MAHATMA GANDHI ALBUM

Early Years of Gandhi:

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in
Porbandar in the present day state of Gujarat in India on October 2, 1869. He was raised in a very
conservative family that had affiliations with the ruling family of Kathiawad. He was educated in
schools of Rajkot and was married at the age of 13. Then he studied law at University College in
London. In 1891, after having been admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and
attempted to establish a law practice in Bomaby, without much success. Two years later, an Indian
firm with interests in South Africa retained him as legal adviser in a lawsuit 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 elememenatry rights for Indians.

RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE :
Gandhi remained in South Africa for twenty years, suffering imprisonment many times. In 1896,
after being attacked and humiliated by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a policy of
passive resistance to, and non-cooperation
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
(from Sanskrit, "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 Durban, 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 completed, he returhned to India.

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 non-violent resistance to Great 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 throughout India,
gaining millions of followers. A demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts resulted in a massacre of
Indians at Amritsar by British soldiers; in 1920, when the British government failed to make
amends, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of non-cooperation. Indians in public office
resigned, government agencies such as courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children were
withdrawn from government schools. Throughout 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 (from Sanskrit, "self-governing") 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.
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 a
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 (great-souled), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's
advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (non-violence), was the expression of a way of life
implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Great 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 the British 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
Ahmedabad 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.

Photograph by V.N. O'key, circa 1945

Gandhi takes on Domestic Problems :

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 an upper 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 Rajkot 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.
 v Man of Firm Step
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.

Men Carrying Gandhi, Noakhali

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 (see: Tryst with Destiny -- the story of
India's independence). During the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with
Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta, 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
a fanatic Hindu.
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.A. under the civil rights leader
Martin Luther King, Jr. and in South Africa under Nelson Mandela.