Life of Gandhi: Unheard Stories
- Fathima Ismail
- Oct 2, 2021
- 7 min read
In India, Gandhi has always been treated as one of the greatest visionaries that this world has ever produced. No other day can be better than his birthday, October 2nd to shed light on the various incidents throughout his lifetime that make us realise that he was after all a flawed human being, just like us.
Gandhi's childhood, education and his marriage with Kasturbai Gokuldas Kapadia:
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born to a Hindu Merchant family on 2nd October 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, India. He was the last child of his father, Karamchand Gandhi, and his father's fourth wife Putlibai. In 1883, Gandhi got married to Kasturbai at a very young age of thirteen, but it was not early by the standards of Gujarat at that time. They had four sons together.
In September 1888, He left for England and he spent three years in London to pursue a degree in law. After successfully completing his degree, he got enrolled in the London High Court, but later that year, he left for India. He attempted to practice law in India for the next two years, but as he went on, he found that he lacked both knowledge of Indian law and self-confidence at trial, hence he returned to Porbandar.
Gandhi in South Africa:
When he was about to give up on his profession as a lawyer, Gandhi was hired by Dada Abdullah Jhaveri, a merchant of an Indian business firm of Transvaal (at present, Gauteng) to serve as a legal counsel to Dada Abdullah. Within weeks of his arrival in Durban, Dada Abdullah asked him to travel to Pretoria to settle a commercial dispute.
During his rail trip, he was thrown out of the train by the authorities despite carrying a first-class ticket as a white man complained about sharing the compartment with him, since 'coolies' (a racist term for Indians) and non-whites were not permitted in first-class compartments. The humiliation that he went through that day led him to form The Natal Indian Congress on 22 August 1894, and this marked the birth of the first permanent political organisation to strive to maintain and protect the rights of Indians in South Africa.
In no time, Gandhi was able to establish himself as the political leader of the South African Indian community by 1896. He achieved his greatest professional success in South Africa by this time.
During his resistance movements in South Africa, he had no grudges or hatred in his heart against his opponents. Instead, he was always ready to help them when they were in distress. The rare combination of his capacity to love his enemies and his readiness to resist wrong never failed to baffle his opponents and they were unable to resist themselves from admiring his unique and great qualities.
Through these many years in South Africa, he was specifically challenging White arrogance and was resisting inequality and injustice towards Indians, but he wasn't doing so by placing equality for all. He believed that the South African Indian community is superior to African Natives.
There are a lot of instances that prove this and they are too hard to ignore. Gandhi used to call Black Africans Native people as Kaffirs, a derogatory term, for a larger part of his stay in the country. He also said that black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."
He even demanded for a separate entrance for Indians at the Durban post office. He objected that Indians were classed with the natives of South Africa. In 1904, he complained to the health council of Johannesburg to "withdraw Kaffirs" from the "Coolie Location", an unsanitary slum where a large number of African Natives lived along with Indian people. He even said - "to be placed on the same level with the Natives seemed too much to put up with.”
Gandhi's biographer and grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, says - "the younger Gandhi arrived in South Africa as a 24-year-old briefless lawyer and he was undoubtedly, at times, ignorant and prejudiced about South African black people". He believes that Gandhi's struggle for Indian rights in South Africa also paved the way for the struggle of black rights.
He says, "Gandhi too was an imperfect human being, but the imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots".
Ramachandran Guha, Gandhi's biographer, says - "Gandhi was a racist early in his life, However, he outgrew his racism quite decisively, and for most of his life as a public figure, he was an anti-racist, talking for an end to discrimination of all kinds."
Gandhi had started off as a racist, but his public views had drastically changed by the time he became the face of India's Freedom Movement. Even the greatest men are flawed and Gandhi was possibly no exception.
His vow of brahmacharya, his experiments with celibacy and his sexism:
In 1906, he took a vow of brahmacharya, which is normally referred to as chastity, at the age of 38. He thought that his family and personal life was stopping him from using his full potential as a public advocate, and he believed that by embracing poverty and chastity, he could give best service to humanity. Gandhi also believed that taking the vow of brahmacharya helped him to come up with the concept of Satyagraha in late 1906. It was easy for him to embrace poverty. But it wasn't the same case with chastity.
So as he went along, he started creating weird complex rules, and one of them was - to engage himself in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters and behaviours and still say that he was chaste. And as he grew older, he had women in his bed, to stay engaged in his "experiments" of abstaining himself from sexual activities.
Since such behaviour was not an accepted practice of Brahmacharya, he reinvented the concept of being a Brahmachari and described it as: One that could do whatever he wished, as long as there was no apparent "lustful intention". He had effectively redefined the concept of chastity according to his personal practices and rules.
Gandhi was widely criticised by family members and politicians for his behaviour. He was so obsessed with his own celibacy that, in his late 70s, he slept in the same bed with his grandniece when she was in her late teens to test his willpower to abstain from sexual activities.
A lot of material regarding his sexism was known during his lifetime, but after his death, it either got distorted or suppressed during the process of making Gandhi the "Father of the Nation". One such incident was his refusal to treat his wife with western medicine for pneumonia, which eventually caused her death, but his readiness to take a quinine shot when he caught malaria himself.
Gandhi's sexism was a blackmark on his reputation. But after his death, all of this was ignored. As the time passed by, the Indian politicians efficiently covered this blackhole of Gandhi's life.
His return to India:
He sailed to India in January 1915, almost after 2 decades of living abroad and mostly in South Africa. As the Historian Chandran Devanesan remarked, South Africa was "The making of the Mahatma".
By the time he reached India, he was already a national hero. The India he came back to in 1915 was rather different from the one that he left in 1893. The country was far more active in its political sense. And seeing all this, Gandhi was eager to begin reforms in India. But on his friend Gokhale's advice, he spent a year travelling around British India to acquaint himself with the people and their tribulations.
In an attempt to travel more anonymously, he started wearing a dhoti (loincloth) and sandals during this journey. He would always add a shawl to his outfit. This became his wardrobe for the rest of his life. During this year, he founded a communal settlement in Ahmedabad and named it as the Sabarmati Ashram. He spent the next sixteen years of his life in this Ashram along with his family.
Gandhi's assassination:
On 30th January, 1948 the most famous apostle of non-violence himself met a violent end as he was murdered by a Hindu fanatic Nathuram Godse.
Gandhi fought a lifelong battle for a free and united India. He trusted that "the worst is over", that Indians would henceforth work collectively for the "equality of all classes and creeds, never the domination and superiority of the major community over a minor, however insignificant it may be in numbers or influence".
He soon realised that the freedom he had struggled for so long had come at an unacceptable price, with a nation divided and Hindus and Muslims at each other's throats.
Violence broke out between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and a lot of bloodshed was happening around the country because of the communal riots.
On 20th January 1948, a group of Hindu fanatics set off a bomb some yards from him, but it did no harm. It was one of the first attempts on Gandhi’s life, but he said: "If I am to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips."
On the evening of January 30 1948, around 5p.m, Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting in New Delhi. He was frail from fasting. As he raised his hands to greet the crowd that was waiting, a young Hindutva fanatic from Pune, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, forced his way forward and shot him three times at point-blank range in the stomach and chest, aimed at the heart. Almost as if he was welcoming his murderer, Gandhi fell to the ground, mortally wounded. His lips uttered "Ram Ram". There was no attempt to call a doctor or get him to hospital in all the hustle-bustle, and he passed away within half an hour.
Nathuram Godse tried to shoot himself but he failed. He was quickly apprehended after Gandhi’s murder and on 15th November 1949, he and a co-conspirator were hanged for their crimes.
After his death, the then Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru announced:
"The father of the nation is no more. Now that the light has gone out of our lives, I don't quite know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader is no more."
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Credits:
Written by Fathima Ismail
Edited by Mehran Saquib
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Sources and References:
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