GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND. - Indian politician, 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 degree in law; three years later he returned to India. In 1893 he went to South Africa, wishing to defend the 15,000 Indian workers who had emigrated there and who found themselves in difficult living conditions. In 1899, during the war against the Boers, he did not forget that he was a subject of England and did his duty, alongside the English troops, organizing the Indian Red Cross. Almost
(for the Indian)
At the same time he began the publication Indian opinion. With this activity began the mission of social redemption of 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 understanding which he strove to bring about for India. At Johannesburg he opened a hospital for plague victims. In 1906 he cooperated with the English against the rebellious Zulus; but he energetically opposed the South African government's policy against the poll tax and proclaimed, for the first time, satydgrahi (insistence on truth), inaccurately called passive resistance.
From South Africa he returned to Ahmedabad and in the ātram (meditation) he sought to perform works of good and peace until 1918, when he actively resumed the political action of the Indian Congress and promoted, against the Rowlatt repressive laws, the union of Hindus and Muslims. In 1920 he succeeded Tilak as head of the Congress and proclaimed non-cooperation (suadeh), which provoked rebellions, violence, repressions and G.'s repentance. In the same year, in Nov., he opened the University of Gujerat 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 Feb. he was pardoned and in his retreat at Ahmedabad he proclaimed "the Beatitudes of the Gospel the most beautiful pages he had ever known."
In Dec. 1929 he resumed political activity and at the Lahore Congress he advocated India's will for complete independence; three months later he urged the peoples of India to civil disobedience without violence, setting the example with the "march of the martyrs" and the breach of the salt monopoly law at Dandi on 5 Apr. 1930. Imprisoned again, he was released on 25 Jan. 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 and in Jan. 1932 he saw prison again. He then began the famous fasts, which succeeded in bending the will of the English government and in softening the discords between Hindus and Muslims for greater social justice.
In 1934 he renounced the presidency of the Indian National Congress; but he always remained its spiritual head.
In 1944 he became, through fasting, counselor and mediator between his people and the English government, to which, in 1942, on the occasion of the Cripps mission, he had opposed a firm refusal to cooperate.
In 1947 he affirmed India's will for unity; only to avoid a civil war between Hindus and Muslims did he accept the proposal of Viceroy Mountbatten, wept over the division between Hindustan and Pakistan and preached peace. On 5 Aug. 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 Jan. 1948 at New Delhi he was struck and killed by the fanatical hatred of the Hindu Mahasabha.
Mahātmā, the great soul, they called him in life, and the crowds went to dip cloths in his blood, as in the blood of a martyr; on the urn of his ashes the leaders of independent and free India had the word "God, God" engraved. Romain Rolland called him a "saint of Christianity" and others of Christianity called him an "enemy."
G. is one of the figures most difficult to study and define. He was an authentic Hindu, an Oriental mystic, tinged with strong Christian influences. He strove to make the existence of the humble and the oppressed less painful; to make men good, so that in goodness and truth they might have a serene existence; to urge them to believe in a Supreme Truth so as not to think of any 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 did not accept the dogmas of the Christian faith, because for him religion always remained a philosophy and a ritual.
