Kasturba Gandhi

• 1. Introduction

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  Kasturba Gandhi's birthday, the 11th of April, is observed across India every year as National Safe Motherhood Day. She was born Kasturba Gokuldas Kapadia in 1869, in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Gujarat coast. Her family belonged to the Modh Bania caste of Gujarati Hindu tradesmen. At fourteen she was a wife; at seventy-four she died inside a British detention camp. Her husband was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who would become known to the world as Mahatma Gandhi. His fame has long overshadowed her own life and political work. What brought Kasturba into the independence movement? What kind of organizer did she become in her own right? Her first foray into organized political life came not in India but in South Africa, at a settlement near Durban that she helped establish in 1904.

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• 2. Two Young Strangers

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  Mohandas recalled the day of their wedding with a kind of fond distance: "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." They had married in May 1883. She was fourteen; he was thirteen. Their parents had arranged the union.

  Tradition held that a bride of Kasturba's age would spend the first years of marriage at her parents' home, away from her husband. Years later, Mohandas wrote about the pull he felt toward her even as a schoolboy: "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He also acknowledged that he had been possessive in those early years. He wanted a wife who would follow his every instruction.

  Kasturba became pregnant at seventeen. Her first child was born prematurely and did not survive the first year. She never fully recovered from that loss. Their remaining four sons all reached adulthood. Mohandas left for London to study in 1888, shortly after the birth of their son Harilal. Kasturba remained in India. He returned in 1891. Their son Manilal arrived in 1892. In 1893, Mohandas left again, this time for South Africa, leaving Kasturba and the children behind.

  Three years later, in 1896, the family joined him in South Africa. In 1906, Mohandas took a vow of celibacy known as brahmacharya. Some reports indicated Kasturba found this at odds with her role as a traditional Hindu wife. Yet when a woman once suggested she was unhappy, Kasturba defended the marriage. Her relatives pressed on her that the right path was to remain devoted and obedient to her husband. Ramachandra Guha wrote in Gandhi Before India that they had, in the emotional as well as sexual sense, always been true to one another. He added that their frequent separations may have made their time together all the more cherished. In the ashrams she would later help manage in India, she would come to be known simply as "Ba": mother.

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• 3. Prison and Protest

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  In 1913, Kasturba joined protests in South Africa against the ill-treatment of Indian immigrants. Colonial authorities arrested her and sentenced her to hard labour. She did not simply endure her time in prison. She led the other women in prayer. When she found that educated women and uneducated women were confined together, she encouraged those who could read to teach those who could not.

  The Gandhis left South Africa in July 1914. The experience of organizing under prison conditions would prove useful in the years ahead.

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• 4. Mother of the Ashrams

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  In 1917, Kasturba was in Champaran in Bihar, where Mohandas was working alongside indigo farmers. Her focus was not his. She worked directly with the women of the region, teaching hygiene, discipline, and health, as well as reading and writing.

  In 1922, she joined a Satyagraha movement in Borsad, Gujarat, pressing ahead despite poor health. She did not take part in Mohandas's famous Salt March in 1930, but she continued to join civil disobedience campaigns and marches. She was arrested and jailed numerous times as a result. In the ashrams where she lived, she was known as "Ba", meaning mother. She served as a guiding presence for those communities.

  She and Mohandas had one domestic disagreement that ran through their ashram years. She felt he neglected their sons; he believed the boys deserved no special treatment within the community. Mohandas once described their dynamic at length: "According to my earlier experience, she was very obstinate. In spite of all my pressure she would do as she wished. This led to short or long periods of estrangement between us. But as my public life expanded, my wife bloomed forth and deliberately lost herself in my work."

  In 1939, women in Rajkot appealed to Kasturba directly to speak out against British rule on their behalf. She stepped in, was arrested, and was held in solitary confinement for a full month. Her health worsened further, but she did not withdraw. The Quit India movement of 1942 brought the last of her arrests.

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• 5. The Aga Khan Palace

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  Kasturba had contended with chronic bronchitis from birth, a condition later complicated by pneumonia. In January 1908, when Mohandas was in prison, she fasted and fell gravely ill. She came near enough to death that Mohandas apologized to her and promised not to remarry if she did not survive. She recovered, though her health was never fully restored. She later underwent a major surgery.

  By January 1944, imprisoned at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, Kasturba suffered two heart attacks. She was largely bedridden from then on. Spells of breathlessness interrupted her sleep. She asked to see an Ayurvedic doctor. After several delays, the colonial government allowed a specialist in traditional Indian medicine to attend her. By the second week of February, she had recovered enough to sit on the veranda in a wheelchair and speak with him. She then suffered a relapse.

  Her son Devdas arranged for penicillin to be brought. Her doctors explained that her kidneys had already deteriorated too far for any antibiotic to address. The family was told that penicillin would not help. She died at 7:35 PM on the 22nd of February 1944.

  Mohandas requested that the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust Fund be used for the welfare of women and children in Indian villages. Kasturba Nagar in Delhi would be designated as an Assembly constituency in her name.

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• 6. Across India's Map

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  Kasturba Gandhi Marg, a road running through New Delhi, is one of dozens of places across India that carry her name. Kasturba Medical College in Manipal, Kasturba Hospital in Wardha, and the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya are among the institutions named for her. The Kasturba Gandhi Primary School in Durban, South Africa, stands in the city where her political work began.

  Narayan Desai wrote a stage play titled Kasturba, directed by Aditi Desai, which was performed on multiple occasions. In the 1982 film Gandhi, the role of Kasturba Gandhi was taken by the actor Rohini Hattangadi. The Kasturba Vaidyakiya Rahat Mandal in Valsad, Gujarat, has been in operation since 1944, the year of her death.

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