Acharya Vinoba Bhave Jayanti

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Recently, the Prime Minister of India paid tributes to Acharya Vinoba Bhave on his Jayanti, 11th September.

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GS I: History

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Original name: Vinayak Narahari Bhave
Birth: September 11, 1895, in a Chitpavan Brahmin family at Gagoda village of the Konkan area of Maharashtra.
Along with reading the texts, he studied Sanskrit and a number of regional languages.
The “Kannada” script was referred to as the “Queen of World Scripts” or “Vishwa Lipigala Raani” by Vinoba Bhave.
He is considered as India’s National Teacher.
Bhave committed his life to religious work and the fight for liberation, keeping his vow of celibacy throughout.
Died in 1982, Wardha, Maharashtra.

In 1918, Bhave burned his books rather than showing up for an exam in Bombay.
- After reading an article by Mahatma Gandhi, something transpired.
- He was a devoted supporter of Gandhi.
Gandhi in India chose Bhave to be the “First Individual Satyagrahi” against the British Raj in 1940.
Bhave was crucial to the movement to Quit India.

At Pochampally in Telangana, Vinoba Bhave launched the Bhoodan Movement, a land donation movement.
He obtained given land from Indian landowners and distributed it to the underprivileged and landless so they might cultivate it.

Then after 1954, he started to ask for donations of whole villages in a programme he called Gramdan.
He got more than 1000 villages by way of donation. Out of these, he obtained 175 donated villages in Tamil Nadu alone.

It is a tiny community for women that was established as part of Bhave’s ashrams in order for them to become independent and non-violent in a community.
This group farms to provide for themselves, but they follow Gandhi’s principles for food production, which include social justice and sustainability.

Vinoba observed the life of the average Indian living in a village and tried to find solutions for the problems he faced with a firm spiritual foundation. This formed the core of his Sarvodaya movement.
- Sarvodaya is Gandhi’s most important social political movement. Like Satyagraha, it too is a combination of two terms, Sarva meaning one and all, and Uday meaning welfare or uplift. The conjunction thus implies Universal uplift or welfare of all as the meaning of Sarvodaya.
Although Sarvodaya was a social ideology in its fundamental form, India’s immediate post independence requirement demanded that it be transformed into an urgent political doctrine.