Biography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Essay

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi “the great souled one”was an Indian rights activist. He fought against racial persecution in South Africa under the British rule and had a big impact in the fight. Gandhi made the world aware of the oppression of people in India, he freed India from British rule, and he inspired civil rights leaders in the United States such as Martin Luther King.

Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, in the present-day Indian state of Gujarat.

Gandhi’s father Karamchand was the chief minister or the dewan of Porbandar. He did not have much formal education however His mother was deeply religious and valued spiritual wealth over materialistic wealth. Gandhi grew up where children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. Though Mohandas occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as “good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting.” He was married at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. A diffident child, he shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by then ailing father (who died soon thereafter) or helping his mother with her household chores. house that worshipped the Hindu god Vishnu. Mahatma primary schooling was poor. He had practiced ,in his words, “to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them.” However with the intense passivity he was raised around, there was a one point in his life where he went through a rebellious phase marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking and meat eating. However Mohatmas decided to ended his transgressions and desired self-improvement.

When debating Gandhi’s future, his family wanted him to be a doctor despite his ambitions to keep the family tradition of holding high office in Gujarat alive. At 19, Mahatma left home to study law in the London Inner Temple. The transition from the borderline-rural atmosphere of Rajkot to the cosmopolitan life of London was a difficult one for Mahatmas.He struggled painfully to adapt himself to Western food, dress, and etiquette and ultimately he felt like an outcast. Many of the men and women around Gandhi rejected his views and beliefs which shaped Mahatmas personality and his views in politics. In 1891 when Gandhi returned to India, he was in for a rude awakening. After his return, he discovers that his desired career may not be very lucrative. At the time the legal profession was already overcrowded and Gandhi was diffident. Therefore two years later accepted a one year’s contract from the Indian Firm in South Africa.

When in South Africa Gandhi faced discrimination as an Indian immigrant in South Africa, he became disgusted with the behavior of the European’s and as a result he experienced a turning point in which he started to begin practicing and teaching of passive resistance. This notion of passive resistance was revered and ultimately served as an influencer for Martin Luther King. In 1929, he authored a short article in the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, and in 1935 he met with a group of African-American leaders visiting India, including Benjamin Mays, who later became president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, which King attended.As a mentor to King, Mays encouraged him to read Gandhi’s writings, which informed King’s leadership of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. King later wrote that Gandhi’s teachings were “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”Meanwhile, leading stalwarts of the nonviolent movement in India watched King with interest. After visiting the U.S. in 1956, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said he wished he had met King. In January 1959, Harishwar Dayal of the Indian Embassy passed along a letter from the Gandhi National Memorial Fund inviting King to visit India.King, toured the country, meeting with leaders, scholars and everyday citizens and discussing issues of poverty, economic policy, race relations and world peace. King Stated ,”If this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and nonviolence that [Gandhi] so nobly illustrated in his life.” After returning from India King had returned to America with a greater determination to achieve freedom for my people through nonviolent means.

In July 1914 Gandhi left South Africa to return to India. He took many precautions in the journey to free India from British rule. 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. 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 invested with all the authority of the Indian National Congress (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.

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