Mahatma Gandhi

Anyone asking who was Mahatma Gandhi has to begin in Porbandar, a small port on the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat, where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, served as dewan, or chief minister, of the princely state, and his mother, Putlibai, was a devout Hindu whose fasting and religious observance left a deep mark on her youngest son ^[1]. The family belonged to the Modh Bania merchant caste, and the household mixed Vaishnava Hindu practice with Jain influences that stressed nonviolence toward all living things ^[2].

Gandhi was, by his own later account, an unremarkable and shy student. At thirteen he was married to Kasturba Makhanji in an arranged union typical of the region and era ^[1]. His father died when Mohandas was sixteen, and the family decided that law offered the surest route to restoring its standing. In 1888, at eighteen, he sailed for London to study at the Inner Temple, one of the city's four Inns of Court, after promising his mother he would abstain from meat, alcohol, and other temptations ^[3].

London changed him in quiet ways. He joined the Vegetarian Society, read the Bhagavad Gita seriously for the first time in Edwin Arnold's English translation, and encountered the Sermon on the Mount, texts he would return to for the rest of his life ^[2]. Called to the bar in 1891, he went home to India and promptly struggled. He froze during his first courtroom appearance in Bombay and found little work, so when a Gujarati trading firm offered him a one-year contract in South Africa in 1893, he accepted ^[1].

South Africa turned a timid lawyer into a political organizer. Shortly after arriving in 1893, Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave a first-class compartment reserved for whites, an episode he later described as a turning point in his life ^[3]. He stayed on far beyond his original contract, ultimately spending twenty-one years fighting discriminatory laws aimed at the Indian community in Natal and the Transvaal ^[1].

During these years he worked out the method that defined his career. He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, edited the newspaper Indian Opinion from 1903, and in 1906 launched his first mass campaign of civil resistance against a Transvaal ordinance requiring Indians to register and carry passes ^[2]. He coined the term satyagraha, roughly translated as truth force or firmness in truth, to distinguish his approach from mere passive resistance. Participants accepted arrest and physical punishment without retaliation, aiming to convert opponents rather than defeat them ^[4]. Thousands were jailed, including Gandhi himself on several occasions, before General Jan Smuts negotiated a settlement in 1914 ^[3].

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. On the advice of his political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he spent his first year traveling the country by rail, observing conditions before speaking publicly ^[1]. He founded an ashram near Ahmedabad and took up local grievances: indigo farmers in Champaran, Bihar, in 1917, mill workers in Ahmedabad, and peasants facing crop failure in Kheda in 1918. Each campaign applied satyagraha to a concrete injustice, and each success built his reputation. By 1920 he had assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress and transformed it from an elite debating body into a mass movement ^[2].

Any honest list of Mahatma Gandhi achievements starts with the campaigns that made British rule in India unworkable. The Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922 asked Indians to boycott British courts, schools, titles, and cloth. Millions responded, and homespun cotton, or khadi, became the uniform of the national movement ^[2]. Gandhi called off the campaign after a mob killed twenty-two policemen at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, insisting that a movement stained by violence had forfeited its claim to truth. The British arrested him weeks later, and he served two years of a six-year sentence for sedition ^[1].

His most famous act came in 1930. Protesting the colonial monopoly and tax on salt, Gandhi walked roughly 240 miles from his Sabarmati ashram to the coastal village of Dandi over twenty-four days, gathering crowds and correspondents along the route. On April 6 he picked up a handful of natural salt from the shore, a symbolic crime that set off nationwide civil disobedience ^[4]. Some 60,000 people were imprisoned in the months that followed, and the Salt March fixed international attention on India's cause. Time magazine named Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930 ^[5].

The pressure of repeated campaigns forced negotiations. Gandhi met Viceroy Lord Irwin in 1931, attended the Second Round Table Conference in London that year, and in 1942 launched the Quit India Movement demanding immediate British withdrawal, for which he and the entire Congress leadership were jailed for most of the Second World War ^[2]. Britain, exhausted by the war and unable to govern against sustained mass resistance, transferred power on August 15, 1947. Alongside the political struggle, Gandhi campaigned against untouchability, calling the oppressed castes Harijans, promoted Hindu and Muslim unity, and pressed for village self-sufficiency through spinning and handicrafts ^[1].

Gandhi's private life was inseparable from his public experiments, a word he chose himself: his autobiography, published in the 1920s, is titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth ^[3]. He and Kasturba had four sons: Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas, and Devdas. The marriage endured sixty-two years, through prison terms on both sides, until Kasturba died in February 1944 while detained with her husband at the Aga Khan Palace in Poona ^[1].

He lived by austere self-discipline. In 1906 he took a vow of brahmacharya, or celibacy, and he progressively stripped his possessions down to a few items: spectacles, sandals, a watch, spinning wheel, and the plain white dhoti and shawl that became his visual signature ^[2]. He ate a spare vegetarian diet, observed a weekly day of silence, and used fasting both as personal purification and as a political instrument, undertaking at least seventeen major fasts during his career ^[4].

His communities, from the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa to the Sabarmati and Sevagram ashrams in India, functioned as laboratories for his ideas about shared labor, simple living, and equality across caste and religion ^[1]. He corresponded with Leo Tolstoy late in the writer's life and repeatedly credited Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, along with John Ruskin's Unto This Last and Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience, as shaping influences ^[3].

Independence arrived entangled with catastrophe. The 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan, which Gandhi opposed to the end, uprooted well over ten million people and set off communal massacres that killed hundreds of thousands ^[2]. While official celebrations unfolded in Delhi on August 15, 1947, Gandhi was in Calcutta, fasting and walking through riot-scarred neighborhoods to calm violence between Hindus and Muslims. Observers, including the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten, credited his presence with restraining bloodshed in Bengal that troops had failed to stop elsewhere ^[1].

In January 1948, aged seventy-eight, he undertook his final fast in Delhi, seeking an end to communal violence in the capital and pressing the Indian government to release funds owed to Pakistan. The fast lasted five days and ended when community leaders pledged peace ^[4]. His conciliatory stance toward Muslims and Pakistan enraged Hindu nationalists who saw it as betrayal.

On the evening of January 30, 1948, as Gandhi walked to a prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House in New Delhi, Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist with ties to extremist organizations, shot him three times at point-blank range ^[1]. He died within minutes. The site is preserved today as Gandhi Smriti, a national memorial. An estimated two million people joined the funeral procession to the cremation ground at Raj Ghat on the banks of the Yamuna ^[5]. Godse and a co-conspirator were tried and executed in 1949.

The honorific Mahatma, meaning great soul, was attached to Gandhi as early as 1914 and is often credited to the poet Rabindranath Tagore; in India he is also called Bapu, father ^[2]. His birthday, October 2, is a national holiday in India and was designated the International Day of Non-Violence by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 ^[6].

His influence traveled far beyond South Asia, one of the most cited Mahatma Gandhi facts. Martin Luther King Jr. studied satyagraha closely and applied its methods in the American civil rights movement, writing that Gandhi supplied the technique for the social change Christian ethics demanded ^[7]. Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, and campaigners from Poland to the Philippines drew on the same repertoire of disciplined, nonviolent mass action. Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times but never received it, an omission the Nobel committee has since publicly regretted ^[6].

His record continues to be argued over. Scholars have examined his early statements about black Africans during his South African years, his views on caste, which reformers such as B. R. Ambedkar sharply contested, and the unconventional celibacy practices of his final years ^[4]. Yet the core of any Mahatma Gandhi biography remains secure: he demonstrated, on the largest possible stage, that an unarmed population using organized nonviolent resistance could bring down an empire. Few individuals of the twentieth century altered political method itself so thoroughly.