Mahatma Gandhi (English: Mahatma Gandhi, born: October 2, 1869; died: January 30, 1948) is considered the leader of the Indian national movement against British rule and the ‘Father of the Nation’. His full name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He gained international fame for his principle of non-violent protest to achieve political and social progress. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a prominent political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He had an unbroken relationship with ‘Sabarmati Ashram’. Mahatma Gandhi remained associated with this ashram throughout his life, that is why he also got the title of ‘Saint of Sabarmati’.
Mahatma Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at a place called Porbandar in Gujarat. His parents were devout Hindus. His father’s name was Karamchand Gandhi. Mohandas’s mother’s name was Putlibai who was the fourth wife of Karamchand Gandhi. Mohandas was the last child of his father’s fourth wife. His father Karamchand (Kaba Gandhi) was first Diwan of Porbandar, the capital of a small princely state in the Gujarat state of western India under British rule, and later Diwan of Rajkot (Kathiawad) and Wankaner respectively. Karamchand Gandhi did not receive much formal education, but he was a skilled administrator and knew how to navigate his way between eccentric princes, their unhappy subjects and the staunch British political officers in power.
The author of the book ‘My Experiment with Truth’ was Mahatma Gandhi. He originally wrote this book in his mother tongue Gujarati under the name of “Satya Ke Prayog”. It is famous as the autobiography of Gandhiji. This book was translated into English by Mahadev Desai. In this book, Gandhiji has mentioned the events from his birth till 1921. Later, all these incidents were published in Gandhiji’s newspaper ‘Navjeevan’ between 1925 and 1929.[1]
In 1887, Mohandas somehow passed the matriculation examination of ‘Bombay University’ and took admission in ‘Samaldas College’ located in Bhavnagar. Due to the sudden switch from Gujarati to English, he started having some difficulty in understanding the lectures. Meanwhile, discussions were going on in his family regarding his future. If the decision had been left to him, he would have wanted to become a doctor. But apart from the prejudice against dissection in the Vaishnav family, it was also clear that if he wanted to follow the family tradition of attaining a high position in one of the royal houses of Gujarat, he would have to become a barrister. This meant a trip to England and Gandhi, who was not particularly interested in ‘Samaldas College’, gladly accepted this proposal. In his young mind the image of England was ‘the land of philosophers and poets, the center of the entire civilization’. In September 1888 he boarded a ship. 10 days after reaching there, he got admitted to ‘Inner Temple’, one of the four law colleges of London.
In the Durban court the European magistrate asked him to remove his turban, he refused and walked out of the court. A few days later, on his way to Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and spent the night shivering at the station. On the next leg of the journey he was beaten by a horse-drawn carriage driver because he refused to make way for a European traveler and was eventually banned from hotels reserved ‘for Europeans only’. . These insults were part of daily life for Indian traders and workers in Natal. What was new was not Gandhi’s experience but his reaction. Till now he was not in favor of dogmatism and aggressiveness, but when he had to go through unexpected humiliations, something changed in him.
In 1906 the Tonswall government issued a particularly humiliating ordinance for the registration of Indian people in South Africa. Indians organized a protest rally under the leadership of Gandhi in Johannesburg in September 1906 and vowed to punish any violation of the ordinance and its consequences. Thus Satyagraha was born, which was a new technique to endure pain instead of inflicting it, to resist without malice and to fight it without violence.
Gandhiji’s religious quest started in his childhood under the influence of his mother, his home in Porbandar and Rajkot. But it got a lot of strength after reaching South Africa. He was fascinated by Tolstoy’s writings on Christianity. He studied translations of the Quran and delved into Hindu scriptures and philosophy. Through the study of relative karma, conversations with scholars, and personal study of theological works, he came to the conclusion that all religions are true and yet each is imperfect. Because sometimes they have been interpreted with a narrow mind and narrow heart and have often been misinterpreted. The Bhagavad Gita, which Gandhi first studied in England, became his ‘spiritual dictionary’ and probably had the greatest influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words mentioned in Geeta attracted him the most. One was ‘Aparigraha’ (renunciation), which means, man should give up material things which hinder his spiritual life and he should become free from the bondage of wealth. The second word is ‘Samabhava’ (equal feeling), which taught him to remain firm in sorrow or happiness, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or fear of failure.
hind swaraj
‘Hind Swaraj’ is a book written by Mahatma Gandhi. The original composition was in Gujarati in 1909. This is a short booklet of about thirty thousand words, which Gandhiji wrote in a ship during his journey from England to South Africa. It was first published in Indian Opinion, which was banned in India by the British on the grounds that it contained seditious material. On this, Gandhiji also brought out its English translation to show that its content was not seditious. Ultimately the ban was lifted on 21 December 1938. Translation of ‘Hind Swaraj’ is available in many languages including Hindi and Sanskrit.
