He was born on October 2, 1869 in Probandar, India, a
country that had already been dominated by the British Empire for
centuries. For one hundred years before
his birth, the control of India was in the hands of the British East India
Company that was licensed by the Crown. It was afforded a free hand to pursue its
commercial fortune by any means including raising an army and waging war. By the year 1757, it had secured the control
of the whole of Northern India. The
control exerted by the British East India Company often operated furtively
behind puppet regimes with the net consequence of draining the wealth of the
country. This behavior is at the very
heart of the colonialist mentality. Some
historians claim that England’s Industrial Revolution was financed by the
exploitation of India. As a consequence,
Indian society showed the extremes of wealth and dire poverty. Calcutta was built by the East India Company while
village life was severely impacted, especially since farmers were coerced into
producing crops designated for export.
To give an idea of the extent of the consequence of British
rule, the following table compares deaths by starvation over the course of 175
years.
|
Time Frame
|
Deaths by Starvation
|
|
1825 - 1850
|
400,000
|
|
1850 – 1875
|
5,000,000
|
|
1875 – 1900
|
15,000,000
|
By 1857, Northern Indians began to openly rebel. The strategy of the Empire was to keep India
divided, for India was seen as the “Jewel in the Crown.” Shortly thereafter, India became an Imperial
Colony, for it was too important to be left in the hands of the British East
India Company. The psychological impact
of centuries of occupation left its scars on the psyche of the Indian
population. This was the social climate
and the real politick into which Gandhi was born.
As a teenager, Gandhi was sent to London to study law. At that time, he was an anglophile and
quickly took on the dress and customs of the British. After he passed his bar exams, he returned to
India; by that time, he was married and had a four year old son. He did not fare well as a lawyer in his home
country. He was offered a job by a
group of Moslems from his home village of Porbandar. They wanted to send him to South Africa in regards to a law suit, and he arrived in
Durban, Natal in May of 1893. It was
here that a singular event transformed the man, his thinking, his attitudes,
his personal future and ultimately the fate of his people.
At that time, there were a small number of successful Indian
traders in South Africa and some one hundred thousand indentured
Indian laborers working in the fields and in the mines. He boarded a train to Pretoria and was
unaware of the severity of the laws establishing segregation based on national
origin or color. In the midst of his
journey, he was ordered off the whites-only section of the train that he
happened to be on. He refused to do as
he was told and was beaten in the process.
He was so impacted by this singular event that upon his arrival in Pretoria, he summoned all the Indians
in that city to a meeting. There he gave
his first public address and urged his fellows to forget all distinctions
between them and unite behind a common cause.
Regular meetings were held thereafter, and thus began the beginning of
his journey of a lifetime.
In three years, Gandhi had become a prosperous lawyer and a
well known figure. He was seen as the
spokesman for indentured laborers. He
developed a considerable reputation. His
success was in many ways due to the fact that he could appeal to the common
sense and morality of his opponent.
According to Gandhi, “It has always been a mystery to me how men can
feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.” In 1896, he went back home to fetch his wife
and family and returned to South Africa. At home, he traveled to gather support for
his work in South Africa. He was so
successful in doing this that he took back 800 free Indians with him and sailed
back to Pretoria. Word of his success
reached the South African government.
The government tried unsuccessfully to prevent the ship from
landing. Gandhi was so feared by the
white population that he was badly assaulted.
The secret of the essential Gandhi was his strategy of
rebuilding, healing and unifying. In
describing his strategy, Gandhi said, “If we get our house in order, dependency
would fall like a ripe fruit as a natural consequence.” He also cautioned, “Begin at home, begin with
yourself, correct underlying conditions and suffer the consequences. The rest will fall into place.” He was resolute and persistent. In regard to Gandhi’s beliefs, the
centerpiece of his philosophy was the Bhagavad
Gita that he envisioned as the Song of God and
represented to him an infallible creed of conduct. Out of all his works, he published one book
while in South Africa – Satyagraha. He defined Satyagraha as love in action and
the technology of peace. An essential
ingredient to this approach was respect for one’s adversary. Gandhi thought it was important to never
attempt to diminish an opponent, for this would prove to be a real obstacle to
peace. In his own words, “A Satyagrahi
(those who live by Satyagraha) bids goodbye to fear. He is therefore never afraid of trusting the
opponent. Even if the opponent plays him
false twenty times, the Satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the twenty-first
time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of the creed.”
An important part of Gandhi’s strategy in his opposition to
the South African government’s discriminatory policies was the use of the press.
Indian Opinion, a weekly journal, was employed in this way. It was published in English and Gujarati. Gandhi was instrumental in the creation of
this publication. In 1904, a few months
after its founding, the publication was having difficulties. In response to this problem, Gandhi journeyed
to Durban where it was published. There he happened to meet an Englishman,
Henry S. L. Polak who gave him a copy of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last. According to
Gandhi, “That book marked the turning point in my life.” The contents of this book resonated with his
own convictions. He understood the
teachings in this book to be that:
·
“The good of the individual is contained in the
good of all
·
That a lawyer’s work has the same value as a
barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihoods from
their work
·
That a life of labor - the life of the tiller of
the soil and the handicraftsman - is the life worth living.”
During his time in South Africa, Gandhi began the gradual
process of simplifying his existence.
This kind of change reflected a spiritual transformation that was
happening within. The changes Gandhi
undertook operated on many levels. He
exhibited remarkable patience, persistence and a gift for moral
persuasion.
A significant test of his resolve came when the so-called Black
Act or Asiatic Registration Law went into effect in March 1907. This act required all Indians to get
fingerprinted and keep registration documents on them at all times. On the first of July, 1907, the permit
offices were opened. Gandhi had
organized mass meetings before this fateful date. The community decided to picket each day at
every office. Many of the protesters
were beaten and arrested. The certificates were burnt and thousands went to
jail. After seven years of struggle, the
Black Act was repealed in June 1914, demonstrating the effectiveness of
Satygraha. He finally left South Africa on July 18, 1914, never to return.
He then began the long struggle on behalf of his own people
at home. Within India, he demonstrated
as a teacher that persistence, courage, determination in the face of repression
and intimidation, non-violence, patience, self-reliance and respect for their
British adversaries would ultimately produce a successful conclusion. Gandhi led by example; he showed his
followers just how powerful and effective acting out of moral principle could
be. This is the essence of Satyagraha.
The struggle he led lasted thirty years. Gandhi not only faced the British oppressors,
but also took on injustice that stemmed from his own people, especially in
regard to the issue of the so-called “untouchables.” Along with this radical departure from the
conventional way of thinking, Gandhi made major changes in his outward
appearance that made him more readily fit in with the dress of the overwhelming
majority of Indians. With this change,
the people became more receptive to his message. Gandhi gave the untouchables a new name – Harijans, literally meaning “Children
of God.” Gandhi had made an
unprecedented decision to accept an untouchable family in his Satyagraha Ashram
in Ahmadabad. Following that decision,
all monetary assistance to the Ashram stopped, but Gandhi persisted. The message was clear – the Ashram would not
countenance untouchability.
During the protracted struggle, Gandhi applied continual
pressure on the British authorities always insisting on non-violence. In Gandhi’s words, “If India attains what
will be to me so-called freedom by violent means she will cease to be the
country of my pride.” The most well known event that is so characteristic of
Gandhi’s approach is the Salt March. On March 2, 1930, Gandhi wrote a fateful
letter to the then British Viceroy, Lord Irwin.
An excerpt of this letter follows, “Dear Friend. Before embarking on Civil Disobedience and
taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I would feign approach
you and find a way out.
“My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that
lives, much less human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me
and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold the
British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any
legitimate interest he may have in India
“And why do I regard the British rule a curse?
“It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of
progressive exploitation and by a ruinous expensive military and civil
administration which the country can never afford.
“It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our
culture. And by the policy of cruel
disarmament, it has degraded us spiritually…”
This letter went on to inform the British authorities that
it was Gandhi’s intention to put pressure on the British to revise the revenue
system. He would begin by defying the Salt
Law that
forbade Indians from making salt and taxing the salt they did purchase. In Gandhi’s words, “The tax shows itself
still more burdensome on the poor and when it is remembered that salt is the
one thing he must eat more than the rich man.”
It was obvious that he felt compelled to oppose it.
Early on the morning of April 5, the ashramites accompanied
Gandhi to the sea in the now famous Salt March.
Thousands accompanied him. From
that point, all of India began making salt illegally. In response, the British authorities arrested
some sixty thousand offenders, and, finally, Gandhi was arrested as well.
This demonstration of Indian resolve made it clear that
Indians were quite capable of making orderly British rule untenable. January 16, 1931 had been the date fixed by
the Congress Party – the Congress Party was formed in 1885 and eventually
assumed the leadership of the independence movement - as the official day of
Independence, for on that date a Declaration of Independence had been
issued. On the same day, Lord Irwin
released Gandhi from prison. After this,
Gandhi was invited to a series of discussions with the Viceroy in his palace. At the end of this parlay, the Irwin-Gandhi
Pact was signed. This represented a
significant victory for India and a turning point in regards to British rule.
In 1941, the Second World War took center stage. At the war’s end, it became clear to the
British that they could no longer reasonably hold on to India. On July 26, 1945, the newly-elected British
Labor Government announced that it was ready to expedite self-government in
India. On August 12, 1946, Lord Wavell,
the British Viceroy, commissioned Jawaharlal Nehru to form the new government. Nehru approached Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the
President of the Moslem League, to join the government but Jinnah refused. On September 2, Nehru became the Prime Minister of India,
and Jinnah proclaimed that day a day of mourning and instructed Moslems to
display black flags. As a result of this
schism between Hindus and Moslems, horrendous rioting ensued, especially in
Calcutta.
Although Gandhi spent most of his adult life struggling for
India’s independence from the British Empire, using non-violence as an
essential part of his methodology, he was only one man and could not heal the
growing rift between the highly polarized spiritual communities. As independence was coming close to a reality
and fear and suspicion mounted among members of these two different
communities, violence was inevitable.
And sadly, Gandhi was assassinated on January 25, 1948 by Nathuram
Vinayak Godse, a thirty-five year old Hindu and a high-degree
Brahman.
The impact that Gandhi had not only in India but throughout
the world can best be summarized by the comment made by Albert Einstein,
“Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this
ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”
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