1869-1948
Indian politician

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

Mohandas Gandhi was an Indian independence leader, widely known by the honorific ‘Mahatma’, meaning ‘great souled’ or ‘venerable’. He trained as a barrister in the UK, returned to India, then moved to South Africa where he lived for 21 years as a lawyer and civil rights campaigner. He moved back to India in 1915 and briefly became leader of the Indian National Congress party. He launched various anti-colonial protests, becoming a nationalist figurehead. Independence was gained in 1947 during Clement Attlee’s tenure as UK prime minister, involving partition, forming the new country of Pakistan. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in 1948.

2. Stories

• Gandhi was a sergeant-major and won three medals as a stretcher bearer during his formative years in South Africa.
• Russian author Leo Tolstoy was one of the various western and Asian influences on Gandhi.
• Gandhi promoted army recruitment during World War I but gave limited backing to Britain during World War II.
• Churchill’s general dislike of Hinduism was mainly due to his identification of it with nationalist leaders’ elitism, the caste system and pacifism.
• Churchill’s antipathy towards Gandhi is well known; less well known are the reservations about Gandhi of some of his other opponents and colleagues.
• Like Churchill with his son Randolph, Gandhi had a difficult relationship with his son Harilal.
• Gandhi’s extremist assassin accused him of betraying Hindus by favouring Muslims.

Gandhi was a sergeant-major and won three medals as a stretcher bearer during his formative years in South Africa.

In his youth, Gandhi was in some ways as much of a product of the British Empire as Churchill. His early career was shaped by it, undertaking his legal training in England, with his qualification enabling him to practise back in India and then in South Africa. At age 23, he was offered a legal position in the British colony of Natal by a Muslim trader. On arrival, he considered himself to be a Briton first, then an Indian, but this soon changed after he experienced considerable racial discrimination.

He had intended to return to India after a year but decided to stay on to oppose legislation that denied Indians the right to vote. He ended up remaining for 21 years. He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 as a campaigning body, wrote pamphlets, sent letters to newspapers and petitioned authorities. After making little progress, he began to formulate the notion of satyagraha (‘devotion to truth’), which took the form of non-violent non-cooperation, including burning registration documents and making illegal border crossings. He was jailed several times, spending a total of around eight months in prison.

In 1900 he sought and gained permission to form an Indian unit of stretcher-bearers to transport the wounded in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902. He served on the front line at the Battle of Spion Kop, in which Churchill acted as a message courier, and saw action again in the Zulu Rebellion of 1906. He was made a sergeant-major and won three medals.¹ His rationale was that by participating in the wars, albeit as non-combatants, Indians would be in a better position to make political gains.

In 1904 he founded the weekly newspaper Indian Opinion and a settlement called Phoenix near Durban for community living and teaching. In 1906 he took a vow of chastity, aged 37. By this time, he had four children with his wife Kasturba. In 1910, he founded a second community near Johannesburg, called Tolstoy Farm.

His mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a nationalist leader, asked Gandhi to return to India to assist efforts for self-determination there. Gandhi left South Africa in 1914 and headed for India via the UK.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy was one of the various western and Asian influences on Gandhi.

Tarak Nath Das was an Indian nationalist who lived in Canada and the USA, editing an anti-colonial publication called Free Hindustan. He sent two editions and a letter to Tolstoy, who replied with his thoughts on how non-violent resistance could assist India in its aim for independence from Britain. The reply was published in Free Hindustan,² which Gandhi read and then wrote himself to Tolstoy. They corresponded for a year before Tolstoy died in 1910. Gandhi was particularly affected by Tolstoy’s work The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) which sets out his advocacy of pacificism and non-violent resistance, based largely on Tolstoy’s interpretation of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.³

John Ruskin’s essay Unto This Last (1862) captivated Gandhi with its anti-capitalist economics and inspired him to start his first community. American writer Henry David Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Civil Government (1849) convinced Gandhi of the validity of non-payment of taxes which support slavery or other forms of oppression.

The most important text for Gandhi was the Bhagavad Gita (the ‘Song of God’), an ancient Hindu scripture that is part of a larger Sanskrit epic poem called Mahabharata. The Gita is a dialogue between a prince and the deity Krishna. Although Gandhi was brought up in a devout Hindu household, it was not until he was in London that he was introduced to the text by theosophist* Henry Steel Olcott.

Another influence on Gandhi was the Jain poet and philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra whom Gandhi called ‘Kavi’ (‘the Poet’). Jainism is an ancient Indian religion which incorporates non-violence, commitment to truth, chastity (i.e. celibacy for monks and nuns, and faithfulness for spouses) and non-possessiveness (material and psychological).

Gandhi drew on various religious and secular worldviews, seeking to transcend any one belief system. However, he always identified as a Hindu. He admitted knowing little about Buddhism. He studied the Koran and appealed to Muslims to engage in a non-violent jihad (‘fight’) against oppression. He also read the Hebrew Bible but was not particularly keen on it. He empathised with the Jewish desire for a homeland but believed that it should only be brought about through non-violence.

* Theosophy was a mystic movement founded primarily by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian émigrée to the USA, in the late 1800s, drawing on ancient European philosophies, Buddhism, Hinduism and occultism.

Gandhi promoted army recruitment during World War I but gave limited backing to Britain during World War II.

Gandhi was en route to the UK by sea, intending to travel from there to India, when World War I was declared. Shortly after arrival, he proposed raising an Indian ambulance unit which was approved and mobilised, but he fell ill with pleurisy and could not treat the wounded himself. After nearly six months in London, he left for India without knowing what he would do there.

By 1918, Britain was desperate for recruits and extended its search in India from what it defined as ‘martial races’ (living mainly in the north-west) to others. The viceroy called Indian opinion leaders including Gandhi to a war conference, after which Gandhi became active in recruiting combatants. He travelled around Gujarat making speeches and writing recruitment materials. Unlike the support of other leaders, his was not conditional on promises about post-war progress towards self-rule.

This was a step further than his earlier recruitment drives in South Africa and the UK for non-combatants. In his leaflet Appeal for Enlistment, he said, ‘Voluntary enlistment is the right key to self-government, to say nothing of the manliness and broadmindedness it confers. […] We shall acquire that capacity for self-defence, the absence of which at present makes us unable to protect our women and children.’ He added, ‘He alone can practise ‘ahimsa‘ [doing no harm] who knows ‘himsa‘ [doing harm] not in the abstract but in fact’.⁴

At the beginning of World War II, many Indian National Congress leaders were perturbed by Viceroy Lord Linlithgow’s declaration that India was joining the war, without consulting them. Gandhi and others condemned Nazi Germany but made any additional support conditional on commitment to independence. When this commitment was not forthcoming, they launched the Quit India movement and were promptly arrested. Gandhi was detained from 1942 to 1944 in a palace belonging to Aga Khan III in Poona (now Pune) but was released early due to ill health. The others were not released until the end of the war. Meanwhile their detention had allowed Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s All-India Muslim League, which supported the war, to make significant political gains, a factor which contributed to the partition of India and Pakistan.

Churchill’s general dislike of Hinduism was mainly due to his identification of it with nationalist leaders’ elitism, the caste system and pacifism.

Ironically, given Gandhi’s apparent opposition to oppression, Churchill was outraged by what he saw as the oppressive behaviour and hypocrisy of the Indian nationalist leadership: ‘These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow countrymen whom they call “untouchable”.’⁵

A few points escaped the logic of his rhetoric. First, his main antagonist Gandhi was not a Brahmin, typically understood at the time to be the highest of four main Hindu classes (which exclude ‘untouchables’, i.e. Dalits and particular tribes), but was from the merchant Vaishya class, the third highest level. Second, although a Hindu social stratification system had been present for centuries, aspects of it had been reinforced by British authorities through codification from 1860 to 1920, resulting in reinforced ‘caste’ identities (more complex than the four or five tier system). Third, the nature of the relationship between Hinduism and the social stratification system is debatable, with some texts and doctrines being against it.

Gandhi’s reputation amongst Dalits has been mixed. He opposed their subjugation but campaigned against a 1932 proposal regarding a separate Dalit electorate, in opposition to their leader B.R. Ambedkar. Gandhi went on hunger strike and a compromise arrangement was made.

In his youth, Gandhi subscribed to a Victorian-era hierarchical view of races, as held by Churchill. According to biographer Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi in his twenties believed that ‘Europeans are the most civilized. Indians were almost as civilized, and Africans were uncivilized’.⁶ Although he dispensed with this later, he is still viewed suspiciously by some anti-racist activists for his early attitudes.

Churchill claimed that ‘The Hindus do not possess among their many virtues that of being a fighting race’.⁷ As a military man, he took this assertion to indicate a significant weakness which could result in Hindus being dominated in some circumstances by Muslims, who had a more militaristic history. Many Hindu traditions interpret ahimsa (doing no harm) as requiring pacifism, which Churchill saw as a threat to the British Empire in the case of war. However, other Hindu traditions have doctrines of military self-defence and just war, and the second highest of the four social categories, Kshatriya, is associated with warriorhood, so there is no consensus.

Churchill’s antipathy towards Gandhi is well known; less well known are the reservations about Gandhi of some of his other opponents and colleagues.

In 1906, the only ever meeting between Churchill and Gandhi was cordial enough, while Churchill was under-secretary of state for the colonies and Gandhi was petitioning UK authorities about Indian rights in South Africa. In 1931, however, after Gandhi had met India viceroy Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), Churchill wrote, ‘It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’⁸

‘Gandhi stands for the expulsion of Britain from India’, said Churchill. ‘Gandhi stands for the permanent exclusion of British trade from India. Gandhi stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India.’⁹ He believed that Gandhi’s saintly image belied his motives. Compounding this, his minimalist clothing was, to Churchill, insincere for an urban lawyer and disrespectful for formal meetings.

Churchill had modified his view somewhat by 1935: ‘Mr. Gandhi has gone up very high in my esteem since he stood up for the untouchables.’¹⁰ However, it declined again in World War II after the launch of Gandhi’s Quit India campaign during hostilities against Axis powers.

Some of Gandhi’s compatriots, including colleagues, were also sceptical about him. Some thought that his satyagraha campaigns were ineffective or counterproductive. Veteran politician Srinivasa Sastri called his use of hunger strikes ‘whitemail’.¹¹ In an international, modernising India, many disagreed with his isolationism and his anti-industrial, subsistence approach. Radical activists such as Subhas Chandra Bose disagreed with his non-violence, believing that he delayed India’s independence for many years. Some, including his assassin, thought that Gandhi had given in to Muslim pressure and blamed him for partition.

Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, wrote, ‘Often we discussed his fads and peculiarities and said, half humorously, that when Swaraj [self-rule] came these fads must not be encouraged’.¹²

Like Churchill with his son Randolph, Gandhi had a difficult relationship with his son Harilal.

Gandhi had four adult sons (another son died in infancy) and no daughters. They all became involved in nationalist activism and were jailed on numerous occasions. Harilal was the eldest, born in India when Gandhi was 16 and his wife Kasturba was 17, shortly before Gandhi travelled to England to become a barrister. Later, Harilal wished to do the same but his father prevented this on the basis that it would not help resistance to British rule. Despite Harilal’s passion for the independence movement, father and son had a personal conflict that was never resolved.

Contrary to custom, Harilal did not seek his father’s approval when he married. To Gandhi’s chagrin, he also had a business trading in foreign goods. He converted to Islam at age 48, causing his mother more stress than his father, but soon converted back to Hinduism. Gandhi was more concerned about Harilal’s lifestyle, particularly his drinking, which became alcoholism.

Letters from Gandhi to Harilal in 1935 revealed some of Gandhi’s distress. ‘You should know that your problem has become much more difficult for me than even our national freedom’, he wrote. ‘Please tell me if still you are interested in alcohol and debauchery. I wish that you better die rather than resort to alcohol in any manner.’¹⁴ Harilal was so dishevelled at Gandhi’s funeral that few recognised him. He died four months later from tuberculosis.

Gandhi’s second son, Manilal, remained in South Africa after Gandhi returned to India, editing the weekly newspaper Indian Opinion that Gandhi had started. He too had a complex relationship with his father, although less difficult than Halilal. Gandhi’s third son Ramdas moved to India and participated in his father’s protests but avoided his ascetic lifestyle. His fourth son Devdas was an editor for the Hindustan Times in India.

Gandhi had fifteen grandchildren. His numerous descendants are now mainly in India, South Africa and the USA. Former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were unrelated to him. Indira was the daughter of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and married Feroze Gandhi, a nationalist journalist and politician who had perhaps changed the spelling of his name from Ghandy to identify with his near-namesake. Rajiv was Indira’s elder son.

Gandhi’s extremist assassin accused him of betraying Hindus by favouring Muslims.

Gandhi stayed with the wealthy industrialist G.D. Birla in New Delhi for five months after independence, holding daily public prayer meetings in the late afternoon on the lawn of Birla’s large house. On 30 January 1948, he was about to start the meeting when a 30-year-old man in khaki, Nathuram Godse, stepped out of the crowd and shot him three times in the abdomen. Gandhi died half an hour later from blood loss.

At his trial, Godse gave a full description of his motives, centred on his view that Gandhi had given priority to Muslims over Hindus. He said that Gandhi’s latest fast-unto-death was in favour of Pakistan rather than India; that he was a ‘violent pacifist’ running a dictatorship; that he was the ‘Father of Pakistan’; this his proposal for the national language of India to be Hindustani (a mix of India’s Hindi and Pakistan’s Urdu) was deplorable; and that he had brought ‘rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus’.¹⁴

An assassination attempt 10 days earlier by Godse and his co-conspirators had failed when the person assigned to throw a grenade at Gandhi lost his nerve. After the trial for the successful assassination, Godse and another were executed and four others were given life imprisonment, including Godse’s brother Gopal.

‘Nathuram’ means ‘Ram with a nose ring’, Ram being a male name and a nose ring being a Hindu female decoration. His parents’ eldest three sons died in infancy but a daughter survived, leading the parents to believe there was a curse on their male children. They brought Nathuram up as a girl, with a nose ring, until his younger brother also survived infancy.

Gandhi was cremated by the Yamuna River at Raj Ghat, New Delhi, where there is now a memorial. His ashes were distributed to seven different locations, including being immersed in the sea off Bombay. Despite many tributes from world leaders, a message from Churchill was absent. By coincidence, Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January was the same date as that of Churchill’s burial seventeen years later.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Barrister, nationalist campaigner, politician, writer
Country	India
Career	Called to the bar, Inner Temple, London (1891). Legal practice, India (1891-93). Legal practice and social activism, South Africa (1893-1914). Founder, Natal Indian Congress (1894). President, Indian National Congress party (1924-25). First Indian satyagraha (1920-22). Jailed (1922-24). Salt March (1930). Gandhi–Irwin Pact (1931). Quit India campaign (1942). Jailed (1942-44). Independence negotiations and post-independence mediation (1944-48).
Born	1869 in Porbandar, Kathiawar (now Gujarat), western British India
Father	Karamchand Gandhi (1822-1885), senior government official; married four times; first three wives died; he died when Mohandas was 16; from the Vaishnava sect of the Vaishya caste
Mother	Putlibai (1839-1891); last of Karamchand’s four wives
Siblings	Youngest of four children: 1. Laxmidas (1860-1914), brother 2. Raliat (1862-1960), sister 3. Karsandas (1866-1913), brother 4. Mohandas Karamchand (1869-1948) Two older step-sisters from father’s first two marriages: 1. Muliben 2. Pankunvarben
Education	Rajkot High School, Rajkot, Gujarat; Samaldas College, Bhaunagar (now Bhavnagar) (incomplete); University College London (perhaps a brief English course); Inner Temple, London (law)
Spouses	Kasturbai (nee Kasturbai) Kapadia (1869-1944), m. 1883 until her death (62 years of marriage); merchant’s daughter; independence activist
Relationships
Children	Five sons: 1. Eldest son died in infancy 2. Harilal (1888-1948), independence activist; five children 3. Manilal (1892-1956), newspaper editor, activist; three children 4. Ramdas (1897-1969), activist; three children 5. Devdas (1900-1957), journalist, activist; four children
Died	1948 (aged 78); assassinated (shot)
Buried	Cremated at Raj Ghat, New Delhi by Yamuna River
Nicknames	Monia (by his mother); Mahatma (honorific; ‘great-souled’ or ‘venerable’); Bapu (‘daddy’) or Bapu-ji (‘ji’ indicating respect); Gandhi-ji; Father of the Nation
Height	5’4” (1.63 m)
Time magazine	Person of the Century runner-up to Albert Einstein, 1999. Man of the Year 1931. Front cover: 1947.

4. See also

Asian nationalists

• Aung San (Burma)
• Bose, Subhas Chandra (India)
• Jinnah, Mohamed Ali (Pakistan)

Bengal famine

• Aung San (Japanese invasion of Burma as a key factor)

Others associated with India

• Mountbatten, Louis

Churchill controversies

• Imperialism
• Race
• Religion

5. Further reading

Gandhi

• Gandhi, Rajmohan, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (University of California Press, 2008)
• Guha, Ramachandra, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)
• Wolpert, Stanley, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford Paperbacks (Oxford University Press, USA, 2002)

Gandhi in the UK and South Africa

• Desai, Ashwin, and Goolem Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford University Press, 2015)
• Guha, Ramachandra, Gandhi before India (Penguin Books Limited, 2014)

Gandhi and Churchill

• Herman, Arthur, Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Arrow, 2009)
• Tondon, Vishwanath, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill’, 2014

Gandhi and Jinnah

• Akbar, M.J., Gandhi’s Hinduism: The Struggle against Jinnah’s Islam (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
• Matthews, Roderick, Jinnah vs. Gandhi (Hachette India, 2012)

India partition

• (See Mohamed Ali Jinnah)

6. References

1 Queen’s South Africa Medal (Boer War 1899-1902); Natal Rebellion 1906 medal; Kaisar-i-Hind Medal 1915 (returned in 1920 as a protest). See Peter Dickens, ‘Gandhi Was a Man ó Peace, but He Was Also a Man ó War!’, The Observation Post, 2017

2 The reply was later published separately: see Leo Tolstoy, ‘A Letter to a Hindu’, Project Gutenberg, 1909.

3 Matthew 5:38-42 in the Bible: ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” ³⁹But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. ⁴⁰And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. ⁴¹And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. ⁴²Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.’ (New King James version)

4 Manimugdha S. Sharma, ‘Meet Sergeant Major Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’, Times of India, 2014.

5 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Our Duty in India’, International Churchill Society, 1931.

6 Lauren Frayer, ‘Gandhi Is Deeply Revered, But His Attitudes On Race And Sex Are Under Scrutiny’, NPR, 2019. See Guha in ‘Further reading’; also Desai and Vahed.

7 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Our Duty in India’.

8 Winston Churchill, Churchill: The Power of Words : His Remarkable Life Recounted Through His Writings and Speeches : 200 Readings, ed. by Martin Gilbert (London: Bantam, 2012), p. 185. Gandhi was in fact an Inner Temple, not Middle Temple, barrister. A fakir is normally understood to be a Sufi Muslim ascetic but has sometimes also been used to refer to Hindu ascetics.

9 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Our Duty in India’.

10 Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Arrow, 2009), p. 400.

11 Judith M. Brown, ‘Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2011).

12 J. Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 73.

13 Euan Stretch, ‘Gandhi Letters Tell Tale of Strained Relationship with “debauched” Son’, Mirror, 2014.

14 FPJ Web Desk, ‘Why I Killed Gandhi: Godse’s Final Address’, Free Press Journal, 2019.