Occasionally, we note here examples of foreign cultures brought into this country by recent legal and illegal immigrants that are insinuating themselves into American culture.
Consider, for example, the 155-foot statue of the Hindu god Murugan going up in rural North Carolina (right), which we reported on in February 2020. That edifice, along with its Hindu temple, soccer field, wedding venue, and community garden, will consume 130 acres that, until a few years ago, were occupied by family farms.
Today, we take note of the upcoming “Eternal Gandhi Museum” slated for Houston, Texas–a similar example, only this one is being partially funded by your own taxes.
The gargantuan, pork-loaded, $1.5 trillion spending bill enacted by Congress in March marked the return of earmarks to Congress, and–giddy at the prospects of bringing federal dollars into their districts and states–Republicans and Democrats alike rushed to fund their own special projects. Among them was Texas Democrat Al Green, who worked $3 million into the bill for that museum being built in Southwest Houston.
Green was the Chief Guest last year at the ground-breaking ceremony for the museum. In his remarks, he cited the following quote from Martin Luther King: “Gandhi’s non-violent approach was the only morally, and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”
Yet contemporary scholars have called into question the now commonly accepted belief that the Indian lawyer and activist was a friend of blacks. A 2015 book by South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed titled The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford, 2015) cites numerous instances from Gandhi’s own writings and speeches that contradict that belief.
For example, in a speech in Bombay in September 1896, Gandhi charged that
whites in the Natal state desired to “degrade [Indians] to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.” [Emphasis added]
This and other such anti-black remarks are detailed in a Washington Post piece dated September 3, 2015, and titled “What Did Mahatma Gandhi Think of Black People?” According to the authors of The South African Gandhi:
As we examined Gandhi’s actions and contemporary writings during his South African stay, and compared these with what he wrote in his autobiography and ‘Satyagraha in South Africa,’ it was apparent that he indulged in some ‘tidying up.’ He was effectively rewriting his own history.
That rewrite is still underway, this time in Texas and at your expense.
For more on the museum, see The South Asian Times.