Journey
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), born in Porbandar on the Kathiawar coast and trained in law at the Inner Temple in London, became the central figure of the Indian freedom struggle and the modern world's foremost exponent of satyagraha — nonviolent civil resistance rooted in truth. Twenty-one years in South Africa (1893–1914) sharpened the method; back in India from 1915, he turned it on indigo planters at Champaran, salt at Dandi, the Raj itself with Quit India, and finally the Hindu–Muslim violence of the Partition at Noakhali and Delhi. Twenty-three stops that trace a life lived in public from the Kathiawar coast to the Yamuna bank — a traveller's biography of the man India calls the Mahatma.
Stops (24)
- Mohandās Karamchand Gandhi · The man — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869–1948
Born 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, trained for the bar at Inner Temple, shaped as a political thinker through twenty-one years in South Africa, and returning to India in 1915 to lead the Indian National Congress through Champaran, Dandi, Quit India and the Partition walks. Satyagraha — nonviolent civil resistance rooted in truth — was his method; ahimsa, swaraj and swadeshi his vocabulary. Assassinated at Birla House, Delhi, on 30 January 1948. The stops that follow retrace a public life lived from the Kathiawar coast to the Yamuna bank.
- Porbandar · Porbandar — the beginning, 1869
A Kathiawar port town of merchants and state officials, where Mohandas was born on 2 October 1869 in the family’s three-storey wooden haveli. His father Karamchand was diwan to the Porbandar princely state. The quiet, pious household and his mother Putlibai’s Jain-influenced Vaishnava vegetarian discipline shape the practice of ahimsa he brings to politics forty years later.
- London · London — reading for the bar, 1888–91
He arrived in London in October 1888 aged 19 to read for the bar at Inner Temple, after a vow to his mother to touch neither meat nor alcohol. The vegetarian society introduced him to the Bhagavad Gita in Arnold’s English translation; he returned to India in July 1891 called to the bar but unable to establish a practice in Bombay.
- Pietermaritzburg · Pietermaritzburg, 7 June 1893
Thrown off a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg station for refusing to move to third class on a journey to Pretoria — one week into his 21 years in South Africa. He sat on the platform all night. He named this later as the decisive moment: the moment he realised a legal career would not meet what he had seen, and would have to work differently.
- Pretoria · Pretoria — the first public meeting, 1894
Within weeks of arriving he called a meeting of the Indian traders at Pretoria — the first time a large group of South African Indians had been addressed as a political community. He drafted a petition against the proposed Transvaal franchise amendment that would have disenfranchised Indian voters; the petition is the earliest surviving Gandhi political document.
- Phoenix Settlement · Phoenix Settlement, 1904
A hundred acres near Durban bought after reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last on the train, and set up as a co-operative printing-and-farming community for Indian Opinion. The Phoenix model — shared labour, shared living, voluntary poverty — is the template he carries to Sabarmati in 1917 and Sevagram in 1936.
- Johannesburg · Johannesburg, September 1906 — the satyagraha vow
Three thousand people at the Empire Theatre swore not to submit to the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act (the 'Black Act'). The pledge was the first collective practice of what Gandhi named satyagraha — insistence on truth — and the campaign ran for seven years until the 1914 Gandhi-Smuts agreement.
- Tolstoy Farm · Tolstoy Farm, 1910
Eleven hundred acres outside Johannesburg given by the architect Hermann Kallenbach, to house the families of the satyagrahis while they went to jail. Named for Tolstoy, whom Gandhi had been corresponding with. The last of his three South African experiments in collective living.
- Mumbai · Mumbai, Apollo Bunder, 9 January 1915
Gandhi landed at Apollo Bunder (now Gateway of India) at 7 am on 9 January 1915, after 21 years in South Africa, aged 45. His political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale met him with the counsel to spend his first year in India keeping his eyes open and his mouth closed. He crossed India by train in third-class carriages that year.
- Sabarmati Ashram · Sabarmati Ashram, 25 May 1917
Founded on the west bank of the Sabarmati at Ahmedabad as the Satyagraha Ashram. 36 residents and a constitution requiring vows of truth, non-violence, celibacy, non-stealing, non-possession, the untouchability-free kitchen, and manual labour. The headquarters of every satyagraha from Champaran onwards until Gandhi left on the Dandi March in 1930 and never returned.
- Champaran indigo landscape · Champaran, April 1917
Gandhi’s first mass campaign in India, called by Rajkumar Shukla, a Champaran peasant who travelled to Lucknow to find him. The three-caste indigo-planter tinkathiya system forced local peasants to grow indigo on 3/20 of their holdings for European planters at fixed low prices; Gandhi’s week-long inquiry and his refusal to leave the district under magistrate’s order broke the system and gave him the title Mahatma from Rabindranath Tagore the following month.
- Ranchhodrai, Kheda · Kheda, March-June 1918
A no-tax campaign in the Kheda district of Gujarat after famine failure of the kharif crop. Vallabhbhai Patel joined the campaign as Gandhi’s organiser — the beginning of their lifelong political partnership. The British government suspended revenue collection in June; Patel’s rise from municipal commissioner to national leader starts here.
- Jallianwala Bagh · Jallianwala Bagh — the aftermath, 1919
He did not go to Amritsar himself; the news of the 13 April 1919 massacre reached him at Sabarmati, where he suspended the Rowlatt satyagraha and returned Kaisar-i-Hind medal to the Viceroy. The massacre and the Hunter Committee’s refusal to condemn Dyer radicalised Gandhi; he called off the moderate anti-Rowlatt protest, launched Non-Cooperation at the Nagpur Congress of December 1920, and committed to full independence as the goal.
- Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, Chennai · Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, Chennai, 1918
Founded in Madras by Gandhi in 1918 with an initial donation from Jamnalal Bajaj as the institutional base of his campaign to make Hindi a Southern link-language. He served as its first president and the Sabha continues to run four-step Hindi certifications across Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Karnataka and Kerala. Declared an Institution of National Importance in 1964.
- Chauri Chaura · Chauri Chaura, 4 February 1922
A crowd of Non-Cooperation volunteers at the small market town in Gorakhpur district burnt alive 22 constables in the Chauri Chaura police station after a lathi charge. Gandhi called off the national Non-Cooperation movement a week later over Congress protest; the suspension cost him Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru’s father Motilal, and the Hindu-Muslim unity of Khilafat collapsed in the vacuum.
- Bardoli · Bardoli, 1928
Vallabhbhai Patel led the Bardoli taluka’s no-revenue satyagraha against a 22% revenue increase. Gandhi, after four years in retreat following Chauri Chaura, re-engaged publicly to support the campaign. The victory — the government’s August 1928 Broomfield Committee rolled back the increase to 6.03% — restored Patel as a national Congress leader and the Sardar epithet was given to him by the Bardoli peasants.
- Dandi · Dandi — 24 days, 385 kilometres, 1930
Twenty-four days on foot from Sabarmati to the sea at Dandi, Navsari district, with 78 ashramites, to gather a handful of salt and break the Salt Act. Thousands joined along the route. The salt was picked up at 6:30 am on 6 April 1930, and the Civil Disobedience movement began. 95 members of the Legislative Council resigned by week’s end.
- Dharasana · Dharasana, 21 May 1930
The planned raid on the Dharasana salt works. Gandhi was imprisoned at Yerwada before the raid; Sarojini Naidu and Imam Sahib led 2,500 satyagrahis towards the stockpile. Webb Miller’s dispatch of the police lathi-charge of nonresisting bodies, broadcast worldwide, is credited with turning Indian independence into an international moral cause.
- Sevagram / Wardha · Sevagram, 1936–1942
The Wardha ashram from 1936, and the work he thought mattered most: village industry, Nai Talim education, cow protection, Hindu-Muslim unity. The last six years before the Quit India arrest and effectively the last Gandhi ashram; Sevagram remained his Indian base when he was not in jail or on the road.
- Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan · Gowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan, 8 August 1942
'Do or die.' The AICC passed the Quit India resolution at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay on 8 August 1942; Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and the entire Congress working committee were arrested before dawn on 9 August. Three years of mass agitation, state repression and famine followed; the British had decided by 1944 that India would be ungovernable.
- Aga Khan Palace, Pune · Aga Khan Palace, Pune, 1942–1944
Held here from August 1942 after Quit India. Mahadev Desai, his secretary of twenty-five years, died here of a heart attack within a week; Kasturba died here in February 1944. Gandhi fasted for 21 days in protest at the suppression of the national movement, nearly dying himself. Released May 1944.
- Noakhali · Noakhali, November 1946 – March 1947
A four-month barefoot walk through the Hindu-Muslim riot villages of Noakhali district in East Bengal, following the October 1946 killings. Gandhi walked from village to village staying one night in each; the Partition riots were cooler in his wake. He left for Bihar in March 1947 to repeat the exercise. His last and most sustained peace campaign.
- Gandhi Smriti, New Delhi · Birla House, Delhi, 1947–1948
The Birla industrialist family’s New Delhi residence was Gandhi’s base in the capital from September 1947 after Independence, through the Partition massacres and the January 1948 fast against the Pakistan payment refusal. He held his prayer meetings in the garden every evening at 5 pm. Nathuram Godse shot him here at 5:17 pm on 30 January 1948.
- Rajghat, New Delhi · Rajghat, 31 January 1948
Cremated the next afternoon on a sandalwood pyre on the west bank of the Yamuna at the spot now marked by the black marble platform at Rajghat. His last words, 'hē rām', are inscribed at one end. Lord Mountbatten walked at the head of the funeral procession; two million people lined the five-mile route from Birla House.