Remarkable
People in History
MAHATMA
GHANDI
"One
must be the change one wishes to see in the world"
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.
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.
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.
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 goat'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 on January 30, 1948, in Delhi signaled an end to an era
and was regarded as an international catastrophe. To the thousands
attended his funeral, the new fight ahead was to secure India's
status as a modern, secular state. Though he was idolized for
his role in the struggle for independence, Gandhi's own desire
for an epitaph was characteristically modest: "The only virtue
I want to claim is truth and non-violence. I lay no claim to
superhuman powers. I want none."
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.
( Ghandi's Funeral )
