Letter

I was very interested in the September Peacework issue on Gandhi, and especially some of the articles which use some of the new scholarship to see him as a human being in his relationships to his wife and children, and his attitudes on sexuality. But I mainly want to write to inform younger Quakers about the history of British Quakers with Gandhi in India, now more than a half century ago.

British Quakers such as Horace Alexander, Marjorie Sykes, and Donald Groom all knew and supported Gandhi in India during the nonviolent movement for Independence from their own country. Most of them were in India for several decades between l920 and l960 and Sykes, who worked as a teacher trainer at Wardha after Gandhi’s death, was in India for 50 years and became an Indian citizen. Quakers also met Gandhi when he was in England for the government conferences on Independence.

Among the hundreds of books written about Gandhi, Quakers have a very personal witness: Horace Alexander wrote Gandhi through Western Eyes (1969), and a second edition was published by New Society Publishers in Philadelphia in l984 with a new foreword written when he was 96. Marjorie Sykes co-wrote Gandhi and his Gift of the Fight in l987 and also co-wrote Gandhi and Tagore and Candid Friends, and a biography or her was written by Martha Dart. Some of these are not well known as they were published by the Friends Rural Centre in Rasulia, India where my husband John Foster, sent by AFSC, worked from l951-54; he met all of these Friends, and learned about how Gandhians met at Rasulia before Independence. In the l950s the Centre was trying to be a village centre in the Gandhian model,with Donald Groom as Director; he later walked with Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s disciple, in the “land gift” movement.

In addition, it should be known that the AFSC sponsored a trip for Martin Luther King to India early in the civil rights movement.

Georgana M. Foster, Leverett, MA