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Summary
Gandhi (1869-1948), also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born
in Porbandar in the present day state of Gujarat in India
on October 2, 1869, and educated in law at University College,
London. In 1891, after having been admitted to the British
bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to establish
a law practice in Bombay, with little success. Two years
later an Indian firm with interests in South Africa retained
him as legal adviser in its office in Durban. Arriving in
Durban, Gandhi found himself treated as a member of an inferior
race. He was appalled at the widespread denial of civil
liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South
Africa. He threw himself into the struggle for elementary
rights for Indians.
Resistance
to Injustice
Gandhi remained in South Africa for 20 years, suffering
imprisonment many times. In 1896, after being attacked and
beaten by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a
policy of passive resistance to, and non-cooperation with,
the South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for
this policy came from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose
influence on Gandhi was profound. Gandhi also acknowledged
his debt to the teachings of Christ and to the 19th-century
American writer Henry David Thoreau, especially to Thoreau's
famous essay "Civil Disobedience." Gandhi considered
the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate
for his purposes, however, and coined another term, Satyagraha
(Sanskrit, “truth and firmness”). During the
Boer War, Gandhi organized an ambulance corps for the British
army and commanded a Red Cross unit. After the war he returned
to his campaign for Indian rights. In 1910, he founded Tolstoy
Farm, near Durban, a cooperative colony for Indians. In
1914 the government of the Union of South Africa made important
concessions to Gandhi's demands, including recognition of
Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for them.
His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India.
Campaign
for Home Rule
Gandhi became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian
campaign for home rule. Following World War I, in which
he played an active part in recruiting campaigns, Gandhi,
again advocating Satyagraha, launched his movement of non-violent
resistance to Great Britain. When, in 1919, Parliament passed
the Rowlatt Acts, giving the Indian colonial authorities
emergency powers to deal with so-called revolutionary activities,
Satyagraha spread throughout India, gaining millions of
followers. A demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts resulted
in a massacre of Indians at Amritsar by British soldiers;
in 1920, when the British government failed to make amends,
Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of non-cooperation.
Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such
as courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children were
withdrawn from government schools. Throughout India, streets
were blocked by squatting Indians who refused to rise even
when beaten by police. Gandhi was arrested, but the British
were soon forced to release him.
Economic
independence for India, involving the complete boycott of
British goods, was made a corollary of Gandhi's Swaraj (Sanskrit,
“self-ruling”) movement. The economic aspects
of the movement were significant, for the exploitation of
Indian villagers by British industrialists had resulted
in extreme poverty in the country and the virtual destruction
of Indian home industries. As a remedy for such poverty,
Gandhi advocated revival of cottage industries; he began
to use a spinning wheel as a token of the return to the
simple village life he preached, and of the renewal of native
Indian industries.
Gandhi became
the international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual
and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. His
union with his wife became, as he himself stated, that of
a brother and sister. Refusing earthly possessions, he wore
the loincloth and shawl of the lowliest Indian and subsisted
on vegetables, fruit juices, and oat's milk. Indians revered
him as a saint and began to call him Mahatma (great-souled),
a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's advocacy
of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (non-violence), was the
expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion.
By the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Great
Britain too would eventually consider violence useless and
would leave India.
The Mahatma's
political and spiritual hold on India was so great that
the British authorities dared not interfere with him. In
1921 the Indian National Congress, the group that spearheaded
the movement for nationhood, gave Gandhi complete executive
authority, with the right of naming his own successor. The
Indian population, however, could not fully comprehend the
unworldly ahimsa. A series of armed revolts against Great
Britain broke out, culminating in such violence that Gandhi
confessed the failure of the civil-disobedience campaign
he had called, and ended it. The British government again
seized and imprisoned him in 1922. After
his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi withdrew from active
politics and devoted himself to propagating communal unity.
Unavoidably, however, he was again drawn into the vortex
of the struggle for independence. In 1930 the Mahatma proclaimed
a new campaign of civil disobedience, calling upon the Indian
population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax
on salt. The campaign was a march to the sea, in which thousands
of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmedabad to the Arabian
Sea, where they made salt by evaporating sea water. Once
more the Indian leader was arrested, but he was released
in 1931, halting the campaign after the British made concessions
to his demands. In the same year Gandhi represented the
Indian National Congress at a conference in London.
Gandhi
with Followers
Gandhi takes
on Domestic Problems
In 1932, Gandhi began new civil-disobedience campaigns against
the British. Arrested twice, the Mahatma fasted for long
periods several times; these fasts were effective measures
against the British, because revolution might well have
broken out in India if he had died. In September 1932, while
in jail, Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death”
to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. The British,
by permitting the Untouchables to be considered as a separate
part of the Indian electorate, were, according to Gandhi,
countenancing an injustice. Although he was himself a member
of the Vaishya (merchant) caste, Gandhi was the great leader
of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust
social and economic aspects of the caste system.
In 1934 Gandhi
formally resigned from politics, being replaced as leader
of the Congress party by Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi traveled
through India, teaching ahimsa and demanding eradication
of "untouchability." The esteem in which he was
held was the measure of his political power. So great was
this power that the limited home rule granted by the British
in 1935 could not be implemented until Gandhi approved it.
A few years later, in 1939, he again returned to active
political life because of the pending federation of Indian
principalities with the rest of India. His first act was
a fast, designed to force the ruler of the state of Rajkot
to modify his autocratic rule. Public unrest caused by the
fast was so great that the colonial government intervened;
the demands were granted. The Mahatma again became the most
important political figure in India.
Independence
for India
When World War II broke out, the Congress party and Gandhi
demanded a declaration of war aims and their application
to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response from
the British, the party decided not to support Britain in
the war unless the country were granted complete and immediate
independence. The British refused, offering compromises
that were rejected. When Japan entered the war, Gandhi still
refused to agree to Indian participation. He was interned
in 1942 but was released two years later because of failing
health.
By 1944 the
Indian struggle for independence was in its final stages,
the British government having agreed to independence on
condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the
Muslim League and the Congress party, should resolve their
differences. Gandhi stood steadfastly against the partition
of India but ultimately had to agree, in the hope that internal
peace would be achieved after the Muslim demand for separation
had been satisfied. India and Pakistan became separate states
when the British granted India its independence in 1947
(see: Tryst with Destiny -- the story of India's independence).
During the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi
pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully.
Riots engulfed Calcutta, one of the largest cities in India,
and the Mahatma fasted until disturbances ceased. On January
13, 1948, he undertook another successful fast in New Delhi
to bring about peace, but on January 30, 12 days after the
termination of that fast, as he was on his way to his evening
prayer meeting, he was assassinated by a fanatic Hindu.
Gandhi's
death was regarded as an international catastrophe. His
place in humanity was measured not in terms of the 20th
century, but in terms of history. A period of mourning was
set aside in the United Nations General Assembly, and condolences
to India were expressed by all countries. Religious violence
soon waned in India and Pakistan, and the teachings of Gandhi
came to inspire nonviolent movements elsewhere, notably
in the U.S. under the civil rights leader Martin Luther
King, Jr. and in South Africa under Nelson Mandela.
.::Other Links::.
Hindu
Gods
Hindu Temples
Caste System In India
Aryans
Hindu
Festivals
Hinduism
Ramayana
Vedas
Upanishads
Puranas
The
Moghal
India:
Between
1757-1947
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