Mahatma Gandhi

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Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Devanagari: मोहनदास करमचन्द गांधी; October 2, 1869—January 30, 1948), also called Mahatma Gandhi ("great soul") was the charismatic intellectual and mass-movement leader who brought the cause of independence for British colonial India to world attention. His ideas, especially the satyagraha model of non-violent protest, have influenced both nationalist and internal movements throughout the world.

By means of non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi helped bring about India's independence from British rule, inspiring other colonial peoples to work for their own independence and ultimately dismantle the British Empire and replace it with the Commonwealth. Gandhi's principle of satyagraha ('"truth force"), often roughly translated as "way of truth" or "pursuit of truth," has inspired other democratic activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. He often stated his values were simple, drawn from traditional Hindu beliefs: truth (satya), and non-violence (ahimsa).

Early life

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born into a Hindu family on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, India. He was the son of Karamchand Gandhi, the dewan (Chief Minister) of Porbander, and Putlibai, Karamchand's fourth wife. They were descendants of traders (The word "Gandhi" means grocer). At the age of 13 Gandhi married Kasturbai, who was of his same age. They had four children, all sons: Harilal Gandhi, born in 1888; Manilal Gandhi, born in 1892; Ramdas Gandhi, born in 1897; and Devdas Gandhi, born in 1900.

At the age of 19, Gandhi went to University College, in the University of London to train as a barrister. He returned to India after being admitted to the British bar. In India he tried very hard to establish a law practice in Mumbai, though he had diminutive success.

Civil rights movement in South Africa

In April 1893, an Indian firm sent Gandhi to South Africa. Gandhi was dismayed to see the prevalent denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants and began protesting and lobbying against legal and racial discrimination against Indians in South Africa.

One of the most cited incidents of his initial days in South Africa was the one in which he was physically thrown off a train in Pietermaritzburg, after refusing to move to the third class coach, while travelling on a first class ticket. In June 1907, Gandhi organised a campaign against 'The Black Act', which required compulsory registration of all Asians in South Africa. In September 1913, he joined the campaign against nullification of marriages not consecrated according to Christian rites.

Gandhi was arrested on November 6, 1913 while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa. In 1914, the government promised the alleviation of anti-Indian discrimination in South Africa.

During his years in South Africa, Gandhi drew inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of Leo Tolstoy, who in the 1880s had undergone a profound conversion to a personal form of Christian anarchism. Gandhi translated Tolstoy's "Letter to a Hindu" [1] which was written in 1908 in response to aggressive Indian nationalists, and the two corresponded until Tolstoy's death in 1910. The letter by Tolstoy uses Hindu philosophy taken from the Vedas and sayings of the Hindu God Krishna to present his view of that state of growing Indian nationalism. Additionally, Gandhi was inspired by the American writer Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on “Civil Disobedience." Gandhi's years in South Africa were his formative years as a socio-political activist, when the concepts and techniques of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance were developed.

During World War I, Gandhi returned to India, where he campaigned for Indians to join the British Indian Army. He felt that this display of loyalty to the British Empire would motivate the British to give self-government to India by giving it the status of a self-governing dominion within the Empire. However, this did not happen.

Movement for Indian independence

After the war, he became involved with the Indian National Congress and the movement for independence. He gained worldwide publicity through his policies of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and the use of fasting as a form of protest, and was repeatedly imprisoned by the British authorities (for example on March 18, 1922 he was sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience but served only 2 years).

Gandhi's other successful strategies for the independence movement included swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that all Indians should wear khadi – homespun cloth, instead of relying on British-made textiles. Gandhi advocated that Indian women, rich or poor, should spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. This was a strategy to include women in the independence movement at a time when many thought that such activities were not 'respectable' for women to engage in.

His pro-independence stance hardened after the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British educational institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, to refuse to pay taxes, and to forsake British titles and honors.

He was elected president of All-India Home Rule League in April 1920, and was invested with executive authority on behalf of the Indian National Congress in December 1921. Under Gandhi's leadership, the Congress was reorganized and given a new constitution, whose goal was swaraj (independence). Membership in the party was opened to anyone prepared to pay a token fee, and a hierarchy of committees was established and made responsible for discipline and control over a hitherto amorphous and diffuse movement. The party was transformed from an elite organization to one of mass national appeal.

In 1922, Gandhi temporarily called off his civil disobedience movement after violence erupted at Chauri Chaura, Uttar Pradesh. He turned to social activism, establishing the Sabarmati Ashram at Ahmedabad and began the newspaper Young India. He worked for equal rights for the historically downtrodden castes in Hindu society, particularly the untouchables, whom he named Harijan (children of God).

Gandhi re-entered the independence movement in 1930, when the Congress called upon him to lead another mass civil disobedience movement. He launched his most famous campaign from March 21 to April 6 1930, marching 400 kilometres from Ahmedabad to Dandi. Known as the Dandi March, thousands of people walked to the sea to collect their own salt rather than pay salt tax to the government.

The Gandhi-Irwin pact was signed in March 1931, when the British Goverment agreed to set all political prisoners free, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. In August 1931, Gandhi made a visit to England, including a trip to Birmingham, to attend the second Round Table Conference, a round of talks with the British government that ended in failure. Gandhi resumed civil disobedience after this failure.

On May 8, 1933 Gandhi began a fast that would last 21 days to protest British oppression in India. In the summer of 1934, three separate, unsuccessful attempts were made on his life. At Bombay, on March 3, 1939 Gandhi fasted again in protest of the autocratic rule in India.

Gandhi's chosen successor in Congress was Jawaharlal Nehru, later Prime Minister. They disagreed openly about the path that an independent India should take, but Gandhi trusted Nehru rather than his authoritarian rival Sardar Patel to build the institutions that would guarantee the liberty of India's citizens.

World War II

World War II broke out in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Though Gandhi was fully sympathetic with the victims of fascist aggression, he after great deliberations with the colleagues in the Congress, declared that India could not be party to a war which was ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was being denied to India itself. He proclaimed to be with the British if they could show him how the war aims would be implemented in India after the end of the war. The British government's response was entirely negative and they even tried to create a rift between Hindus and Muslims in the country.

Gandhi became even more vocal in his demand for independence during World War II, drafting a resolution calling for the British to Quit India, which soon sparked the largest movement for Indian independence ever, with mass arrests and violence on an unprecedented scale. Gandhi and his supporters made clear that they would not support the war effort unless India was granted immediate independence. During this time, he even hinted an end for his otherwise unwavering support for non-violence, saying that the 'ordered anarchy' around him was 'worse than real anarchy'. He was then arrested in Bombay by British forces on August 9, 1942 and was held for two years.

Partition of India and assassination

Gandhi had great influence among the Hindu and Muslim communities of India. It is said that he ended communal riots through his mere presence. Gandhi was vehemently opposed to any plan which partitioned India into two separate countries. Nevertheless, the plan was eventually adopted, creating a secular but Hindu-majority India and an Islamic Pakistan. On the day of the power transfer, Gandhi did not celebrate independence with the rest of India, but mourned partition alone in Calcutta instead.

He was assassinated in Birla house, New Delhi on January 30, 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu radical who held him responsible for weakening the new government by insisting on a payment to Pakistan. Before shooting Gandhi, Godse bowed before him three times. Godse was later tried, convicted, and executed.

It is indicative of Gandhi's long struggle and search for God that his dying words were a popular two-word mantra to the Hindu conception of God as Rama: "Hey Ram!" It is seen as an inspiring signal of his spirituality as well as his idealism regarding the possibility of unificatory peace. While there are some who are sceptical about this, the vast majority of evidence and witnesses, as well as popular opinion, support this utterance as truly having occurred. (External links)

Principles

Gandhi's philosophies and his ideas of satya and ahimsa had been influenced by the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu beliefs as well as practiced Jain religion. The concept of 'non-violence' (ahimsa) was a long-standing one in Indian religious thought and saw many revivals with Hindu, Buddhist and Jain contexts. Gandhi explains his philosophy and way of life in his autobiography The Story of my Experiments with Truth.

Although he experimented with eating meat when he first left India, he subsequently became a strict vegetarian and wrote books on the subject while studying law in London (where he met vegetarian campaigner Henry Salt at meetings of the Vegetarian Society). It might be added that the idea of vegetarianism was a deeply ingrained one in Hindu and Jain society in India, and that in his native land of Gujarat most Hindus were vegetarian. He experimented with different diets and believed that a diet should be enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of the body. He also abstained from eating for substantial periods of time, and he used this practice of fasting also as a political weapon.

Gandhi gave up sexual intercourse at the age of 36 and became totally celibate while still married, a course deeply influenced by the Hindu idea of brahmacharya, or spiritual and practical purity, largely associated with celibacy.

Gandhi spent a day of the week in silence. He would abstain from speaking and he believed it brought him inner peace. These were drawn from such Hindu understandings of the power of mouna (silence) and shanti (peace). On such days he communicated with others by writing on paper. For three and a half years, from the age of 37, Gandhi refused to read any newpapers, claiming that the tumultous state of world affairs caused him more confusion than his own inner unrest.

After returning to India from a successful legal career in South Africa, he gave up his Western-style clothing that represented wealth and success. His idea was to dress to be accepted by the poorest person in India. He advocated use of home-spun cloth (khadi). Gandhi and his followers followed the practice of weaving their own cloth using a spinning-wheel and wearing a dress made of that. He also advocated others use spinning wheels to spin clothes. This was a threat to the British establishment – while Indian workers were often idle due to unemployment, they bought their clothing from foreign English industrial manufacturers – if Indians spun their own clothes, this would leave British industry idle. The spinning wheel was later incorporated into the flag of the Indian National Congress.

The honorific title Mahatma

The word "mahatma", while widely mistaken for Gandhi's given name, is a Sanskrit term of reverence that literally means "great soul".

The wide acceptance of its use, outside India, may in part reflect complexities, during his life, of the relationship between India and Britain. In any case, that acceptance is fairly consistent with widespread perception of Gandhi as having been deeply committed to non-violence and his religious beliefs.

Artistic depictions

The most famous artistic depiction of his life is the film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley (interestingly, himself half-Gujarati) in the title role. Another film that deals with Gandhi's 21 years of life in South Africa is The Making of the Mahatma directed by Shyam Benegal and starring Rajat Kapur.

In the United Kingdom, there are several prominent statues of Gandhi, most notably in Tavistock Gardens, London, near University College where he studied law.

In the United States, there are statues of Gandhi outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, in Union Square Park in New York City, and near the Indian Embassy in the Dupont Circle neighbourhood of Washington, DC.

There are statues in honour of Gandhi in other cities such as Paris, Amsterdam and Lisbon. The government of India donated a statue to the City of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, to signify their support for what will eventual be home to The Canadian Museum for Human Rights. [2]

Miscellaneous

Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated five times for it between 1937 and 1948. Decades later however, the omission was publicly regretted by the Nobel Committee. When the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".

The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing the issue. [3]

Throughout his lifetime, Gandhi's activities attracted a wide range of comment and opinion. For example, as a subject of the British Empire, Winston Churchill once referred to Gandhi as "nauseating" and as a "half-naked fakir". Conversely, Albert Einstein said of Gandhi: "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one, as this, ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

Mahatma's Gandhi's work is not forgotten by his future generations. His grandsons, Arun Gandhi and Rajmohan Gandhi and even his great grandson, Tushar Gandhi, are also socio-political activists, involved with the promotion of non-violence around the world.

See also

References

  • An Autobiography:The Story of My Experiments With Truth, by Mohandas Gandhi. ISBN 0807059099
  • The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, by Mohandas Gandhi, Louis Fischer. ISBN 1400030501
  • Gandhi: A Life, by Yogesh Chadha. ISBN 0471350621
  • Gandhi, Peter Rühe, 2002. ISBN 0714892793
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