Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat, then part of the British Raj. He was born into a Gujarati Hindu Modh Bania family, the youngest child of Karamchand Gandhi, who served as a dewan, or chief minister, and Putlibai, who came from a Pranami Vaishnava Hindu family. Gandhi grew up in Rajkot, where he entered local school at nine and later attended Alfred High School. He was an average student, shy and tongue-tied, more drawn to books and lessons than to games.

Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the bar at the age of 22. After two uncertain years in India, where he could not build a successful law practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He remained there for 21 years, raised a family, and first used nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights. The honorific Mahātmā, meaning “great-souled” or “venerable,” was first applied to him in South Africa in 1914 and is now used throughout the world.

In 1915, at 45, Gandhi returned to India and began organizing peasants, farmers, and urban labourers against discrimination and excessive land tax. In 1921, he assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress. From that position, he led nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women’s rights, build religious and ethnic amity, end untouchability, and win swaraj, or self-rule. He adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a sign of identification with India’s rural poor, lived in a self-sufficient residential community, ate simple food, and undertook long fasts for introspection and political protest.

Gandhi is best known for using nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule. He brought anti-colonial nationalism to common Indians, led the 400 km Dandi Salt March in 1930 against the British-imposed salt tax, and called for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India. His thinking was shaped by his family’s religious life, especially his mother’s prayer and fasting, and by childhood stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra, which strengthened his early attachment to truth and love as supreme values.

Gandhi’s vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was severely tested in the 1940s. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but British India was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. As displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs moved to new lands, violence broke out, especially in Punjab and Bengal. Gandhi stayed away from the official celebration of independence, visited affected areas, and undertook hunger strikes to stop the violence. On 30 January 1948, he was assassinated at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist.

Gandhi is considered the Father of the Nation in post-colonial India and was commonly called Bapu, an endearment meaning “father.” His birthday, 2 October, is marked in India as Gandhi Jayanti and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. His words still speak plainly because they come from a life spent linking private discipline with public action. “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind” captures the moral clarity for which he is still remembered.