Social hierarchy in gulliver's travels novel with Gandhi.

1. WELCOME
Name:- Sanjaykumar N Jogadiya.
Subject:- Paper -2: Neo-Classical
Topic:- Social Hierarchy in Gulliver's Travels novel
with Gandhi.
 Part:- M.A. Sem-1
RollNo.34, EnrollmentNo.2069108420200017
 Email Id:- snjogadiya@amail.com
 Submitted:- Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English
MKB University.

2. Social Hierarchy in Gulliver's Travels
novel with Gandhi
Main themes
1)According to capacity or for
economic, social or professional
status.
2)Might v/s Right
3)The Individual v/s Society
4)The Limits of Human
Understanding

3. Gandhi and Gulliver's Travels: An
Indian Saint and an Irish Priest.
According to capacity or for
economic, social or
professional status.
 Gulliver's Journey is written by Jonathan
Swift. It is a prose satire on human nature
and the political situation, placing Julfar in a
different place and society; he has deeply
disturbed human nature.
 Though Gandhi’s worldview was forged by
several authors like Ruskin, Thoreau,
Tolstoy, Marx, and others, Swift was the
only one, who like Gandhi, directly suffered
and stood up to British colonialism.

4.  Might v/s Right
 Mahatma Gandhi in a letter dated 18 May 1911 advised his
nephew and disciple Maganlal Gandhi to read Jonathan Swift’s
masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels (1726) again and again.
 His close friend Maganlal. Gandhiji's letters have avoided the
persuasive praise of Irish author and priest Swift, because in
Gulliver's Travels he found 'effective condemnation' of modern
culture and colonial modernity.
 Although Gandhi's worldview was devised by writers such as
Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Marx, and others, Swift was the only
one who, like Gandhi, directly suffered and opposed British
colonialism.

5. The Individual v/s Society
Gulliver belongs to a middle class family but has not
been able to attend university, he has just completed
his college at Emmanuel College, while in the 18th
century England was a place in which some education
was available. The key to a certain position was. In
society.
But after passing through the racial discrimination that
Gandhi had towards his English education and lifestyle,
he disappeared after being thrown off the first class of
trains at Pietermaritzburg.

6. Swift and Gandhi were both disapproving critics of
colonialism;
Though as a white man, Swift did not have to
undergo any kind of racial discrimination yet Ireland
was brutally subjugated by England in every
possible way.
To his utmost surprise, the satirical representation
of the English Church infuriated Queen Anne so
much that all his chances of promotion within the
English Church ended forever.
What Pietermaritzburg did to Gandhi, A Tale of a
Tub did to Swift, making him painfully aware of his
colonized identity.

7.  The Limits of Human Understanding
This publishing debacle has been humorously
fictionalized in Gulliver’s Travels.
There are several parallels between Swift’s gradual
disenchantment with his English lineage and Gandhi’s
disillusionment with a borrowed English identity.
Swift satirizes the colonization of Ireland in Book III of
Gulliver’s Travels, with reference to a flying island
called Laputa. The given island, a fictional
representation of England, symbolizes a totalitarian
state
Governance without morality invariably leads to an
authoritarian state.

8. • Swift, as a satirist and master of irony, takes his
critique of abstract science to an extreme and
enables the readers to easily comprehend the
absurd ways of a totalitarian state.
• It was this impoverished and shallow morality of
modern civilization and colonial state that Gandhi
denounced in Hind Swaraj (1909) as fundamentally
rotten.
• Gandhi calls modern civilization ‘Satanic’, ‘a Black
Age,’ for it primarily focuses on securing bodily
comforts but fails miserably even in doing so.

9. conclusion
This Swiftian narrative became a recurring
metaphor in Gandhi’s oeuvre. The inner
paradox of modernity is more palpable than
ever today, when India, on the one hand, has
emerged as the third-largest economy, and on
the other, To understand the catastrophic
outcome of the abuse of science and reason in
contemporary times, it makes good sense to
follow Gandhi’s advice –and revisit Gulliver’s
Travels.

10. Resources
• https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-
literature/mahatma-gandhi-collected-works-volume-11.pdf
• https://indianexpress.com
• https://www.shmoop.com
• https://ramizsolanki.blogspot.com
• https://www.wikipedia.org/ , And anyothers.