneducated, she became a model of feminism and led female freedom fighters in our war for independence, said retired advocate MM Gadkari.
“Women have an identity of their own and they must preserve it. They must remember that even after marriage their identity remains the same. So was the case with Savitribai Phule — she educated herself and then ran a school to educate other women. We know her today as not the wife of Mahatma Phule, but for who she was,” he said.

Gadkari spoke on the occasion of 150th birth anniversary of Kasturba Gandhi and 191st anniversary of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule at an event organized at Kasturba Bhavan in Bajaj Nagar on Thursday. Also present at the event were social activist and writer Ravindra Pandharinath, author from Bhopal Govind Bhutada and secretary of society Sunil Patil.

Talking about Kasturba’s importance in Mahatma Gandhi’s life, Pandharinath said, “Gandhiji was Mahatma because of Kasturba, she was the silent rock in his life. In fact, she was the idea behind Satyagraha Movement. She always resolved all arguments with a calm demeanour, never losing her temper. So, Gandhiji applied the theory in our freedom fight as well and it worked.”

He further said that we must seek forgiveness because a name as strong and a figure as brave as hers has been neglected in our history. “Even today we know so little about her, we consider her a shadow when she was the light we should be regaling about. She was the first female Satyagrahi, the first true feminist lady of our nation,” said Pandharinath.