Mahatma Gandhi
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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| Date of Birth |
: |
Oct 2, 1869 |
| Date of Death |
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Jan 30, 1948 |
| Place of Birth |
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Gujarat |
Biography of Mahatma GandhiMahatma Gandhi (Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi) was born into a Hindu Modh family in Porbandar,
Gujarat, India in 1869. He was the son of Karamchand Gandhi, the diwan
(Chief Minister) of Porbandar, and Putlibai, Karamchand's fourth wife
(his previous three wives had died in childbirth), a Hindu of the
Pranami Vaishnava order. Growing up with a devout mother and surrounded
by the Jain influences of Gujarat, Gandhi learned from an early age the
tenets of non-injury to living beings, vegetarianism, fasting for
self-purification, and mutual tolerance between members of various
creeds and sects. He was born into the vaishya, or business, caste.
In May 1883, at the age of 13, Gandhi was married
through his parents' arrangement to Kasturba Makhanji (also spelled
"Kasturbai" or known as "Ba"), who was the same age as he. They had four
sons: Harilal Gandhi, born in 1888; Manilal Gandhi, born in 1892;
Ramdas Gandhi, born in 1897; and Devdas Gandhi, born in 1900. Gandhi was
a mediocre student in his youth at Porbandar and later Rajkot. He
barely passed the matriculation exam for the University of Bombay in
1887, where he joined Samaldas College. He was also unhappy at the
college, because his family wanted him to become a barrister. He leapt
at the opportunity to study in England, which he viewed as "a land of
philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization." Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi was a major political and spiritual leader of India,
and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer and perfector
of Satyagraha - the resistance of tyranny through mass civil
disobedience strongly founded upon ahimsa (total non-violence) - which
led India to independence, and has inspired movements for civil rights
and freedom across the world.
Gandhi is commonly known and addressed in India and across the world
as Mahatma Gandhi and as Bapu. Though his elders objected, Gandhi could
not be prevented from leaving; and it is said that his mother, a devout
woman, made him promise that he would keep away from wine, women, and
meat during his stay abroad. Gandhi left behind his son Harilal, then a
few months old. In London, Gandhi encountered theosophists, vegetarians,
and others who were disenchanted not only with industrialism, but with
the legacy of Enlightenment thought. They themselves represented the
fringe elements of English society. Gandhi was powerfully attracted to
them, as he was to the texts of the major religious traditions; and
ironically it is in London that he was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita.
Here, too, Gandhi showed determination and single-minded pursuit of his
purpose, and accomplished his objective of finishing his degree from the
Inner Temple.
He was called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court
of London; but later that year he left for India. After one year of a
none too successful law practice, Gandhi decided to accept an offer from
an Indian businessman in South Africa, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a
legal adviser. Unbeknown to him, this was to become an exceedingly
lengthy stay, and altogether Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over
twenty years. The Indians who had been living in South Africa were
without political rights, and were generally known by the derogatory
name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness of the
frightening force and fury of European racism, and how far Indians were
from being considered full human beings, when he thrown out of a
first-class railway compartment car, though he held a first-class
ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this political awakening Gandhi was to
emerge as the leader of the Indian community, and it is in South Africa
that he first coined the term satyagraha to signify his theory and
practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself
preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be
attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya
(celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi conceived of his own life as a
series of experiments to forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner
as to make the oppressor and the oppressed alike recognize their common
bonding and humanity: as he recognized, freedom is only freedom when it
is indivisible. In his book 'Satyagraha in South Africa' he was to
detail the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and their
resistance to oppressive legislation and executive measures, such as the
imposition of a poll tax on them, or the declaration by the government
that all non-Christian marriages were to be construed as invalid. In
1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi authored a short treatise entitled
'Hind Swaraj' or Indian Home Rule, where he all but initiated the
critique, not only of industrial civilization, but of modernity in all
its aspects.
Gandhi returned to India in early 1915, and was never to leave the
country again except for a short trip that took him to Europe in 1931.
Though he was not completely unknown in India, Gandhi followed the
advice of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it upon himself to
acquire a familiarity with Indian conditions. He traveled widely for one
year. Over the next few years, he was to become involved in numerous
local struggles, such as at Champaran in Bihar, where workers on indigo
plantations complained of oppressive working conditions, and at
Ahmedabad, where a dispute had broken out between management and workers
at textile mills. His interventions earned Gandhi a considerable
reputation, and his rapid ascendancy to the helm of nationalist politics
is signified by his leadership of the opposition to repressive
legislation (known as the "Rowlatt Acts") in 1919.
His saintliness was not uncommon, except in someone like him who
immersed himself in politics, and by this time he had earned from no
less a person than Rabindranath Tagore, India's most well-known writer,
the title of Mahatma, or 'Great Soul'. When 'disturbances' broke out in
the Punjab, leading to the massacre of a large crowd of unarmed Indians
at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote
the report of the Punjab Congress Inquiry Committee. Over the next two
years, Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement, which called upon
Indians to withdraw from British institutions, to return honors
conferred by the British, and to learn the art of self-reliance; though
the British administration was at places paralyzed, the movement was
suspended in February 1922 when a score of Indian policemen were
brutally killed by a large crowd at Chauri Chaura, a small market town
in the United Provinces.
Gandhi himself was arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of
sedition, and sentenced to imprisonment for six years. At The Great
Trial, as it is known to his biographers, Gandhi delivered a masterful
indictment of British rule. Owing to his poor health, Gandhi was
released from prison in 1925. Over the following years, he worked hard
to preserve Hindu-Muslim relations, and in 1924 he observed, from his
prison cell, a 21-day fast when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out at Kohat, a
military barracks on the Northwest Frontier. This was to be of his many
major public fasts, and in 1932 he was to commence the so-called Epic
Fast unto death, since he thought of "separate electorates" for the
oppressed class of what were then called untouchables (or Harijans in
Gandhi's vocabulary, and dalits in today's language) as a retrograde
measure meant to produce permanent divisions within Hindu society.
Gandhi earned the hostility of Ambedkar, the leader of the untouchables,
but few doubted that Gandhi was genuinely interested in removing the
serious disabilities from which they suffered, just as no one doubt that
Gandhi never accepted the argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted
two separate elements in Indian society.
These were some of the concerns most prominent in Gandhi's mind, but
he was also to initiate a constructive programme for social reform.
Gandhi had ideas -- mostly sound -- on every subject, from hygiene and
nutrition to education and labor, and he relentlessly pursued his ideas
in one of the many newspapers which he founded. Indeed, were Gandhi
known for nothing else in India, he would still be remembered as one of
the principal figures in the history of Indian journalism. In early
1930, as the nationalist movement was revived, the Indian National
Congress, the preeminent body of nationalist opinion, declared that it
would now be satisfied with nothing short of complete independence
(purna swaraj). Once the clarion call had been issued, it was perforce
necessary to launch a movement of resistance against British rule. On
March 2, Gandhi addressed a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing
him that unless Indian demands were met, he would be compelled to break
the "salt laws".
Predictably, his letter was received with bewildered amusement, and
accordingly Gandhi set off, on the early morning of March 12, with a
small group of followers towards Dandi on the sea. They arrived there on
April 5th: Gandhi picked up a small lump of natural salt, and so gave
the signal to hundreds of thousands of people to similarly defy the law,
since the British exercised a monopoly on the production and sale of
salt. This was the beginning of the civil disobedience movement: Gandhi
himself was arrested, and thousands of others were also hauled into
jail. It is to break this deadlock that Irwin agreed to hold talks with
Gandhi, and subsequently the British agreed to hold a Round Table
Conference in London to negotiate the possible terms of Indian
independence. Gandhi went to London in 1931 and met some of his admirers
in Europe, but the negotiations proved inconclusive. On his return to
India, he was once again arrested. For the next few years, Gandhi would
be engaged mainly in the constructive reform of Indian society.
He had vowed upon undertaking the salt march that he would not return
to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he had made his home, if India
did not attain its independence, and in the mid-1930s he established
himself in a remote village, in the dead center of India, by the name of
Segaon (known as Sevagram). It is to this obscure village, which was
without electricity or running water, that India's political leaders
made their way to engage in discussions with Gandhi about the future of
the independence movement, and it is here that he received visitors such
as Margaret Sanger, the well-known American proponent of birth-control.
Gandhi also continued to travel throughout the country, taking him
wherever his services were required. One such visit was to the Northwest
Frontier, where he had in the imposing Pathan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan (known by the endearing term of "Frontier Gandhi", and at other
times as Badshah Khan), a fervent disciple. At the outset of World War
II, Gandhi and the Congress leadership assumed a position of neutrality:
while clearly critical of fascism, they could not find it in themselves
to support British imperialism. Gandhi was opposed by Subhas Chandra
Bose, who had served as President of the Congress, and who took to the
view that Britain's moment of weakness was India's moment of
opportunity. When Bose ran for President of the Congress against
Gandhi's wishes and triumphed against Gandhi's own candidate, he found
that Gandhi still exercised influence over the Congress Working
Committee, and that it was near impossible to run the Congress if the
cooperation of Gandhi and his followers could not be procured. Bose
tendered his resignation, and shortly thereafter was to make a dramatic
escape from India to find support among the Japanese and the Nazis for
his plans to liberate India. In 1942, Gandhi issued the last call for
independence from British rule. On the grounds of what is now known as
August Kranti Maidan, he delivered a stirring speech, asking every
Indian to lay down their life, if necessary, in the cause of freedom.
He gave them this mantra: "Do or Die"; at the same time, he asked the
British to 'Quit India'. The response of the British government was to
place Gandhi under arrest, and virtually the entire Congress leadership
was to find itself behind bars, not to be released until after the
conclusion of the war. A few months after Gandhi and Kasturba had been
placed in confinement in the Aga Khan's Palace in Pune, Kasturba passed
away: this was a terrible blow to Gandhi, following closely on the heels
of the death of his private secretary of many years, the gifted Mahadev
Desai. In the period from 1942 to 1945, the Muslim League, which
represented the interest of certain Muslims and by now advocated the
creation of a separate homeland for Muslims, increasingly gained the
attention of the British, and supported them in their war effort. The
new government that came to power in Britain under Clement Atlee was
committed to the independence of India, and negotiations for India's
future began in earnest. Sensing that the political leaders were now
craving for power, Gandhi largely distanced himself from the
negotiations. He declared his opposition to the vivisection of India.
It is generally conceded, even by his detractors, that the last years
of his life were in some respects his finest. He walked from village to
village in riot-torn Noakhali, where Hindus were being killed in
retaliation for the killing of Muslims in Bihar, and nursed the wounded
and consoled the widowed; and in Calcutta he came to constitute, in the
famous words of the last viceroy, Mountbatten, a "one-man boundary
force" between Hindus and Muslims. The ferocious fighting in Calcutta
came to a halt, almost entirely on account of Gandhi's efforts, and even
his critics were wont to speak of the Gandhi's 'miracle of Calcutta'.
When the moment of freedom came, on 15 August 1947, Gandhi was nowhere
to be seen in the capital, though Nehru and the entire Constituent
Assembly were to salute him as the architect of Indian independence, as
the 'father of the nation'. The last few months of Gandhi's life were to
be spent mainly in the capital city of Delhi. There he divided his time
between the 'Bhangi colony', where the sweepers and the lowest of the
low stayed, and Birla House, the residence of one of the wealthiest men
in India and one of the benefactors of Gandhi's ashrams. Hindu and Sikh
refugees had streamed into the capital from what had become Pakistan,
and there was much resentment, which easily translated into violence,
against Muslims. It was partly in an attempt to put an end to the
killings in Delhi, and more generally to the bloodshed following the
partition, which may have taken the lives of as many as 1 million
people, besides causing the dislocation of no fewer than 11 million,
that Gandhi was to commence the last fast unto death of his life. The
fast was terminated when representatives of all the communities signed a
statement that they were prepared to live in "perfect amity", and that
the lives, property, and faith of the Muslims would be safeguarded.
A few days later, a bomb exploded in Birla House where Gandhi was
holding his evening prayers, but it caused no injuries. However, his
assassin, a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin by the name of Nathuram Godse, was
not so easily deterred. Gandhi, quite characteristically, refused
additional security, and no one could defy his wish to be allowed to
move around unhindered. In the early evening hours of 30 January 1948,
Gandhi met with India's Deputy Prime Minister and his close associate in
the freedom struggle, Vallabhai Patel, and then proceeded to his
prayers. That evening, as Gandhi's time-piece, which hung from one of
the folds of his dhoti (loin-cloth), was to reveal to him, he was
uncharacteristically late to his prayers, and he fretted about his
inability to be punctual. At 10 minutes past 5 o'clock, with one hand
each on the shoulders of Abha and Manu, who were known as his 'walking
sticks', Gandhi commenced his walk towards the garden where the prayer
meeting was held. As he was about to mount the steps of the podium,
Gandhi folded his hands and greeted his audience with a namaskar; at
that moment, a young man came up to him and roughly pushed aside Manu.
Nathuram Godse bent down in the gesture of an obeisance, took a revolver
out of his pocket, and shot Gandhi three times in his chest.
Bloodstains appeared over Gandhi's white woolen shawl; his hands still
folded in a greeting, Gandhi blessed his assassin: He Ram! He Ram! As
Gandhi fell, his faithful time-piece struck the ground, and the hands of
the watch came to a standstill. They showed, as they had done before,
the precise time: 5:12 P.M.
1 comments
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, was an Indian nationalist, social reformer and
freedom fighter who was the first popular leader of the Indian
Independence Movement. Tilak sparked the fire for complete independence
in Indian consciousness, and is considered the father of Hindu
nationalism as well. Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it! This
famous quote of his is very popular and well-remembered in India even
today. 
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