Mohandas Gandhi
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I |
INTRODUCTION |
Mohandas Gandhi
Indian nationalist leader
Mohandas Gandhi spent his life campaigning for human rights in India. His
strategy was to use a combination of passive resistance to and noncooperation
with the British, who ruled India. Gandhi said his techniques were inspired by
the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, by American writer Henry David Thoreau, and by
the teachings of Jesus Christ. In 1947 Gandhi’s pacifist efforts brought an end
to British rule in India.
Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian nationalist
leader, who established his country's freedom through a nonviolent revolution.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,
also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar in the present state of
Gujarฤt 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 (now Mumbai), 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.
|
II |
PASSIVE RESISTANCE |
Mohandas Gandhi in South
Africa
While practicing law in
South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, center, led Indians there in a struggle
for equal rights. In the process Gandhi developed a policy of nonviolent
resistance, which he later upheld in leading India’s movement for independence
from Britain.
Corbis
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.” Gandhi considered
the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate
for his purposes, however, and coined another term, satyagraha (Sanskrit
for “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 Johannesburg, 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.
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III |
CAMPAIGN FOR HOME RULE |
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign
of nonviolent civil resistance to British rule of India led to India’s
independence in 1947. A member of the merchant caste, Mohandas K. Gandhi, later
called Mahatma (Sanskrit for “great soul”), studied law in London. As a
lawyer, and later as a political activist, he effectively fought discrimination
with his principles of truth, nonviolence, and courage.
Culver Pictures/Courtesy
of Gordon Skene Sound Collection. All rights reserved.
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 passive resistance to 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 through India, gaining millions of followers. A demonstration
against the Rowlatt Acts resulted in a massacre of Indians at Amritsar by
British soldiers (see Amritsar Massacre); in 1920, when the British
government failed to make amends, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of
noncooperation. Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such as
courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children were withdrawn from
government schools. Through 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.
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.
Mohandas Gandhi
Archive Films/Hot Shots
Cool Cuts Inc.
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
(Sanskrit, “great soul”), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's
advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit, “noninjury”), was
the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian
practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Britain too would eventually consider
violence useless and would leave India.
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 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 Ahmadฤbฤd 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.
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IV |
ATTACK UPON THE CASTE
SYSTEM |
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.
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
Rฤjkot 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.
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V |
INDEPENDENCE |
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. During the riots that
followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live
together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta (now Kolkata), 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 Nathuram Godse,
a Hindu fanatic.
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 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.