Mahatma Gandhi Ji Biography

Mahatma Gandhi Ji Biography

Mahatma Gandhi full name is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He is honored as the title of “Mahatma” Mahatma (Sanskrit: "great-souled", "venerable"), throughout the world. He is a picture towards Independence which claimed the depletion of British rule in India.

    

   

Mahatama Gandhi 

                                                                             

 Mahatma Gandhi was born

Mahatma Gandhi was born on 2nd October 1869, His birthday, popularly known as ‘Gandhi Jayanti’ is celebrated as a National Holiday in India and on 15 June 2007, The United Nations General Assembly declared this day to be the International Day of Non-Violence across the globe.

 Gandhi had a natural love for 'truth' and 'duty'. With his complete dedication and confidence, this man had freed India from the British Rule and proved the world that freedom can be achieved with non-violence. Even today his teachings are encouraged to stay away from violence and find peaceful solutions to conflicts. For Gandhi, Truth, and Non-violence was his entire philosophy of life.

Gandhi began his activism as an Indian immigrant in South Africa in the early 1900s, and in the years following World War I became the leading figure in India’s struggle to gain independence from Great Britain. Known for his ascetic lifestyle–he often dressed only in a loincloth and shawl–and devout Hindu faith, Gandhi was imprisoned several times during his pursuit of non-cooperation, and undertook a number of hunger strikes to protest the oppression of India’s poorest classes, among other injustices. After Partition in 1947, he continued to work toward peace between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi was shot to death in Delhi in January 1948 by a Hindu fundamentalist.

Mahatma Gandhi

                                                      

Mahatma Gandhi Date of Birth

MahatmaGandhi was born on dated October 2, 1869, raised in a Hindu family in Porbander, Gujarat(a state of India). The name of his Father was ‘Karamchand Gandhi’ and the name of his mother was ‘Putlibai Gandhi’. His father was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar. Mahatma Gandhi was the fourth and last child of them. At the age of 19, Mohandas left home to study law in London at the Inner Temple, one of the city’s four law colleges. Upon returning to India in mid-1891, he set up a law practice in Bombay but met with little success. He soon accepted a position with an Indian firm that sent him to its office in South Africa. Along with his wife, Kasturba, and their children, Gandhi remained in South Africa for nearly 20 years.

In the famous Salt March popularly known as “Dandi March” of April-May 1930, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmadabad to the Arabian Sea. The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself.

Gandhi was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian immigrant in South Africa. When a European magistrate in Durban asked him to take off his turban, he refused and left the courtroom. On a train voyage to Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and beaten up by a white stagecoach driver after refusing to give up his seat for a European passenger. That train journey served as a turning point for Gandhi, and he soon began developing and teaching the concept of Satyagraha (“truth and firmness”), or passive resistance, as a way of non-cooperation with authorities.
                                                                     

The Birth of Passive Resistance

In 1906, after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years. During its final phase in 1913, hundreds of Indians living in South Africa, including women went to jail, and thousands of striking Indian miners were imprisoned, flogged and even shot. Finally, under pressure from the British and Indian governments, the government of South Africa accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts, which included important concessions such as the recognition of Indian marriages and the abolition of the existing poll tax for Indians.

In July 1914, Gandhi left South Africa to return to India. He supported the British war effort in World War I but remained critical of colonial authorities for measures he felt were unjust. In 1919, Gandhi launched an organized campaign of passive resistance in response to Parliament’s passage of the Rowlatt Acts, which gave colonial authorities emergency powers to suppress subversive activities. He backed off after violence broke out–including the massacre by British-led soldiers of some 400 Indians attending a meeting at Amritsar–but only temporarily, and by 1920 he was the most visible figure in the movement for Indian independence.

Nonviolence Leadership towards Free India

As part of his nonviolent non-cooperation campaign for home rule, Gandhi stressed the importance of economic independence for India. He particularly advocated the manufacture of khaddar or homespun cloth, in order to replace imported textiles from Britain. Gandhi’s eloquence and embrace of an ascetic lifestyle based on prayer, fasting, and meditation earned him the reverence of his followers, who called him Mahatma (Sanskrit for “the great-souled one”). Invested with all the authority of the Indian NationalCongress (INC or Congress Party), Gandhi turned the independence movement into a massive organization, leading boycotts of British manufacturers and institutions representing British influence in India, including legislatures and schools.

After sporadic violence broke out, Gandhi announced the end of the resistance movement, to the dismay of his followers. British authorities arrested Gandhi in March 1922 and tried him for sedition; he was sentenced to six years in prison but was released in 1924 after undergoing an operation for appendicitis. He refrained from active participation in politics for the next several years, but in 1930 launched a new civil disobedience campaign against the colonial government’s tax on salt, which greatly affected Indian’s poorest citizens.

A Divided Movement

In 1931, after British authorities made some concessions, Gandhi again called off the resistance movement and agreed to represent the Congress Party at the Round Table Conference in London. Meanwhile, some of his party colleagues–particularly Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a leading voice for India’s Muslim minority–grew frustrated with Gandhi’s methods, and what they saw as a lack of concrete gains. Arrested upon his return by a newly aggressive colonial government, Gandhi began a series of hunger strikes in protest of the treatment of India’s so-called “untouchables” (the poorer classes), whom he renamed Harijans, or “children of God.” The fasting caused an uproar among his followers and resulted in swift reforms by the Hindu community and the government.

In 1934, Gandhi announced his retirement from politics in, as well as his resignation from the Congress Party, in order to concentrate his efforts on working within rural communities. Drawn back into the political fray by the outbreak of World War II, Gandhi again took control of the INC, demanding a British withdrawal from India in return for Indian cooperation with the war effort. Instead, British forces imprisoned the entire Congress leadership, bringing Anglo-Indian relations to a new low point. Gandhi, who had taken a leading role in spearheading the campaign for independence from Britain, hailed the partition of the sub-continent into the separate independent states of India and Pakistan in August 1947 as ‘the noblest act of the British nation’. He was, though, horrified by the violence that broke out between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs; and the eviction of thousands from their homes in the run-up to Independence Day, 15 August 1947, and undertook a fast to the death, a tactic he had employed before. It was the born of new India, India breathes its Independence.

The Partition of Nation and Death of Gandhi

After the Labor Party took power in Britain in 1947, negotiations over Indian home rule began between the British, the Congress Party and the Muslim League (now led by Jinnah). Later that year, Britain granted India its independence but split the country into two dominions: India and Pakistan. Gandhi strongly opposed Partition, but he agreed to it in hopes that after independence Hindus and Muslims could achieve peace internally. Amid the massive riots that followed Partition, Gandhi urged Hindus and Muslims to live peacefully together and undertook a hunger strike until riots in Calcutta ceased.

In January 1948, Gandhi carried out yet another fast, this time to bring about peace in the city of Delhi. On January 30, 12 days after that fast ended, Gandhi was on his way to an evening prayer meeting in Delhi when he was shot to death by ‘Nathuram Godse’, a Hindu fanatic enraged by Mahatma’s efforts to negotiate with Jinnah and other Muslims. The next day, around 1 million people followed the procession as Gandhi’s body was carried in the state through the streets of the city and cremated on the banks of the holy Yamuna River. The Birla House site where Gandhi was assassinated is now a memorial called ‘Gandhi Smriti’. The place near Yamuna River where he was cremated is the ‘Raj Ghat Memorial’ in New Delhi. A black marble platform, it bears the epigraph "He Ram" (Hey Raam). These are widely believed to be Gandhi's last words after he was shot, though the veracity of this statement has been disputed.

Legacy

It was Gandhi who had made the independence struggle a mass movement or rather a movement of the people. At the time of Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915, participation in the independence struggle was limited. Only the upper strata of the society took part. Because the vast majority was illiterate and the media was not strong i.e no television, radios were rare and newspapers couldn't help the illiterate. Gandhi traveled throughout India and mobilized masses. The common man saw the spirit and soul of India in him which lead to freedom with the verdict of nonviolence. He is thus termed as the father of Nation of Independent India (the largest democratic country in the world).

Mahatma Gandhi University

Many universities built by the name of Mahatma Gandhi indifferent state and city of India some famous universities listed below.

Mahatma Gandhi University, New Delhi.

Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology, UP.

Famous Speeches Mahatma Gandhi

 Banaras Hindu University Speech (4 February, 1916)

“If we are to receive self-government, we shall have to take it… freedom-loving as it (British Empire) is, it will not be a party to give freedom to a people who will not take it themselves.”2. Dandi March Speech (11 March 1930)

“We have resolved to utilize all our resources in the pursuit of an exclusively nonviolent struggle. Let no one commit a wrong in anger.”

3. Round Table Conference Speech, (30 November 1931)

“I dare to say, it (the strife between Hindus and Muslims in India) is coeval with the British Advent, and immediately this relationship, the unfortunate, artificial, unnatural relationship between Great Britain and India is transformed into a natural relationship when it becomes, if it does become, a voluntary partnership to be given up, to be dissolved at the will of either party, when it becomes that you will find that Hindus, Mussalmans, Sikhs, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Christians, Untouchable, will all live together as one man.”

4. The ‘Quit India’ Speech (8 August 1942)

“I believe that in the history of the world, there has not been a more genuinely democratic struggle for freedom than ours.”

5. Speech before His Final Fast (12 January 1948)

“I yearn for heart friendship between the Hindus, the Sikhs, and the Muslims. It subsisted between them the other day. Today it is non-existent. It is a state that no Indian patriot worthy of the name can contemplate with equanimity.”

 Mahatma Gandhi Famous Quotes

Mahatma Gandhi endeavored for endless teachings to the nation. The below mentioned are few highly inspirational quotes for well being:

1. The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

2. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

3. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

4. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong

5. You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

6. Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

7. A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks he becomes

8. Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
9. The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.

10. It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

11. Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

12. In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

13. No one can hurt me without my permission.

14. Where there is love there is life.

15. All compromise is based on giving and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals,
any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all given and no take.

16. Self-respect knows no considerations.

17. My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realizing Him.

18. The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

19. Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.

20. An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.