I’m not sure it’s completely accurate that he didn’t think of people by color or race. He certainly advocated on the part of his country and its peoples in the struggle for independence from the British, and he did so from the perspective of humanity and human rights. He also had to think of the numerous sects that have existed in India for centuries, especially because some rivaled with others. In order to gain independence through peaceful means, he had to balance the British on one hand and appeasement of tribal or sectarian differences on the other. Everything he did required knowing how to deal with different cultures and customs, all of which is based on or part of color and race.
It might be more accurate to state that he may not have looked negatively upon people braces on the colors or races.
~
Thank you. It’s always seemed to me that there are no people who are not of color.
~
Gandhi was only concerned about raising the equality of his race to the whites.
Collected Works Of Mahatma Gandhi...
“A general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.”
(kaffir is a racist slur used to refer to an individual of Nguni ancestry. In the form of cafri, it evolved during the pre-colonial period as an equivalent of "negro).
“In the face, too, of financial operations, the success of which many of their detractors would envy, one fails to understand the agitation which would place the operators in the same category as the half-heathen Native and confine him to Locations, and subject him to the harsher laws by which the Transvaal Kaffir is governed.”
When one reflects that the conception of Brahmanism, with its poetic and mysterious mythology, took its rise in the land of the ‘Coolie trader,’ that in that land 24 centuries ago, the almost divine Buddha taught and practised the glorious doctrine of self-sacrifice, and that it was from the plains and mountains of that weird old country that we have derived the fundamental truths of the very language we speak, one cannot but help regretting that the children of such a race should be treated as equals of the children of black heathendom and outer darkness. Those who, for a few moments, have stayed to converse with the Indian trader have been, perhaps, surprised to find they are speaking to a scholar and a gentleman…. And it is the sons of this Land of light who are despised as Coolies, and treated as Kaffirs.”
“So far as the feeling has been expressed, it is to degrade the Indian to the position of the Kaffir.”
While, in other parts of South Africa, it is the railway officials who make the lot of the 1st and 2nd class passengers on the railway intolerable, the Transvaal people have gone one better in that there the law prohibits the Indians from travelling 1st or 2nd class. They are, irrespective of position, huddled together in the same compartment with the natives of South Africa.”
Merlin 