Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Biography

Name: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Birth Date: October 2, 1869
Death Date: January 30, 1948
Place of Birth: Porbandar, India
Place of Death: Delhi, India
Nationality: Indian
Gender: Male
Occupations: reformer, lawyer

World of Sociology on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an revolutionary spiritual leader who used his influence for political and social reform. Although he held no governmental office, he was the prime mover in the struggle for India's independence. Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a seacoast town north of Bombay. His wealthy family was of the Vaisya, or merchant, caste. He was the fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, prime minister to the raja of three small city-states. Mohandas was married at thirteen by parental arrangement to a girl his own age, Kasturbai.
Leaving his wife, Gandhi went to England to study in 1888. In England he studied law but never completely adjusted to English lifestyle. He passed the bar on June 10, 1891, and sailed for Bombay. He attempted unsuccessfully to practice law in Rajkot and Bombay, then for a brief period served as lawyer for the prince of Porbandar.
In 1893 Gandhi represented a Moslem firm in Pretoria, capital of Transvaal in the Union of South Africa. A train incident in which he was asked by a white man to leave first-class seating led Gandhi to his work eradicating race prejudice, a cause that kept him in South Africa until 1914. Shortly after the train incident he called his first meeting of Indians in Pretoria and attacked racial discrimination.
Gandhi decided to buy a farm in Natal and return to a simpler life. He began to fast and in 1906 he became celibate after having fathered four sons. He also began to live a life of voluntary poverty. During this period Gandhi developed the concept of soul force, what he called "a quiet and irresistible pursuit of truth." Truth was Gandhi's chief concern, as reflected in the subtitle of his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth . Truth for Gandhi was a principle which had to be discovered experimentally in each situation. Gandhi also felt the means necessarily shaped the ends.
In 1907 Gandhi urged all Indians in South Africa to defy a law requiring their registration and fingerprinting. He read Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," which left a deep impression on him. He was influenced also by his correspondence with Leo Tolstoy in 1909-1910 and by John Ruskin's Unto This Last. By this time Gandhi had abandoned Western dress for Indian garb.
By the time he returned to India in 1915 Gandhi had become known as "Mahatmaji." Gandhi knew how to reach the masses and insisted on their resistance and spiritual regeneration. He spoke of a new, free Indian individual. He said India's shackles were self-made. Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own clothing rather than buy British goods. Spinning would create employment during the many annual idle months for millions of Indian peasants. He cherished the ideal of economic independence and identified industrialization with materialism.
In 1921 the Congress party again voted for a nonviolent disobedience campaign against the British whom Ghandi believed rendered India helpless. In 1922 Gandhi was tried and sentenced to six years in prison, but he was released two years later for an emergency appendectomy.
One form of passive resistance was the fast which Gandhi used increasingly. He undertook a 21-day fast to bring the Moslem and Hindu communities together. He also fasted in a strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad. Gandhi also developed the protest march. Countering British tax on salt for Indians, Gandhi's famous 24-day "salt march" to the sea led to a nationwide movement in illegal salt production and sale.
But Gandhi was not opposed to compromise. In 1931 he negotiated with Lord Irwin, a pact whereby civil disobedience was to be canceled, prisoners released, salt manufacture permitted on the coast, and Congress would attend the Second Round Table Conference in London.
Gandhi espoused improving the status of "untouchables," who Gandhi called children of God. On September 20, 1932, Gandhi began a fast to the death for these people, opposing a British plan for a separate electorate for them. Following the marriage of one of Gandhi's sons to a woman of another caste, Gandhi came to approve only intercaste marriages.
Gandhi devoted the years 1934 through 1939 to promotion of spinning, basic education, and Hindi as the national language. During these years Gandhi worked closely with Jawaharlal Nehru in the Congress Working Committee whom he designated as his successor.
England's entry into World War II brought mandated India's immediate involvement. Gandhi, in August 1942, proposed noncooperation, and Congress passed the "Quit India" resolution. Gandhi, Nehru, and other Congress leaders were imprisoned, sparking violence throughout India. When the British attempted to place the blame on Gandhi, he fasted three weeks in jail. He contracted malaria in prison and was released on May 6, 1944.
When Gandhi emerged from prison, he sought to avert creation of a separate Moslem state of Pakistan. Civil unrest regarding this matter resulted in Jinnah declaring August 16 "Direct Action Day," which initiated killings that left 5,000 dead and 15,000 wounded in Calcutta alone. Violence spread through country. Aggrieved, Gandhi went to Bengal, saying, "I am not going to leave Bengal until the last embers of trouble are stamped out," but while he was in Calcutta 4,500 more were killed in Bihar. Gandhi, now 77, warned that he would fast to death. Either Hindus and Moslems would learn to live together or he would die. The situation there calmed, but rioting continued elsewhere.
In March 1947 the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, arrived in India charged with taking Britain out of India by June 1948. Gandhi, despairing because his nation was not responding to his plea for peace and brotherhood, refused to participate in the independence celebrations on August 15, 1947. On September 1, 1947, after a Hindu mob broke into the home where he was staying in Calcutta, Gandhi began to fast which led to Hindu and Moslem leaders promising no more killings.
On January 13, 1948, Gandhi began his last fast in Delhi, praying for Indian unity. On January 30, as he was attending prayers, he was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, a 35-year old editor of a Hindu Mahasabha extremist weekly in Poona.