Main Index
 
 
Book Name: From Ignorance to InnocencePrevious     Next
 

too. His wife died there, her grave is still there in the Aga Khan's palace. You must have seen it in Poona -- when you pass the bridge, just on top of the hill above there is a beautiful house.

I had asked the owner, because the owner lived in Bombay and used to come to me, "Whatsoever you want you can take, but give that house to me before I move to Poona. I want that house," because in the whole of Poona, that was the highest point from where you could see the whole city, and it was really a beautiful palace.

He said, "It is difficult because it belongs to my mother. She is the owner of the house and she will not sell it because Gandhi was kept prisoner there, and she is a follower of Gandhi. So she wants to make it a national museum in the memory of Gandhi. It is impossible to persuade her -- and particularly for you. Even your name is unmentionable in my family. When I come here I have to say I am going somewhere else. Your name is unmentionable." Gandhians will not mention my name because I have been speaking against Gandhi continually.

So these special palaces were turned into prisons. They had acres of greenery, beautiful views. So Bhavani Prasad Tiwari used to say to me, "It would be better if I stop going underground -- because you ask inconvenient questions."

I said, "If you cannot answer them, what is going to happen to the country when the country becomes independent? These will be the questions which you will have to solve. You cannot even answer them verbally, and then you will have to actually solve them. I asked him, "Just by the Britishers leaving the country" -- and there were not many Britishers -- how is poverty going to disappear? And do you want me to believe that before the Britishers came to India, India was not poor?

"It was as poor as it is now, perhaps even poorer, because the Britishers brought industry, technology, and that helped the country to become a little better. They brought education, schools, colleges, universities. Before that, there was no way to be educated: the only educated people were the brahmins, because the father would teach the son. They kept everybody else uneducated because that

Previous Page (16/619) Next Page
 
Go to page: