Background

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, Bombay Presidency, British India (currently Porbandar, Gujarat, India). His wealthy family was of a Modh Bania subcaste of the Vaisya, or merchant, caste. He was the fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, prime minister to the raja of three small city-states. Gandhi described his mother as a deeply religious woman who attended temple service daily.

Education

Mohandas was a small, quiet boy who disliked sports and was only an average student. Mohandas was to study medicine, but as this was considered defiling to his caste, his father prevailed on him to study law instead.

Gandhi went to England to study in September 1888. In England he studied law but never became completely adjusted to the English way of life. He was called to the bar on June 10, 1891, and sailed for Bombay (currently Mumbai).

Career

Gandhi attempted unsuccessfully to practice law in Rajkot and Bombay, then for a brief period served as lawyer for the prince of Porbandar. In 1893 Gandhi accepted an offer from a firm of Moslems to represent them legally in Pretoria, capital of Transvaal in the Union of South Africa. While traveling in a first-class train compartment in Natal, Gandhi was asked by a white man to leave. He got off the train and spent the night in a train station meditating. He decided then to work to eradicate race prejudice. This cause kept him in South Africa not a year as he had anticipated but until 1914. Shortly after the train incident he called his first meeting of Indians in Pretoria and attacked racial discrimination by whites. This launched his campaign for improved legal status for Indians in South Africa, who at that time suffered the same discrimination as blacks.

In 1896 Gandhi returned to India to take his wife and sons to Africa. While in India he informed his countrymen of the plight of Indians in Africa. News of his speeches filtered back to Africa, and when Gandhi reached South Africa, an angry mob stoned and attempted to lynch him.

Gandhi began to do menial chores for unpaid boarders of the exterior castes and to encourage his wife to do the same. He decided to buy a farm in Natal and return to a simpler way of life. He began to fast. In 1906 he became celibate after having fathered four sons, and he extolled Brahmacharya (vow of celibacy) as a means of birth control and spiritual purity. He also began to live a life of voluntary poverty. During this period Gandhi developed the concept of Satyagraha, or soul force.

In 1907 Gandhi urged all Indians in South Africa to defy a law requiring registration and fingerprinting of all Indians. For this activity Gandhi was imprisoned for 2 months but released when he agreed to voluntary registration. During Gandhi's second stay in jail he read Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," which left a deep impression on him. He was influenced also by his correspondence with Leo Tolstoy in 1909-1910 and by John Ruskin's Unto This Last.

Gandhi decided to create a cooperative commonwealth for civil resisters. He called it the Tolstoy Farm. By this time Gandhi had abandoned Western dress for Indian garb. Two of his final legal achievements in Africa were a law declaring Indian marriages (rather than only Christian) valid, and abolition of a tax on former indentured Indian labor. Gandhi regarded his work in South Africa as completed.

By the time Gandhi returned to India, in January 1915, he had become known as "Mahatmaji," a title given him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi knew how to reach the masses and insisted on their resistance and spiritual regeneration. He spoke of a new, free Indian individual. He told Indians that India's shackles were self-made. In 1914 Gandhi raised an ambulance corps of Indian students to help the British army, as he had done during the Boer War.

The repressive Rowlatt Acts of 1919 caused Gandhi to call a general hartal, or strike, throughout the country, but he called it off when violence occurred against Englishmen. Following the Amritsar Massacre of some 400 Indians, Gandhi responded with noncooperation with British courts, stores, and schools. The government followed with the announcement of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms.

In 1922 Gandhi was tried and sentenced to 6 years in prison, but he was released 2 years later for an emergency appendectomy. This was the last time the British government tried Gandhi.

Another technique Gandhi used increasingly was the fast. He firmly believed that Hindu-Moslem unity was natural and undertook a 21-day fast to bring the two communities together. He also fasted in a strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad.

Gandhi also developed the protest march. A British law taxed all salt used by Indians, a severe hardship on the peasant. In 1930 Gandhi began a famous 24-day "salt march" to the sea. Several thousand marchers walked 241 miles to the coast, where Gandhi picked up a handful of salt in defiance of the government. This signaled a nationwide movement in which peasants produced salt illegally and Congress volunteers sold contraband salt in the cities. Nationalists gained faith that they could shrug off foreign rule. The march also made the British more aware that they were subjugating India.

Gandhi was not opposed to compromise. In 1931 he negotiated with the viceroy, Lord Irwin, a pact whereby civil disobedience was to be canceled, prisoners released, salt manufacture permitted on the coast, and Congress would attend the Second Round Table Conference in London. Gandhi attended as the only Congress representative, but Churchill refused to see him, referring to Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir."

Another cause Gandhi espoused was improving the status of "untouchables," members of the exterior castes. Gandhi called them Harijans, or children of God. On Sept. 20, 1932, Gandhi began a fast to the death for the Harijans, opposing a British plan for a separate electorate for them. In this action Gandhi confronted Harijan leader Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, who favored separate electorates as a political guarantee of improved status. As a result of Gandhi's fast, some temples were opened to exterior castes for the first time in history. Following the marriage of one of Gandhi's sons to a woman of another caste, Gandhi came to approve only intercaste marriages.

Gandhi devoted the years 1934 through 1939 to promotion of spinning, basic education, and Hindi as the national language. During these years Gandhi worked closely with Jawaharlal Nehru in the Congress Working Committee, but there were also differences between the two. Nehru and others came to view the Mahatma's ideas on economics as anachronistic. Nevertheless, Gandhi designated Nehru his successor, saying, "I know this, that when I am gone he will speak my language."

England's entry into World War II brought India in without consultation. Because Britain had made no political concessions satisfactory to nationalist leaders, Gandhi in August 1942 proposed noncooperation, and Congress passed the "Quit India" resolution. Gandhi, Nehru, and other Congress leaders were imprisoned, touching off violence throughout India. When the British attempted to place the blame on Gandhi, he fasted 3 weeks in jail. He contracted malaria in prison and was released on May 6, 1944. He had spent a total of nearly 6 years in jail.

When Gandhi emerged from prison, he sought to avert creation of a separate Moslem state of Pakistan which Muhammad Ali Jinnah was demanding. A British Cabinet mission to India in March 1946 advised against partition and proposed instead a united India with a federal parliament. In August, Viceroy Wavell authorized Nehru to form a Cabinet. Gandhi suggested that Jinnah be offered the post of prime minister or defense minister. Jinnah refused and instead declared August 16 "Direct Action Day." On that day and several days following, communal killings left 5,000 dead and 15,000 wounded in Calcutta alone. Violence spread through the country.

Aggrieved, Gandhi went to Bengal, saying, "I am not going to leave Bengal until the last embers of trouble are stamped out," but while he was in Calcutta 4,500 more were killed in Bihar. Gandhi, now 77, warned that he would fast to death unless Biharis reformed. He went to Noakhali, a heavily Moslem city in Bengal, where he said "Do or die" would be put to the test. Either Hindus and Moslems would learn to live together or he would die in the attempt. The situation there calmed, but rioting continued elsewhere.

In March 1947 the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, arrived in India charged with taking Britain out of India by June 1948. The Congress party by this time had agreed to partition, since the only alternative appeared to be continuation of British rule.

Gandhi, despairing because his nation was not responding to his plea for peace and brotherhood, refused to participate in the independence celebrations on August 15, 1947. On September 1, 1947, after an angry Hindu mob broke into the home where he was staying in Calcutta, Gandhi began to fast, "to end only if and when sanity returns to Calcutta. " Both Hindu and Moslem leaders promised that there would be no more killings, and Gandhi ended his fast.

On January 13, 1948, Gandhi began his last fast in Delhi, praying for Indian unity. As he was attending prayers, he was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, a 35-year old editor of a Hindu Mahasabha extremist weekly in Poona. Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition. Gandhi's ashes were poured into urns which were sent across India for memorial services. Most of the ashes were immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad on 12 February 1948. However, some of them were secretly taken away. Some of Gandhi's ashes were scattered at the source of the Nile River near Jinja, Uganda, and a memorial plaque marks the event. The contents of another urn were immersed at Girgaum Chowpatty on 30 January 2008. Another urn is at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune and another one in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Los Angeles.

Achievements

• Mahatma Gandhi was an Indian activist who was famous as the most prominent leader of the Indian Independence movement and he is unofficially referred to as "Father of the Nation" in India. He also worked on a number of social issues in India. He launched campaigns to improve the lives of untouchables, or lower caste people. His successful application of non-violent methods of protest has proved to be highly influential for numerous movements since then. Gandhi proved to be an inspirational figure for several important world leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
  
  Gandhi was also the runner-up to Albert Einstein as "Person of the Century" at the end of 1999. The Government of India awarded the annual Gandhi Peace Prize to distinguished social workers, world leaders and citizens. Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • India of My Dreams

    (A book, which places before the reader not only those bas...)

    1947
  • Third class in Indian railways

    (From the filthy, overcrowded conditions in third class to...)

    1917
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi

    (Assembled with skill and sensitivity, this selection of b...)

    1951
  • Gandhi's Response to Islam

    (Gandhi's thoughts on Islam are collected here for the fir...)

    2004
  • The Words of Gandhi

    (This bestselling volume includes an introduction by Atten...)

    1982
  • The Penguin Gandhi Reader

    (This meticulously edited volume culled from the Collected...)

    1956
  • Gandhi: Selected Political Writings

    (Based on the complete edition of his works, this new volu...)

    1951
  • The Way to God

    (The Way to God explores the spiritual roots Mahatma Gandh...)

    1971
  • The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi

    (The Bhagavad Gita presents a synthesis of the Brahmanical...)

    1946
  • Constructive Programme: It's Meaning & Place

    (The constructive programme may otherwise and more fitting...)

    1941
  • Gandhi on Non-Violence

    (The basic principles of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violen...)

    1965
  • The Essential Gandhi

    (The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His...)

    1962
  • Gandhi's Health Guide

    (Millions of people today continue to be inspired by Mahat...)

    1921
  • The Message of Mahatma Gandhi

    (The book is a brief anthology of Gandhiji's writings and ...)

    1968
  • Hind Swaraj Or Indian Home Rule

    (The book contains his views on Swaraj (Home Rule), Modern...)

    1909
  • Gandhi on Christianity

    (Gandhi is widely revered as one of the great moral prophe...)

    1991
  • Gandhi: An Autobiography

    (Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most inspiring figures o...)

    1927

Religion

Gandhi was deeply interested in the comparative study of religions since the days of his youth. He was born a Hindu but his interpretation of Hinduism was his own. While keeping firm roots in ancient Hinduism, he welcomed contact with other religions, especially the Christian doctrines. In this he had no doubt that he would not do any injustice to Hinduism or depart from its essential teachings, for his belief remained that Hinduism could assimilate and synthesize whatever new elements it came up against.

Gandhi believed that Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were traditions of Hinduism, with shared history, rites and ideas. He had generally positive and empathetic views of Islam, and he extensively studied the Quran. He thought that Islam is a faith that proactively promoted peace, and felt that non-violence had a predominant place in the Quran. His close friend Badshah Khan suggested to open Hindu temples for Muslim prayers and Gandhi began having Muslim prayers read in Hindu temples to play his part. However, he was unable to get Hindu prayers read in mosques.

Gandhi criticised as well as praised Christianity. He was critical of Christian missionary efforts in British India, because they mixed medical or education assistance with demands that the beneficiary converts to Christianity. He believed that the message of Jesus was not to humiliate and imperialistically rule over other people considering them an inferior or second class or slaves, but that "when the hungry are fed and peace comes to our individual and collective life, then Christ is born."

Gandhi discussed the Zionism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. He said that Zionists in Palestine represented European imperialism and used violence to achieve their goals. Gandhi argued that "the Jews should disclaim any intention of realizing their aspiration under the protection of arms and should rely wholly on the goodwill of Arabs."

Politics

Mahatma Gandhi dedicated his life to discovering and pursuing truth, or Satya, and called his movement satyagraha. He based Satyagraha on the Vedantic ideal of self-realization, ahimsa (nonviolence), vegetarianism, and universal love. Gandhi's political thought stems from different traditions, Eastern and Western. Though he had inherited many traditions he had not agreed in to with any one of them. He had picked up many traditional concepts from his immediate predecessors as well as from ancient texts.

Gandhi brought Satyagraha to India in 1915, and was soon elected to the Indian National Congress political party. He began to push for independence from the United Kingdom, and organized resistance to a 1919 law that gave British authorities carte blanche to imprison suspected revolutionaries without trial. He protested discrimination against the "untouchables," India’s lowest caste, and negotiated unsuccessfully for Indian home rule. Gandhi also organised the Quit India movement, a campaign to get Britain to voluntarily withdraw from India during World War II.

Views

Gandhi believed that any form of food inescapably harms some form of living organism, but one should seek to understand and reduce the violence in what one consumes because "there is essential unity of all life". He believed that slaughtering animals is unnecessary, as other sources of foods are available. Besides, he believed in sarvodaya economic model, which literally means "welfare, upliftment of all".

Gandhi also rejected the colonial Western format of the education system. He favoured an education system with far greater emphasis on learning skills in practical and useful work, one that included physical, mental and spiritual studies.

Gandhi believed that a wife is not a slave of the husband, but his comrade, better half, colleague and friend. However, he opposed contraception and invited young women to sleep in his bed naked as a way of testing his sexual self-control.

Quotations: "In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals."

"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary."

"Under democracy individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded."

"No action which is not voluntary can be called moral."

"Any action that is dictated by fear or by coercion of any kind ceases to be moral."

"If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics. Swaraj would descend upon India from heaven. But I am painfully aware that that event is far off as yet."

"There is no such thing as slow freedom. Freedom is like a birth. Till we are fully free we are slaves."

"If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should feel free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence."

"Always believe in your dreams, because if you don't, you'll still have hope."

"Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed."

Personality

Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t a great orator. He didn’t have a very attractive physique, lived a life of simplicity and avoided the limelight as much as he could. He always favored the truth and honesty, he condemned violence, kept himself away from the materialistic desires and walked a path of high moral. Gandhi also didn’t waste his time looking back at the past or wondering what would happen in the future.

Quotes from others about the person

• Barack Obama: "I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared with America and the world."
  
  Einstein: "Mahatma Gandhi's life achievement stands unique in political history. He has invented a completely new and humane means for the liberation war of an oppressed country, and practised it with greatest energy and devotion. The moral influence he had on the consciously thinking human being of the entire civilised world will probably be much more lasting than it seems in our time with its overestimation of brutal violent forces. Because lasting will only be the work of such statesmen who wake up and strengthen the moral power of their people through their example and educational works. We may all be happy and grateful that destiny gifted us with such an enlightened contemporary, a role model for the generations to come."

Interests

• Gandhi believed that walking is the best exercise and walked around 18 km every day, for 40 years.

• Writers

  Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy

Connections

At the age of 13 Gandhi was married without foreknowledge of the event to a girl of his own age, Kasturbai. The Gandhi couple had four children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.

Father:

Karamchand Gandhi

Mother:

Putlibai Gandhi

Wife:

Kasturba Gandhi

Kasturba Gandhi (11 April 1869 – 22 February 1944) was an Indian political activist.

Son:

Devdas Gandhi

Devdas Gandhi (22 May 1900 – 3 August 1957) was the fourth and youngest son of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He became active in his father's movement and also became a prominent journalist, serving as editor of Hindustan Times.

Son:

Manilal Gandhi

Manilal Gandhi (28 October 1892 – 5 April 1956) was the second son of Mohandas Gandhi and an editor of the Indian Opinion.

Son:

Harilal Gandhi

Harilal Gandhi (23 August 1888 – 18 June 1948) was the eldest son of Mohandas Gandhi. He wanted to go to England for higher studies, hoping to become a barrister but his father however firmly opposed this. Eventually rebelling against his father's decision, in 1911 Harilal renounced all family ties.

Son:

Ramdas Gandhi

Ramdas Gandhi (2 January 1897 – 14 April 1969) was the third son of Mohandas Gandhi. He was active in his father's Indian independence movement.

References

• The Gift of Anger: And Other Lessons from My Grandfather Mahatma Gandhi Discover ten vital and extraordinary life lessons from one of the most important and influential philosophers and peace activists of the twentieth century - Mahatma Gandhi - in this poignant and timely exploration of the true path from anger to peace, as recounted by Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi. In the current troubled climate, in our country and in the world, these lessons are needed more than ever before.
  2015
• Mahatma Gandhi: The Little Black Book "Whose Little Black Book do you have?" In the days of old, the little black book was a means to get you things you wanted; it was your secret to certain forms of taboo success. In modern society, we know that knowledge and wisdom will get you farther in life than the phone numbers of secret lovers.
  2015
• Mahatma Gandhi: Proponent of Peace Presents the life and accomplishments of the Indian statesman and peacemaker, from his early life in British-controlled India to his nonviolent actions to achieve the nation's independence.
  2010
• Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.
  2011
• Gandhi: Great men in history Gandhi has been the source of inspiration of millions of men, but: Did you know that he was a lawyer that at the beginning of his career was practically a failure? Did you know that he got the inspiration of non-violence and civil disobedience by reading Thoreau, an American philosopher? Did you know that he was arrested more than 10 times spending about 6 years in prison for defending his rights and those of his people? The second volume of the series Great Men in History is dedicated to this great man, Gandhi.
  2013
• Mahatma Gandhi For Kids And Beginners Do you want to know who Mahatma Gandhi was and what he did, who were this brothers and sisters, and mother and father? Do you what to know what he was as a child, and what his weapons were and how be fought against injustice and freedom? Do you want to know why he was called the "Mahatma" and "Bapu". This book is an introduction on the life, works and biography of the great soul, Mahatma Gandhi.
  2014