Vinobha Bhave - Bhudan Movement

Vinobha Bhave – Bhudan Movement

Vinoba Bhave was one of the great spiritual leaders & reformers of modern India, whose work & personal example moved the hearts of countless Indians.

Born in 1895, at the tender age of ten, Vinoba took a vow life-long celibacy & selfless service to others.

Vinoba discovered Gandhi, & joined in Gandhi’s work for the regeneration & freedom of India.

In 1940 Gandhi chose Vinoba to be the first Satyagrahi i.e. non-violent resister, to offer non-violent resistance to the British regime.

Vinoba’s social activism was founded on a lifetime’s study of the other major world religions. Vinoba’s life reveals the harmony of the inner & outer life of a great man, who had an unwavering commitment to the practice of non-violence, to an engaged spirituality, & to the universal power of love.

After India won independence, Vinoba started out on his extraordinary & unprecedented in recorded history, the Bhoodan (Land-Gift) Movement.

Over a period of twenty years, Vinoba walked through the length & breadth of India persuading land-owners & land-lords to give their poor & downtrodden neighbours a total of four million acres of land.

The Bhoodan-Gramdan movement initiated inspired by Vinoba brought Vinoba to the international scene.

For Vinoba the future of India was essentially a contest between the fundamental creeds of Gandhi & Marx. In coming to Hyderabad, Vinoba & other Gandhians were confronting a challenge & testing their faith in non-violence.

Pochampalli gave Vinoba a warm welcome. Vinoba went to visit the Harijan (the Untouchables) colony there. By early afternoon villagers began to gather around Vinoba at Vinoba’s cottage. The Harijans asked for eighty acres of land, forty wet, forty dry for forty families that would be enough. Then Vinoba asked,”If it is not possible to get land from the government, is there not something villagers themselves could do?” To everyone’s surprise, Ram Chandra Reddy, the local landlord, got up & said in a rather excited voice: “I will give you 100 acres for these people.” At his evening prayer meeting, Ram Chandra Reddy got up & repeated his promise to offer 100 acres of land to the Harijans. This incident neither planned nor imagined was the very genesis of the Bhoodan movement & it made Vinoba think that therein lay the potentiality of solving the land problem of India. This movement later on developed into a village gift or Gramdan movement.

The movement passed through several stages in regard to both momentum & allied programmes. In October 1951, Vinoba was led to demand fifty million acres of land for the landless from the whole of India by 1957. Thus a personal initiative assumed the form of a mass movement, reminding the people of Gandhi’s mass movements. This was indeed a very remarkable achievement for a constructive work movement. The enthusiasm for the movement lasted till 1957 & thereafter it began to wane.

Meanwhile the Bhoodan Movement had been transformed from a land-gift movement to a village-gift or Gramdan movement, in which the whole or a major part of a village land was to be donated by not less than 75% of the villagers who were required to relinquish their right of owner-ship over their lands in favour of the entire village, with power to equitably redistribute the total land among village’s families with a proviso for revision after some intervals.

The Programme of individual land-gifts was still there, but henceforth became a neglected activity.

The Gramdan idea did not prove popular in the non-tribal areas & this partly accounted for the decline of the movement at the end of the 1950s.

The movement directly influenced the life-style of the co-workers, especially the life-long co-workers & through them many workers & associates or fellow-seekers. By adopting Gandhi’s ideas to the solution of the basic economic problem of land collection & equitable redistribution among the landless, the Movement kept Gandhi’s ideas of socioeconomic reconstruction alive at a period when the tendency of the educated elite was to overlook, if not to reject Gandhi’s ideas as irrelevant. The Movement kindled interest in the individuals to study Gandhi’s ideas & to assess their relevance. Jayaprakash Narayan, a renowned Marxist, and a Socialist, & one of the fore-most leaders in politics, before & after India’s Independence, came to be more & more intimately associated with the movement & realized that it was a superb endeavor to bring about revolution in human relations founded on on the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence. Ultimately Jayaprakash devoted his entire life to the construction of a Sarvodaya society.

Arthur Koestler, in 1959 wrote in London Observer, that the Bhoodan Movement presented an Indian alternative to the Nehruvian model of Western development.