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At 5:17 p.m. on 30 January 1948, Gandhi was with his grandnieces in the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), on his way to address a prayer meeting, when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, fired three bullets into Gandhi's chest from a pistol at close range.
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Initially, Gandhi’s campaigns sought to combat the second-class status Indians received at the hands of the British regime. Eventually, however, they turned their focus to bucking the British regime altogether, a goal that was attained in the years directly after World War II. The victory was marred by the fact that sectarian violence within India between Hindus and Muslims necessitated the creation of two independent states—India and Pakistan—as opposed to a single unified India.
Read more below: Years in South Africa: Emergence as a political and social activist
India: The transfer of power and the birth of two countries
Read more about the partition of India and Pakistan.
What were Gandhi’s religious beliefs?
Gandhi’s family practiced a kind of Vaishnavism, one of the major traditions within Hinduism, that was inflected through the morally rigorous tenets of Jainism—an Indian faith for which concepts like asceticism and nonviolence are important. Many of the beliefs that characterized Gandhi’s spiritual outlook later in life may have originated in his upbringing. However, his understanding of faith was constantly evolving as he encountered new belief systems. Leo Tolstoy’s analysis of Christian theology, for example, came to bear heavily on Gandhi’s conception of spirituality, as did texts such as the Bible and the Quʾrān, and he first read the Bhagavadgita—a Hindu epic—in its English translation while living in Britain.
Gandhi was the youngest child of his father’s fourth wife. His father—Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in western India (in what is now Gujarat state) under British suzerainty—did not have much in the way of a formal education. He was, however, an able administrator who knew how to steer his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power.
Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery or jewelry, divided her time between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism—worship of the Hindu god Vishnu—with a strong tinge of Jainism, a morally rigorous Indian religion whose chief tenets are nonviolence and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal. Thus, he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects.
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Gandhi and Indian History
The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. Though Mohandas occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as “good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting.” He was married at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. A diffident child, he shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by then ailing father (who died soon thereafter) or helping his mother with her household chores.
He had learned, in his words, “to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them.” With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking, and—most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family—meat eating. His adolescence was probably no stormier than that of most children of his age and class. What was extraordinary was the way his youthful transgressions ended.
- Missy Sullivan
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- Early Life. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, in the present-day Indian state of Gujarat. His father was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar; his deeply religious mother was a devoted practitioner of Vaishnavism (worship of the Hindu god Vishnu), influenced by Jainism, an ascetic religion governed by tenets of self-discipline and nonviolence.
- The Birth of Passive Resistance. In 1906, after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years.
- Leader of a Movement. As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule, Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India.
- A Divided Movement. In 1931, after British authorities made some concessions, Gandhi again called off the resistance movement and agreed to represent the Congress Party at the Round Table Conference in London.
- He was a vocal civil rights advocate in South Africa. After his law studies in London and a call to the bar (in 1891), Mahatma Gandhi took up a job as a lawyer for an Indian trader and businessman in Johannesburg, South Africa.
- Founded the Natal Indian Congress. While in South Africa, Gandhi also worked to unite Indians from all spheres of work. His civil rights activism garnered him a lot of attention.
- Fought to change how the world perceived people of color. Some historians have stated that Mohandas Gandhi devoted all of his attention only to Indians while in South Africa.
- Protested against economic marginalization of rural farmers. After returning to India in 1915, Gandhi quickly devoted his life to championing the doctrine of Satyagraha (“devotion to the truth”) and nonviolent forms of protests in his country.
Timeline of key events in the ‘life of Mahatma Gandhi, leader of India’s independence movement. When India was a colony of Great Britain, Gandhi (who was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) used nonviolent methods to protest against British rule. His efforts earned him the title Mahatma. Mahatma means ‘great soul.’.
Jan 29, 2016 · It was one of the many residences (1917-30) of Mahatma Gandhi, located at Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Gandhi Timeline Information. Check out this brief chronology of Mahatma Gandhiji's life and important events.
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List of some of the major achievements of Mahatma Gandhi who ended British rule over his native India without striking a single blow. Gandhi came to be considered the father of his country. He devoted his life to peace and brotherhood in order to achieve social and political progress.
