Vinoba Bhave walked India for thirteen years asking landowners to adopt him
Vinoba Bhave had a simple request for every landowner he met: count me as one of your sons, and give me a son's share of your fields, one-sixth. Starting in a Telangana village in 1951, the Gandhian ascetic collected land for the landless on foot, and eventually whole villages were signed over to him.
Bhave's break with ordinary life came in 1916. After reading a newspaper account of a Gandhi speech, he threw his school and college certificates into a fire while travelling to Bombay to sit an exam. Letters followed, and on 7 June 1916 he met Gandhi at the Kochrab Ashram in Ahmedabad. He never went back to his studies, throwing himself instead into spinning, teaching, sanitation and village industry at Sabarmati. Gandhi later sent him to run the ashram at Wardha and to supervise the entry of Harijans into the temple at Vaikom.
Prison became his library. Arrested repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s and jailed for five years in the 1940s, he wrote books behind bars, learned four South Indian languages and devised a script called Lok Nagari at Vellore jail. His talks on the Bhagavad Gita to fellow inmates and ashramites became Talks on the Gita, which he believed would outlast all his other writing. Still little known nationally, he became famous in 1940 when Gandhi picked him as the first individual satyagrahi against British rule.
The land campaign began at Pochampally on 18 April 1951, after he met 80 Harijan families. From 1954 he pressed for gifts of entire villages, a scheme called Gramdan, and obtained more than 1000, including 175 in Tamil Nadu. In 1958 he received the first Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership, and he founded the Brahma Vidya Mandir at Paunar in 1959, a community where women farm by nonviolent principles and pray together three times a day.
His reputation took a hit when he backed Indira Gandhi's Emergency, calling it a time for discipline; critics mocked him as a government saint, and V.S. Naipaul faulted his imitation of Gandhi. He died at Paunar on 15 November 1982 after refusing food and medicine, and Indira Gandhi cut short a Moscow trip to attend his funeral. The Bharat Ratna followed in 1983.
Source: Vinoba Bhave
