Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ( New Delhi , 1869 – 1948 ). Indian lawyer , thinker and politician . In a country where politics was synonymous with corruption, Gandhi brought ethics into that domain through preaching and example. His followers called him in different ways: Gandhi , Bapú (bāpu: father ) or Mahatma Gandhi ( majātmā , means great soul , being majā: great and ātmā: soul ), a title given to him by the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Considered one of the great theorists who modified the political and ideological configuration of the world in the 20th century . Man of inflexible austerity and absolute modesty.
In India he was openly at the forefront of the nationalist movement, establishing methods of social struggle such as strikes while rejecting the armed struggle to achieve his goals, for this he was turned into a leader of non-violence. Imprisoned several times by the English , he soon became a national hero. He lived in unmitigated poverty, never granted privileges to his relatives, and always rejected political power, before and after the liberation of India.
Biographical synthesis
Birth
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was born in the small Porbandar , a coastal city of the small princely state of Kathiawar , currently in the state of Gujarat , New Delhi , on October 2 , 1869.
Gujarat was at that time a mosaic of tiny principalities, whose rulers had absolute power over the lives of their subjects. Gandhi’s father, Karamchand Gandhi , was the Diwan (Prime Minister) of Porbandar and belonged to the Banyan caste , merchants of proverbial cunning and skill in trade. His mother, called Putlibai, was the fourth wife of his father, came from the sect of the Pranamis , who mixed Hinduism with the teachings of the Koran. She was a deeply religious and austere woman who divided her time between the temple and the care of her own, in addition to practicing frequent fasts. In the spiritual formation of Mohandas, who felt an unlimited love for his parents, in addition to the worship of the goddess Visnu that the family professed, a series of amalgamated cultures and creeds concurred: Hindu , Muslim , Jain . The latter had a special influence on their philosophy: the Jains practiced non-violence not only with animals and humans, but even with plants, microbes, water , fire, and wind . One of the sacred texts of Hinduism, states that:Without killing living beings, meat cannot be used, and since killing is contrary to the principles of ahimsa, the consumption of meat must be renounced.
Gandhi learned at an early age not to harm any living being, to be a vegetarian, to fast to purify himself, and to have tolerance for other creeds and religions. On one occasion I comment:Not eating meat constitutes without the slightest doubt a great help for the evolution and peace of our spirit. A country, a civilization can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
Youth
A typical example of late genius, Mohandas was a silent, withdrawn, and not very bright adolescent in his studies, who passed unnoticed through the schools of Rajkot . At the age of thirteen, following Hindu custom, he was married to a girl one year older than him named Kasturba Makharji , to whom he had been betrothed since the age of six without knowing it. The young husband fell passionately in love with the girl, and to make love with her he left the bed of his dying father the same night he died. The event left an indelible guilt on Gandhi, who later declared himself against marriage between children and in favor of sexual continence.
Gandhi and Kasturba Makharji had four children.
University study
He barely managed to pass the entrance examination at Bombay University in 1887 , enrolling at the Samaldas school in Bhavnagar . As his grades did not improve at the institute, the family decided to send him to London to take law courses at the Inner Temple , the demands of which were lower than those of Indian universities. Young Gandhi sailed from Bombay in September 1888 . He was nineteen years old and had just become a father for the first time. Before leaving he had solemnly promised his mother not to follow the English custom of eating meat, since Visnuism prohibited it. Several times in his adolescence he had transgressed this rule, prompted by a friend who advised him to eat meat to resemble the English in strength.
He studied Law at the University of London , the city where he lived between 1888 and 1891 , a period in which one of the most decisive events of his vocation took place: the discovery of the East through the West. Indeed, in the English capital he began to frequent the Theosophists , who initiated him by reading the first Indian classic, the Bhagavad Gita , which he came to consider ” the book par excellence for the knowledge of the truth .” Also there he came into contact with the teachings of Christ, and for a time he was so drawn to Christian ethics that he wavered between it and Hinduism. From that time are his attempts to synthesize the precepts of Buddhism , Christianity , Islam and his native religion, through what he pointed out as the unifying principle of all of them: the idea of renunciation.
In these decisive years for his intellectual formation he read Leo Tolstoy , in whom he would later find the guide for the improvement of the practice and theory of non-violence. Gandhi read several books by Tolstoy, but the ones that most influenced him were The Kingdom of God is in you and Letter to a Hindu ( 1908 ), in response to Indian nationalists who supported violence, this letter is based on Hindu doctrines and the teachings of the god Krishna in relation to growing Indian nationalism. Gandhi remained in contact with Tolstoy until his death in 1910 .
lawyer
When he returned to India with the title of lawyer, he did so with his oriental identity signs: he had gone in search of Western wisdom and returned with the secret that had made the Hindus wise.
Returning to Porbandar he found his family disintegrated: the mother had died shortly before and the Gandhi had lost all influence in the princely court. As a lawyer he did not find many prospects, since his first professional performance ended in humiliating failure, as he became speechless when he addressed the court and could not continue. It was then that a Muslim business factory offered him a contract to take care of a company case in Durban , and Gandhi did not miss the opportunity. He sailed for South Africa in 1893 .
Gandhi returned to India for a short time to take his wife and children to South Africa. Upon his return, in January 1897 , a group of white men attacked him and tried to lynch him. As a clear indication of the values that he would uphold throughout his life, he refused to report his attackers to justice, stating that it was one of his principles not to seek compensation in court for the damages perpetrated on his person.
In the country of the former Dutch settlers there lived a Hindu colony made up mostly of workers, whom the English disparagingly called Sami. They lacked all rights, they were despised and racially discriminated, as the young lawyer was able to see firsthand during some of his railroad trips. But the situation was even more serious than it appeared. His work finished, Gandhi was about to return to India when he learned of the existence of a bill to remove the right to vote for Hindus. He decided then to postpone the departure for a month to organize the resistance of his compatriots (about 150,000), and the month became twenty-two years.
During that long stage of his life, his greatest concern was the liberation of the Indian community, and in it he was shaping the weapons of struggle that he would later use in his country. In the early years, convinced of the good intentions of British colonialism, he opened a law firm to defend his compatriots in court in Johannesburg and set out to articulate a movement dedicated to agitation by legal means. He founded the newspaper The Indian Opinion , to bring together the Indian community and, as an instrument of legal agitation, created the Indian Congress Party of Natal ( 1894 ). His Anglophile sympathies led him during the Boer war to organize theIndian Ambulance Corps , an action that received harsh criticism from the Indian nationalists.
Revolutionary labor
From 1904 activity Gandhi underwent a remarkable change: after reading the critique of capitalism contained in Unto The Last of John Ruskin, he changed his lifestyle and went on to lead a simple communal existence on the outskirts of Johannesburg where he founded a commune called Tolstoy. At that time he outlined the theory of non-violent activism, which he first launched to oppose the registration law. This law required all Indians to register in a special register with their fingerprints. Gandhi ordered his compatriots not to register, to trade in the streets without a license, and later to burn their registration cards in front of the Johannesburg mosque. Like many of his followers, he went to jail several times, but the civil resistance movement had several partial successes.
In 1913 the protest against a tax considered unjust resulted in a march through the Transvaal , to Natal . The following year, the British authorities reversed the tax and authorized Asians to reside in Natal as free workers. The victory seemed complete, and Gandhi, who had abandoned European clothing in protest, left South Africa definitively with his wife and children. In the long term all the achievements of the Indian community were lost and the authorities of that country further hardened their racist policy.
Return to india
Gandhi’s spinning wheel . The exploitation of Indian peasants by British industrialists had led to extreme poverty. Gandhi proposed as a solution to this situation to promote the rebirth of artisan industries, and began to use a spinning wheel as a symbol of the return to the simple peasant life that he preached.
Gandhi came to India in 1915 a true hero, with the aura of his campaigns abroad. The masses of Bombay gave him a warm welcome, the English governor came to greet him and the poet Rabindranath Tagore welcomed him at his Free University of Santiniketan . Shortly after arriving, in the city of Ahmedabad, he founded a quasi-monastic community in which foreign clothing, spiced foods, and private property were prohibited. Its members were dedicated to only two material jobs: agriculture, to obtain sustenance, and knitting by hand, to provide shelter. Here he began a struggle that Gandhi would have to sustain throughout his life: the battle against the evils of Hinduism and in favor of the untouchables. The first step was to admit them as members of the community.
In those early years Gandhi abandoned all political agitation in order to support Britain’s war efforts in World War I , even going as far as the recruitment of soldiers for the English army. His entry into Indian politics did not occur until February 1919 , when the passage of the Rowlatt Act, which established censorship and laid down harsh penalties for anyone suspected of terrorism or sedition, opened his eyes to the true intentions of the English imperialists in his country. Gandhi then went on to lead the opposition to the law. He organized a nationwide propaganda campaign through non-violence, which began with a general strike. This soon spread throughout the country and protests took place in the main cities, where there were some sources of violence despite the leader’s insistence on the peaceful nature of the demonstrations. When he went to Delhi to appease the population, Gandhi was arrested. Days later, on April 13 , Brigadier General Dyer ordered his Gurkas to be fired on the crowd gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh from the city of Amritsar . English domination had shown its true bloody and brutal face: almost four hundred people were killed and thousands more wounded. But the British authorities were forced to reconsider their tactics and the Rowlatt Act never went into effect.
In the years following the Amritsar massacre , Gandhi became the undisputed nationalist leader, reaching the presidency of the Indian National Congress – a party founded by Alan Octavius Hume in 1885 -, which he knew how to turn into an effective instrument for independence. . From a grouping of the urban middle classes, it became a mass organization rooted in the towns and the peasantry. Major civil disobedience campaigns were launched, ranging from massive refusal to pay taxes to boycotting the authorities. Thousands of Indians filled the prisons and Gandhi himself was arrested in March 1922. Ten days later “the Great Trial” began, in which the Mahatma pleaded guilty and regarded the sentence of six years in prison as an honor, thus ending the session with a mutual bow between judge and defendant.
When he got out of prison – appendicitis caused the colonial authorities to release him in 1924 – he found that the political landscape had changed in his absence: the Congress Party had split into two factions and the unity between Hindus and Muslims achieved with the civil disobedience movement, it had disappeared. Gandhi then decided to retire from politics, to live as an anchorite , in absolute poverty and seeking silence as a regenerative force. Retired in his Ashram he became in those years the spiritual head of India, the religious leader of international fame that many Westerners in search of spiritual peace treated like a guru.
His retirement ended abruptly in 1927 , when the British government appointed a commission in charge of the reform of the Constitution, in which no native participated. At the head of the political struggle, Gandhi succeeded in getting all the country’s parties to boycott the commission. Shortly afterwards, the Bardoli strike , in support of the refusal to pay taxes, ended in total success. The victory of the movement encouraged Congress to declare independence of India, the 26 of January of 1930 , and the direction of non – violence campaign to implement the resolution instructed the Mahatma. The latter chose the salt monopoly as its objectivewhich particularly affected the poor-, and left Sabartami on March 12 with 79 volunteers for Dandi, a coastal town 385 kilometers away. The small movement spread until it reached all of India: the peasants planted the paths with green branches where that small and half-naked man would pass, with a bamboo stick , on the way to the sea.and at the head of a huge peaceful army. On the anniversary day of the Amritsar massacre, Gandhi reached the seashore and picked up a handful of salt. From that moment on, civil disobedience was unstoppable: local deputies and officials resigned, local leaders abandoned their posts, Indian army soldiers refused to fire on protesters, women joined the movement, while Gandhi supporters peacefully invaded the streets. salt factories.
The campaign ended with a compromise pact between Gandhi and His Majesty’s Viceroy, by virtue of which the production of salt was legalized and the nearly 100,000 prisoners detained during the mobilizations were released. On the other hand, Gandhi was sent to London to participate in the conference that discussed the steps to follow to establish a constitutional government in India. The presence of the Mahatma in England, despite the great popular reception that the London neighborhoods gave him, did not bring favorable results for the cause, and when he returned to his country he found that Nehru and other leaders of Congress were once again in prison.
Several times in his life Gandhi resorted to fasting as a means of pressure against power, as a form of spectacular and dramatic struggle to stop violence or to attract the attention of the masses. The inhumanity of the caste system, which condemned pariahs to utter destitution and ostracism, made Gandhi make the abolition of untouchability a fundamental goal of his efforts. And from the prison of Yervada, where he had been confined again, he performed a “fast until death” against holding separate elections for Hindus and outcasts. This forced all political leaders to go to his prison bed to sign a pact with English consent. The work of “popular pedagogy” to cure Hindu society of its sores did not end here. Distanced from Congress before the disappointment caused by the maneuvers of the politicians, he dedicated himself to visiting distant towns, insisting on popular education, on the prohibition of alcohol, on the spiritual liberation of man.
WWII
The outbreak of the Second World War was the reason that Gandhi, once again, returned to the political foreground. His opposition to the war was absolute and he did not share the opinion of Nehru and other congressional leaders, inclined to support the fight against fascism. But the viceroy’s decision to incorporate the subcontinent into Britain’s war preparations without consulting with local politicians, clarified the waters, prompting the resignation en masse of ministers belonging to Congress.
After lengthy deliberations, Gandhi declared that India could not support a war that was apparently a fight for democratic freedom, while that same freedom was denied to India. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his claim for independence, outlining a call for the British to leave India. Gandhi’s rebellion and the most definitive of the Congress Party had the objective of ensuring the British exit from India. At the party congress in 1942 , Gandhi was criticized by some party members and by other Indian political groups, favorable to the British and opposed to Mohandas’ position. They believed that he did not support Great Britain in her life and death struggle against Nazism.it was immoral. Gandhi and his supporters were clear that they would not support the war effort unless immediate independence was granted to India. He was even clear that this time the movement would not stop even if individual acts of violence were committed, and ordered that “anarchy” around him was “worse than true anarchy.” He invited all members of Congress and Indians to maintain discipline via ahimsa (non-violence), and karó ia maró ( done or given ) in the ultimate cause of freedom.
After the taking of Rangoon by the Japanese, Gandhi demanded the complete independence of India, so that the country could freely choose its decisions. The next day, August 9, 1942, he was arrested along with other members of Congress, which produced a mass uprising of the natives, followed by a series of violent revolts throughout the Indian territory. The British held Gandhi for two years at the Aga Khan Palace in Poona . It was then that Gandhi suffered two terrible blows in his personal life. His secretary Mahadev Desai (42 years old) died of a heart attack 6 days later and his wife Kasturba died after 18 months of imprisonment, in February 1944 ; Gandhi suffered a severe attack of malaria six weeks later. He was released before the end of the war, on May 6, 1944, due to his poor health and the need to heal. The British Raj did not want him to die in prison and that would produce hatred in the nation.
Indian Independence
Gandhi moved to Noakhali , where fighting had started, and walked from town to town, barefoot, trying to stop the massacres that accompanied the partition in Bengal , Calcutta , Bihar , Kashmir and Delhi . But his efforts only served to increase the hatred of him by the extremist fanatics of both peoples: Hindus attempted his life in Calcutta and Muslims did the same in Noakhali.
The plan for the division of India was approved by Congress as a way to avoid a large-scale Hindu-Muslim civil war. Congressional leaders knew that while Gandhi was viscerally opposed to partitioning India, it was also virtually impossible to accept the plan without Gandhi’s approval, because the support he enjoyed throughout India was so strong. Sadar Patel, Gandhi’s trusted person, was in charge of obtaining his consent to the division plan.
Gandhi enjoyed great influence in the Hindu and Muslim communities. Their mere presence prevented and stopped riots and riots. He was vehemently opposed to any plan involving the partition of India. On the other hand, the Muslim League argued that the numerical superiority of the Hindus would systematically oppress the Muslim minority in a united India and that a separate Muslim nation was the only solution. However, many Muslims in India lived alongside Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Parsis, and Jews and were supporters of the unity of India.
But Mohammed Ali Jinnah had broad support in West Punjab , Sindh , NWFP, and East Bengal – that is, everything that forms Pakistan and Bangladesh today . The day of the transfer of government, Gandhi did not celebrate it as in the rest of India and was alone that day in his residence in Calcutta. During his last days in Delhi he carried out a fast to reconcile the two communities, which seriously affected his health. Even so, he appeared again before the public a few days before his death.
Death
The night of the 30 of January of 1948, when Gandhi was addressing a prayer meeting, was assassinated in Birla Bhavan , New Delhi, at 78 years old by Nathuram Godse , a Hindu fundamentalist fanatic who shot several times wounding mortally to the nationalist leader. Nathuram was linked to far-right groups in India who accused Gandhi of weakening the new government by insisting that Pakistan be paid the promised money . The day after his death, the body of Mahatma Gandhi was cremated and his ashes thrown into the Ganges River .
Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were tried and sentenced to death. His execution took place on November 15 , 1949 . However, it is considered as the instigator of the murder, the president of the party Hahasabha , Vinayak Damodar Savarkar , was freed without charge for lack of evidence.
A proof of Gandhi’s struggle and his search for God is in his last words before he died he exclaimed: “Hey, Rama!” This is interpreted as a sign of his spirituality, as well as his idealism in the search for peace in his country. These words are written on the monument erected in his honor in New Delhi . As Einstein said :perhaps future generations will ever doubt that such a man was a reality of flesh and blood in this world.
Gandhi and nonviolence
The figure of Gandhi is associated with peaceful resistance and non-violence . Indeed, this Indian political leader showed that pacifism was a viable instrument for achieving political goals and ambitious independence of India was possible without the shedding of blood . Gandhi preached harmony and non-violence in a century convulsed by two world wars.
Gandhi was a nationalist leader, defender of equality and justice. He fought with great impetus both to achieve the independence of India and to end the inequalities that the society of his country suffered. In a society as stratified as India, he sided with the untouchables – a caste deprived of all rights – and preached the admission of all individuals as members of society. His ambitions transcended the strictly political sphere: beyond the liberation of his country and social transformation, he advocated the spiritual improvement of man.
During his life, Gandhi knew successes and suffered failures. He saw how his strategy of non-violence made possible the independence of his nation. However, he was able to see that his country was radically divided between Hindus and Muslims, and he witnessed the separation of Pakistan from India. However, Gandhi’s thinking and attitudes served as an example for the different pacifist movements that emerged throughout the world after World War II .
Gandhi also became a point of reference for the nationalist leaders of Asia and Africa who had in the independence of India an important impulse to the process of decolonization of their nations in the second half of the 20th century through the independence movements.
Even today the figure of Gandhi continues to arouse fascination. His fragile and serene appearance, his sober white tunic and his pacifist ideals have helped to give him a certain mythical aura. For this reason, it is not surprising that his life has been recreated in various television series and movies. Particularly famous is the film Gandhi ( 1982 ), by Richard Attenborough , in which Ben Kingsley played the famous Indian activist.
Writings
- My religion.
- My God.
- My Faith in Truth: A thought for every day.
- Truth is God: Written from my experience of God.
- My Life is my Message: Writings about God, truth and non-violence.
- Mahatma Gandhi Autobiography.
- Words of truth
- Civil disobedience and other proposals.
- All men are brothers.
Recognitions
- Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize , although he was nominated five times between 1937 and 1948 .
- The Government of India awards an award they call the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Prize .
- In India, every October 2 is celebrated Gandhi Jayanti day .
- On January 30, the School Day of Nonviolence and Peace is celebrated in memory of Gandhi. In countries with their own school calendars in the southern hemisphere, this day is commemorated on March 30 .
- In Montevideo , an important coastal avenue bears the name of Rambla Mahatma Gandhi .