Indian
nationalist leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more commonly known as Mahatma
Gandhi, was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, Kathiawar, India, which was
then part of the British Empire. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, served as a
chief minister in Porbandar and other states in western India. His mother,
Putlibai, was a deeply religious woman who fasted regularly. Gandhi grew up
worshiping the Hindu god Vishnu and following Jainism, a morally rigorous
ancient Indian religion that espoused non-violence, fasting, meditation and
vegetarianism.
In 1885,
Gandhi endured the passing of his father and shortly after that the death of
his young baby. Although Gandhi was interested in becoming a doctor, his father
had hoped he would also become a government minister, so his family steered him
to enter the legal profession. Shortly after the birth of the first of four
surviving sons, 18-year-old Gandhi sailed for London, England, in 1888 to study
law. The young Indian struggled with the transition to Western culture, and
during his three-year stay in London, he became more committed to a meatless
diet, joining the executive committee of the London Vegetarian Society, and
started to read a variety of sacred texts to learn more about world
religions.
Upon
returning to India in 1891, Gandhi learned that his mother had died just weeks
earlier. Then, he struggled to gain his footing as a lawyer. In his first
courtroom case, a nervous Gandhi blanked when the time came to cross-examine a
witness. He immediately fled the courtroom after reimbursing his client for his
legal fees. After struggling to find work in India, Gandhi obtained a one-year
contract to perform legal services in South Africa. Shortly after the birth of
another son, he sailed for Durban in the South African state of Natal in April
1893.
When
Gandhi arrived in South Africa, he was quickly appalled by the discrimination
and racial segregation faced by Indian immigrants at the hands of white British
and Boer authorities. Upon his first appearance in a Durban courtroom, Gandhi was
asked to remove his turban. He refused and left the court instead. The Natal
Advertiser mocked him in print as “an unwelcome visitor.”
A seminal
moment in Gandhi’s life occurred days later on June 7, 1893, during a train
trip to Pretoria when a white man objected to his presence in the first-class
railway compartment, although he had a ticket. Refusing to move to the back of
the train, Gandhi was forcibly removed and thrown off the train at a station in
Pietermaritzburg. His act of civil disobedience awoke in him a determination to
devote himself to fighting the “deep disease of color prejudice.” He vowed that
night to “try, if possible, to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the
process.” From that night forward, the small, unassuming man would grow into a
giant force for civil rights.
Gandhi
formed the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 to fight discrimination. At the end of
his year-long contract, he prepared to return to India until he learned at his
farewell party of a bill before the Natal Legislative Assembly that would
deprive Indians of the right to vote. Fellow immigrants convinced Gandhi to
stay and lead the fight against the legislation. Although Gandhi could not
prevent the law’s passage, he drew international attention to the injustice.
After a
brief trip to India in late 1896 and early 1897, Gandhi returned to South
Africa with his wife and two children. Kasturba would give birth to two more
sons in South Africa, one in 1897 and one in 1900. Gandhi ran a thriving legal
practice, and at the outbreak of the Boer War, he raised an all-Indian
ambulance corps of 1,100 volunteers to support the British cause, arguing that
if Indians expected to have full rights of citizenship in the British Empire,
they also needed to shoulder their responsibilities as well.
Gandhi
continued to study world religions during his years in South Africa. “The
religious spirit within me became a living force,” he wrote of his time there.
He immersed himself in sacred Hindu spiritual texts and adopted a life of
simplicity, austerity and celibacy that was free of material goods.
In 1906,
Gandhi organized his first mass civil-disobedience campaign, which he called
“Satyagraha” (“truth and firmness”), in reaction to the Transvaal government’s
new restrictions on the rights of Indians, including the refusal to recognize
Hindu marriages. After years of protests, the government imprisoned hundreds of
Indians in 1913, including Gandhi. Under pressure, the South African government
accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts that
included recognition of Hindu marriages and the abolition of a poll tax for
Indians. When Gandhi sailed from South Africa in 1914 to return home, Smuts
wrote, “The saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope forever.”
After
spending several months in London at the outbreak of World War I, Gandhi
returned in 1915 to India, which was still under the firm control of the
British, and founded an ashram in Ahmedabad open to all castes. Wearing a
simple loincloth and shawl, Gandhi lived an austere life devoted to prayer,
fasting and meditation. He became known as “Mahatma,” which means “great soul.”
(source: http://khurpi.com/in-defence-of-mahatma-gandhi/)
In 1919,
however, Gandhi had a political reawakening when the newly enacted Rowlatt Act
authorized British authorities to imprison those suspected of sedition without
trial. In response, Gandhi called for a Satyagraha campaign of peaceful
protests and strikes. Violence broke out instead, which culminated on April 13,
1919, in the Massacre of Amritsar when troops led by British Brigadier General
Reginald Dyer fired machine guns into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators and
killed nearly 400 people. No longer able to pledge allegiance to the British
government, Gandhi returned the medals he earned for his military service in
South Africa and opposed Britain’s mandatory military draft of Indians to serve
in World War I.
Gandhi
became a leading figure in the Indian home-rule movement. Calling for mass
boycotts, he urged government officials to stop working for the Crown, students
to stop attending government schools, soldiers to leave their posts and
citizens to stop paying taxes and purchasing British goods. Rather than buy
British-manufactured clothes, he began to use a portable spinning wheel to
produce his own cloth, and the spinning wheel soon became a symbol of Indian
independence and self-reliance. Gandhi assumed the leadership of the Indian
National Congress and advocated a policy of non-violence and non-cooperation to
achieve home rule.
After
British authorities arrested Gandhi in 1922, he pleaded guilty to three counts
of sedition. Although sentenced to a six-year imprisonment, Gandhi was released
in February 1924 after appendicitis surgery. He discovered upon his release
that relations between India’s Hindus and Muslims had devolved during his time
in jail, and when violence between the two religious groups flared again,
Gandhi began a three-week fast in the autumn of 1924 to urge unity.
After
remaining away from active politics during much of the latter 1920s, Gandhi
returned in 1930 to protest Britain’s Salt Acts, which not only prohibited
Indians from collecting or selling salt—a staple of the Indian diet—but imposed
a heavy tax that hit the country’s poorest particularly hard. Gandhi planned a
new Satyagraha campaign that entailed a 390-kilometer/240-mile march to the
Arabian Sea, where he would collect salt in symbolic defiance of the government
monopoly.
“My
ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence and
thus make them see the wrong they have done to India,” he wrote days before the
march to the British viceroy, Lord Irwin. Wearing a homespun white shawl and
sandals and carrying a walking stick, Gandhi set out from his religious retreat
in Sabarmati on March 12, 1930, with a few dozen followers. The ranks of the
marchers swelled by the time he arrived 24 days later in the coastal town of
Dandi, where he broke the law by making salt from evaporated seawater.
The Salt
March sparked similar protests, and mass civil disobedience swept across India.
Approximately 60,000 Indians were jailed for breaking the Salt Acts, including
Gandhi, who was imprisoned in May 1930. Still, the protests against the Salt
Acts elevated Gandhi into a transcendent figure around the world, and he was
named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” for 1930.
Gandhi was
released from prison in January 1931, and two months later he made an agreement
with Lord Irwin to end the Salt Satyagraha in exchange for concessions that
included the release of thousands of political prisoners. The agreement,
however, largely kept the Salt Acts intact, but it did give those who lived on
the coasts the right to harvest salt from the sea. Hoping that the agreement
would be a stepping-stone to home rule, Gandhi attended the London Round Table
Conference on Indian constitutional reform in August 1931 as the sole
representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference, however, proved
fruitless.
Gandhi
returned to India to find himself imprisoned once again in January 1932 during
a crackdown by India’s new viceroy, Lord Willingdon. Later that year, an
incarcerated Gandhi embarked on a six-day fast to protest the British decision
to segregate the “untouchables,” those on the lowest rung of India’s caste
system, by allotting them separate electorates. The public outcry forced the
British to amend the proposal.
After his
eventual release, Gandhi left the Indian National Congress in 1934, and
leadership passed to his protégé Jawaharlal Nehru. He again stepped away from
politics to focus on education, poverty and the problems afflicting India’s
rural areas.
As Great
Britain found itself engulfed in World War II in 1942, though, Gandhi launched
the “Quit India” movement that called for the immediate British withdrawal from
the country. In August 1942, the British arrested Gandhi, his wife and other
leaders of the Indian National Congress and detained them in the Aga Khan
Palace in present-day Pune. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order
to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire,” Prime Minister Winston
Churchill told Parliament in support of the crackdown. With his health failing,
Gandhi was released after a 19-month detainment, but not before his 74-year-old
wife died in his arms in February 1944.
After the
Labour Party defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in the British general election
of 1945, it began negotiations for Indian independence with the Indian National
Congress and Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League. Gandhi played an active role
in the negotiations, but he could not prevail in his hope for a unified India.
Instead, the final plan called for the partition of the subcontinent along
religious lines into two independent states—predominantly Hindu India and predominantly
Muslim Pakistan.
Violence
between Hindus and Muslims flared even before independence took effect on
August 15, 1947. Afterwards, the killings multiplied. Gandhi toured riot-torn
areas in an appeal for peace and fasted in an attempt to end the bloodshed.
Some Hindus, however, increasingly viewed Gandhi as a traitor for expressing
sympathy toward Muslims.
In the
late afternoon of January 30, 1948, the 78-year-old Gandhi, still weakened from
repeated hunger strikes, clung to his two grandnieces as they led him from his
living quarters in New Delhi’s Birla House to a prayer meeting. Hindu extremist
Nathuram Godse, upset at Gandhi’s tolerance of Muslims, knelt before the
Mahatma before pulling out a semiautomatic pistol and shooting him three times
at point-blank range. The violent act took the life of a pacifist who spent his
life preaching non-violence. Godse and a co-conspirator were executed by
hanging in November 1949, while additional conspirators were sentenced to life
in prison.
Even after
his death, Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence and his belief in simple
living—making his own clothes, eating a vegetarian diet and using fasts for
self-purification as well as a means of protest—have been a beacon of hope for
oppressed and marginalized people throughout the world. Satyagraha remains one
of the most potent philosophies in freedom struggles throughout the world
today, and Gandhi’s actions inspired future human rights movements around the
globe, including those of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the
United States and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
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