The man who faced down an empire was once too shy to speak
As a schoolboy in Rajkot, Mohandas Gandhi was tongue-tied, avoided games and kept company mainly with books. In London he had to join a public-speaking group just to manage a courtroom. That same person later led millions against British rule with marches, fasts and a refusal to use violence.
Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat, the youngest child of Karamchand Gandhi, a chief minister of the small state, and Putlibai, a deeply pious woman who thought nothing of fasting several days running. Childhood tales of truthful heroes such as King Harishchandra haunted him, he later wrote. At 13 he was married to Kasturba, a year older, in an arranged match; his father died in 1885, and he never forgave himself for leaving the bedside minutes before the end.
To reach London in 1888 he vowed to his mother to avoid meat, alcohol and women, and his caste elders in Bombay expelled him anyway for crossing the sea. He trained at the Inner Temple and was called to the bar at 22. Failing to build a practice in India, he went to South Africa in 1893 to handle one merchant's lawsuit and stayed 21 years. There he raised his family, first used nonviolent resistance in a civil-rights campaign, and in 1914 was first called Mahatma, meaning great-souled.
Back in India from 1915, he organised peasants and workers against unfair land taxes and in 1921 took the lead of the Indian National Congress. He wore a short dhoti of hand-spun cloth to identify with the rural poor, lived in a self-sufficient community and used long fasts as both reflection and protest. The 400-kilometre Salt March of 1930 defied the British salt tax, and in 1942 he demanded that Britain quit India. He spent many years in prison on two continents.
Independence came in August 1947 with partition into India and Pakistan, and religious violence followed. Gandhi skipped the celebrations to visit stricken areas and fasted to halt the killing, the last fast beginning at 78. On 30 January 1948 a Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, assassinated him in Delhi. His birthday is now India's Gandhi Jayanti holiday and the International Day of Nonviolence.
Source: Mahatma Gandhi
