GANDHI, Mohandas Karamchand, called Mahatma Gandhi
was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat on Oct. 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.
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." When his work
in South Africa was completed in 1914, he returned to India.
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 (non
resistance), launched his movement of passive resistance to Great Britain.
Economic independence for India, involving the complete boycott of British
goods, was made a corollary of Gandhi's swaraj (Skt., "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 (Skt.,
"great-souled"), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's advocacy
of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Skt., "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.
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.
By 1944 the Indian struggle for independence was in its
final stages; the British government had agreed to independence for India
on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the Muslim League
and the Congress party, resolve their differences. Gandhi stood steadfastly
against the partition of the country 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 Jan.
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 UN 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.
