Place · ashram · India
Sevagram / Wardha
Also known as Sevagram Ashram, Wardha, 1948), Gandhi's Sevagram (1936, Gandhi's Sevagram (1936-1948), Sevagram Ashram, Wardha
The rural ashram at Sevagram near Wardha in Maharashtra, 76 kilometres from Nagpur — the ashram Mahatma Gandhi founded on 30 April 1936 after leaving Sabarmati permanently (his 1930 vow not to return to Sabarmati until India was free was still in effect). Sevagram ('village of service') was chosen in the exact geographical centre of India, in a village with no electricity, no post office, and no railway station, because Gandhi had decided the constructive programme in the villages mattered more than the campaigns. The ashram ran daily life around manual labour, spinning the charkha, Nai Talim (basic education), village sanitation and sharing meals across caste. Gandhi lived here from 1936 to 1946 (except for his 1942-44 Aga Khan Palace imprisonment); the Mahatma Gandhi Hindi Vishwavidyalaya (1997) is at Sevagram.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Gandhian movement history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.750, 78.600
Connections (3)
- Gandhi ashramsSabarmati Ashram
Gandhi left Sabarmati for Dandi in March 1930 having vowed not to return until India was free, and he never did return to live there. From 1936 he based himself at Sevagram near Wardha — chosen because it was in the geographical centre of the country, in a village with no electricity, and because he had decided the constructive programme in the villages mattered more than the campaigns. Most of the Congress humoured him about that.
- Monastic foundationMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
From 1936 Gandhi ran the movement from a mud hut at Sevāgrām near Wardha, deliberately in a village with no electricity. The constructive programme worked out there — khadi, Nai Talim basic education, village sanitation — is what he rated above the civil disobedience he is remembered for. He stayed there until 1946 and ran the Quit India period from it, so the largest mass movement against the empire was directed from a village with no electric light.
- Education modernity debateB. R. Ambedkar
Gandhi's Nai Talim, worked out at Sevagram from 1937, proposed education through a productive craft in the mother tongue, self-financing and rooted in the village. Ambedkar rejected the whole premise: the village, he said, was a den of localism and the sink of communalism, and the only route out for an untouchable was English, the city, and the law. The two positions are the founding argument of Indian education policy and it was never resolved.
On these journeys
- Reform, education & the national movement
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
- The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sevagram”. M.K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division).
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