Mohandas K. Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born Oct 2, 1869 in the Gujarat province of India. His father was the dewan ("prime minister") of the princely state of Porbandar, population about 72,000. "My father was a lover of his clan, truthful, brave and generous, but short-tempered. To a certain extent he might have been given to carnal pleasures ... The outstanding impression my mother has left on my memory is that of saintliness. She was deeply religious ... She would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching." The family belonged to the Banya (merchant) caste, known for their frugality. Thus a disciple said of Gandhi: "He wrote on the backs of letters he'd received, or even on the envelopes. What a Banya he was! He didn't believe in wasting anything."

Mohan was married at the age of 13 to a local girl named Kasturbai. "Kasturbai was illiterate. I was very anxious to teach her, but lustful love left me no time ... I am sure that, had my love for her been absolutely untainted with lust, she would be a learned lady today; for I could then have conquered her dislike for studies. I know that nothing is impossible for pure love." Mohandas was in bed with his wife when a servant brought him the news that his father had just died. "The shame to which I have referred ... was this shame of my carnal desire even at the critical hour of my father's death, which demanded wakeful service. It is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget."

In 1888, the upwardly mobile Gandhi clan sent Mohandas to England to become a barrister. There he began his lifelong experiments with diet. He learned to like English cooking, on the grounds that it discouraged sensuality. "I now relished the boiled spinach which in Richmond tasted insipid, cooked without condiments." Gandhi never liked school, and took more interest in promoting vegetarianism. He passed his bar examinations in 1890, and returned to India, where he discovered that his mother had died in his absence. "My grief was even greater than over my father's death."

Gandhi was unhappy as a lawyer in India, and in 1893 his family sent him to South Africa (at the time, like India, part of the British Empire.) There, "I discovered that as a man and as an Indian I had no rights", so Gandhi found his true vocation as an activist and moral reformer. He developed three rules which were to shape the rest of his life: satyagraha or truth-force ("The term denotes the method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms"); ahimsa or non-violence ("He who injures others, is jealous of others, is not fit to live in the world"); and brahmacharya or sexual abstinence ("A man or woman completely practicing Brahmacharya is absolutely free from passion. Such a one therefore lives nigh unto God, is Godlike.")

After twenty-one years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India. He founded an ashram, intended to be a model community, where he eroded the barriers of caste by inviting a family of untouchables to live alongside the caste Hindus. Untouchables were thought to be a source of spiritual pollution: one reason for Hindu resentment of Muslims in India is that many Muslims are the descendants of untouchable converts. Untouchables lived apart and were barred from schools, temples, and certain roads and wells. They did work that would defile a caste Hindu, for instance, cleaning up human excrement. An unfortunate result of this system was that human excrement generally didn't get cleaned up, causing cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. Gandhi was appalled. Sanitation became a main theme of his reforms. "If we approach any village, the very first thing we encounter is the dunghill. If a traveller who is unfamiliar with these parts comes across this state of affairs, he will not be able to differentiate between the dunghill and the residential part. As a matter of fact, there is not much of a difference between the two." One of Gandhi's favorite object-lessons was to publicly clean a latrine (he had no sense of smell, which must have been a help.)

Rabindranath Tagore called Gandhi Mahatma ("Great Soul") and the title stuck in spite of Gandhi's resistance to it. "I shall gladly subscribe to a bill to make it criminal for anybody to call me Mahatma and to touch my feet."

Gandhi did not separate religion and politics. "Politics bereft of religion are absolute dirt, ever to be shunned." He took the term Swaraj ("self-rule") to mean both "self-control" and "home rule for India." To promote Swaraj, he joined the Indian National Congress, India's largest political party, which in 1920 consisted of Anglicized lawyers, all talk and no action. "Of the prominent Congress leaders only one, Motilal Nehru, supported Gandhi in the early stages" (reported Motilal's son, Jawaharlal.) With Motilal Nehru's help, Gandhi persuaded the Congress to adopt his plan of non-cooperation, a total boycott of all things British; so Indian lawyers quit their practice in the British-run courts, students stopped attending British-run universities, and everyone gave up their British-made clothes. Khadi ("homespun") became the uniform of the Congress Party, and the spinning wheel its emblem. "Spinning was the cottage industry years ago and if the millions are to be saved from starvation they must be enabled to reintroduce spinning in their homes and every village must repossess its own weaver."

Non-cooperation was called to a halt by Gandhi himself after rioting broke out in the village of Chauri Chaura. Nehru wrote, "The sudden suspension of our movement after the Chauri Chaura incident was resented, I think, by almost all the prominent Congress leaders."

Gandhi's next campaign, in 1930, was a brilliant symbolic gesture. Salt is a staple in India's climate; but the government held a monopoly on its production and imposed a tax on its sale. Gandhi planned to march to the sea and make salt in defiance of the government monopoly, setting off a nationwide campaign. He began the march at his ashram, with a few satyagrahis ("truth warriors"); as his progress continued, the procession picked up more people, including, not coincidentally, foreign newsmen. Day after day Westerners saw on their newsreels what Nehru saw: "He was at Jambusar with his pilgrim band, and we spent a few hours with him there and then saw him stride away with his party to the next stage in the journey to the salt sea. That was my last glimpse of him then as I saw him, staff in hand, marching along at the head of his followers, with firm step and a peaceful but undaunted look."

The Salt Campaign was Gandhi's most successful, resulting in civil disobedience throughout India. Nehru recalled: "It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released; all over the country, in town and village, salt manufacture was the topic of the day ... we collected pots and pans and ultimately succeeded in producing some unwholesome stuff, which we waved about in triumph and often auctioned for fancy prices." Within a few months the British had jailed thousands of satyagrahis and most of the Congress leadership, including Gandhi and Nehru.

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in 1889 to a wealthy clan of the self-satisfied Kashmiri Brahmin caste; he was handsome, charming, highly intelligent, and completely secular ("The spectacle of what is called religion ... has filled me with horror.") The vital and complex Nehru-Gandhi partnership was to shape modern India. Nehru wrote of Gandhi: "he was a very difficult person to understand, sometimes his language was almost incomprehensible to an average modern", but also: "[he was] a tremendous personality, drawing people to himself like a magnet, and calling out fierce loyalties and attachments."

In 1931 the British released Gandhi from jail long enough for him to negotiate with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, and then attend a Round Table Conference in London. Gandhi seized the oppurtunity as a public relations windfall. He spoke on the radio: "The world is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to the hungering world." When the conference overlapped his evening prayer time, he sat on the floor of the House of Commons and chanted the Bhagavad Gita, to the amazement of the British. He took tea with the King at Buckingham Palace wearing nothing but loincloth and sandals, explaining later, "the King was wearing enough for both of us." Little was accomplished by the Conference itself, and within a week of Gandhi's return to India he was back in prison again.

The British had proposed a new Constitution for India which included a separate electorate for untouchables. Gandhi saw this as one more barrier, and he began a "fast to the death" in protest. "Untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic poisons milk." Nehru wrote, "I felt angry with him at his religious and sentimental approach to a political question, and his frequent references to God in connection with it ... What a terrible example to set!" The government brought in the leaders of the various factions to negotiate with Gandhi while he lay on an iron cot in the jail yard, and new legislation was worked out. The fast was over. Nehru sent him a telegram: "news that some settlement reached filled me with relief and joy ... Am unable to judge from religious viewpoint. Danger your methods being exploited by others but how can I presume to advise a magician. Love."

In 1942 Gandhi mounted his final independence campaign, "Quit India." He was jailed almost immediately, along with Kasturbai. When Kasturbai became seriously ill with acute bronchitis, the British had a precious shipment of penicillin flown in to the prison for her. But Gandhi felt that the injection of penicillin would be an act of violence; he insisted on nursing her himself using natural methods. Kasturbai died. "I cannot imagine life without Ba ["Mother"] ... her passing has left a vacuum which never will be filled."

With the end of World War II, the British realized they would have to let India go. They could not afford the manpower and material to continue suppressing the Indian independence movement. At the same time Muhammed Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League were lobbying hard for a separate Islamic nation. In August of 1946 the Muslim League proclaimed a "direct action day" which set off a wave of Hindu-Muslim violence. Gandhi was in despair. "I would love to attempt an answer to a question which has been addressed to me from more than one quarter of the globe ... Does your message of nonviolence still hold? In reply I must confess my bankruptcy, not that of nonviolence." The partitioning of India into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan would result in the deaths of about five hundred thousand people through sectarian violence.

In Birla House in Delhi Gandhi began a fast to bring peace. He was met with hostility; a crowd of refugees gathered outside Birla House and chanted, "Let Gandhi die." Two days into the fast, Gandhi's doctor, realizing that his kidneys had ceased to function, told him he was dying. "If I have acetone in my urine, it is because my faith in Rama [loosely, "God"] is incomplete", he told her. Finally, the city of Delhi came around. The leaders of all the major factions signed pledges to end the violence, and Gandhi ended his fast. "In the name of God we have indulged in lies, massacres of people, without caring whether they were innocent or guilty, men or women, children or infants. We have indulged in abductions, forcible conversions, and we have done all this shamelessly. I am not aware if anybody has done these things in the name of Truth. With that same name on my lips I have broken the fast."

On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was walking toward his evening prayer meeting in front of a congregation of about five hundred people when he was approached by a Hindu extremist named Nathuram Godse. Gandhi put his palms together in a traditional gesture of greeting. Godse pulled out a pistol and shot three bullets into Gandhi's chest at point-blank range. For a moment Gandhi continued to move forward; then he crumpled and died. It was left to Nehru, now India's Prime Minister, to announce Gandhi's death on All-India radio: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu ["Father"] as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more."

copyright © 1996 Beth Randall bibliography Table of Contents