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 of the same age as Mohandas himself . 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.
Owing to his poor health, Gandhi was released from prison
in 1925. Over the following years, he worked hard to preserve Hindu-Muslim
relations, and in 1924 he observed, from his prison cell, a 21-day fast
when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out at Kohat, a military barracks on the
Northwest Frontier. This was to be of his many major public fasts, and
in 1932 he was to commence the so-called Epic Fast unto death, since he
thought of "separate electorates" for the oppressed class of
what were then called
untouchables (or Harijans in Gandhi's vocabulary,
and dalits in today's language) as a retrograde measure meant to produce
permanent divisions within Hindu society. Gandhi earned the hostility
of Ambedkar, the leader of the
untouchables, but few doubted that
Gandhi was genuinely interested in removing the serious disabilities from
which they suffered, just as no one doubt that Gandhi never accepted the
argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate elements in
Indian society. These were some of the concerns most prominent in Gandhi's
mind, but he was also to initiate a constructive programme for social
reform. Gandhi had ideas -- mostly sound -- on every subject, from hygiene
and nutrition to education and labor, and he relentlessly pursued his
ideas in one of the many newspapers which he founded. Indeed, were Gandhi
known for nothing else in India, he would still be remembered as one of
the principal figures in the history of Indian journalism.
In early 1930, as the nationalist movement was revived, the Indian National
Congress, the preeminent body of nationalist opinion, declared that it
would now be satisfied with nothing short of complete independence (
purna
swaraj). Once the clarion call had been issued, it was perforce necessary
to launch a movement of resistance against British rule. On March 2, Gandhi
addressed a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him that unless
Indian demands were met, he would be compelled to break the "salt
laws". Predictably, his letter was received with bewildered amusement,
and accordingly Gandhi set off, on the early morning of March 12, with
a small group of followers towards Dandi on the sea. They arrived there
on April 5th: Gandhi picked up a small lump of natural salt, and so gave
the signal to hundreds of thousands of people to similarly defy the law,
since the British exercised a monopoly on the production and sale of salt.
This was the beginning of the civil disobedience movement: Gandhi himself
was arrested, and thousands of others were also hauled into jail. It is
to break this deadlock that Irwin agreed to hold talks with Gandhi, and
subsequently the British agreed to hold a Round Table Conference in London
to negotiate the possible terms of Indian independence. Gandhi went to
London in 1931 and met some of his admirers in Europe, but the negotiations
proved inconclusive. On his return to India, he was once again arrested.
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