Gandhi’s massive collected works contain contradictory statements allowing any narrative to be cherry-picked
Evidence
Gandhi’s life and his writing—48,000 pages bound into ninety-eight volumes of collected works—have been disaggregated and carried off, event by event, sentence by sentence, until no coherent narrative remains, if indeed there ever was one. The trouble is that Gandhi actually said everything and its opposite. To cherry pickers, he offers such a bewildering variety of cherries that you have to wonder if there was something the matter with the tree. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 91
Categorization
- XREF: Directly contradicts the earlier learned pattern that Gandhi was praised by all sides — and grounds it in the sheer volume and contradiction of his 48,000-page corpus. — connects to: Gandhi contradicted himself on whether varna is essential to Hinduism — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1261; Gandhi’s published words contradicted his later sympathetic recollections of Zulus; Gandhi consistently insulted Untouchables and denied them political self-organization
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 91