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In 1893, a Muslim merchant in Kathiawar named Dada Abdullah contacted Gandhi. Abdullah owned a large successful shipping business in South Africa. His distant cousin in Johannesburg needed a lawyer, and they preferred someone with Kathiawari heritage. Gandhi inquired about his pay for the work.
He was Mohandas K Gandhi. At that time, India was part of the British Empire, a group of countries ruled by Britain and Britain decided their laws. Gandhi believed this was wrong.
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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.
- Missy Sullivan
- 2 min
- Early Life. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, in the present-day Indian state of Gujarat. His father was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar; his deeply religious mother was a devoted practitioner of Vaishnavism (worship of the Hindu god Vishnu), influenced by Jainism, an ascetic religion governed by tenets of self-discipline and nonviolence.
- The Birth of Passive Resistance. In 1906, after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years.
- Leader of a Movement. As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule, Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India.
- A Divided Movement. In 1931, after British authorities made some concessions, Gandhi again called off the resistance movement and agreed to represent the Congress Party at the Round Table Conference in London.
Timeline of key events in the ‘life of Mahatma Gandhi, leader of India’s independence movement. When India was a colony of Great Britain, Gandhi (who was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) used nonviolent methods to protest against British rule.
Harilal Mohandas Gandhi (formerly Abdullah Gandhi; born Hiralal Mohandas Gandhi; 23 August 1888 – 18 June 1948) [1] was the eldest son of Mahatma Gandhi and Kasturba Gandhi. [2] He had three younger brothers: Manilal Gandhi, Ramdas Gandhi and Devdas Gandhi.
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Dec 12, 2023 · In this article, we will delve into the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, exploring his early years, his role in the Indian independence movement, and his impact on the world. We will also take a closer look at his beliefs and principles, which continue to hold relevance in today's society.
