Write short note: Sarvodaya as a social movement. (1985)
Sarvodaya — “the rise of all” — entered Indian vocabulary in 1908, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi gave that title to his Gujarati rendering of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Against the utilitarian formula of the greatest good of the greatest number, Gandhi insisted the good of the individual is contained in the good of all, including the last. After 1948 this ethic was converted into an organised movement by his successors.
The movement in its phases
- Constructive programme to organisation: the Sarva Seva Sangh, formed in 1948, became the movement’s body, working through village industries, khadi and Nai Talim rather than through the state or a party.
- Bhoodan (land-gift): Vinoba Bhave received his first donation at Pochampally, Nalgonda district, on 18 April 1951, and walked across India soliciting land as a moral duty of the propertied.
- Gramdan (village-gift), from 1952, went further — vesting ownership in the village collectivity, an attempt at gram swaraj and the practical form of Gandhian trusteeship.
- Total Revolution: Jayaprakash Narayan’s call in 1974 turned Sarvodaya outward into a political struggle against corruption and authoritarian rule, culminating in the Emergency confrontation.
Does it qualify as a social movement?
M. S. A. Rao’s criteria are met: a coherent ideology, sustained collective mobilisation outside institutional channels, and an explicit orientation to changing existing relationships. In Rao’s scheme it is transformative in aspiration — it sought to replace private landed property with communal ownership — yet reformative in method, since it relied on persuasion and voluntary surrender. Rajni Kothari’s idea of a non-party political process describes it well: Sarvodaya pioneered the Indian tradition of the voluntary sector acting as society’s conscience outside party politics.
Critical assessment
- Nearly 47 lakh acres were pledged, but official data cited in 2015 showed roughly 23 lakh acres still undistributed — much of it barren, encroached or under litigation.
- It substituted moral appeal for structural reform: landlordism was asked to reform itself, so the agrarian class structure survived intact. Marxist scholarship in India, A. R. Desai foremost, held that without altering property relations no agrarian transformation is possible.
- Its very success at defusing conflict may have blunted radical mobilisation; Naxalbari (1967) was in part the answer of those who had waited for the gift.
- Charisma did not routinise: after Vinoba and Jayaprakash Narayan, the movement lacked both leadership and a cadre base.
Conclusion
Sarvodaya was a genuine, ideologically rich social movement that failed as land reform but succeeded as political culture — it kept alive a non-violent, decentralised idea of change that resurfaces in Gram Sabha empowerment under the 73rd Amendment and in India’s rights-based civil society.