Feb 05 2009
Mahatma Gandhi and non violence resistance
Motandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in Gujarat. The name “Mahatma” is in fact an honorific title, first applied to him by poet Rabindranath Tagore and means ‘great soul’. Born into an upper class family, we was married at age 8 to his bride in an arranged child marriage as was the custom of the time and in his region.
In 1888, he was sent to London and studied law at University College London, later to qualify as a barrister. Although admitted to the Inner Temple, his success was limited and he returned to India where he ran a small law firm. A vegetarian by tradition, his stay in London brought him into close contact with the Vegetarian Society, and he advocated vegetarianism as a means of self purification as well as economics. Several of his books and articles are dedicated to the subject which he practised all his life, interspersed with long periods of fasting.
A year long contract from an Indian firm brought him to South Africa where he experienced at close quarters what apartheid really meant and how the system affected not only his countrymen but other races too. He started to organise civil rights movements, always advocating the principles of defying tyranny and dictatorship by non obedience and total non violence. During his life, as well in South Africa as in India, he was arrested and sentenced to prison on several occasions.
Upon his return to India in 1915, he organised the resistance of the Indian people and the fight for independence from the British Empire, which was finally granted after WWII. Gandhi was assessinated by a radical Hindu during his usual evening walk in a park in 1948.
