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Early
Career
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Gandhi,
Mohandas Karamchand (1869-1948),
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Indian thinker,
statesman, and nationalist leader who led India out of the British
Empire. Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar,
in the modern state of Gujarat, on October 2, 1869, into a political
Hindu family, both his father and grandfather having been prime
ministers to the rulers of two adjacent and tiny princely
statesmediocre . After a career at school, he went to London in he
had 1888 to train as a lawyer, leaving behind his young and
illiterate wife, whom married when she was barely in her teens.
Gandhi qualified as a barrister three years later and returned to
India.
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an undistinguished performance in a legal practice in India, Gandhi
left for South Africa in 1893 to serve as legal adviser to an Indian
firm. The 21 years that he spent there marked a turning point in his
life. The racial indignities to which he and his countrymen were
subjected there turned the hitherto shy and diffident lawyer into a
courageous political activist. Realizing that violence was evil and
rational persuasion often unavailing, he developed a new method of
non-violent resistance, which he called satyagraha and which he used
with some success to secure racial justice for his people. |
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also reflected deeply on his own religion, interacted with Jewish
and Christian friends, and evolved a distinct view of life based on
what he found valuable in his own and other religions. He commanded
a Red Cross unit in the South African Wars, and organized a commune
near Durban based on the ideas of Leo Tolstoy. Gandhi finally
returned to India in 1915, after the government of the Union of
South Africa had made important concessions to his demands,
including recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll
tax for them. After travelling all over India to familiarize himself
with the country of which he had only a limited understanding, he
plunged into politics, and soon became the unquestioned leader of
the Indian nationalist movement. Almost single-handedly he
transformed the middle- and upper-class Indian National Congress
into a powerful national organization, bringing in large sections of
such hitherto excluded groups as women, traders, merchants, the
upper and middle peasantry, and youth, and giving it a truly
national basis. Following the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, Gandhi led
a nationwide campaign of passive non-cooperation with the government
of British India, including the boycott of British goods. He was
first imprisoned by the British in 1922 for two years. |
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