Biography - Mohandas Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi was born in 1869 in India to a family of government workers. As a child he was shy, soft-spoken, and only a mediocre student at school. At age 13, Gandhi married his wife in an arranged marriage. They would have four children and stay married until her death in 1944.
In September 1888, at age 18, Gandhi left India, without his wife and newborn son, in order to study law in England. When he first arrived in England, Gandhi tried to make himself into an English gentleman by buying new suits, fine-tuning his English accent, learning French, and taking violin and dance lessons. However, after a few months, Gandhi decided these things were a waste of time and money. After that, he became a serious student and living a very simple lifestyle. While in England, Gandhi discovered his life-long passion for vegetarianism. In his search for vegetarian restaurants, Gandhi found and joined the London Vegetarian Society. The Society consisted of an intellectual crowd who introduced Gandhi to different authors, such as Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, both famous for his writings on civil disobedience.
Gandhi became a lawyer 1891 and returned to India. After having difficulty practicing law in India, Gandhi left his family in India again to become a lawyer in South Africa. It was his experience in South Africa that transformed Gandhi into a leader against discrimination. Gandhi had only been in South Africa for week when a railroad officials told Gandhi that he could not ride in a first class carriage (even though he had purchased a ticket) because he was not white and that he could only ride in a third-class carriage. When Gandhi refused to move, a policeman came and threw him off the train. Sitting in the cold of the railroad station after being thrown off the train, Gandhi contemplated whether he should go back home to India or to fight the discrimination. After much thought, Gandhi decided that he could not let these injustices continue and that he was going to fight to change these discriminatory practices.
Gandhi spent the next twenty years working to better the rights of Indians in South Africa. During the first three years, Gandhi learned more about Indian grievances, studied the law, wrote letters to officials, and organized petitions. Gandhi became well-known for his activism and his acts were even covered by newspapers in England and India. In a few short years, Gandhi had become a leader of the Indian community in South Africa.
It was during his work in South Africa, that Gandhi developed the concept of satyagraha in 1906. In the very simplest sense, satyagraha is passive resistance. Needing a new term for the Indian resistance, Gandhi chose the term "satyagraha," which literally means "truth force." Since Gandhi believed that exploitation was only possible if both the exploited and the exploiter accepted it, if one could see above the current situation and see the universal truth, then one had the power to make change. In practice, satyagraha was a focused and forceful nonviolent resistance to a particular injustice. The goal was not for there to be a winner and loser of the battle, but rather, that all would eventually see and understand the "truth" and agree to rescind the unjust law.
The first time Gandhi officially used satyagraha was in South Africa beginning in 1907 when he organized opposition to the Asiatic Registration Law (known as the Black Act). In March 1907, the Black Act was passed, requiring all Indians - young and old, men and women - to get fingerprinted and to keep registration documents on them at all times. While using satyagraha, Indians refused to get fingerprinted and picketed the documentation offices. Many of the protesters were beaten and arrested, including Gandhi. (This was the first of Gandhi's many jail sentences.) It took seven years of protest, but in June 1914, the Black Act was repealed. Gandhi had proved that nonviolent protest could be immensely successful.
Gandhi returned to India in 1914 a national hero. Although he was eager to begin reforms in India, a friend advised him to wait a year and spend the time traveling around India to learn about the lives of average Indians and their problems. In order to travel anonymously, Gandhi began wearing a loincloth (dhoti) and sandals (the average dress of the masses). If it was cold out, he would add a shawl. This became his wardrobe for the rest of his life. It was during his first year back in India that Gandhi was given the honorary title of Mahatma ("Great Soul"). The title represented the feelings of the millions of Indian peasants who viewed Gandhi as a holy man. However, Gandhi never liked the title because it seemed to mean he was special while he viewed himself as ordinary.
In 1919, the British government in India passed the Rowlatt Act that gave the British the power to break up "revolutionary" organizations and keep Indians in prison indefinitely without trial. In response to this Act, Gandhi organized a general strike. Unfortunately, such a large scale protest quickly got out of hand and in many places it turned violent. The worst violence was in Amritsar, where British soldiers attacked a group of protesting Indians with machine guns, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1000 in 15 minutes. The violence of the Amritsar Massacre caused Gandhi to begin to advocate for Indian Independence.
After this, Gandhi spent several years working to make sure his followers understood the ideals of satyagraha and organizing to keep nationwide protests from becoming violent. Gandhi also began advocating self-reliance as a way to gain freedom from the British by making the making the process of maintaining the colony an economic loss. For example, from the time that the British had established India as a colony, the Indians were supplying Britain with raw materials, like cotton, and then importing expensive, woven cloth from England. Thus, Gandhi advocated that Indians spin their own cloth to free themselves from this reliance on the British and hurt the British economically. Gandhi popularized this idea by traveling with his own spinning wheel, often spinning yarn while giving a speech. In this way, the image of the spinning wheel became a symbol for Indian independence.
In December 1928, Gandhi began the protest against the British salt tax. The British had made it illegal to own salt not sold or produced by the British government. In a tropical environment, salt is an important part of people's daily diets. The tax that Indians paid to buy British salt was used to fund the British rule of India. Gandhi recognized that this tax symbolized the way the British forced the Indians to pay for their own colonization. In 1930, Gandhi lead his followers on the Salt March, a 200 mile march to the sea. When they reached the coast, Gandhi deliberately broke the law by picking up a piece of sea salt that lay on the beach. He then encouraged his followers to do the same and make their own salt. Thousands of people went to the beaches to pick up loose salt while others began to evaporate salt water. Indian-made salt was soon sold across the country. The British responded with mass arrests.
When Gandhi announced that he planned a march on the government-owned Dharasana Salt Works, the British arrested Gandhi and imprisoned him without trial. Although the British had hoped that Gandhi's arrest would stop the march, they had underestimated his followers. As the group of the 2,500 marchers reached the 400 policemen and 6 British officers who were waiting for them, the marchers approached in a column of 25 at a time. The marchers were beaten with clubs, often being hit on their heads and shoulders. The international press watched as the marchers did not even raise their hands to defend themselves. After the first 25 marchers were beaten to the ground, another column of 25 would approach and be beaten, until all 2,500 had marched forward and been pummeled. The news of the brutal beating by the British of peaceful protesters shocked the world.
Realizing he had to do something to stop the protests, the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, met with Gandhi. The two men agreed on the Delhi Pact, the first step on a long negotiated path to Indian independence. The outbreak of World War Two complicated this process because the British believed they needed it for their war effort. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had opposed Indian independence, he announced that Britain would free India at the end of World War II. However, this was not enough for Gandhi. He organized a "Quit India" campaign in 1942. In response, the British jailed Gandhi for most of the war.
When Gandhi was released from prison in 1944, Indian independence seemed in sight. Unfortunately, the reality of independence created conflict between Hindus and Muslims over how a new India would be governed. Specifically, the Muslim population feared living in a Hindu dominated India. The Muslim population wanted to create their own country, Pakistan, in the area of northwest India. Gandhi opposed this plan.
The argument over the creation of Pakistan caused massive violence to erupt across India. Hindu and Muslim population massacred each other and it seemed like the country was falling into civil war. Gandhi tried to stop this by travelling across India, hoping his presence could end the violence. Although violence did stop where Gandhi visited, he could not be everywhere. In the face of this violence, decided to sped up the process for giving India independence. In 1947, Britain granted independence to India and to the newly formed Muslim country of Pakistan.
The violence between the Hindus and Muslims continued as millions of Muslim refugees marched out of India on the long trek to Pakistan and millions of Hindus who found themselves in Pakistan packed up their belongings and walked to India. To stop this wide-spread violence, Gandhi started a fast, saying that he would only eat again when he saw clear plans to stop the violence. Realizing that the frail and aged Gandhi could not withstand a long fast, both sides worked together to create a peace.
Unfortunately, not everyone was happy with this peace plan. In particular, radical Hindu groups blamed Gandhi for the creation of Pakistan. On January 30, 1948, the 78-year-old Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting, when a young Hindu, who blamed Gandhi for the partition and creation of Pakistan, stopped before him and bowed. Gandhi bowed back. The young man then shot Gandhi and killed him.
Source # 1 - Video clip from the movie Gandhi showing the Salt March and the protest at the Dharasana Saltworks - click here
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Source # 2 - Cartoon from the Hindustan Times (Indian newspaper) in 1931. Lord Wellington was the Viceroy (another term for Governor) of the British Colony of India.
