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Recorded October 1931. Signature. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ( ISO: Mōhanadāsa Karamacaṁda Gāṁdhī; [c] 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.
The 'Quit India Movement' or the 'Bharat Chhodo Andolan' was the most aggressive movement launched by the Indian national Congrees under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was arrested on 9th August 1942 and was held for two years in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, where he lost his secretary, Mahadev Desai and his wife, Kasturba.
Oct 2, 2019 · Mahatma Gandhi set about tackling segregation and founded the Indian Congress in the Natal region of South Africa. This was also the point at which he began dressing in the traditional white Indian dhoti, which became his trademark attire. His first target was the £3 ($3.69) tax on people of Indian origin.
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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.
Jan 30, 2022 · Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi was a lawyer, nationalist, and anti-colonial activist. He led a non-violent mass movement against the British rule of India which ultimately resulted in Indian independence. Mahatma Gandhi is revered in India as the Father of the Nation.
Jul 30, 2010 · Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was leader of India's nonviolent independence movement against British rule. He was revered the world over for his philosophy of passive resistance and was known to his ...
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Apr 4, 2020 · Mahatma Gandhi marched from Ahmedbad to Dandi in order to protest against the Salt Tax. For close to half a century, Britain had imposed draconian tax laws on British India in terms of the production and distribution of salt. Those oppressive tax laws came under immense opposition from Indians in 1930.
