Acharya Vinoba Bhave Jayanti

In News

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

Acharya Vinoba Bhave

• Original name: Vinayak Narahari Bhave
• Birth: September 11, 1895, in a Chitpavan Brahmin family at Gagoda village of the Konkan area of Maharashtra.
• Personal Life: 
  • He is regarded as the National Teacher of India.
  • Bhave took the vow for celibacy and followed it all his life. 
  • He dedicated his life to religious work and the freedom struggle.
• Polyglot:
  • He learnt various regional languages and Sanskrit along with reading the scriptures.
  • Vinoba Bhave called the “Kannada” script as “Queen of World Scripts” – “Vishwa Lipigala Raani”.
• Some of his works:-
  • The essence of Quran
  • The essence of Christian teachings
  • Thoughts on education
  • Swarajya Sastra
• Role in Freedom Struggle:
  • Instead of appearing for an exam in Bombay in 1918, Bhave threw away his books in the fire. This happened after he read an article by Mahatma Gandhi.
  • He was an ardent follower of Gandhi.
  • In 1940, Bhave was selected as the ‘First Individual Satyagrahi’ against the British Raj by Gandhi in India.
  • Bhave played an important role in the Quit India Movement.

Political Efforts

• Bhoodan Movement: 
  • In 1951, Vinoba Bhave started his land donation movement at Pochampally in Telangana, the Bhoodan Movement.
  • He took donated land from land owner Indians and gave it away to the poor and landless, for them to cultivate.
• Gramdan:
  • 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.
•  Brahma Vidya Mandir: 
  • It is one of the ashrams that Bhave created. 
  • It is a small community for women that was created in order for them to become self-sufficient and non-violent in a community. 
  • This group farms to get their own food, but uses Gandhi’s beliefs about food production, which include sustainability and social justice, as a guide.
• Sarvodaya Movement: 
  • 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. 

Source: PIB