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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 2, 1869
Porbandar, Gujarat, India
157 years ago
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, born on October 2, 1869, the leader of the Indian independence movement and the most influential advocate of nonviolent resistance in modern history.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar in western India, the son of a local chief minister. He was a timid child and an unremarkable student. Sent to London at eighteen to study law, he qualified as a barrister, but back in India he found himself too nervous to cross-examine a witness in his first case. In 1893 he accepted a one-year contract with an Indian firm in South Africa, mostly for want of better options.
South Africa remade him. Within days of arriving, he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave a first-class compartment reserved for white passengers. He stayed in the country for twenty-one years, organizing the Indian community against discriminatory laws and developing the method he called satyagraha, a term usually translated as truth force: disciplined, open, nonviolent refusal to cooperate with injustice, with a willingness to accept the punishment that followed.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Salt March of 1930, Gandhi's 240-mile walk to the sea to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly, the most famous single act of civil disobedience in the independence struggle.
Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and within a few years had turned the Indian National Congress from a debating society of lawyers into a mass movement. He wore homespun cloth, lived in simple ashrams, and asked Indians of every class to boycott British goods, courts, and schools. He was jailed repeatedly. He called off campaigns when they turned violent, to the frustration of many allies, because he held that the means of a struggle shape the country that results.
His most effective stroke came in 1930. British law made it illegal for Indians to collect or sell salt, a tax that touched even the poorest household. On March 12, Gandhi, then sixty, set out on foot from his ashram at Sabarmati with a few dozen followers. Twenty-four days and about 240 miles later, with a crowd of thousands and the world's press in tow, he reached the shore at Dandi and picked up a lump of natural salt. Tens of thousands of Indians were arrested in the wave of lawbreaking that followed, and British authority never quite recovered its moral footing.
Independence came in August 1947, but it came with the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan and with communal violence that killed hundreds of thousands. Gandhi spent that period walking through riot-torn districts and fasting to stop the killing. On January 30, 1948, a Hindu nationalist who blamed him for being too conciliatory toward Muslims shot him dead at a prayer meeting in Delhi. He was seventy-eight. India marks his birthday as a national holiday, and the United Nations observes it as the International Day of Non-Violence.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Gandhi showed that organized nonviolence could defeat a major power. His campaigns made British rule in India politically and morally unsustainable, and they did so without an army. The example changed what colonized and oppressed peoples believed was possible.
His method traveled. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela in his early career, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and many others studied Gandhi's campaigns and adapted his tactics to their own struggles.
His legacy remains argued over, which is a sign of its weight. Critics point to his early views on race in South Africa, his positions on caste, and the failure to prevent partition. Admirers and detractors alike still measure political movements against the standard he set.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 2, 1869, a boy was born in a small Gujarati port who would grow into a nervous lawyer, then into the leader of the largest anticolonial movement in history. He never held office or commanded a soldier. A handful of salt on a beach did more damage to the British Empire than any battle.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“My life is my message.”
— Mohandas Gandhi, in reply to a request for a message, as commonly reported
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Mohandas Gandhi, his years in South Africa, the Salt March, the idea of satyagraha, and the independence and partition of India?
