From Mohandas to Mahatma

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a small princely state on the Kathiawar coast. He was the youngest child of Karamchand Gandhi and his fourth wife, Putlibai.

His home combined Vaishnava devotion with the strong Jain influence of western India: vegetarianism, fasting, tolerance and the duty to avoid injury. Stories of the truthful king Harishchandra and the devoted son Shravana stayed with him throughout his life.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in present-day Gujarat. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, served as the diwan (chief minister) of Porbandar state, and his mother, Putlibai, was a deeply religious woman whose devotion to prayer and fasting left a lifelong mark on her son.

Young Mohandas was a shy, average student. In May 1883, at the age of 13, he was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji — Kasturba — in an arranged child marriage, as was customary then. They would remain partners for 62 years and have four sons: Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas.

A story that shaped him forever: he once stole a piece of gold to clear a brother's debt, then confessed to his father in a written note, begging forgiveness without demanding exemption from punishment. His father wept and forgave him. Gandhi later called this his first lesson in the power of truthful confession — the seed of satyagraha.

After his father's death, Gandhi sailed to London in September 1888 to study law at Inner Temple, promising his mother he would abstain from meat, wine and women. In London he joined the Vegetarian Society, read the Bhagavad Gita for the first time (in English translation), studied the Bible and the Quran, and encountered ideas of non-violence from Tolstoy and the Theosophists.

He was called to the bar in June 1891 and returned to India, but his attempt to establish a law practice in Bombay and Rajkot largely failed — he was too shy to argue cases in court.

Returning to India after his mother's death, Gandhi struggled to build a legal practice. Shyness silenced him in his first Bombay case, and work drafting petitions in Rajkot ended after conflict with a British official.

In 1893 the firm Dada Abdulla & Co. offered him a year's legal work in Natal. The temporary assignment became a twenty-one-year political education in South Africa.

In 1893 Gandhi accepted a one-year contract with an Indian firm in Natal, South Africa. A week after arriving, he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave a first-class compartment despite holding a valid ticket — because of his skin colour. He spent a freezing night in the station and resolved to fight the disease of colour prejudice rather than flee it.

He stayed 21 years. He founded the Natal Indian Congress (1894), served as a stretcher-bearer in the Boer War, and in 1906 organised the first satyagraha campaign against the Transvaal 'Black Act' requiring Indians to register. He coined the word satyagraha — satya (truth) + agraha (firmness) — a force born of truth and love, not violence.

He established the Phoenix Settlement (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910), communities of simple, self-reliant living. After years of imprisonment and protest, the 1914 Gandhi-Smuts Agreement recognised Indian marriages and abolished the poll tax on indentured Indians. When Gandhi left South Africa in July 1914, his method of non-violent resistance was fully formed.

Gandhi returned to India on 9 January 1915 (now celebrated as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas). On his guru Gopal Krishna Gokhale's advice, he spent a year travelling India without speaking publicly, learning the condition of his own people. He founded the Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad in 1917.

His first great Indian campaigns were local and won through satyagraha: Champaran (1917) for indigo farmers forced to grow indigo on a share of their land; the Ahmedabad mill strike (1918), where he undertook his first hunger strike; and Kheda (1918), where peasants were freed from paying taxes during famine.

After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919, when British troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in Amritsar, Gandhi called the nationwide Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22). He returned his Kaiser-i-Hind medal, led the boycott of foreign cloth, courts and schools, and was arrested in 1922, pleading guilty to sedition: 'Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.'

After suspending Non-Cooperation following the Chauri Chaura killings, Gandhi was tried for sedition in March 1922 and sentenced to six years. He was released in 1924 after an appendicitis operation.

He concentrated on khadi, village industries, sanitation, Hindu-Muslim unity and ending untouchability. By the Lahore Congress of 1929, the national movement had adopted complete independence—purna swaraj—as its goal.

On 12 March 1930, the 60-year-old Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram with 78 followers to walk 388 km to the sea at Dandi. On 6 April he picked up a handful of natural salt — breaking the British salt monopoly law. Millions followed; around 60,000 were jailed. The Salt March made independence inevitable in the world's imagination.

He attended the Second Round Table Conference in London (1931), negotiated the Poona Pact (1932) with Dr B. R. Ambedkar after his fast against separate electorates for the 'Depressed Classes' — whom he called Harijans, children of God — and led the Quit India Movement of 1942 with the call 'Do or Die'. He spent 1942–44 imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace, where Kasturba died in his arms in February 1944.

On 15 August 1947, India became free. But Gandhi was not in Delhi celebrating — he was in Calcutta, fasting to stop Hindu-Muslim riots, heartbroken by Partition.

As communal violence spread, Gandhi walked through Noakhali in eastern Bengal, visited riot-stricken Bihar and stayed in Calcutta around independence. He refused to celebrate on 15 August 1947 while India and Pakistan were born amid displacement and killing.

In September 1947 his Calcutta fast helped secure a pledge of peace. His final fast in Delhi in January 1948 pressed Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders to protect minorities and restore places of worship. He ended it when they signed a joint assurance.

On 30 January 1948, as Gandhi walked to his evening prayer meeting at Birla House, New Delhi, Nathuram Godse fired three bullets into his chest at point-blank range. Gandhi died with the words 'Hey Ram' on his lips. He was 78.

Albert Einstein said of him: 'Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.' His cremation at Rajghat was attended by over a million mourners; the site is now India's most visited memorial.