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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