Gandhi


Gandhi was born in the 2nd of October 1869, into a merchant family in Porbandar. The small coastal town located in western India at the shores of the Arabian sea. His father was a poorly paid bureaucrat who had a little formal education. Like many others, his life started as a simple empty page to be filled with events. Subsequently, it turned to be a very militant one.

He was the youngest and fourth child of his father's fourth wife. The other three died. He had two elder brothers and three elder sisters. When Gandhi was seven, his father moved from Porbandar to Rajkot.

Early Life and education of Gandhi

He attended the primary school there until he was twelve years old. In 1881, Gandhi entered the high school in Rajkot which is now called Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalaya. In 1887, Gandhi graduated from the high school and joined Salmadas college in Bhavnagar. That is a city in Gujarat state.

Perhaps the most intense early memory was a play he had watched during primary school. That memory had a great impact on shaping his personality. The play was about Harishchandra, a legendary king in Indian mythology. A king who went through several ordeals whilst adhering strictly to absolute truth. Young Gandhi wondered why everyone could not be truthful. Just as the legendary figure. A thought he acted on throughout his life.

In college, Gandhi had a very difficult time keeping up with his studies. A friend of the family suggested that he go to England and come back as a barrister. Of course for a good life opportunity, Gandhi could not resist the idea.

He began to override the social disadvantages of his vegetarian lifestyle. Gandhi took lessons to be a proper English gentleman. Lessons included elocution, French, dancing, and western music. He started to wear finely tailored western clothing. After completing his legal studies, he enrolled in the high court and set sail for India. The year was 1891.

Gandhi, the lawyer and here are the ordeals embarking

European in dress and manner, Gandhi knew nothing about the laws of his own country. At the high court in Bombay, he could not gather the courage to cross examine a witness in his first case. He never appeared again in court on behalf of a client in India.

In early 1893, Gandhi sailed to Durban, the third largest city in South Africa. He left his wife behind, intending to return in a year. Two days after arriving, Gandhi was chastised in a Durban court. The reason was his refusal to remove his turban. He wrote to the press and while labeled an unwelcome visitor, got noticed.

In June 1893, on his way to Pretoria from Johannesburg, he was forcibly expelled from his first class seat. A colored passenger! When he objected, he was thrown out of the train in Pietermaritzburg. Incensed by his treatment on the train to Pretoria, Gandhi called a meeting of the Indian community. Finally, he gave the first public speech of his life. Hence, he began a political career that lasted for 55 years!

Not happy with the untruths it took to pursue a business case, Gandhi settled his client's case and returned to Durban, prepared to return to India. At his farewell party in April 1894, he read about a new law depriving Asians of representation in the legislature. He asked the Indians to fight this law, and they asked him to extend his stay. Gandhi continued to practice law in Pretoria and Durban and continued to experience racial indignities.

In late 1893, he was kicked off the sidewalk near President Kruger's house in Pretoria. Even when pressed by white sympathizers to press charges, he refused. He did not believe in litigation for personal grievances and never pursued the same. In September 1894, he realized that he was not returning to India soon, so he applied for admission to practice in the Natal (region in South Africa) Supreme Court. The Natal law society objected on the basis of race and color, but the chief justice accepted him. Two weeks later, he successfully argued and won what was probably his first court case.

Indians in Transvaal (South Africa) could not own property and those in Natal were losing their right to vote. Gandhi took his grievances to lord Ripon, secretary of state for colonies. Over 10,000 signatures were collected in a petition drive organized by Gandhi in two weeks.

In June 1895, Gandhi defended the release of a prominent indentured laborer who was a victim of these laws. As his organizing skills matured, Gandhi organized workers in mines on walkouts. Another law Gandhi took issue with was one prohibiting the carrying of colored passengers by Indian rickshaw haulers in rickshaws marked "for Europeans only". While Gandhi himself objected to using rickshaws pulled by the Durban natives, he protested this by law with the Durban town clerk and petitioned the Natal governor on the subject in 1900.


Gandhi returned to India in June 1896 to bring back his family. Based on his interviews and speeches in India, he was almost lynched by Durban Europeans, upon return on January 14th 1897. Based in Durban, Gandhi was active in organizing against a new threat in 1899- the removal of Asiatic Indians in Transvaal to special locations, when the Anglo Boer war intervened.

On his way back to India from Natal in 1901, Gandhi arrived in Port Louis, Mauritius on October 30th. His reputation preceded him from Durban. He helped organizing the indentured workers in Mauritius sugar plantations. Between the years 1893 and 1914, Gandhi sailed by the sea several times between India and Africa, as the Arab and Indian merchants did for centuries. Ports of call during these sailings across the Arabian sea included Malé (Maldives), Victoria (Seychelles), Denis (Reunion), Port Louis (Mauritius) and Colombo (Ceylon).

It all began in the last year of the 19th century, in southern Africa. Gandhi fulfilled what he perceived his moral duty. In recognition of his service to the crown during the Anglo Boer war, Gandhi was awarded the British Empire war medal (Queen's South Africa medal). Gandhi offered the services of the Indians on October 27th and left for the front with the ambulance corps on December 14th 1899. He served in Estcourt (South Africa) on December 19th, when the corps was temporarily disbanded.

When the war began, Gandhi's personal sympathy was with the Boer, but he felt he had no right to consider his individual convictions before duty to the nation. The choice of volunteering for the medical service was simple, Indians in Natal were neither trained nor were allowed to enter combat. The Indian ambulance corps was disbanded on January 28th 1900 just after the British Red Cross arrived.

While Gandhi kept away from lateral action in the war, he did specifically make public comments comment on the brutal treatment of Boer civilians by British authorities. His impressions on the goodness of the Empire was already beginning to wear off, with the reports that were coming out of pow camps.

Gandhi was living in Johannesburg when the news of the Zulu rebellion reached him. Natal had a volunteer defense force to quell the rebellion and Gandhi with his sense of loyalty to the crown, offered to form an ambulance corps and the offer was accepted. Gandhi enlisted 24 Indian men from Durban to serve with him. He was awarded the Natal war medal for organizing the ambulance corps under the rank of a Sergeant Major.

Gandhi did not bear any grudge against the Zulus, who had harmed no Indians. He indicated that the rightness or otherwise of the rebellion was not likely to affect his decision. Gandhi's heart was with the Zulus and he was elated to know that he would basically nurse wounded Zulus, so his offer for the ambulance corps was accepted so quickly as White Red Cross volunteers did not want to nurse the Zulus wounded by the British vigilante forces.

When World War I broke out, Gandhi was in England . He gathered Indians in England, Ireland, and many of his colleagues from South Africa. He insisted on Indians in England doing their bit for the war, an idea objected to by many other Indian nationalists. Gandhi assembled a class of 80 volunteers who trained for first aid, who went on to serve British and Indian soldiers wounded in battles on the Western front. Besides the 70,000 Indians in the Western front in Europe, Indians served in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and East Africa. Over 1.3 million Indians served in World War I, 72,000 of whom were killed. For his recruitment efforts, Gandhi was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for public service.

Gandhi was invited by the Viceroy to participate in the Imperial war conference in 1918. He left Delhi and initiated a call for volunteers. This was different from all else; Gandhi was recruiting combatants for battle, not an ambulance corps. The moral dilemma was probably taxing. Gandhi got very sick towards the end of this drive, as he did while he was recruiting in London in 1914.

All had changed in World War II for Gandhi. Tired of British intransigence on self rule for India, he decided not to cooperate with their war. Gandhi particularly opposed the presence of foreign allied troops in Indian soil, American, Canadian, Australian, Egyptian, Chinese and others.
In contrast to his recruiting Indians for active service in World War I, Gandhi opposed their involvement in World War II. This did not stop millions of recession starved Indians. The Indian army swelled to over 2.6 million in 1945. Indian soldiers were famous for successfully engaging Germans and Italians in the Western desert of Eritrea.

On the domestic front, Gandhi was fighting another political battle. He vehemently opposed Subhash Chandra Bose, Who founded the rebel Indian National army to join the Japanese in attacking British India.
Bose left Berlin for Singapore, to join the Japanese in their drive towards India and Burma. His declaration of Azad Hind (Free India) was a direct rebuff to Gandhi's passive non-cooperation with the British during World War II. The British government did everything to rally the Indian masses against a possible Japanese invasion.


Gandhi, who was in jail under the defense of India act for speaking out against cooperating in the war effort, was encouraged to speak out against the Japanese.
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