Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)

Life and public work

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat, then part of the British Raj. He was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist who used nonviolent resistance in the campaign for India’s independence from British rule. The honorific Mahatma, meaning “great-souled” or “venerable,” was first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa and later became known around the world.

Gandhi grew up in a Hindu family. His father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi, served as dewan, or chief minister, of Porbandar state and later of Rajkot. His mother, Putlibai, came from a Pranami Vaishnava family and was deeply religious, keeping daily prayers and difficult vows, including fasts. As a child, Gandhi was shy and tongue-tied at school, more attached to books and lessons than to games. The stories of Shravana and King Harishchandra made a strong mark on him, and he later connected them with his early attachment to truth and love as highest values.

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 establish 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 civil rights campaign. In 1915, at age 45, he returned to India and began organizing peasants, farmers, and urban labourers against discrimination and excessive land tax.

Leadership and nonviolence

In 1921, Gandhi assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress. He led nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women’s rights, build religious and ethnic amity, end untouchability, and achieve swaraj, or self-rule. He adopted a short dhoti woven from hand-spun yarn to identify with India’s rural poor, lived in a self-sufficient residential community, ate simple food, and undertook long fasts for introspection and political protest. He 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, for many years, in both South Africa and India.

Gandhi’s hope for an independent India based on religious pluralism was tested in the 1940s by demands for a separate Muslim homeland within British India. In August 1947, Britain granted independence, and the British Indian Empire was partitioned into India and Pakistan. As displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs moved to new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in Punjab and Bengal. Gandhi did not take part in the official independence celebration. Instead, he visited affected areas and tried to ease distress, then undertook hunger strikes to stop the violence.

On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was assassinated at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune. Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October, is commemorated in India as Gandhi Jayanti and worldwide as the International Day of Nonviolence. In post-colonial India, he is considered the Father of the Nation and was commonly called Bapu, an endearment meaning “father.” People still return to his words because they were joined to action, discipline, and moral risk. A line like “If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Ask.” fits the public courage of a man who asked empires, communities, and himself to change.