3 Quotes by Gail Omvedt

This was a different experience from that of the nationalist elite. Gandhi may have travelled third class on trains out of conviction, but Ambedkar did so out of necessity. Nehru and his companions may have been able to give up their government jobs or connections with government institutions such as courts because they had the assurance that wealthy, often landlord families could continue to support the rest of their relatives.

Attacking the supposedly ‘moral’ critique of the love of money and worldly goods, he argued that ‘at a time when the whole world was living in “pain economy” … and when the productivity of human labour was extremely low … it is but natural that moralists should have preached the gospel of poverty and renunciation of worldly pleasures only because they were not to be had

Phule had propounded the theory of the Aryan invasion as the source of oppression; dalit radicals of the 1920s took it to its extreme; Amedkar denied it.