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Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi (1869-1948)
by Sean Richards
Definition of Mahatma: Literally "Great Soul", used of
a man of developed spirituality.
To fully understand the story of India’s
Independence, consideration must be given to the unbelievable role of
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was born in 1869 in India and was murdered
in 1948 by Nathuram Godsey a fanatic Hindu.
Gandhi himself was a Hindu and born in the second highest cast.
In Hinduism people are born into a cast in which they stay their whole
life and when they demonstrated good behavior they are promoted in a higher
cast in their next life. If they behave badly they only attain a lower
cast.
There are also the 'untouchables' or people without a cast. People
with a cast treat people without a cast badly and very often wouldn't
even physically touch them. People with no cast live in the worst conditions
of poverty and have hardly any chances to live a good life.
In the time Gandhi was born, India was a colony of the British
Empire. The British ruled the country for several hundred years and many
people lived in great poverty because the British extracted all the countries
wealth.
After completing his early education, Gandhi went to London and
studied in a university, became a lawyer and there moved back to India.
Shortly after returning to India, an Indian firm wanted him to travel
to South Africa and work for them. When he moved to South Africa, he realized
that white people didn’t welcome Indians. One day Gandhi was pushed
out of the train when he refused to leave his first class seat for a white
person, because it wasn’t seen as appropriate for a colored person
to be traveling first class.
It was due to this that Gandhi decided never to be pushed down
again and to fight for the rights of minorities. He started to lead the
Indian workers in South Africa and fought for their rights. He also made
another very important rule for himself, which he used throughout his
whole life: never to use violence in his fights, even if others would
use violence against him. With this in mind he started to fight for the
rights of Indian workers in South Africa. He had great success, and he
never used violence.
During his time in South Africa, Gandhi started a project to demonstrate
that people from different religions could live together in peace and
freedom. He never kept secrets to the press and was a nice and friendly
person throughout his whole life.
When he returned to India, crowds were already waiting for him
at the port and celebrating his arrival. However, this didn't make him
happy. He yearned for the experience of living like most of the people
in India, located in the countryside and poor.
He wanted to be one of them, one of the people of the country he
was born in, a country from which he was away from for so long. To gain
this experience, started traveling through the country by train in the
third class wagons. Here he was able to experience a lot of 'India' and
learnt much about how people lived and worked.
In a very short time he became the leader of the Indian Campaign
for Home-Rule, and the Indians loved him because he was so close to them.
He resided in the country and lived an easy life of joy and satisfaction,
learnt the craft of spinning a pastime that he continued for his whole
life.
Gandhi had the opinion that a lot of the poverty in India was caused
by many clothes being produced for the Indian market in Great Britain
rather than supporting the Indian industry and manufacturing locally.
He encouraged the people to start spinning again, as he believed that
if they had nothing better to do they could make some money by producing
local clothing.
One day a symbolic event occurred. Gandhi asked his followers in
a big meeting to throw all their British clothes into a big fire and encouraged
them not to buy any more British clothes and rather to produce and buy
their own Indian clothes. After that many people started to boycott British
goods. Many people in the British factories became unemployed and more
people in India had work again.
This was the beginning – and only one step in Gandhi’s
influence towards India's independence from the British.
Another very important influence by Gandhi in the achievement of
India’s step toward independence was that he asked the whole nation
to strike for one day, and they did. No one worked on that day, no traffic
moved, no mail was transported, factories stood still. For the British
a crippling factor was that the telegraph lines didn't work, and the British
in India were cut off from their mother country.
It was then that the British first realized Gandhi's awesome power
in India.
Another very important event on India's move to independence was
Gandhi’s orchestrated protest against British control of India’s
salt industry. The British had full control India’s salt and charged
the Indians tax for the purchase of this critical commodity if one was
to survive in India.
Gandhi thought that the rule over the salt industry was one of the
strongholds the British had as a ruler over India. To demonstrate against
the British rule, he started a march over 200 kilometers to the sea. At
the start of the march he had only a few hundred followers but when they
reached the sea they were a group of many thousands of people. Indians
from many villages, which they passed through, decided to walk with them.
When they arrived at the sea, as a symbolic action, Gandhi took
a handful of salt and he asked everybody to do the same. After the police
"cleaned" them all away from the beach, they marched towards the salt
factories to try and take their salt as a further demonstration.
The British ordered their soldiers to stand before the gate to
the factories and not let anyone in. The protesters walked towards them
and tried to enter the factories, only five at a time. The soldiers beat
the Indians until they couldn't walk any further. Women picked up the
wounded and took them away. Not one Indian used violence.
Most of Gandhi's actions against the British rule were a great
success. The reason for this was that the British didn't know how to act
against an enemy who didn’t use violence. This was such a radical
approach to protest that the press all over the world talked about Gandhi
and his passive actions.
More and more people everywhere in the world agreed with him when
they saw the British violence against the non-violent people. Gandhi was
so close to the people in his country and was much loved. His work in
partnership with the world press and his honesty was one of the major
contributors in his success.
Gandhi went to jail very often in his life. He was arrested in
South Africa and in India many times. He used this time in jail to think
and plan further actions, and also to think about how he could help the
untouchables. He was a religious man and although he believed in casts,
he didn't think that god would have approved of people being thought of
as ‘untouchables’.
He went for long walks traveling the whole of India to collect
money for the untouchables and fought for their rights throughout his
life. He also fought for the peaceful living together of different religions.
When fights broke out between Hindus and Moslems he tried to talk to them
and when that didn't help he started to fast, which he did many times
in his life.
Once he nearly fasted to death when Hindus and Moslems fought each
other, and eventually the fights stopped and the two religions started
to live together in peace again. Gandhi also fasted when he heard of violence
against the British or against soldiers or policemen. Violence made him
sad and he had more than once the feeling that all he had done was useless
when people fought against each other.
When people came to him when he was fasting, and asked, would it
be their right to kill someone if that person had killed their son or
wife Gandhi used to reply: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
During the Second World War Britain’s power to keep India as a colony
was dramatically reduced, and India and Britain started to talk about
India’s independence. After the war, in 1947 India was finally independence
and the British left India.
Gandhi, even though his whole life had been dedicated to the cause
of obtaining independence and peaceful existence amongst the peoples of
India, didn't feel like celebrating because religious fights broke out
once again between the religious sects. Eventually with his talks to the
people, and finally with his fast, he was able to stop the violence and
people of different religions lived together again.
However, India became divided into two countries India and Pakistan.
In Pakistan, most people are Muslims whereas India contains mainly Hindus.
Gandhi didn't want to divide the country but he couldn't stop it, and
shortly after his last fast where he stopped the religious violence again
a fanatic Hindu shot him at his daily payer. The whole of India mourned
his death.
Gandhi
and his influence in the nonviolent movement
I think Mohandas Gandhi was one of the most significant persons
in the 20th century. He was the one who proved that it is possible to
fight very successfully without violence. He fought his whole life with
humanity, tolerance, ideas and without violence. He showed the way to
a better world.
Still today there are many people who love him and who apply his
philosophy to effect change the world. A very important example is the
‘peace movements’ fight against wars. Usually people who fight
against a war try to fight without violence by marching through cities
and trying to convince people not to go to the war.
One example of peaceful protest, which all of us see and experience
from time to time is the method of conducting a strike in the workplace.
Gandhi made 'the strike' as a way of demonstrating, popular. This method
is still used today. At the start of the 20th century the British Empire
was the biggest empire in the world. India was it's biggest colony and
was very important to Britain. Gandhi assisted to achieve India’s
independence from the British. The biggest Empire in the world lost a
war of independence against a country like India, which didn’t use
any form of violence or weapons. That was a sign for the world, and especially
for the other countries ruled by the British. Observing this many of those
countries saw their chance for independence and it was Gandhi that showed
them the way. In the 1960's most colonies in Africa and also Indochina
became independent.
Gandhi fought for the rights of minorities and people who were
pushed down, his whole life. He encouraged every one to stand up for their
rights and to fight against cruelty. He showed the whole world how easy
it is to demonstrate for rights and how successful it can be if there
are many people fighting for the same cause together. Many people were
motivated by Gandhi to demonstrate for their rights when they realized
how successful he was. Good examples are the fights of the blacks in North
America, especially Martin Luther King who fought under the influence
of Gandhi. Also the fights in South America under Ché Guevara and
the fights of Aborigines in Australia are other examples.
Demonstrations for rights still happen all over the world again
and again because there are always people who push others down. Gandhi
played a big part in the fight for humanity and the rights of minority
groups. I think Gandhi represented the epitome of humanitarianism. He
changed and opened millions of people’s minds and views toward class
distinction, oppression, independence, racism and violence as a negative
form of demonstration.
Still today when people see the movie ‘Gandhi,’ or read
about his life they reflect about this incredible man and how successful
non-violent demonstration can be, and the importance to save human life
and not destroy it.
"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of
mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised
by the ingenuity of man." (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)
Copyright,
sources and comments Sources
used for writing this text were: The
author lives in Australia and wrote this text for a Contemporary History
Project. He got an A+.
the
Gandi Text Collection |
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This page was updated March/21/2004 [diese Seite in deutsch] |