Mahatma Gandhi

• 1. Introduction

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  At 5:17 p.m. on the 30th of January 1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking through the garden of Birla House in Delhi, his grandnieces beside him, on his way to a prayer meeting. A man named Nathuram Godse stepped close and fired three bullets into his chest. The light, said Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru over the radio that night, had gone out of the nation's lives. How did a shy, tongue-tied boy from a coastal town in Gujarat become the figure a country called Bapu, father of the nation? How did a lawyer who could not bring himself to cross-examine a witness end up leading a campaign that broke an empire's hold on a subcontinent? And why, on the day his country won its freedom, did this same man refuse to celebrate? The answers run through fasting and prison cells, through a salt march and a self-spun cloth, through strange private experiments and bitter public enemies. His honorific, Mahatma, Sanskrit for great-souled, was first given to him in 1914.

• 2. The Restless Boy Of Porbandar

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  Gandhi was born on the 2nd of October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula then ruled as a small princely state. His sister Raliat remembered him as a child "restless as mercury, either playing or roaming about," whose favourite pastimes included twisting dogs' ears. His father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi, born in 1822, served as dewan, or chief minister, of Porbandar despite only an elementary education. Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young, and after a childless third marriage he sought permission to wed again, marrying Putlibai in 1857. She was the boy's deeply pious mother, who would take "the hardest vows and keep them without flinching," fasting for days at a time. The Indian classics shaped him early. The stories of Shravana and of king Harishchandra left what Gandhi called an indelible impression. "It haunted me," he wrote, "and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." In May 1883, at thirteen, he was married to fourteen-year-old Kasturbai Gokuldas Kapadia in an arranged ceremony shared with his brother and cousin. As they didn't know much about marriage, he later said, it meant only new clothes, sweets, and playing with relatives. The shadow that fell over his youth came in late 1885. His father lay dying, and Gandhi had left the bedside to be with his wife minutes before the end. Decades later he wrote that if "animal passion had not blinded me," he would have been spared the torture of that separation.

• 3. An Education In London

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  On the 10th of August 1888, an eighteen-year-old Gandhi left Porbandar bound for England to study law, the first Bania from Kathiawar to go for the Barrister Examination. To win his mother's blessing he had vowed to abstain from meat, alcohol, and women. The Modh Bania elders of Bombay warned that England would corrupt him, and when he refused to relent they excommunicated him from his caste. He sailed anyway. In London he enrolled at the Inns of Court School of Law at Inner Temple and joined a public speaking practice group to overcome the shyness that had followed him since boyhood. His vow to his mother steered his days. Repelled by his landlady's bland vegetarian food, he hunted out one of the few vegetarian restaurants, and reading Henry Salt drew him into the London Vegetarian Society, where he was elected to the executive committee under its president Arnold Hills. There he faced an early test of conscience. When Hills moved to expel a member named Thomas Allinson for promoting birth control, Gandhi disagreed with Allinson's views yet defended his right to hold them. Too shy to read his own argument aloud, he had another member read it for him, and the vote was lost. Some vegetarians he met belonged to the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, who urged him to read the Bhagavad Gita in translation and in the original. He was called to the bar in June 1891, then sailed home to learn that his mother had died while he was away, news his family had kept from him.

• 4. Twenty-One Years In South Africa

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  In 1893 a Muslim merchant from Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah needed a lawyer for a cousin in Johannesburg and offered a salary of £105 plus travel expenses. Gandhi accepted, expecting a year's work, and stayed twenty-one. The humiliations began at once. He was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave the first-class carriage, and sat shivering in the station all night, weighing whether to return to India or to stand and protest. He chose to protest. A magistrate in Durban ordered him to remove his turban and he refused. A police officer kicked him off a footpath that Indians were forbidden to walk. Arthur Herman writes that Gandhi had arrived thinking of himself as "a Briton first, and an Indian second," but the prejudice he met began to undo that. The Abdullah case ended in May 1894, yet a farewell party became a working committee to resist a bill stripping Indians of the vote. He stayed, founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and forged the Indian community into a political force. In 1900, during the Boer War, he raised 1,100 Indian volunteers as the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps, carrying wounded soldiers for miles at the Battle of Spion Kop; he and 37 others received the Queen's South Africa Medal. His record there is not without contradiction. In a speech in September 1896 he complained that whites were "degrading the Indian to the level of a raw Kaffir," and scholars Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed note that his views on race were complex and changed over time. The turning point came in 1906, when the Transvaal government compelled Indians and Chinese to register their fingerprints and carry identity certificates. At a mass meeting in Johannesburg on the 11th of September that year, he first adopted the method he would call Satyagraha.

• 5. The Weapons Of The Spinning Wheel

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  Gopal Krishna Gokhale asked Gandhi to come home, and in 1915 he returned to India aged 45, soon organising peasants, farmers, and labourers against discrimination and excessive land tax. His first major success came in 1917 with the Champaran agitation in Bihar, where indigo growers were forced to sell their crops at fixed prices to plantation owners. Pursuing nonviolent protest, he took the administration by surprise and won concessions. The following year in Kheda, struck by flood and famine, he organised peasants to pledge non-payment of revenue, aided by a notable recruit named Vallabhbhai Patel, until the government relaxed its terms by the end of May 1918. Gandhi made the body itself an argument. He adopted the short dhoti woven from hand-spun yarn as a mark of identity with India's rural poor, lived in a self-sufficient community, ate simple food, and undertook long fasts as both introspection and protest. Winston Churchill found the spectacle nauseating. In a 1931 speech he derided "Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir," striding "half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace." The defiance peaked at the salt pans. After a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 went unanswered, Gandhi launched a Satyagraha against the salt tax, marching with volunteers 388 km from Ahmedabad to Dandi between the 12th of March and the 6th of April 1930 to make salt himself before huge crowds. He was interned on the 5th of May under a regulation dating from 1827, and the protest at the Dharasana salt works on the 21st of May was brutally suppressed in his absence. Britain imprisoned at least 60,000 people. In Andhra Pradesh, Telugu plays were already casting him as a messiah, and in those villages, Murali records, Gandhi became a folk hero, a sacred figure.

• 6. Truth As A Force

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  Satyagraha, Gandhi said, means "appeal to, insistence on, or reliance on the Truth," and he first formulated it as a political principle in his 1920 "Resolution on Non-cooperation" before the Indian Congress. It was this step, Dennis Dalton argues, that embedded him in popular consciousness and transformed him into the Mahatma. He built it on the Vedantic ideal of self-realisation, on ahimsa, vegetarianism, and universal love. His spirituality rested on the five great vows shared by Jainism and Hindu Yoga: Satya, ahimsa, brahmacharya, asteya, and aparigraha. "Unless you impose on yourselves the five vows," he said, "you may not embark on the experiment at all." He first declared "God is Truth," then later reversed it to "Truth is God." The essence of the method was soul force rather than physical force, refusing brute force against the oppressor while seeking to transform and purify him. Martin Luther King Jr. would use the same phrase, soul force, in his "I Have a Dream" speech. "If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy," Gandhi wrote, "we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause." His nonviolence was not pacifism at any cost. Though he held nonviolence "infinitely superior to violence," he preferred violence to cowardice, saying he would rather India "resort to arms in order to defend her honor" than remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour. That conviction surfaced in April 1918, when, having raised ambulance volunteers in earlier wars, he tried to recruit actual combatants for World War I, writing that Indians must "have the ability to bear arms." By July he confessed he had "not a single recruit" to his credit, because, he said, they feared to die.

• 7. Strange Experiments In Celibacy

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  In 1906, at age 37 and though married, Gandhi vowed to abstain from sexual relations, having studied the Bhagavad Gita in South Africa. His discipline went beyond sex to food. On the advice of the Jain scholar Shrimad Rajchandra, whom he called Raychandbhai and who told him milk stimulated sexual passion, he began abstaining from cow's milk in 1912, even when doctors urged him to drink it. The most controversial chapter began after Kasturba's death in February 1944. To test his brahmacharya vow, Gandhi had women sleep first in separate beds in his room, then later in his own bed, often naked. In April 1945 he wrote to Birla referencing sleeping with several "women or girls" as part of these experiments. His grandniece Manu, then 18, agreed to help, and he also shared his bed with 18-year-old Abha, wife of his grandnephew Kanu, sometimes sleeping with both at once to test his celibacy. The experiments drew sharp criticism from his own circle. Two of his newspaper editors resigned rather than print his sermons on the subject, and his Bengali interpreter Nirmalkumar Bose objected, worried about the psychological effect on the women. Gandhi held firm, saying that to refuse Manu his bed would be a sign of weakness. In February 1947 he was still asking confidants whether testing the oath was wrong, even as his sickly, skeletal figure, Sean Scalmer notes, was caricatured in the Western press.

• 8. Partition And The Final Fast

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  Gandhi's vision of an India bound by religious pluralism collided in the early 1940s with a demand for a separate Muslim homeland. He opposed partition along religious lines, proposing instead that Congress and the Muslim League attain independence under a provisional government, with the partition question settled later by plebiscite in Muslim-majority districts. Muhammad Ali Jinnah rejected the offer and called Direct Action Day on the 16th of August 1946. In Bengal, the League's chief minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy gave Calcutta's police a holiday, and the day triggered mass murder of Calcutta Hindus, with retaliatory killing spreading across India. Gandhi went into the worst of it, visiting riot-prone areas to plead for the massacres to stop. When Britain granted independence in August 1947, it partitioned the British Indian Empire into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, on terms Stanley Wolpert says Gandhi never approved. More than half a million people were killed as ten to twelve million migrated across the new borders. On the day of independence, the 15th of August 1947, Gandhi did not celebrate. He fasted and spun in Calcutta, appealing for peace among his countrymen, and his fasts are credited with halting the violence there. His final fast ran from the 13th to the 18th of January 1948. A belief had spread among some Hindus that Gandhi was too resolute in defending Pakistan and India's Muslims, and Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from Pune with links to the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, acted on it. The trial of the conspirators began on the 27th of May 1948 and ran eight months before Justice Atma Charan's final order on the 10th of February 1949; Godse and Narayan Apte were sentenced to hang, while Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was acquitted. Over a million people joined the five-mile funeral procession to Raj Ghat, where a black marble platform bears the epigraph "Hē Rāma," said to be his last words.