Mahatma Gandhi: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · The Nervous Student

Gujarat, an early marriage and a law degree in London

1869 – 1893 · Porbandar · London · Bombay

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat where his father served as chief minister to the local ruler. His mother Putlibai was devoutly religious, and the household absorbed Jain ideas current in Gujarat — above all *ahimsa*, non-injury to living things, and the view that truth has many sides.

He was married at thirteen, as was customary, to Kasturba, also thirteen. In his autobiography he wrote with real shame about the demands he made on her and about being at his father's bedside less attentively than he should have been.

In 1888 he sailed to London to study law at the Inner Temple, promising his mother he would avoid meat, alcohol and women. He was intensely shy — he once wrote out a speech and could not deliver it — and coped by joining the Vegetarian Society, which unexpectedly gave him a political education among English radicals. It was in London, in an English translation, that he first read the *Bhagavad Gita* properly, along with the Sermon on the Mount, and began the lifelong practice of taking ethical instruction from several traditions at once.

He qualified in 1891, returned to India, and failed. He was too nervous to cross-examine witnesses and could not build a practice. In 1893 he accepted a one-year contract with an Indian firm in South Africa, largely because nothing better was available.

Why this matters

Gandhi's failure as a conventional lawyer matters: the method he later developed was built by someone with no aptitude for the ordinary practice of confrontation.

You have met the young man before the method. What would you ask him?

Ask Gandhi

• “What did your mother's religion give you that you kept?”
• “How do you look back on being married at thirteen?”
• “What did London teach you that India could not?”
• “Why did you first read the Gita in English?”
• “Why did you fail as a lawyer in Bombay?”

Chapter 2 · Twenty-One Years in South Africa

Where satyagraha was invented — and where his views on race began

1893 – 1915 · Pietermaritzburg · Durban · Johannesburg

Within days of arriving, Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage with a valid ticket. He spent the night on the platform deciding whether to go home or to stay and fight. He stayed for twenty-one years.

In South Africa he built the method he called *satyagraha*, usually translated as truth-force or soul-force. Its principles: refuse to obey an unjust law openly rather than secretly; accept the legal penalty without resistance; never injure the opponent, whose conversion rather than defeat is the aim; and keep the campaign disciplined, because violence hands the state its justification. The great campaigns were against the Asiatic Registration Act of 1906, which required Indians to be fingerprinted and carry passes, and against a court ruling invalidating non-Christian marriages. Thousands, including women workers, courted arrest; Gandhi was imprisoned repeatedly.

He founded communal settlements, Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm, where property was shared and manual labour compulsory, influenced by Ruskin's *Unto This Last*, Tolstoy's Christian anarchism and Thoreau on civil disobedience.

This period also contains material his admirers often omit. In his early South African years he argued for Indian rights partly on the grounds that Indians should not be classed with Black Africans, and used contemptuous language about them in print. His views changed substantially over his life, and by the 1930s and 1940s he was speaking of a shared struggle against racial domination — but the early record is documented and has been raised forcefully by South African and African critics.

Why this matters

Satyagraha was developed and tested over two decades in South Africa before it was ever used in India — it was an experimental method, not a moral intuition.

You have the method being built. What would you ask him?

Ask Gandhi

• “What actually happened on the platform at Pietermaritzburg?”
• “How is satyagraha different from simply not fighting back?”
• “How do you answer critics who quote what you wrote about Black Africans?”
• “Why did you build communal farms as part of a political campaign?”
• “Why accept the punishment for breaking a law?”

Chapter 3 · Salt, Spinning and Non-Cooperation

Turning a mass movement into a disciplined one

1915 – 1934 · Champaran · Amritsar · Dandi

Gandhi returned to India in 1915 and spent a year travelling third class to learn the country. His early successes were local and practical: the indigo growers of Champaran in 1917, the peasants of Kheda in 1918, mill workers in Ahmedabad.

The Amritsar massacre of April 1919, in which troops under General Dyer fired on a penned-in crowd at Jallianwala Bagh and killed several hundred people, destroyed his remaining faith in British good intentions. He launched non-cooperation in 1920: boycott of British courts, schools, titles and cloth, and the spinning wheel as both an economic programme and a symbol of self-reliance. When a mob burned twenty-two policemen alive at Chauri Chaura in 1922, he called the entire national campaign off, to the fury of colleagues, on the grounds that an undisciplined movement was worse than none.

The Salt March of 1930 was his masterpiece of political theatre. Salt was a government monopoly, taxed and illegal to make; everyone needed it, including the poorest. Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea at Dandi over twenty-four days, gathering journalists as he went, and picked up a lump of natural salt. Tens of thousands followed, and around sixty thousand were arrested. Newsreel of police clubbing unresisting volunteers at the Dharasana salt works, filed by an American reporter, did enormous damage to British moral authority abroad.

He went to London in 1931 for the Round Table Conference, in a shawl and sandals, and met mill workers in Lancashire whose jobs his boycott had cost — and was cheered by them.

“With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”

— Attributed to Gandhi as he lifted salt at Dandi, 6 April 1930, in contemporary press reports

Why this matters

The Salt March demonstrated that a symbolic, disciplined and highly visible breach of law could delegitimise a government internationally — a template later used from Alabama to Eastern Europe.

You have the campaigns that shook an empire. What would you ask him?

Ask Gandhi

• “Why choose salt of all things?”
• “Why call off non-cooperation after Chauri Chaura?”
• “What did Amritsar change in you?”
• “Why was the spinning wheel more than a symbol?”
• “How much did foreign newsreel coverage matter to your campaigns?”

Chapter 4 · Ambedkar, Caste and the Limits of the Method

The arguments Gandhi did not win

1932 – 1942 · Yerwada Jail · Poona · Delhi

Gandhi's most serious opponent within India was not the British government but B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit lawyer with doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics, who had experienced untouchability from birth.

Ambedkar argued that caste was not a corruption of Hinduism that could be reformed away but a system built into it, and that Dalits needed political power — separate electorates guaranteeing their own representatives — rather than the goodwill of high-caste reformers. When the British granted separate electorates in 1932, Gandhi, in prison, began a fast unto death against them, arguing they would permanently divide Hindu society. Ambedkar, facing the prospect of being blamed for Gandhi's death, conceded and signed the Poona Pact, which substituted reserved seats within a joint electorate.

Ambedkar never accepted that this was a fair negotiation and wrote that Gandhi had used moral pressure as coercion. He also rejected the word Gandhi used for Dalits, *Harijan* or children of God, as patronising, and most Dalit organisations reject it today. The disagreement between the two men remains one of the central arguments in modern Indian politics.

Gandhi campaigned genuinely against untouchability — entering temples, sharing meals, cleaning latrines himself to break the taboo — but he did not, until late, call for the abolition of the caste system as such.

His private demands were also severe. His experiments in celibacy included sleeping beside young women, including relatives, to test his self-control; the practice disturbed his closest colleagues at the time and remains indefensible to most readers now. His eldest son Harilal broke with him entirely.

Why this matters

The Gandhi–Ambedkar dispute frames a permanent political question: whether the oppressed should seek guaranteed power of their own or trust reform led by the majority.

This is where the method met its hardest test. What would you ask him?

Ask Gandhi

• “Why did you fast against separate electorates for Dalits?”
• “Was fasting a form of coercion?”
• “How would you answer Ambedkar's argument that caste cannot be reformed?”
• “How do you defend your experiments in celibacy?”
• “What did your demands cost your wife and sons?”

Chapter 5 · Independence, Partition and Delhi

The victory that broke his heart

1942 – 1948 and after · Calcutta · Noakhali · Delhi

Gandhi launched the Quit India movement in August 1942, demanding immediate British withdrawal in the middle of the war. He and the Congress leadership were imprisoned for most of the remaining conflict; Kasturba died in detention in 1944.

Independence came on 15 August 1947 and with it partition into India and Pakistan, which Gandhi had opposed absolutely and could not prevent. Between one and two million people are estimated to have died in the accompanying violence, and ten to fifteen million were displaced — one of the largest forced migrations in history.

He did not attend the independence celebrations. He was in Calcutta, where communal killing was at its worst, and his presence and fasting there are credited by contemporaries, including the last Viceroy, with quieting a city that troops could not. In Noakhali he walked from village to village through areas where massacres had occurred. In January 1948 he fasted in Delhi to force the Indian government to release funds owed to Pakistan and to stop attacks on Muslims in the capital.

That fast was the immediate motive for his murder. On 30 January 1948 Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed Gandhi had betrayed Hindus, shot him at close range in a Delhi garden. He was seventy-eight.

His method outlived him. Martin Luther King Jr. travelled to India in 1959 and adapted satyagraha for the American South; the anti-apartheid movement, the Solidarity movement in Poland and campaigners since have drawn on it.

Why this matters

Gandhi's last months show the limits of his method as clearly as the Salt March showed its power: it could delegitimise a foreign government but could not stop communal killing between neighbours.

You have reached the end, and the method's global afterlife. What would you ask him?

Ask Gandhi

• “Why did you refuse to celebrate independence?”
• “Could anything have prevented the violence of 1947?”
• “Why did Godse believe you had betrayed Hindus?”
• “Does non-violence work against a government willing to kill?”
• “What would you change about how you led the movement?”

What Gandhi changed

Gandhi developed and proved a method of mass non-violent resistance that helped end British rule in India and was then adapted by the American civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid struggle and campaigns across Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. He also made political leadership by moral example, personal austerity and symbolic action a recognisable global model.

A debate that continues

Historians and Indian political thinkers continue to argue over Gandhi's record on caste — Ambedkar's charge that his approach preserved the system while softening it — over his early writings on race in South Africa, and over whether his insistence on non-violence delayed independence or made it less bloody.

Keep exploring — ask Gandhi

• “How do you decide when a campaign should be called off?”
• “What did twenty-one years in South Africa teach you that India could not?”
• “Which of your own beliefs did you change most over your life?”

Related lives

• Martin Luther King Jr. — Reverend · Nobel Laureate · Prophet
• Nelson Mandela — Madiba · Father of the Nation
• Desmond Tutu — Voice of the Rainbow Nation

Related themes

Indian independence and partition · Non-violent resistance · Empire and decolonisation