Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in the town of
Porbander
in the state of what is now
Gujarat
on 2 October 1869. He had his schooling in nearby
Rajkot
, where his father served as the adviser or prime minister to the local ruler.
Though
India
was then under British rule, over 500 kingdoms, principalities, and states were
allowed autonomy in domestic and internal affairs: these were the so-called
'native states'.
Rajkot
was one such state.
Gandhi later recorded the early years of his life in his extraordinary
autobiography, The Story of My Experimentswith Truth. His father died before
Gandhi could finish his schooling, and at thirteen he was married to Kasturba
[or Kasturbai], who was even younger. In 1888 Gandhi set sail for
England
, where he had decided to pursue a degree in law. Though his elders objected,
Gandhi could not be prevented from leaving; and it is said that his mother, a
devout woman, made him promise that he would keep away from wine, women, and
meat during his stay abroad. Gandhi left behind his son Harilal, then a few
months old.
In
London
, Gandhi encountered theosophists, vegetarians, and others who were disenchanted
not only with industrialism, but with the legacy of Enlightenment thought. They
themselves represented the fringe elements of English society. Gandhi was
powerfully attracted to them, as he was to the texts of the major religious
traditions; and ironically it is in
London
that he was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita. Here, too, Gandhi showed
determination and single-minded pursuit of his purpose, and accomplished his
objective of finishing his degree from the
Inner
Temple
. He was called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court of
London; but later that year he left for
India
.
After one year of a none too successful law practice,
Gandhi decided to accept an offer from an Indian businessman in
South Africa
, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a legal adviser. Unbeknown to him, this was to
become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and altogether Gandhi was to stay in
South Africa
for over twenty years. The Indians who had been living in
South Africa
were without political rights, and were generally known by the derogatory name
of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness of the frightening force and
fury of European racism, and how far Indians were from being considered full
human beings, when he when thrown out of a first-class railway compartment car,
though he held a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this political
awakening Gandhi was to emerge as the leader of the Indian community, and it is
in
South Africa
that he first coined the term satyagraha to signify his theory and practice of
non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself preeminently as a votary
or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be attained other than through
ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya (celibacy, striving towards God).
Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series of experiments to forge the use of
satyagraha in such a manner as to make the oppressor and the oppressed alike
recognize their common bonding and humanity: as he recognized, freedom is only
freedom when it is indivisible. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa he was to
detail the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and their resistance
to oppressive legislation and executive measures, such as the imposition of a
poll tax on them, or the declaration by the government that all non-Christian
marriages were to be construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to
India
, Gandhi authored a short treatise entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule,
where he all but initiated the critique, not only of industrial civilization,
but of modernity in all its aspects.
Gandhi returned to
India
in early 1915, and was never to leave the country again except for a short trip
that took him to
Europe
in 1931. Though he was not completely unknown in
India
, Gandhi followed the advice of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it upon
himself to acquire a familiarity with Indian conditions. He traveled widely for
one year. Over the next few years, he was to become involved in numerous local
struggles, such as at Champaran in
Bihar
, where workers on indigo plantations complained of oppressive working
conditions, and at Ahmedabad, where a dispute had broken out between management
and workers at textile mills. His interventions earned Gandhi a considerable
reputation, and his rapid ascendancy to the helm of nationalist politics is
signified by his leadership of the opposition to repressive legislation (known
as the "Rowlatt Acts") in 1919. His saintliness was not uncommon,
except in someone like him who immersed himself in politics, and by this time he
had earned from no less a person than
Rabindranath Tagore
,
India
's most well-known writer, the title of Mahatma, or 'Great Soul'. When
'disturbances' broke out in the Punjab, leading to the massacre of a large crowd
of unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in
Amritsar
and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote the report of the Punjab Congress Inquiry
Committee. Over the next two years, Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation
movement, which called upon Indians to withdraw from British institutions, to
return honors conferred by the British, and to learn the art of self-reliance;
though the British administration was at places paralyzed, the movement was
suspended in February 1922 when a score of Indian policemen were brutally killed
by a large crowd at Chauri Chaura, a small market town in the United Provinces.
Gandhi himself was arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of sedition,
and sentenced to imprisonment for six years. At The Great Trial, as it is known
to his biographers, Gandhi delivered a masterful indictment of British rule.
For the next few years, Gandhi would be engaged mainly in
the constructive reform of Indian society. He had vowed upon undertaking the
salt march that he would not return to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he
had made his home, if
India
did not attain its independence, and in the mid-1930s he established himself in
a remote village, in the dead center of
India
, by the name of Segaon [known as Sevagram]. It is to this obscure village,
which was without electricity or running water, that
India
's political leaders made their way to engage in discussions with Gandhi about
the future of the independence movement, and it is here that he received
visitors such as Margaret Sanger, the well-known American proponent of
birth-control. Gandhi also continued to travel throughout the country, taking
him wherever his services were required.
One such visit was to the Northwest Frontier, where he had in the imposing
Pathan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known by the endearing term of "Frontier
Gandhi", and at other times as Badshah [King] Khan), a fervent disciple. At
the outset of World War II, Gandhi and the Congress leadership assumed a
position of neutrality: while clearly critical of fascism, they could not find
it in themselves to support British imperialism. Gandhi was opposed by Subhas
Chandra Bose, who had served as President of the Congress, and who took to the
view that
Britain
's moment of weakness was
India
's moment of opportunity. When Bose ran for President of the Congress against
Gandhi's wishes and triumphed against Gandhi's own candidate, he found that
Gandhi still exercised influence over the Congress Working Committee, and that
it was near impossible to run the Congress if the cooperation of Gandhi and his
followers could not be procured. Bose tendered his resignation, and shortly
thereafter was to make a dramatic escape from
India
to find support among the Japanese and the Nazis for his plans to liberate
India
.
In 1942, Gandhi issued the last call for independence from
British rule. On the grounds of what is now known as August Kranti Maidan, he
delivered a stirring speech, asking every Indian to lay down their life, if
necessary, in the cause of freedom. He gave them this mantra: "Do or
Die"; at the same time, he asked the British to 'Quit India'. The response
of the British government was to place Gandhi under arrest, and virtually the
entire Congress leadership was to find itself behind bars, not to be released
until after the conclusion of the war.
A few months after Gandhi and Kasturba had been placed in
confinement in the Aga Khan's Palace in Pune, Kasturba passed away: this was a
terrible blow to Gandhi, following closely on the heels of the death of his
private secretary of many years, the gifted Mahadev Desai. In the period from
1942 to 1945, the Muslim League, which represented the interest of certain
Muslims and by now advocated the creation of a separate homeland for Muslims,
increasingly gained the attention of the British, and supported them in their
war effort. The new government that came to power in
Britain
under Clement Atlee was committed to the independence of
India
, and negotiations for
India
's future began in earnest. Sensing that the political leaders were now craving
for power, Gandhi largely distanced himself from the negotiations. He declared
his opposition to the vivisection of
India
. It is generally conceded, even by his detractors, that the last years of his
life were in some respects his finest. He walked from village to village in
riot-torn Noakhali, where Hindus were being killed in retaliation for the
killing of Muslims in Bihar, and nursed the wounded and consoled the widowed;
and in
Calcutta
he came to constitute, in the famous words of the last viceroy, Mountbatten, a
"one-man boundary force" between Hindus and Muslims. The ferocious
fighting in
Calcutta
came to a halt, almost entirely on account of Gandhi's efforts, and even his
critics were wont to speak of the Gandhi's 'miracle of
Calcutta
'. When the moment of freedom came, on 15 August 1947, Gandhi was nowhere to be
seen in the capital, though Nehru and the entire Constituent Assembly were to
salute him as the architect of Indian independence, as the 'father of the
nation'.
The last few months of Gandhi's life were to be spent
mainly in the capital city of
Delhi
. There he divided his time between the 'Bhangi colony', where the sweepers and
the lowest of the low stayed, and Birla House, the residence of one of the
wealthiest men in India and one of the benefactors of Gandhi's ashrams. Hindu
and Sikh refugees had streamed into the capital from what had become
Pakistan
, and there was much resentment, which easily translated into violence, against
Muslims. It was partly in an attempt to put an end to the killings in Delhi, and
more generally to the bloodshed following the partition, which may have taken
the lives of as many as 1 million people, besides causing the dislocation of no
fewer than 11 million, that Gandhi was to commence the last fast unto death of
his life. The fast was terminated when representatives of all the communities
signed a statement that they were prepared to live in "perfect amity",
and that the lives, property, and faith of the Muslims would be safeguarded. A
few days later, a bomb exploded in Birla House where Gandhi was holding his
evening prayers, but it caused no injuries. However, his assassin, a Marathi
Chitpavan Brahmin by the name of Nathuram Godse, was not so easily deterred.
Gandhi, quite characteristically, refused additional security, and no one could
defy his wish to be allowed to move around unhindered. In the early evening
hours of 30 January 1948, Gandhi met with
India
's Deputy Prime Minister and his close associate in the freedom struggle,
Vallabhai Patel, and then proceeded to his prayers.
That evening, as Gandhi's time-piece, which hung from one
of the folds of his dhoti [loin-cloth], was to reveal to him, he was
uncharacteristically late to his prayers, and he fretted about his inability to
be punctual. At 10 minutes past 5 o'clock, with one hand each on the shoulders
of Abha and Manu, who were known as his 'walking sticks', Gandhi commenced his
walk towards the garden where the prayer meeting was held. As he was about to
mount the steps of the podium, Gandhi folded his hands and greeted his audience
with a namaskar; at that moment, a young man came up to him and roughly pushed
aside Manu. Nathuram Godse bent down in the gesture of an obeisance, took a
revolver out of his pocket, and shot Gandhi three times in his chest.
Bloodstains appeared over Gandhi's white woolen shawl; his hands still folded in
a greeting, Gandhi blessed his assassin: He Ram! He Ram!
As Gandhi fell, his faithful time-piece struck the ground,
and the hands of the watch came to a standstill. They showed, as they had done
before, the precise time: 5:12 P.M
