GANDHI AND INDIA

.Mahatma Gandhi’s dying cry, “He Ram!” is

carved on the onyx stone memorializing the “Step of

Peace”—Shanti Ghat—at which his remains were cremated

on the bank of the River Yamuna in Delhi.

eighteenyear-

old Mohan steamed from Bombay to Southampton

in the fall of 1888, eager to “see and know”

Gandhi met Theosophy’s Russian founder, Madame

Blavatsky, in London, as well as her charismatic disciple,

Annie Besant, who later moved to Madras (Chennai) as

president of the Theosophical Society there

Besant tried very hard to convert

Gandhi to Theosophy, but he remained as impervious

Gandhi left London and sailed home to Bombay

(Mumbai) on 12 June 1891. His mother died while he was

abroad, but he had remained faithful to her vows

He could find no

acceptable work in India, so he took on a case in South

Africa, though it paid little and obliged him to leave his

young family again, sailing from Bombayto represent a wealthy Gujarati Muslim in a family dispute

fought to remove the invidious poll tax charged to every

Indian. On the eve of his final departure from South

Africa in 1914, Gandhi reached what he had believed to

be a firm agreement with General Jan Smuts to remove

that tax, but soon after he left it was reintroduced

He established his first

ashram (rural community) in Durban, inspired by John

Ruskin’s and Robert Owen’s handicrafts and Utopian

ideals. Gandhi was also influenced by his careful reading

of the Bible at this time, as of the Gı¯ta¯, and of John Bunyan’s

Pilgrim’s Progress and Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of

God Is within You. His ashram was named Tolstoy Farm.

Sarvodaya—was the ultimate

goal of Gandhi’s rural community movement,

In 1906 Gandhi launched his first nonviolent noncooperation

movement in Johannesburg, against the British

colonial government’s Asiatic Ordinance Bill, which would

have required every Indian to register and to be fingerprinted.

He called that “Black Act” criminal,

Jawaharlal Nehru, later defined

Gandhi’s greatest message to his nation as “Forget fear!”

Gandhi returned

to India, joining Gopal Krishna Gokhale at his Servants

of India Society in Pune. had presided over India’s National Congress in 1905,

inspiring Gandhi to join the Congress. He was hailed by

Gandhi as “my political guru” (divine teacher).

Gandhi

also admired Pune’s revolutionary Hindu nationalist

leader, Lokamanya (Beloved of the People) Bal Gangadhar

Tilak, launching his first nationwide satyagraha the

day Tilak died, 1 August 1920.

established his first Indian ashram at Sabarmati, on the

outskirts of Gujarat’s capital, Ahmedabad

Patel appealed to

Gandhi to join his struggle on behalf of Gujarat’s faminewracked

peasants in the spring of 1918, after which the

Sardar became a devout disciple of the Mahatma. The

failure of India’s annual monsoon rains conspired with

British wartime shipping of India’s meager grain reserves

to troops on the Western Front to bring famine to

Gujarat’s Kheda district.

Chauri

Chaura. “I have committed a Himalayan blunder!”

Mahatma Gandhi cried, calling a halt to satyagraha.

In 1932, when British prime minister J. Ramsay

MacDonald classified “untouchables” as “separate”

from “upper caste Hindus,” awarding them a separate

bloc of electoral seats on enlarged councils, as the British

had earlier done with India’s Muslims, Gandhi launched

a fast-unto-death,

Albert

Einstein wrote, memorializing Mahatma Gandhi, “he

was the only statesman who represented that higher conception

of human relations in the political sphere to

which we must aspire with all our power.”