Gandhi, Mohandas K.

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(1869–1948), Indian nationalist and promoter of nonviolent resistance. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi grew up in Porbandar, Gujarat, the son of a minister of a princely state. His father became a judge at a special court in Rajkot, Gujarat, settling disputes among princes. In such a court, nobody could be sentenced: the judges had to bring equitable compromises between the princes. Gandhi's father was good at this, and young Mohandas admired him for it. His mother was a pious woman who often took vows and observed them religiously. These parental virtues left a deep impact on him.

Gandhi was sent to London at the age of eighteen to study law. After obtaining his degree, he returned to India in 1891, but did not do well as a lawyer, as he was too shy. A Muslim businessman sent him to South Africa to resolve a legal dispute between two rich Muslims. Gandhi persuaded them to settle the issue out of court. He was about to return to India when he noticed that Indian immigrants in South Africa were about to be deprived of their right to vote. He organized the Natal Indian Congress to fight against this measure. Soon he became involved in more issues affecting the civil rights of the Indian minority. He stressed that rights also implied duties and, during both the Boer War and the Zulu rebellion, he organized an Indian ambulance corps. The white militia's brutal massacre of the Zulus brought about a fundamental change in Gandhi's life. He renounced his profession, took a vow of chastity and decided to devote his life to political and social work. In this new capacity, he developed satyagraha ("holding on to the truth"), a strategy of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. He empowered the Indian minority by organizing campaigns along these lines. He also wrote his manifesto Hind swaraj ("Freedom of India"), which was published in 1909. He stated that the British ruled India only because they could rely on the cooperation of the Indians. Nonviolent noncooperation would thus put an end to colonial rule.

When Gandhi returned to India in 1915, there was no scope for political campaigns. During World War I, the British-Indian government was armed with emergency powers. Gandhi devoted himself to local issues such as oppression of peasants by British indigo planters in Champaran, Bihar. After the war, the British extended their wartime emergency powers by means of an act that became known by the name of Justice Rowlatt, who had drafted it. In 1919, Gandhi organized a hartal, a kind of general strike of all traders, in protest. To his dismay, the campaign did not remain nonviolent, and the strike was brutally repressed by the British. When he launched his satyagraha campaign in 1920, he restricted it to a series of boycotts (for example, of elections, of the schools and law courts, and of foreign cloth). Gandhi also drafted a new constitution of the Indian National Congress, the political party agitating for India's independence. The participation of rural India in Congress politics and the creation of the Working Committee as a permanent leadership for agitation were the main features of this new constitution. Through his hold on the Working Committee, Gandhi controlled the Congress, even when he had no official position in the organization.

The British hesitated to arrest Gandhi during the noncooperation campaign for fear of adding fuel to the fire. In 1922, Gandhi terminated the campaign, as an outbreak of violence in a remote village had alarmed him. He was then sentenced to six years of rigorous imprisonment but was released for health reasons in 1924. Most people thought at that time that he was a spent force. When the Congress planned another political campaign in 1930, however, Gandhi was againits main strategist. This time, he found the unjust salt law to be a proper target for satyagraha. The law gave the government a monopoly over the production of salt; Gandhi organized a march to the sea to collect sea salt. When agrarian prices dropped by half due to the Great Depression, peasants who had to pay revenue and interest at their old rates flocked to the Congress. The British viceroy, Lord Irwin, fearing a peasant rebellion, concluded a pact with Gandhi, who hoped that he could arrive at a similar pact with the British prime minister to secure substantial concessions for India. In this, he was to be disappointed. In subsequent years Gandhi devoted himself to constructive work in Indian villages and to the uplift of the untouchables.

Gandhi was only once more called on to launch a major campaign, when the Congress rejected the offer that the British minister, Sir Stafford Cripps, had taken to India in 1942, promising independence after World War II if Congress would back the British war effort. Gandhi asked the British to "Quit India" immediately, but before he could organize a campaign, he and all other Congress leaders were imprisoned.

On the eve of Independence, Gandhi had to be reconciled to the partition of India into two states, India and Pakistan, which he had opposed. The new Indian government was reluctant to agree to this, as India was already at war with Pakistan over Kashmir. Gandhi saw to it that Pakistan got its share, and for that he was shot fatally by a radical Hindu nationalist, five months after India's independence. Beloved by millions of Indians and admired by people worldwide, he became known as the Mahatma, or Great Soul.

Dietmar Rothermund

Brown, Judith. (1989) Prisoner of Hope. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Conrad, Dieter. (1999) "Gandhi's Egalitarians and the Indian Tradition." In Zwischen den Traditionen, edited by Jürgen Lütt. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner.

Rothermund, Dietmar. (1992) Mahatma Gandhi: An Essay in Political Biography. New Delhi: Manohar.

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