Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was an Indian revolutionary religious leader who used his religious power for political and social reform. Although he held no governmental office, he was the prime mover in the struggle for independence of the world's second-largest nation.

Mohandas Gandhi was born on Oct. 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a seacoast town in the Kathiawar Peninsula north of Bombay. 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. Mohandas was a small, quiet boy who disliked sports and was only an average student. At the age of 13 he was married without foreknowledge of the event to a girl of his own age, Kasturbai. The childhood ambition of 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. Before leaving India, he promised his mother he would abstain from eating meat, and he became a more zealous vegetarian abroad than he had been at home. 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. He attempted unsuccessfully to practice law in Rajkot and Bombay, then for a brief period served as lawyer for the prince of Porbandar.

South Africa: The Beginning

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.

Spiritual Development

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. Gandhi wrote: "Satyagraha is not predominantly civil disobedience, but a quiet and irresistible pursuit of truth." Truth was throughout his life Gandhi's chief concern, as reflected in the subtitle of his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Truth for Gandhi was not an abstract absolute but a principle which had to be discovered experimentally in each situation. Gandhi also developed a basic concern for the means used to achieve a goal, for he felt the means necessarily shaped the ends.

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.

Disobedience and Return to Old Values

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.

Another issue for Gandhi was man versus machine. This was the principle behind the Khadi movement, behind Gandhi's urging that Indians spin their own clothing rather than buy British goods. Spinning would create employment during the many annual idle months for millions of Indian peasants. He cherished the ideal of economic independence for the village. He identified industrialization with materialism and felt it was a dehumanizing menace to man's growth. The individual, not economic productivity, was the central concern. Gandhi never lost his faith in the inherent goodness of human nature.

In 1921 the Congress party, a coalition of various nationalist groups, again voted for a nonviolent disobedience campaign. Gandhi had come "reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically." But freedom for India was not simply a political matter, for "the instant India is purified India becomes free, and not a moment earlier." 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.

Fasting and the Protest March

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.

Drive for Independence

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 Aug. 15, 1947. On Sept. 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 Jan. 13, 1948, Gandhi began his last fast in Delhi, praying for Indian unity. On January 30, 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.

Further Reading

Gandhi's Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (2 vols., 1927-1929) covers the period to 1921. Of the numerous biographies, D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma (8 vols., 1951-1954; rev. ed. 1960-1963), is most voluminous and utilizes Gandhi's own writings. Other treatments include Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi (trans. 1924); C. F. Andrews, ed., Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story and Mahatma Gandhi at Work (both 1931); Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) and Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (1954); G. D. Birla, In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir (1953); Rajendra Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi (1955); Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (2 vols., 1956-1958); and Martin Lewis, ed., Gandhi: Maker of Modern India (1965). Among the more provocative recent studies are Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (1958; rev. ed. 1965); Indira Rothermund, The Philosophy of Restraint: Mahatma Gandhi's Strategy and Indian Politics (1963); Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence (1969); and Penderel Moon, Gandhi and Modern India (1969). □

Gandhi, Mohandas K. 1869-1948

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar, Gujarat, India, on October 2, 1869, the youngest son in a family of four children. Due to his father’s position as a local politician, the family was subject to transfer within the province, and the Gandhis moved to Rajkot when Gandhi was seven years old. He completed his primary and secondary studies there, and at age thirteen, in keeping with Indian custom at that time, was married (to Kasturba Kapadia).

As a young husband, Gandhi exhibited intense jealousy and sexual voracity. However, his sexual appetite would become the source of great guilt throughout his adult life. This began after his father fell ill and Gandhi became his constant bedside companion. One evening, a trusted uncle arrived to temporarily relieve Gandhi of his responsibility. Gandhi jumped at the chance to be with his wife, and during his absence, his father died. Gandhi never forgave himself, and the vow of celibacy (known as Brachmacharya ) that he took later in life may have involved atonement for this event.

Gandhi left for college in Bhavnagar, about ninety miles from Rajkot, soon after his father’s death, with the intention of replacing his father as provider for the extended family. Though he had always been an exemplary student, his college studies suffered because of his melancholy and his guilt intensified when he ultimately returned home defeated.

Not long after his return from Bhavnagar, a family advisor suggested that he travel to England to study law. Gandhi spent three years in England, and was “called to the Bar,” or made an official barrister, in 1891. He then returned to India to begin a legal practice.

However, Gandhi was afraid to speak out in court. In fact, his first trial ended so badly that he refunded his client’s money. He did have an aptitude for drawing up legal documents and briefs, however, and was offered a job with a Rajkot merchant who did business in South Africa. After much deliberation, Gandhi decided to accept the post in South Africa for one year.

In South Africa, Gandhi immediately encountered racial discrimination. Though also British subjects, Indians were not permitted first-class accommodations, always had to give way to British whites, and were treated very poorly in general. Gandhi objected to every indignity, but when his employer stepped in to solve the problem for him, Gandhi backed down and tried to ignore the insult; however, shortly before he was to return to India, the government sought to impose an annual £25 tax on indentured servants who had finished their tenure and continued to work in South Africa. The tax applied to each adult family member, and in many instances would have equaled almost as much as the family’s earnings for a full year. It was an obvious ploy to reduce farming competition for white farmers. Gandhi was outraged and met with Indian businessmen to explain the situation. At their behest, Gandhi remained in South Africa to campaign against the tax.

In 1894 Gandhi founded the Natal National Congress, patterned after the National Congress of India, and soon after returned to India to drum up support. The Green Pamphlet, Gandhi’s first political treatise on the plight of South African Indians, was widely distributed in India and roused greater support for the cause. After returning to South Africa in 1904, Gandhi bought and ran the Indian Opinion newspaper to spread the word among Indians living there. At the end of that same year, in order to run the paper more efficiently, Gandhi set up his first commune—the Phoenix Settlement—where he, his wife, and three of his four children lived. Harilal, his oldest son, had stayed in England to study.

Ultimately, the £25 Tax was reduced to a £3 tax, rather than being rescinded, by the South African Parliament, which only served to increase Indian resentment. A new battle arose over a government order to register all Asians, including longtime residents as well as new immigrants, and women and children. This order, commonly known as the “Black Act,” also required fingerprinting. The entire community was outraged. This sparked Gandhi’s first campaign based on Satyagraha, or political struggle through passive resistance and civil disobedience. Many were arrested for their failure to comply with the order, including Gandhi, who was imprisoned for the first time. Eventually, Gandhi reached an agreement with Cabinet Minister Jan Christen Smuts, whereby the amendment would be repealed once most of the Indian population had registered.

Even after a show of Indian compliance, the South African government reneged on the agreement and in 1908 the Indian community met to burn their registration certificates. Once again, many were arrested, including Gandhi, who was sentenced to prison. In 1913, when the Cape Supreme Court ruled that any marriage outside Christianity and/or not recorded by the Registrar of Marriages was invalid, Indian women became involved in the demonstrations.

To goad the British into revoking their harsh requirements, Gandhi organized a “Great March” of 2,000 Indians from Natal into the Transvaal. Indians were bound by law to present registration papers at the point of entry, though Europeans were not so restricted. The march was meant to overcrowd prisons and increase pressure on the government to repeal the law. This situation deteriorated into such harsh conditions for the Indians that even members of the British government began to support Gandhi’s movement. Embarrassed, the South African government rescinded its order and the Satyagraha campaign in South Africa ended. Soon after, Gandhi returned to India for the rest of his life.

In 1915 Gandhi established the Satyagraha Ashram near Ahmedabad. At that time, Indian society was divided into a social hierarchy of four castes, with the Dalits or “untouchables” considered the lowest of the four. Those of higher castes were even bound not to touch them. Gandhi, who was adamant that all men were created equal and that the caste system should be abolished, was eager to admit an “untouchable” or Dalit family to his ashram. Despite such efforts, however, his continuing push to end the caste system had little result.

Gandhi practiced law in Bombay for a time, but was drawn into renewed Satyagraha for Indian social causes by people who had learned of his success in South Africa. At Champaran, he campaigned for the indigo workers and at Kheda, he pursued justice for factory workers who were being mistreated. When the British passed the Rowlett Act (1919), which gave them full authority to squelch “terrorist” demonstrations, Gandhi launched a series of marches and fasts known as hartals (“strikes”).

Violence marred the hartal in Delhi and an outright massacre took place at Jallianwala Bagh, leading Gandhi to call a halt to the strikes. Many of Gandhi’s followers were unhappy with this decision, which some saw as a sign of weakness. Muslims began to pull further away from the predominantly Hindu Indian population and to consider alternatives for themselves, such as an independent Pakistan. Gandhi could not sway them. Even his staunch supporters began to question his ability to lead the people.

But when the activist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak died in 1920, Gandhi was called on to fill the void in the Home Rule movement, even as his health was failing. He called for a complete boycott of the legislature and proclaimed January 26, 1930, to be Purna Swaraj Day (“Total Independence Day”).

On March 2 Gandhi wrote to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, warning him that he intended to lead followers on a civil disobedience march to protest the prohibition against collecting salt naturally. Actions contrary to this law were harshly dealt with, but when Gandhi had no reply to his ultimatum, the 200-mile march to the sea began on the morning of March 11. As the group traveled along, they stopped in villages and small towns, encouraging residents to burn all European cloth in their possession. Gandhi urged them to spin their own thread and to wear garments made only with Khadi, the homespun Indian material. When the throng reached the salt mines, Gandhi encouraged them to take up salt from the salt beds. Many people were assaulted by police and arrested. Gandhi was among those taken and imprisoned without trial.

In the ensuing months, more than 100,000 were arrested, and the upheaval continued until a pact aimed at ending the civil disobedience was made between Gandhi and Irwin. During the last four months of 1931, Gandhi attended a Round-Table Conference in London to discuss Indian issues with representatives of the British government. At the conference, the British offered to reserve a block of seats in a proposed bicameral legislature for Muslims, Sikhs, and Dalits. Gandhi was vehemently against this proposal because he thought that all Indians should be treated equally, and should not be divided into separate blocks. Though B. R. Ambedkar, the leading Dalit politician, tried to make Gandhi see that this was the Dalits’ only chance of representation, Gandhi continued to oppose the proposal and began a “fast to the death” to stop it.

Gandhi would endure several fasts, more imprisonment, and the deaths of his wife and personal secretary before a final agreement—the Indian Independence Act of 1947—was reached, granting full independence to India. This agreement also called for the creation of an independent Pakistan, a provision that upset many Muslims. Not all Muslims lived in northern India, where Pakistan was formed, and many were displeased that relatives would be living in another country. They felt that Gandhi had failed them. While holding a prayer meeting at Birla House in Delhi on January 20, 1948, Gandhi was murdered by an angry Muslim.

Gandhi, know as the “Mahatma” or the “Great Soul,” was at various times underestimated by the British and by Indian politicians. Though the latter had set him aside as an incompetent old man, they soon came to realize how much they needed him as a source of inspiration, because only Gandhi had been able to hold sway over the hearts and minds of the Indian people.

SEE ALSO Caste; Civil Disobedience; Liberation Movements; Passive Resistance; Protest

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Gandhi, Mohandas K. [1927–1929] 1993. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Online. Vols. 1–98. http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html.

SECONDARY WORKS

Arnold, David. 2001. Gandhi: Profiles in Power. London: Pearson Education.

Ashe, Geoffrey. 1968. Gandhi: A Biography. New York: Stein & Day, 1968. Reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.

Gandhi, Arun, and Sunanda Gandhi. 1998. The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur, Wife of Mahatma Gandhi. Huntsville, AR: Ozark Mountain Publishers.

Shirer, William L. 1979. Gandhi: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wolpert, Stanley. 2001. Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Oxford University Press.

Patricia Cronin Marcello

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (b. 2 Oct. 1869, d. 30 Jan. 1948). Indian national and spiritual leader Known in Hindu as mahatma (great soul), he was born at Porbanda (Gujarat) into a well-to-do family from a trader caste. He read for the Bar in London (1888–9), despite the lack of a university education. On his return to Bombay his first years as a lawyer were not blessed with unqualified success, and in 1893 he was sent to Natal (Southern Africa) to help in the case of an Indian client. Just before his intended return in 1894, he became involved in the protest movement against the disenfranchisement and the withdrawal of civil rights of the Asian immigrant community. A leader of the protests for the next two decades, it was here that he developed the basis of his political and philosophical consciousness.

At the heart of this was his belief in the ‘inner voice’ present within each individual, which was the voice of God. Truth could only be obtained by listening to the inner voice, and this was only possible through focusing on the self, and the denial of all corrupting outside influences. Personally, he began an austere life marked by chastity, simplicity, and hours spent on the spinning wheel, in an attempt to return to his Indian roots and defy Western, ‘alien’ industrially produced textiles. His faith in the inner voice also formed the basis of his political beliefs, which were founded upon religious tolerance, non-violence, and an intense cultural nationalism hostile to the imposition of values and cultures on foreign peoples. In 1904, he founded the Phoenix settlement, which aimed to realize these ideals in common life. Through his personality, his writings, and his political campaigns, he first united the disparate Indian community in South Africa. He then stepped up his campaign through a peaceful march into the Transvaal, and through other acts of defiance against the authorities. Finally, his campaign was successful, and the South African government backed down in 1914. He returned to India on 9 January 1915, and took part in a number of specific agitations. Through his non-violent protest (satyagraha, or ‘truth force’), he led all these to a successful conclusion. Based on this experience, on his reputation from South African and subsequent campaigns, and his sheer personality, in 1919–20 he was able to convince the Indian National Congress (INC) to start a campaign of non-cooperation. This was a reaction to the Rowlatt Act, the Amritsar Massacre, and Muslim concerns at the abolition of the Khilafat in the Ottoman Empire, with British compliance. The confirmation of the non-cooperation policy at the INC's Nagpur Session in 1920 was an unqualified personal triumph, and marked the beginning of Gandhi's hold over the INC and the Indian nationalist movement in general. The immediate campaign was called off on 24 February 1922 because of its escalation into violence. Gandhi was imprisoned, but released in 1924. In the following years he retreated somewhat, but even in times of withdrawal he remained the real leader of the INC, though his formal control was always minimal.

Gandhi's next burst of energy came in response to the establishment of the Simon Commission, which led to his demand of Dominion status for India. When this was ignored, he initiated another civil disobedience movement, choosing the symbolic issue of the Salt Law, which hit the poor particularly hard, as the focus of his campaign. He led the Salt March in 1930, which received enormous national attention and support. He was then sent to represent the INC at the second Round Table Conference in London in 1931. Against Ambedkar's opposition, he was hostile to its decision for separate political representation for the Depressed Classes as divisive for the Hindu community. He thus negotiated the Poona Pact of 1932, a compromise which reserved seats for the Depressed Classes, while maintaining a united electorate. Indeed, during the 1930s, Gandhi became increasingly concerned with the Depressed Classes and the untouchables, whom he called harijans (‘children of God’). In World War II, he opposed Bose's attempt to use Britain's weakness for the cause of independence, despite the unpopularity of his cause among the INC rank and file. He did, however, launch another wave of protests against the British involvement of India in the war without Indian consent, through his ‘Quit India’ campaign (1940–2). He was imprisoned again in 1942, and released in 1944.

After World War II, he was relegated to the political sidelines, while the negotiations for independence and separation were led by Nehru and Jinnah. The decline of his actual influence was partly due to his elevation to mythical status within his own lifetime. In the main part, however, it was because he was his own worst enemy as a practical politician. His strengths of charismatic leadership, wisdom, and integrity predestined him to unite and lead the nationalist movement when its main task was defiance. He was less suitable to develop and lead protracted, pragmatic policies, owing to his constant self-doubts, his reluctance to compromise on his ideals, and those very ideals of unity, harmony, and religious tolerance, which were increasingly out of harmony with the majority of the Indian population, or its leadership.

Deeply disturbed by the division of India and the communal violence that accompanied it, he withdrew to Delhi and on 11 January 1948 embarked upon a final fast to protest against the prosecution of Muslims in the city. Nehru's Cabinet quickly established better relations with Pakistan, while the violence in Delhi ended. Gandhi broke off his fast a week later, only to be assassinated soon afterwards by a young Hindu radical outraged by his benevolence towards Muslims. His importance was summed up by Nehru, who said that his death meant ‘the loss of India's soul’. On the night of the murder, Nehru declared that ‘The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere’.

GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND

Widely known as Mahatma or "Great Soul," Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is considered one of history's great political pacifists. He is remembered nearly as much for his austere persona (frail, bespectacled, clad only in a draped loincloth) as his political achievements. Gandhi played a major role in leading India to independence from British rule, in 1947, following world war ii.

The quintessential nonviolent activist, Gandhi dedicated his life to political and social reform. His teachings and example were to later influence such leaders as martin luther king jr. and Nelson Mandela, who also utilized passive resistance and conversion rather than confrontation to bring about social change. Gandhi's signature marks were what he called Satyagraha (the force of truth and love) and the ancient Hindu ideal of Ahisma, or nonviolence toward all living things.

Gandhi was born in western India in 1869. Just 11 years earlier (in 1858), Britain had declared India a loyal colony. The young Gandhi completed a British-style high school education and was greatly impressed with British manners, genteel culture, and Christian beliefs. He aspired to become a barrister at law, but was prohibited from doing so by the local head of his Hindu caste in Bombay. His first act of public defiance was his decision to assume the role of an "out-caste" and leave for London to study law.

While studying in England, Gandhi first read (and was inspired by) the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu religious poem. The story of the Sermon on the Mount in the Christian New Testament stirred in him an interest in passive resistance, and he also became intrigued with the ethical basis of vegetarianism after befriending a few enthusiasts at a local restaurant. He would later use dietary fasting as a means to draw attention to social causes.

But it was an incident in 1893 that put into motion Gandhi's focused role in history. While on a legal assignment in South Africa, he was traveling on a train near Johannesburg when he was ordered to move from his first-class compartment to the "colored" car in the rear of the train. He refused. At the next station, he was thrown from the train and spent the night at the station. The experience triggered his lifelong dedication to civil rights and to the improvement of the lives of those with little political voice.

By 1906, he had taken on his first major political battle, confronting the South African government's move to fingerprint all Indians with publicized passive resistance. His efforts failed to provoke legal change, but he gained a wider following and influence.

Returning to India in 1915, Gandhi began a succession of political campaigns for independence in his homeland. He orchestrated widespread boycotts of British goods and services, and promoted peaceful noncooperation and nonviolent strikes. He is widely remembered for his 1930 defiance of the British law forbidding Indians to make their own salt. With 78 followers, he started on a march to the sea. Soon more than 60,000 supporters were arrested and jailed, but Britain was forced to negotiate with the gentle and powerful little man. Gandhi himself was arrested several times by the British, who considered him a troublemaker, and all total, spent about seven years of his life in jail.

Although his unrelenting efforts played a major role in India's independence in 1947, the victory was bittersweet for Gandhi. Britain announced not only the independence of India, but also the creation of the new Muslim state of Pakistan. With all his power and influence,

Gandhi could not undo the years of hatred between the Hindus and Muslims. On January 30, 1948, while arriving for evening prayers, he was gunned down by a Hindu fanatic who blamed the formation of Pakistan on Gandhi's tolerance for Muslims. Gandhi was 78 at his death.

"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."
—Mohandas Gandhi

The legacy of Ghandi, and his call for "conversion, not coercion," spread worldwide. Passive resistance, peace marches, sitdown strikes, and silent noncooperation became common means of nonviolent activism through much of the latter twentieth century, especially influencing demonstrators during the civil rights and vietnam war eras. Governmental entities accustomed to punishing violent protesters were forced to revamp their response to demonstrations in which the only violence was coming from police or guards. The U.S. Supreme Court was inundated with cases clarifying the limitations on first amendment rights of speech and association. To this day, passive resistance remains a principal form of protestation for those seeking attention for their cause(s).

further readings

Hay, Stephen. 1989."The Making of a Late-Victorian Hindu: M. K. Gandhi in London, 1888–1891." Victorian Studies (autumn).

McGeary, Johanna. 1999. "Mohandas Gandhi." Time (December 31).

Sudo, Phil. 1997. "The Legacy of Gandhi." Scholastic Update (April 11).

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , 1869-1948, Indian political and spiritual leader, b. Porbandar.

In South Africa

Educated in India and in London, he was admitted to the English bar in 1889 and practiced law unsuccessfully in India for two years. In 1893 he went to South Africa, where he was later joined by his wife and children. There he became a successful lawyer and leader of the Indian community and involved himself in the fight to end discrimination against the country's Indian minority. In South Africa he read widely, drawing inspiration from such sources as the Bhagavad-Gita , John Ruskin , Leo Tolstoy , Ralph Waldo Emerson , and Henry David Thoreau , and his personal philosophy underwent significant changes. He abandoned (c.1905) Western ways and thereafter lived abstemiously (including celibacy); this became symbolized in his eschewal of material possessions and his dress of loincloth and shawl. While in South Africa he organized (1907) his first satyagraha [holding to the truth], a campaign of civil disobedience expressed in nonviolent resistance to what he regarded as unjust laws. So successful were his activities that he secured (1914) an agreement from the South African government that promised the alleviation of anti-Indian discrimination.

Return to India

He returned (1915) to India with a stature equal to that of the nationalist leaders Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak . Gandhi actively supported the British in World War I in the hope of hastening India's freedom, but he also led agrarian and labor reform demonstrations that embarrassed the British. The Amritsar massacre of 1919 stirred Indian nationalist consciousness, and Gandhi organized several satyagraha campaigns. He discontinued them when, against his wishes, violent disorder ensued.

His program included a free, united India; the revival of cottage industries, especially of spinning and the production of handwoven cloth (khaddar); and the abolition of untouchability (see caste ). These ideas were widely and vigorously espoused, although they also met considerable opposition from some Indians. The title Mahatma [great soul] reflected personal prestige so high that he could unify the diverse elements of the organization of the nationalist movement, the Indian National Congress, which he dominated from the early 1920s.

In 1930, in protest against the government's salt tax, he led the famous 200-mi (320-km) march to extract salt from the sea. For this he was imprisoned but was released in 1931 to attend the London Round Table Conference on India as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. When the Congress refused to embrace his program in its entirety, Gandhi withdrew (1934), but his influence was such that Jawaharlal Nehru , his protégé, was named leader of the organization.

Indian Independence

In 1942, after rejection of his offer to cooperate with Great Britain in World War II if the British would grant immediate independence to India, Gandhi called for satyagraha and launched the Quit India movement. He was then interned until 1944. Gandhi was a major figure in the postwar conferences with the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten , and Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah that led to India's independence and the carving out of a separate Muslim state (Pakistan), although Gandhi vigorously opposed the partition.

When violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi resorted to fasts and tours of disturbed areas to check it. On Jan. 30, 1948, while holding a prayer and pacification meeting at New Delhi, he was fatally shot by a Hindu fanatic who was angered by Gandhi's solicitude for the Muslims. After his death his methods of nonviolent civil disobedience were adopted by protagonists of civil rights in the United States and by many protest movements throughout the world.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (tr. 1927, repr. 1966); his collected works (50 vol., 1958-72); selected writings, ed. by R. Duncan (1972); R. N. Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (3 vol., 1986-87) and The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (1991) ; biographies by D. G. Tendulkar (8 vol., 1951-54), B. R. Nanda (1958, repr. 1989), L. Fisher (1959), G. Ashe (1969), and S. Wolpert (2001); studies by J. V. Bondurant (rev. ed. 1965), E. Erikson (1969), J. M. Brown (1972), and A. von Tunzelmann (2007).

Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1869–1948),Indian political and spiritual leader whose non-violent efforts to free his country from the British resulted in his imprisonment during most of the war. He passionately believed in achieving his political ends by means which went beyond passive resistance—a phrase he disliked—and he chose instead the word ‘Satyagraha’ (from Sanskrit satya, truth or love, and agraha, firmness or force) to describe the non-violent resistance practised by his followers.

Gandhi, an English-trained lawyer by profession, was born at Porbandar in Gujarat. After living in South Africa, where he began his life of fighting injustice—whether caused by racism, imperialism, or caste—he returned to India in 1915. By 1921 he controlled the policies of the Indian National Congress (see India, 3) and declared that ‘my life is dedicated to the service of India through the religion of non-violence which I believe to be the root of Hinduism’.

He was soon known to millions as Mahatma (great soul) and he gave them hope and a degree of self-respect. He adopted the dhoti (loincloth) as his usual garb, and his spinning-wheel, which he used daily, became an emblem of his belief in the importance of simplicity. Between the wars his crusade against the inherent injustices of imperial rule led to several terms of imprisonment. Though he left the Congress Party in 1934—not all its members agreed with his beliefs—he retained a controlling influence on it. In 1940 he briefly resumed its leadership before Congress, seeing an opportunity to obtain immediate independence if it supported the British, temporarily rejected his policies. However, when the negotiations failed the party again embraced him and Gandhi then organized a selective satyagraha which had resulted, by the end of 1941, in more than 23,000 arrests. But Gandhi was always pro-Allied, spoke out against the Axis, and tried to minimize any inconvenience to the British war effort.

This confrontation was halted when Japan entered the war. Gandhi fervently believed that India would remain unscathed by the conflict if only the British would relinquish power. But Congress again favoured negotiations with them and once more it abandoned Gandhi's non-violent stance. In March 1942 a mission headed by Stafford Cripps arrived in India with an offer of post-war independence. When this failed to find a solution Gandhi began his ‘quit India’ movement. However, even Nehru, one of his most faithful followers, could not stomach his assertion that if the Japanese did invade they must only be confronted by total non-co-operation not by force.

By August 1942 a full-scale civil disobedience campaign seemed imminent, Congress leaders were imprisoned, and Gandhi was interned. The communal violence which followed was blamed on him, an accusation Gandhi rejected by starting a three-week fast, his preferred form of personal protest. He just survived it and was eventually released from internment in May 1944 having spent a total of 2,089 days in Indian prisons and another 249 in South African ones. He was assassinated while attempting to halt, by fasting, the communal violence that had followed India's independence.

Gandhi was one of the most remarkable men of his age whose power over his people transcended politics, and whose saintliness and simplicity of purpose brought him the adoration of the masses and the bewildered respect of those who ruled his country.

Bibliography

Brown, J. , Gandhi. Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, 1989).
Fischer, L. , The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (London, 1951).
Gandhi, M. K. , An Autobiography. The Story of My Experiments with Truth (London, 1949).

Gāndhī, Mohandās Karamchand (1869–1948). Called Mahātmā, ‘great soul’, spiritual and practical leader of India (especially in pursuit of independence from British rule). When asked for his message to the world, he said, ‘My life is my message.’ Born into the Vaiśya caste, in a Vaiṣṇavite family, with Jain friends (both of which influenced his later attitudes), he left a wife and infant son in 1888 to study law in London. He returned in 1891 to India, carrying with him Christian influences, but when he failed to establish his legal career in India, he went to S. Africa in 1893 (to assist a Muslim in a court case), where his experience of, and resistance to, racial abuse and oppressive government began. He founded the Natal Indian Congress, and began to develop his way of non-resistance, based on ahiṃsā, satyāgraha (lit., ‘truth-insistence’, a term which he coined and defined as ‘soul-force’), tapasya, renunciation (cf. TAPAS), and swaraj, ‘self-rule’. He was much influenced by (within his general Hindu perspective) the Bhagavadgītā, and by such writings as the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, Ruskin's Unto this Last, Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

But his inclusive style led to suspicion among orthodox Hindus, and he was shot on 30 Jan. 1948, uttering the name of Rāma as he died.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948), the ‘Mahatma’ or Great Soul. Born in an Indian princely state, he read for the bar in London. In 1893 he took up practice in Natal but rapidly turned to politics. He unified opposition among the disparate Indian community to the passing of racially discriminatory laws and pioneered the techniques of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), which later were to make him famous. In 1915, he returned to India and, following the 1919 Amritsar massacre, organized protest on a national scale. In 1920, he won the Indian National Congress over to policies rejecting the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional reforms and offering ‘non-cooperation’ to the British Raj. From the 1920s to early 1940s, he led a series of passive resistance campaigns in pursuit of Swaraj (self-rule), which redefined the character of Indian nationalism. As much a religious teacher and social reformer as a politician, he rejected western modernity and demanded a return to the simplicities of the self-sufficient village community. He sought tolerance between Hindus and Muslims and the eradication of caste untouchability. After his final release from gaol in 1944, he became disillusioned at the rise of Hindu–Muslim violence. He refused to celebrate independence in 1947 and rejected the Pakistan partition. In January 1948 he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic for his pro-Muslim sympathies.

David Anthony Washbrook

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948), the ‘Mahatma’ or Great Soul. Born in an Indian princely state, he read for the bar in London. In 1893 he took up practice in Natal but rapidly turned to politics. He unified opposition among the disparate Indian community to the passing of racially discriminatory laws and pioneered the techniques of satyagraha (non‐violent resistance). From the 1920s to early 1940s he led a series of passive resistance campaigns in pursuit of Swaraj (self‐rule), which redefined the character of Indian nationalism. He sought tolerance between Hindus and Muslims and the eradication of caste untouchability. He refused to celebrate independence in 1947 and rejected the Pakistan partition. In January 1948 he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic for his pro‐Muslim sympathies.