Mahatma Gandhiमहात्मा गांधी

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948), known as Mahātmā (“great soul”) and Bāpū (“father”), was the leader of India’s struggle for independence from British rule and one of the most influential moral and political thinkers of the twentieth century. Trained as a lawyer in London, he spent twenty-one years in South Africa, where he developed satyāgraha (“holding firmly to truth”, “truth-force”) — a method of mass non-violent resistance to injustice through civil disobedience, non-cooperation and voluntary suffering. Returning to India in 1915, he transformed the Indian National Congress from an elite debating club into a mass movement of millions, leading the Non-Cooperation movement (1920–22), the Salt March (1930) and the Quit India movement (1942), which ended in independence in 1947. His political method was inseparable from a religious and ethical philosophy drawn from the The Bhagavad Gītā, the Jain ethic of ahiṃsā (Jainism), the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy, Ruskin and Thoreau: truth is God; non-violence is the means to truth; self-rule (swarāj) begins with rule over oneself; and the good of all (sarvodaya) is measured by the condition of the poorest. He was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who blamed him for the partition of India and for his conciliation of Muslims. His ideas inspired Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Cesar Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi and countless movements for civil rights and freedom.

Life

Childhood in Kathiawar

Gandhi was born in Porbandar, a small coastal princely state in Kathiawar, Gujarat, into a family of the Modh Baniā merchant caste; his father Karamchand was the chief minister (dīwān) of Porbandar and later Rajkot. His mother Putlībāī was deeply religious, devoted to fasting and vows, and belonged to the Praṇāmī sect, which drew on both Hindu and Islamic sources. Gujarat was a land of strong Jain influence, and Gandhi grew up among ideas of non-violence, vegetarianism, fasting and tolerance. He was a shy, mediocre student. At thirteen he was married to Kasturbā Makhanji, also thirteen; in his Autobiography he wrote with shame of his jealousy and lust as a young husband, and of his absence from his father’s deathbed because he was with his wife. He experimented secretly with meat-eating, smoking and petty theft, then confessed to his father in a letter, and was forgiven with tears — an early lesson, he said, in the power of confession and of love.

London

In 1888, aged eighteen, he sailed to London to study law at the Inner Temple, having vowed to his mother to abstain from wine, women and meat. He tried for a while to become an English gentleman — taking lessons in dancing, elocution and the violin — then gave it up for simplicity. He joined the London Vegetarian Society, met Theosophists who introduced him to the Bhagavad Gītā (which he first read in Edwin Arnold’s English translation, The Song Celestial) and to Arnold’s The Light of Asia, and read the New Testament: “the Sermon on the Mount went straight to my heart”. He was called to the bar in 1891 and returned to India, where he failed as a lawyer — at his first case in Bombay, too shy to speak, he sat down and returned the fee.

South Africa (1893–1914)

In 1893 he accepted a year’s contract with an Indian firm in Natal, South Africa. Within a week of arriving, travelling to Pretoria with a first-class ticket, he was ordered out of the first-class compartment at Pietermaritzburg because a white passenger objected to an Indian; refusing to move, he was thrown off the train and spent a freezing night in the waiting room. He later called it the turning point of his life: he decided to stay and fight colour prejudice. He stayed twenty-one years.

He founded the Natal Indian Congress (1894), organised petitions and campaigns against discriminatory laws, and led an Indian ambulance corps in the Boer War (1899) and the Zulu rebellion (1906) — where he saw the brutality of British reprisals against the Zulus. He read Ruskin’s Unto This Last on a train journey in 1904 and, in one night, decided to change his life: he founded the Phoenix Settlement, a communal farm, where all would do manual labour and share equally. He read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You (“it overwhelmed me”) and Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience”, corresponded with Tolstoy, and named his second commune Tolstoy Farm (1910). In 1906 he took a vow of celibacy (brahmacarya).

In 1906, the Transvaal government introduced the “Black Act”, requiring all Indians to register and be fingerprinted. At a mass meeting in Johannesburg, Gandhi and his followers vowed to disobey it and accept the consequences. Searching for a name for this new method, he held a competition; the word satyāgraha — “holding firmly to truth” — was coined. Over eight years of campaigns — burning registration certificates, crossing provincial borders illegally, strikes by indentured miners, a great march of over two thousand in 1913 — he and thousands of others were imprisoned, beaten and shot at. In 1914, the government of Jan Smuts conceded many of their demands. Smuts later wrote that it had been his fate “to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect”.

Return to India and the national movement

Gandhi returned to India in 1915, a famous figure. On the advice of his political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he spent a year travelling across the country, third class, to learn about its people. He founded the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he admitted an untouchable family, to the fury of donors. He led local satyāgrahas — for indigo farmers in Champaran (1917), mill workers in Ahmedabad (where he fasted for the first time in a public cause), and peasants in Kheda (1918).

After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar (April 1919), in which British troops under General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, killing hundreds, Gandhi turned against British rule altogether. In 1920 he launched the Non-Cooperation Movement: Indians were to boycott British courts, schools, titles, elections and cloth; to spin their own thread and wear khādī, hand-spun cloth; and to unite Hindus and Muslims (he supported the Muslim Khilafat movement). Millions joined. But when a mob at Chauri Chaura in 1922 burned a police station, killing twenty-two policemen, Gandhi called off the entire movement, to the dismay of his colleagues, saying India was not yet ready for non-violence. He was arrested and sentenced to six years for sedition; at his trial he pleaded guilty and asked for the maximum penalty.

The Salt March

In 1930, the Congress declared complete independence (pūrṇa swarāj) its goal, and Gandhi chose an unlikely target: the British salt tax, which taxed a necessity of even the poorest. On 12 March he set out from Sabarmati with seventy-eight followers on a march of 388 kilometres to the sea at Dandi, gathering crowds and world press coverage along the way. On 6 April he picked up a lump of salt-laden mud, breaking the law. Across India, millions made salt illegally, boycotted British cloth and resigned government posts; some 60,000 were imprisoned. At the Dharasana Salt Works, columns of non-violent satyāgrahis marched up to police lines and were beaten down with steel-tipped lathis without raising a hand, as the American journalist Webb Miller reported to the world. In 1931 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, negotiated with Gandhi as an equal, and Gandhi went to London for the Round Table Conference, wearing his loincloth and shawl — staying in the East End slums, visiting Lancashire mill workers who had lost their jobs because of his boycott, and meeting Charlie Chaplin. Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he is said to have replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Untouchability and the clash with Ambedkar

In 1932 the British government granted the “depressed classes” (untouchables) separate electorates, at the request of their leader B. R. Ambedkar. Gandhi, in prison at Yerwada, declared a fast unto death against it, arguing that it would permanently divide Hindu society. Under enormous pressure, Ambedkar agreed to the Poona Pact, which gave reserved seats within a joint electorate instead. Gandhi then devoted himself to the campaign against untouchability, renaming the untouchables Harijans (“people of God”) — a name many Dalits later rejected as patronising — and founding the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Ambedkar never forgave him; their disagreement over whether caste could be reformed from within Hinduism, or must be destroyed, remains one of the great debates of modern India.

Quit India and Partition

In 1942, during the Second World War, Gandhi launched the Quit India movement, demanding immediate British withdrawal: “Do or die.” He and the entire Congress leadership were imprisoned; his wife Kasturbā and his secretary Mahadev Desai died in detention.

By 1946 independence was certain, but India was descending into communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, as the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded a separate state, Pakistan. Gandhi opposed partition to the end — “you shall have to divide my body before you divide India” — but was overruled by Nehru and Patel. As massacres spread, Gandhi, at seventy-seven, walked barefoot through the riot-torn villages of Noakhali in East Bengal, trying to restore peace. On 15 August 1947, while Delhi celebrated independence, he was in Calcutta, fasting and praying amid the killing. His fast there stopped the riots in the city — “the one-man boundary force”, Lord Mountbatten called him, compared with 55,000 soldiers in the Punjab who failed to stop the slaughter there. Up to two million people died in the Partition violence, and some fifteen million were displaced.

Assassination

In January 1948, Gandhi fasted again in Delhi, demanding peace between Hindus and Muslims and the payment to Pakistan of its share of assets that India was withholding. Hindu nationalists blamed him for appeasing Muslims. On 30 January 1948, as he walked to his evening prayer meeting at Birla House in New Delhi, Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist associated with the Hindu Mahasabha and formerly the RSS, shot him three times in the chest. Nehru announced on the radio: “The light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere.”

Philosophy

Truth

The centre of Gandhi’s thought is truth (satya). He called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and wrote: “I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him.” In 1931 he reversed his formula: not “God is Truth” but “Truth is God”, because “even atheists do not deny the necessity or power of truth”. Truth, for Gandhi, is not a set of propositions but the being of things (sat, “that which is”) and the integrity of a life lived in accordance with conscience. Since no human being possesses the whole truth — Gandhi was deeply influenced by the Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda, the many-sidedness of truth — no one has the right to impose his partial truth on others by violence.

Non-violence

Ahiṃsā, non-violence, is the means to truth: “Ahiṃsā and truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle them… Ahiṃsā is the means; truth is the end.” Gandhi’s non-violence was not passivity: “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” It required more courage than violence; it was “the non-violence of the brave”, not of the coward. “Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence… but I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence.” It extended to thought and word: hatred is violence.

Satyāgraha

Satyāgraha is non-violence in action against injustice. The satyāgrahi breaks unjust laws openly, accepts punishment willingly, and seeks not to defeat or humiliate the opponent but to convert him — to awaken his conscience through the spectacle of suffering voluntarily borne. “Things of fundamental importance to people are not secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with their suffering.” It has rules: no hatred of the opponent, no secrecy, no violence even in self-defence, readiness to negotiate and compromise on non-essentials, and willingness to call off a campaign when it turns violent. Gandhi distinguished it from passive resistance, which he regarded as the weapon of the weak, compatible with hatred and ready to turn to violence.

Means and ends

“They say ‘means are after all means’. I would say ‘means are after all everything’. As the means, so the end… The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree” (Hind Swaraj). A free India won by violence would be a violent India.

Swarāj and Hind Swaraj

In Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi argued that real self-rule is not merely the expulsion of the British but rule over oneself, and that India’s true enemy is modern industrial civilisation — with its railways, lawyers, doctors and machinery — which multiplies desires and destroys community. He envisaged a decentralised India of self-sufficient villages, where people would meet their needs through their own labour, symbolised by the spinning wheel (charkhā). “There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed” (attributed).

Sarvodaya and the talisman

From Ruskin, Gandhi took the idea of sarvodaya, “the welfare of all”. His famous talisman, written in 1947:

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny?

Self-discipline

Gandhi’s politics were inseparable from personal discipline. He took eleven vows — truth, non-violence, celibacy, control of the palate, non-stealing, non-possession, physical labour, fearlessness, equal respect for all religions, swadeshī (using local goods), and the removal of untouchability. He experimented constantly with diet, fasting, nature cure and celibacy. Some of these experiments — especially, in old age, sleeping beside young women relatives to test his celibacy — have been sharply criticised.

Religion

Gandhi called himself a sanātanī Hindu, but his Hinduism was idiosyncratic and universalist: “I believe in the Bible as I believe in the Gītā. I regard all the great faiths of the world as equally true.” His prayer meetings included Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Sikh readings. His favourite hymns were Narsinh Mehtā’s “Vaiṣṇava jana to” (“the true devotee is one who feels the pain of others”) and “Raghupati rāghava rājā rām… Īśvar Allāh tero nām” (“Īśvar and Allāh are your names”). He read the Gītā daily and interpreted it allegorically: the battle of Kurukṣetra is the struggle within the soul, and the Gītā’s essence is selfless action — anāsakti yoga — which, rightly understood, demands non-violence.

Critics

Gandhi has been criticised from every direction.

• B. R. Ambedkar argued that Gandhi’s defence of the varṇa system, even purged of untouchability, preserved caste; that his fast against separate electorates was coercion; and that “Harijan” was paternalism. “Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone, but the Untouchables have remained untouchables.”
• Revolutionaries (Bhagat Singh) and later Marxists saw his non-violence as serving the propertied classes and calling off movements when they became truly popular.
• Hindu nationalists blamed him for weakness toward Muslims and for partition.
• Muslim leaders (Jinnah) saw his religious language as making Congress a Hindu party.
• Tagore criticised the burning of foreign cloth and the cult of the charkhā as narrow and irrational; their correspondence is a classic of civil disagreement.
• George Orwell (“Reflections on Gandhi”, 1949) doubted that non-violence could work against a totalitarian regime, and found his saintliness “inhuman” — though he concluded that “compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”
• Historians have criticised his early views on Black Africans in South Africa and his treatment of his wife and sons.

Legacy

Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October, is a national holiday in India and the UN’s International Day of Non-Violence. His face is on every Indian banknote. His methods inspired Martin Luther King Jr., who called him “the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change”; Nelson Mandela; Cesar Chavez; the Dalai Lama; Aung San Suu Kyi; the anti-nuclear and environmental movements; and the “people power” revolutions of the late twentieth century. Time magazine named him runner-up to Einstein as Person of the Century. His collected works fill one hundred volumes.

Gandhi in conversation

His most useful idea is the talisman: before any decision, recall the face of the poorest person you have seen, and ask whether it will help them. His most argued-over is the claim that means and ends are inseparable — “the means are to the end as the seed is to the tree”.