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April 10, 2026
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"Powell's offering us £1,000 to go home. I'll take the money: the train fare's only 10 quid from here to Dudley."
"Traditionally, television audiences have always been massively white, because it tends to be organisations such as the British Legion who apply for tickets, and black people have never felt as though they belonged in clubs like that. It was only when I went along to the BBC ticket unit and suggested that my stuff might appeal to people who hang out in social clubs in Brixton and Willesden that anyone thought about the imbalance. It wasn't particularly racist — it just hadn't occurred to anyone before."
"Robert Luff was a powerful, articulate businessman, bald-headed, very smart, about 50 to 60 years old, and he had all these shows on, all over Britain, including The Black and White Minstrel Show, which at that stage was making him a fortune."
"At first I thought it was really funny, but the warning bells went off when I saw the first publicity poster for it. It was a picture of me with one of the minstrels and I'm wiping the black off his face and he's pretending to wipe the black off my face."
"In retrospect you look back and think, "Why didn't anybody say anything?" My brother Seymour, who's incredibly militant, used to make these jokes about storming on stage in a black beret and black gloves."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.