Another Look at Mahatma Gandhi

Many myths abound about Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand called Mahatma”Great Souled”) Gandhi (1869-1948).

He wasn’t born into a poor Indian family. His father was dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in Gujarat in western India under British suzerainty. He became dewan of Rajkot.

He was a student and married at the age of 13. He also defied his repressive environment by professed atheism, beef smoking, eating, and petty thieving.

Until the age of 18 He spoke hardly any English. His speech was Gujarati.

He wanted to become a doctor – a surgeon, more exactly. His family compelled his to examine legislation.

His political activity was a part of the London Vegetarian Society’s executive director.

Since he could not find function in 13, he went to South Africa. He was a lawyer that is poor, in both senses of this word. He suffered from stage fright.

The”Encyclopedia Britannica” explains his earliest days :

“Africa was going to introduce to Gandhi challenges and opportunities he could hardly have conceived. In an Durban court, the European magistrate asked him to remove his turban; he left the courtroom and refused.

A few days after, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown from a first-class railway compartment and left handed and brooding at Pietermaritzburg Station; at the further course of this trip he was beaten up from the white driver of a stagecoach because he would not travel to the footboard to make room for a passengerand he was barred from resorts booked”for Europeans only.” These humiliations were the everyday lot of Indian traders and labourers in Natal who’d discovered to pocket them with exactly the exact identical resignation by which they pocketed their meagre earnings.”

When he read about a statement to deprive the Indians of the right to vote he was about to sail to London. He decided to stay. It is in Johannesburg, South Africa his initial civil disobedience (“Satyagraha”) campaign was staged – not in India.

Gandhi’s life was risk many times. He was lynched at Durban as soon as January 1897. He was assassinated in 1948.

He wasn’t a pacifist. Nor was he anti-British. He also organized a volunteer corps of 11,000 Indians to defend the British colony of Natal, when the Boer war broke out.