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| Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchad (Mahatma) (1869-1948)
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchad (Mahatma) (1869-1948)
Margit Falkensteiner
Mohandas´ childhood
Mohandas Karamchad Gandhi (which was his real name) was
born on October 2nd, 1869
in Porbandar, a small seatown in Gurajat (Western India). The Gandhis were
Hindus and belonged to the Bania caste, the second higest caste in Hinduism.
Mohandas´ father was prime minister of Gurajat. His mother was very
religious and he had two older brothers. When Mohandas was seven years old, his
family moved to Rajkot, where his father became a member of the Rajasthenic
Court. There he went to primary school and later to high school. He never was a
good student, but he didn´t copy his work from other students. Gandhi was a
shy boy and tried to avoid any company.
Mohandas as a teenager
In India it´s custom to marry quite early and
parents have the right to choose the partners for the children. Mohandas was
married to Kasturbai Makanji when both were 13 years old. Later he criticized
his father for having married him as a child. Nevertheless, he loved his wife,
but he was a quite jealous husband.
Hindus aren´t allowed to eat meat, because their
religion forbids that, like drinking alcohol. Mohandas thought, that the
Britains ruled over the Indians because they were meat eaters, which made them
stronger. He wanted to get as strong as those Britains were, because he
couldn´t stand being oppressed by them. So he began eating meat for about a
year, without his parents knowing it. But then he stopped and never ate meat
again.
Mahandas Gandhi in
England
Gandhi passed his matriculation exam in 1887. In
September he went to England to study law in London. During this time his wife
was pregnant and gave birth to their first son Harilal.
First of all Gandhi wanted to become an English
gentleman. Therefore he took lessons in French, dancing and elocution, but soon
he stopped these things.
After a year he changed his life. Up to that time he had
lived with a family, but then he rented a small room on his own, because he
didn´t want to get an English gentlemen anymore.
He opened a vegetarian club, but it only existed a few
months. Later he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Vegetarian
Society. Gandhi could talk to single persons quite well, but he was too shy to
talk to the committee.
Gandhi occupied himself with different religions. He
read the Gita (the most important book of Hinduism) and the bible, in which he
liked the ‘’Seromon on the Moun’’ best.
Mohandas passed his examinations, was called to the Bar
and enrolled in the High Court in June 1891. Then he went back to India, where
he found out, that his mother had died.
Gandhi as legal advisor in South
Africa
Gandhi got a job as a lawyer in Bombay, but he
wasn´t succesful in it. He didn´t know the Indian law and in his first
case he was so nervous, that he couldn´t speak a word. Another lawyer had
to finish his work. So he went to Rajkot to set up his own office. In 1892
Gandhi´s second son Manilal was born.
In 1893 an Indian business man offered Gandhi a job in
South Africa, lasting for one year. He went by ship, train and bus to Pretoria,
which is the capital of South Africa, where he worked.
South Africa was ruled by the Britons, and Indians, who
lived there, were discriminated by the law. They had to travel third class, if
they wanted to go by train or bus; they were not allowed to walk on public
foothpaths; they might not move out of doors after nine o´clock p.m.
without a permit; and they had no franchise.
Gandhi organized several meetings of all the Indians in
Pretoria. He told them to work together in order to change their lives. They
should be clean and honest, because the South Africans blamed them to be dirty
and dishonest. At these meetings Gandhi delivered his first public speeches, and
he wasn´t nervous. He was a different man to the lawyer who couldn´t
speak in the law court in Bombay.
Gandhi´s job in South
Africa
After one year Gandhi wanted to return to India, but he
couldn´t, because the Indians in South Africa needed him. So he stayed
there to help them. He moved to Durban (which is in the Natal Province), where
he founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. He organized the resistance of the
Indians against the discriminatory laws.
Indians could go to South Africa as slaves for five
years. If they decided to stay longer, they were slaves forever, or they had to
pay a yearly poll tax of 25, which hardly anyone could afford. Gandhi
achieved, that the tax was reduced to 3.
In 1896 Gandhi went back to India for six months to
fetch his wife and children.
Back in South Africa, Gandhi founded a school and a
hospital. In 1897 Gandhi´s wife Kasturbai gave birth to her third son
Ramdas, and three years later Davadas was born.
In the Boer War Gandhi and his companions fetched
wounded British soilders from the field and nursed them.
In 1901 Gandhi returned to India, promising to come back
to South Africa, if the people there would need him. He got luxurious gifts from
Natal Indians, but instead of keeping them, he gave them to the Indian
community.
The Congress met at Calcutta in 1901. Gandhi offered his
services to the Congress office in order to gain some experience, and so he got
a job as a Congress secretary. Soon Gandhi got a message from South Africa,
telling him, that he should come there, because Mr Chamberlain, the British
prime minister, was going to visit Africa. So he again went there with his
family, but the Asian department didn´t allow him to represent the Indians
in South Africa, because they didn´t regard him as a domiciled
Indian.
1904 Gandhi founded ‘’The Indian
Opinion’’, a weekly newspaper for Indians in South Africa, which was
written in four languages: English, Gujarati, Tamil and Hindi.
Gandhi changed his life
In 1914 Gandhi changed his life. He founded the Phoenix
settlement, a cooperative colony for Indians, near Durban. The members tried to
be independent, so they planted fruit trees and even baked bread on their own.
Gandhi began to wash his clothes and to his cut his hair on his own. He also
helped Kasturbai to do the housework, and his wife didn´t understand that,
because they easily would have been able to afford a servant.
Gandhi also trained to controll himself, and so he
changed from an irescible person into a peaceful man. At the age of 37 he became
a Bramachari. Bramacharies have no sexual intercourses, they cut down eating,
stirs of emotion and talking, and they lead a simple life. Gandhi only wore the
clothes of the lowest Hindu caste, even if he met important people, and he only
travelled by thrid class anymore.
From 1906 to 1913 Gandhi led a campaign, that fought for
the rights of Indians in South Africa. He undertook a series of challenges for
which he was imprisoned several times.
In the Zulu Rebellion he formed an Indian Ambulance Corp
and nursed wounded Zulus.
In 1914 Gandhi went to England with his family and a
companion in order to meet a friend. During this journey the First World War,
in which Gandhi helped the Britons with amblance work, broke out.
Gandhi had achieved quite a lot in South Africa. The
poll tax was abolished in the end, and the Indians were better off than 20 years
before.
Gandhi´s work in
India
In 1914 Gandhi went back to India, and in 1915 he
founded the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, which was like the Phoenix
settlement in South Africa. Gandhi supported the Indians, who needed him, and he
also helped untouchables there.
In Champaran he helped the ryots, who weren´t
fairly treated by the indigo planters, and founded primary schools in six
villages.
In Ahmadabad labouring conditions were bad, and the
wages were low. The situation for mill-hands was worst, and so Gandhi advised
them to strike. After about three weeks he said, that he wouldn´t touch any
food till the mill-hands have reached a settlement with the
mill-owners.
Three days later the strike was called off, and a
settlement was reached.
In the Kheda disrict the crops failed, and so people
were unable to pay the assessment. Gandhi achived that the rich people had to
pay their tax, while it was suspended for the poor ones.
The fight against the Rowlatt
Acts
In 1919 the Parliament set up the Rowlatt Acts, which
allowed the police to imprision victims of persecution without any trial. Gandhi
told the Indians to fight against these Acts, but without any weapons.
In Amistrar 400 Indians were killed by British soilders
in a demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts. Gandhi required the whole country
to observe a general strike on April 6th, 1919. He told all Indians not to work
and not to go to school on that day, but to observe the day as one of fasting
and prayer. Shops, offices, factories and schools were closed on that day.
During public processions proscribed books, written by Gandhi, were sold. Again
lots of Indians were killed. Gandhi blamed himself for the violence during these
two demonstrations. But with the strike on April 6th he achieved, that the
Rowlatt Acts were never actually used.
The strike against this law was the first big act of
civil disobedience in India. The police wanted to arrest Gandhi, but they were
afraid of the Indians, because they would have rebelled, and so they let him
go.
Gandhi in the Indian National
Congress
Gandhi became a member of the Indian National Congress,
where he fought for the Hindu-Muslem unity, and the removal of untouchability.
He told the Indians to spin, to weave and to make their own clothes in order to
get work for poor people, and to become independent from British textile
industry. He himself spinned half an hour every day.
In 1922 Gandhi organized a strike against a tax in
Gurajat. British police men illtreated Indians, and so they burnt down a police
station. Several people died and Gandhi was sentenced to prision for six years,
from where he was released in 1924 because of his bad health. In prision he read
a lot of books, studied two Indian languages and began to write down the story
of his life.
After his release from prison Gandhi travelled
throughout India preaching the cardinal tenets of his doctrine: Hindu-Moslem
unity, the abolition of untouchability and the promotion of hand-spinning. He
began to be known as Mahatma - the great soul.
In 1925 he became president of the Indian National
Congress.
The salt march
In 1930 Mahatma proclaimed a new campaign of civil
disobedience, telling the Indian population to refuse paying taxes, especially
the tax on salt. The campaign was a march, in which thousands of Indians
followed Gandhi from Ahmedabad to the Arabian sea, where they made salt by
evaporating sea water.
This campaign was also a strike against the British
monopoly on salt. Once more the Indian leader was arrested, but he was released
in 1931. Gandhi halted the campaign after the Britons made concessions to his
demands.
Gandhi as president of the
INC
In 1931 Gandhi represented the Indian National Congress
at a conference in London, but he wasn´t successful there.
In 1932 Gandhi began new civil-disobedience campaigns
against British rules. Arrested twice, he fasted several times for long periods;
these fasts were effective measures against the British, because a revolution
might have broken out in India, if he had died. In September 1932, while Gandhi
was in prison, he undertook a fast to death to improve the status of the Hindu
untouchables.
In 1934 Gandhi resigned his leadership of the congress,
but he still remained a powerful influence. The limited home rule, granted by
the Britions in 1934, could not be implented without Gandhi´s
approval.
Gandhi travelled througout India, teaching Ahimsa
(non-violence) and demanding eradiction of untouchability.
The Independence of India
In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, the Indian
National Congress and Gandhi demanded a declaration of war aims and their
application to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response from the
Britons, they decided not to support Britain in the war, unless complete and
immediate independence would have been granted to the country. The Britons
refused that and offered compromises, which were rejected by the
Indians.
Gandhi resumed his leadership from 1940 to 1941. He made
propaganda against the war. For that he was interned in 1942, but the Britons
released him two years later because of his failing health.
In 1944 the Indian struggle for independence was in its
final stage. The British government agreed to Indian´s independence on the
condition, that the two contending national groups, the Muslim League and the
Indian National Congress, should resolve their differences.
Gandhi stood against the partition of India until he
realized its inevitability. So on Independence Day, August 15th, 1947, India was
devided into India (the Hindu state) and Pakistan (the state for the Muslims).
Gandhi refused to celebrate and spent this day fasting and in
prayer.
Religious fights broke out, because nevertheless Hindus
stayed in Pakistan, and Muslims still lived in India. Ryots engulfed in
Calcutta. Gandhi fasted until thedisturbances were ceased.
In January 1948 Gandhi fasted for the Muslims in India.
On January the 30th, 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by a
fanatic Hindu on the way to his evening prayer.
Gandhi´s personality
Gandhi was a saint and a politician.
He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting
and meditation.
All his life he held to two fundamental principles, a
belief in Ahimsa (non-violence) and the concept of
truth (Satya).
Sources:
- M. K. GANDHI: An Autobiography or The Story of My
Experiments with Truth
- DONN BYRNE: Gandhi - His Life Was The
Message
- INTERNET
- LEXICONS
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