GANDHI, Mohandas Karamachand. - Indian political figure, b. at Porbandar (Gulf of Oman) on 2 Oct. 1869, d. at New Delhi on 30 Jan. 1948. In 1888 he left for London to complete his studies and obtained a law degree; three years later he returned to India. In 1893 he went to South Africa, wishing to defend the 15,000 Indian immigrant workers there who were living in difficult conditions. In 1899, during the war against the Boers, he did not forget that he was a subject of England and fulfilled his duty alongside the English troops by organizing the Indian Red Cross. Almost simultaneously he began publication of *Indian Opinion*. With this activity he began the mission of social redemption for his people, which he continued later through *Young India*.
In 1904 at Phoenix, near Durban, he founded an agricultural colony. Indians of different castes and religions were to find, under his guidance, that harmony which he strove to bring to India. In Johannesburg he opened a hospital for plague victims. In 1906 he cooperated with the English against the Zulu rebels; but he energetically opposed the policy of the South African government regarding the poll tax and for the first time proclaimed *satyagraha* (insistence on truth), inaccurately termed passive resistance.
From South Africa he returned to Ahmedabad and in *ahimsa* (non-violence) sought to perform works of good and peace until 1918, when he resumed active political action in the Indian Congress and promoted, against the Rowlatt repression laws, the union of Hindus and Muslims. In 1920 he succeeded Tilak as leader of the Congress, proclaiming non-cooperation (*swadesi*), which provoked rebellions, violence, repression, and Gandhi’s own repentance. In the same year, in November, he opened the Gujarat University at Ahmedabad; elected president of the Indian National Congress at Delhi, he had civil disobedience proclaimed. Arrested in March 1922, he was sentenced to six months in prison; but on 4 February he was pardoned and in his retreat at Ahmedabad proclaimed “the Beatitudes of the Gospel the most beautiful pages he had ever known.”
In December 1929 he resumed political activity and at the Lahore Congress advocated India’s desire for complete independence; three months later he incited the people of India to non-violent civil disobedience, condemning the example with the “march of the martyrs” and the violation of the salt monopoly law at Dandi on 5 April 1930. Again imprisoned, he was released on 25 January 1931 and took part in the second Round Table Conference in London to draft the statute of the Indian Federation. When the conference failed, he returned to India in January 1932 and was again imprisoned. He then began the famous fasts, which succeeded in bending the will of the English government and calming the discord between Hindus and Muslims for greater social justice.
In 1934 he resigned the presidency of the Indian National Congress; but he remained its spiritual leader.
In 1944, through fasting, he became an advisor and mediator between his people and the English government, to which, in 1942 on the occasion of the Cripps Mission, he had firmly refused to collaborate.
In 1947 he affirmed India’s desire for unity; only to avoid civil war between Hindus and Muslims did he accept the proposal of Viceroy Mountbatten, mourned the partition between Hindustan and Pakistan, and preached peace. On 15 August of the same year India was proclaimed independent; but with the tragedy of his homeland came the tragic end of this singular agitator: on 30 January 1948 at New Delhi he was struck down by the fanatical hatred of the Hindu Mahasabha.
“Mahatma,” the great soul, they called him in life, and the crowds went to dip cloths in his blood as in that of a martyr; on the urn of his ashes the leaders of independent and free India had the word “God, God” inscribed. Romain Rolland called him “a saint of Christianity,” while others called him “an enemy of Christianity.”
G. is one of the most difficult figures to study and define. He was an authentic Hindu, an Eastern mystic, tinged by strong Christian influences. He strove to make the existence of the humble and oppressed less painful; to make men good, so that in goodness and truth they might have a serene existence; to urge belief in a Supreme Truth so as not to seek salvation in what he called “the desert of atheism.” For this he admired the moral doctrine of Christianity and the Sermon on the Mount; but he did not accept the dogmas of the Christian faith, for to him religion remained always a philosophy and a ritual.
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**Gandolfi** - A saintly bishop. Painting by Ubaldo G. Bologna, Pinacoteca.
**Gandolfi, Family.** - Bolognese painters. During the second half of the 18th century and beyond, the brothers Ubaldo G. and Gaetano G., and then Mauro, son of Gaetano, carried on a singular artistic activity in their homeland, in which, over the remnants of the local Baroque tradition, Venetian motifs—especially in typology—were pleasantly interwoven, and, in the end, suggestions of international Neoclassicism.
Ubaldo, b. at S. Marta della Decima, near Bologna, on 28 Apr. 1728, d. at Ravenna on 21 July 1781, combined a fluid painterly practice with warm tonalities, especially in easel works, with a very varied and abundant drawing activity; he also modeled in plaster the two prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah for the Bolognese church of S. Giuliano. Particularly noteworthy are the canvas *Diana and Endymion* in the Bologna Town Hall and some female and child heads in private collections.