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Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869-1948), Indian
nationalist leader, who established his country's
freedom through a nonviolent revolution.
Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born
in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat 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.
Passive Resistance
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 noncooperation 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 Johannesburg, a
cooperative colony for Indians. In 1914 the
government of the Union of South Africa made
important concessions to Ghandhi'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 passive
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 through 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 noncooperation. Indians in
public office resigned, government agencies such as
courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children
were withdrawn from government schools. Through
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
brother and sister. Refusing earthly possessions,
he wore the loincloth and shawl of the lowliest
Indian and subsisted on vegetables, fruit juices,
and goat's milk. Indians revered him as a saint and
began to call him Mahatma (Sanskrit, "great soul"),
a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's
advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit,
"noninjury"), 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 Ahmadabad 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.
Attack upon the Caste System
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 Vaisya (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
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. 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 Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic.
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.
"Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand," Microsoft(R)
Encarta(R) 97 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1996 Microsoft
Corporation. All rights reserved.
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Mere
Bharat Mahan
