Vinoba Bhave

Vinoba Bhave walked across India for thirteen years asking landlords to give land away, and collected around four million acres. He left home at twenty for Varanasi to study Sanskrit, read a speech of Gandhi's, wrote to him, and joined the ashram in 1916, where he stayed. Gandhi chose him in 1940 as the first individual satyagrahi, the single person who would break the law against speaking about the war, precisely because he was unknown. The Bhoodan movement began in 1951 at Pochampally, where he asked a village meeting whether anyone would give land to the landless and a man offered a hundred acres before he had finished. He walked from village to village for the next thirteen years repeating the request. Perhaps half the land given was unusable or the transfers never completed, which he acknowledged. He also translated the Gita into Marathi, supported the Emergency of 1975 in terms his admirers found hard to forgive, and died by voluntarily refusing food and medicine. Bhoodan was followed by Gramdan, in which whole villages were asked to hold land in common, and about a hundred and sixty thousand villages were declared to have done so, though the legal reality was often thinner than the declaration. He walked an estimated eighty thousand kilometres. He knew Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali and several others, and translated from most of them. He received the first Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1958 and the Bharat Ratna posthumously. His support for the Emergency, which he called a festival of discipline, split his own movement.

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