Person · lawyer & political leader

Mohandās Karamchand Gandhi

Also known as Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, M. K. Gandhi, Bapu

Date

1869 – 1948

Function

Authority & administration

Tradition

Hind Swaraj; Collected Works

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

The salt march's power was in how small the grievance was: a tax on something everyone eats and anyone can pick off a beach. He chose it over land revenue or the vote precisely because it needed no explanation, and Nehru among others thought it trivial until it worked.

Connections (28)

• Court associationRabindranath Tagore

  Tagore gave Gandhi the title Mahātmā and disagreed with him publicly for twenty years — over non-cooperation, which Tagore thought a doctrine of negation, over the charkha, and over Gandhi's reading of the 1934 Bihar earthquake as divine punishment. The two men wrote it all out in print and stayed friends.

• Monastic foundationSabarmati Ashram

  Sabarmati was Gandhi's base from 1917 to 1930, run on manual labour, spinning and a vow against untouchability that cost the ashram most of its funding when he admitted a Dalit family. He left on 12 March 1930 saying he would not return until India was free, and did not.

• CampaignDandi

  Twenty-four days and three hundred and eighty-five kilometres ended at Dāndi on 6 April 1930 with a handful of natural salt. The grievance was chosen for its smallness: everyone eats salt, the sea makes it free, and the state charged for it. Sixty thousand arrests followed within months. Nehru among others thought the choice of salt trivial until it worked, which is the clearest evidence that the tactic's logic was not obvious even to the people running the movement.

• Monastic foundationSevagram / Wardha

  From 1936 Gandhi ran the movement from a mud hut at Sevāgrām near Wardha, deliberately in a village with no electricity. The constructive programme worked out there — khadi, Nai Talim basic education, village sanitation — is what he rated above the civil disobedience he is remembered for. He stayed there until 1946 and ran the Quit India period from it, so the largest mass movement against the empire was directed from a village with no electric light.

• Life routePietermaritzburg

  Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893 for sitting in a first-class carriage with a valid ticket, and spent the night on the platform. He dated his political life from it. Satyāgraha was developed over twenty-one South African years before it was ever tried in India. He had gone to Natal on a one-year legal contract and stayed twenty-one, developing the tactics through the Transvaal registration campaign and the 1913 miners' strike before returning in 1915.

• Devotional corpus onNarsinh Mehtā

  Gandhi had Vaishnava jana to sung at Sabarmatī every day, and it became the movement's hymn. Narsinh Mehtā's definition of a good person — one who feels another's pain and does not condescend in helping — is as close to a statement of Gandhian ethics as anything Gandhi wrote himself.

• Court associationB. R. Ambedkar

  Ambedkar and Gandhi's central quarrel was the Poona Pact of 1932: Ambedkar had won separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, Gandhi fasted against them from Yerwada jail, and Ambedkar gave way and took reserved seats instead. He wrote afterwards that he had been made to choose between a man's life and his people's political independence.

• Teaching lineageDadabhai Naoroji

  Gandhi called Naoroji the father of the nation before anyone called him Mahatma, and wrote to him from South Africa for advice on the Indian community there. Gokhale and Jinnah also treated him as mentor. The drain theory gave the national movement an economic argument it could put in numbers rather than in grievance, and every subsequent Congress leader used it.

• Life routeJohannesburg

  Everything Gandhi did in India had been tried first in the Transvaal: the newspaper, the settlement farm, the mass oath, the deliberate courting of arrest, the fast, and the word satyagraha itself, chosen by competition in his own paper because passive resistance sounded to him like the weapon of the weak. He arrived back in India in 1915 at forty-five with a complete method and a reputation, and spent a year travelling before using either.

• BirthplacePorbandar

  Gandhi was born at Porbandar in 1869 into a Modh Bania family of state officials — his father was diwan of the small state — in a Kathiawar port whose Jain and Vaishnava culture supplied the vocabulary of vow, fasting and non-injury that he later turned into a political method. He left for London at eighteen, having taken a vow to his mother about meat, drink and women that he kept and wrote about for the rest of his life.

• Life routeChamparan indigo landscape

  Champaran in 1917 was Gandhi's first Indian satyagraha and he came only because Raj Kumar Shukla, a cultivator, followed him around the country until he agreed. He was ordered to leave the district, refused, was prosecuted, and the case was withdrawn — after which he took eight thousand depositions from tenants. The tinkathia system ended by act of council the following year. Rajendra Prasad and J.B. Kripalani joined him there, and both careers begin at Champaran.

• CampaignChauri Chaura

  Gandhi called off Non-Cooperation within days of Chauri Chaura, at the height of its success, against the judgement of Nehru, Bose, Lajpat Rai and almost everyone else, on the ground that a country that would burn twenty-two policemen was not ready for non-violent mass action. He then fasted for five days. Nineteen men were hanged anyway. The decision split the Congress, and the argument about whether he was right has never closed.

• CampaignBardoli

  Bardoli in 1928 was run by Patel while Gandhi stayed out of it deliberately, which is part of why it worked: a single district, a single specific demand about a revenue assessment, eighty-seven thousand cultivators held together for eight months against confiscations, and an inquiry that gave them nearly everything. It restored the Congress's confidence after the collapse of Non-Cooperation and it supplied the organisational model for the salt campaign two years later.

• Devotional corpus onMatangini Hazra

  Matangini Hazra was seventy-three, widowed at eighteen, illiterate, and had already been jailed for the salt satyagraha when she led six thousand people to take the Tamluk police station in September 1942 and was shot three times carrying the flag forward. What Quit India actually was, once every leader was in prison, is better described by Tamluk than by anything Gandhi planned: local people running their own parallel government for two years.

• Samadhi atAga Khan Palace, Pune

  Gandhi, Kasturba, Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu were interned in the Aga Khan Palace from August 1942. Desai, his secretary of twenty-five years, died within a week; Kasturba died there in February 1944 after forty-two years of marriage, with Gandhi refusing the penicillin the doctors wanted to inject because he distrusted it — a decision he defended and was tormented by. Both are buried in the grounds.

• Alternative toBal Gangadhar Tilak

  Tilak died in August 1920, a month before the Calcutta session at which Gandhi carried Non-Cooperation, and the succession is the hinge of the movement: an extremism built on Maharashtrian public festivals, Sanskrit learning and the acceptance of violence, replaced by a method built on vows, fasting and the refusal of it. Gandhi had called Tilak his political guru, which was gracious and not quite true of anything he actually did.

• Life routeNoakhali

  Gandhi reached Noakhali in November 1946 and stayed four months, walking barefoot from village to village with a small party, staying one night in each house, holding prayer meetings where he read from the Quran as well as the Gita, and sending his companions to live singly in separate villages. He was seventy-seven. Mountbatten later called him a one-man boundary force, and Bengal's 1947 casualties were a fraction of Punjab's.

• Teaching lineageLeo Tolstoy

  Gandhi read “A Letter to a Hindu” in 1909, wrote to Tolstoy for permission to reprint it in Indian Opinion, translated it into Gujarati himself, and corresponded with him until Tolstoy's death the following year. He later named his South African settlement Tolstoy Farm. The transmission ran both ways in a sense: Tolstoy's nonresistance was built partly out of Indian material, and it came back to an Indian in South Africa as a Russian argument, which is where satyagraha was being worked out.

• Devotional corpus onTirukkuṛaḷ

  Gandhi came to the Tirukkuṛaḷ through Tolstoy rather than through Tamil, and quoted it afterwards — an ancient Tamil work reaching a Gujarati in Johannesburg by way of a Russian in Tula. The chapter on not killing, and the Kural's insistence that virtue is conduct rather than belief, sit close to what he was assembling; he later encouraged its translation. The route matters as much as the text: this is Indian ethical writing returning to Indian political use through a European intermediary.

• Publicly debated withSadhu Sundar Singh

  Gandhi and Sadhu Sundar Singh met at Sabarmati in the 1910s and engaged in sustained public exchange on whether Christianity could become genuinely Indian without ceasing to be Christianity. Gandhi admired Sundar Singh's sadhu-form Christianity — the saffron robe, the itinerant method, the bhajan-style hymns — and used him as the example of what Christian mission in India ought to look like if it were serious. Sundar Singh, for his part, considered Gandhi closer to Christ in method than most European missionaries.

• Admired byM. S. Subbulakshmi

  Mahatma Gandhi received M.S. Subbulakshmi at Sevagram several times from the 1940s onward and asked her to sing the devotional Hari tum haro at his prayer meetings — her recording of it was played at his 30 January 1948 funeral. He called her Nightingale. Her 1945 film Meera, released at the height of the national movement, was reviewed by Gandhi in Harijan and used Meerabai's sixteenth-century renunciation to speak to the ethical register of the 1940s nationalist moment.

• Mentor ofGopal Krishna Gokhale

  Gandhi met Gokhale in Calcutta in 1896 on his first visit back from South Africa and formally took him as his political guru. Gokhale toured South Africa in 1912 at Gandhi's invitation and brokered the Smuts-Gandhi settlement that ended the Transvaal campaign. After returning to India in 1915 Gandhi observed Gokhale's suggested one-year silence of travel and listening before entering Indian politics. Gokhale's death that year — before Gandhi's political work began in earnest — made the mentorship a shadow that Gandhi acknowledged for the rest of his life.

• AnalogueAyyankali

  Ayyankali's 1898-1941 Travancore Dalit emancipation movement and Mahatma Gandhi's 1915-1948 all-India Dalit-Harijan movement developed in parallel across the colonial period. Ayyankali's 1914 Travancore school-entry agitation preceded Gandhi's 1932 Yeravda Pact Dalit politics by 18 years. Both leaders combined non-violent civil disobedience with mass agrarian mobilisation against the caste-based economic order.

• Publicly debated withMuhammad Ali Jinnah

  Gandhi and Jinnah met for fourteen days in September 1944 at Jinnah's house on Malabar Hill, Bombay, to see whether the Congress and the Muslim League could agree on a shared framework for independence. Gandhi arrived without a Congress mandate; the talks broke on whether Pakistan would be settled before or after the British left and on who would speak for Indian Muslims. Jinnah's formula won in 1947.

• Mentor ofJawaharlal Nehru

  Nehru was thirty-one when he first met Gandhi in 1916 at the Lucknow Congress and sixty when Gandhi was killed in 1948. In between Gandhi named him his political heir in 1942 and the two moved in and out of agreement over the next thirty years — on socialism, on industrialisation, on the Hindi-Urdu question, on Partition — without the relationship breaking. The 1942 Quit India Resolution was drafted together in Bombay.

• Samadhi atRajghat, New Delhi

  Gandhi was shot by Nathuram Godse at Birla House on the evening of 30 January 1948 and 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.

• Publicly debated withAdolf Hitler

  Gandhi wrote to Hitler twice — on 23 July 1939 and again on 24 December 1940 — addressing him as 'Dear Friend' and appealing in the name of non-violence to pull Europe back from war and settle international disputes without arms. The British authorities blocked the 1939 letter from leaving India; the 1940 letter reached Berlin via diplomatic channels but was never acknowledged. The letters sit beside Gandhi's wartime correspondence with Roosevelt, Churchill and Mussolini as part of his consistent satyagraha practice of addressing even the most unlikely interlocutor as morally reachable, and were in no sense an endorsement.

• Monastic foundationDakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, Chennai

  Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha at Chennai was founded by Mohandas Gandhi in 1918 on an initial donation from Jamnalal Bajaj, to teach Hindi as a national link-language in the four southern states. Gandhi served as its first president and continued to patronise the institution through the Khadi-and-Hindi movement of the 1920s and 1930s; it was declared an Institution of National Importance by Act of Parliament in 1964.

On these journeys

• Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
• The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Mahatma Gandhi”. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth; The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Publications Division, 100 vols).

• Wikipedia — Mahatma Gandhi