Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 

Born Oct. 2, 1869, in Porbandar; died Jan. 30, 1948, in New Delhi. One of the leaders of the Indian national liberation movement; founder of the doctrine of Gandhism.

Gandhi was born in the Gujarati principality of Porbandar. His father was prime minister of a number of principalities on the Kathiawar peninsula. Gandhi grew up in a family where the customs of the Hindu religion were strictly observed; this had a great influence on the development of his outlook. After completing his juridical education in England in 1891, he practiced law in Bombay until 1893. From 1893 to 1914 he served as a legal advisor to a Gujarati trading firm in South Africa. Here Gandhi led a struggle against racial discrimination and the oppression of Indians, organizing peaceful demonstrations and petitions addressed to the government. As a result, South African Indians were successful in getting some discriminatory laws revoked. In South Africa, Gandhi developed the tactic of so-called nonviolent resistance, which he called Satyagraha. During the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and the Anglo-Zulu War (1906) he organized an Indian ambulance corps to aid the British, although he personally believed that the Boers and the Zulus were waging a just struggle; he regarded his actions as proof of the Indians’ loyalty to the British Empire, and felt that they ought to convince the British to grant India home rule. During this period Gandhi became acquainted with the works of L. N. Tolstoy, who had a great influence on him and whom he regarded as his teacher and spiritual mentor.

Upoń his return to his native land in January 1915, Gandhi became associated with the Indian National Congress Party and soon became one of the top figures in the Indian national liberation movement and the ideological leader of the Congress Party. After World War I a mass anti-imperialist movement arose in India, as a result of the sharp aggravation of the conflicts between the Indian people and the colonizers and because of the influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Gandhi realized that without mass support it would be impossible to obtain independence, self-government, or any other victories. He and his followers traveled throughout India addressing mass meetings and calling for a struggle against British rule. Gandhi limited this struggle to nonviolent means, rejecting any use of force by the revolutionary people. He also rejected class struggle and advocated the resolution of social conflicts by means of arbitration based on the principle of guardianship. Gandhi’s position corresponded to the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie, and the Indian National Congress Party supported it fully. Between 1919 and 1947 the National Congress, under the leadership of Gandhi, was transformed into a mass national anti-imperialist organization supported by the people. The drawing of the masses into the national liberation movement was Gandhi’s principal achievement and the source of his enormous popularity. The people gave him the title “Mahatma” (“great soul”).

Gandhi idealized patriarchal relations and preached the uniqueness of India’s historical development. He advocated the revival of the peasant community, village handicrafts, and cottage industry, through the widespread introduction of hand spinning and weaving, which he saw not only as a means of liquidating unemployment and improving the situation of the workers but also as a way of freeing the Indian economy from foreign domination. He fought against all manifestations of the British policy of “divide and conquer,” the inflammation of Hindu-Muslim differences, and the preservation of the caste of “untouchables.” During the rise of the national liberation movement in India (1919-22), Gandhi led a campaign of nonviolent noncooperation with the British authorities. However, in February 1922 the leadership of the National Congress, at his request, put a stop to this campaign as a consequence of the violence on the part of the residents of the village of Chauri Chaura against the British police, who had used arms against the participants in a demonstration. After this, the mass movement in India subsided.

From 1923 to 1928, Gandhi concentrated his political activity on campaigning for the revival of handspinning and weaving and the liquidation of the institution of untouchability. During a new rise of the anti-imperialist movement (1929-33) he led a campaign of civil disobedience directed against the government salt monopoly (the Salt March). In 1931 he compromised and concluded an agreement with Viceroy Irwin for the National Congress to halt this campaign; Gandhi agreed to represent the Congress at a round-table conference and the viceroy pledged to free the arrested members of the Congress and grant some concessions to the Indian bourgeoisie. In September 1934, Gandhi announced his withdrawal from the National Congress, but in fact he remained its leader until the end of his life.

Gandhi was frequently arrested and imprisoned (for example, in 1922-24, 1930-31, and 1942-44). Both in prison and out, he often went on hunger strikes aimed at achieving unity between Hindus and Muslims and to protest the institution of untouchability. Gandhi’s fasts produced great agitation among his followers and sometimes forced concessions from the government.

In 1942, during World War II, when the British government blocked the formation of an Indian national government, and in an atmosphere of rising anti-imperialist sentiment, Gandhi raised the demand “Quit India!” to the English colonizers, with the justification that only an independent India could resist the Japanese aggressors. During the rise of the mass anticolonial movement of 1946-47, which led to India winning its independence in 1947, Gandhi condemned the revolutionary eruption of the masses (including the Indian sailors’ uprising in February 1946). At this time he also spoke out against the bloody fratricidal conflicts between Hindus and Muslims that arose in connection with the preparation for and actual division of India into the two states of India and Pakistan. Gandhi called for the unity of Hindus and Muslims. On Jan. 30, 1948, he was assassinated by a member of a Hindu chauvinist organization.

The Indian people deeply revere the memory of Gandhi, a committed fighter for the cause of national independence. In Soviet historical literature until the mid-1950’s, there was an incorrect, one-sided evaluation of Gandhi’s role in the sociopolitical life of India and in the anti-imperialist struggle of the Indian people.

WORKS

Collected Works, vols. 1-10. New Delhi, 1958-63.
Young India, 1919-1922. Madras, 1922.
Young India, 1924-1926 [vol. 2]. New York, 1927.
Basic Education. Ahmedabad [1956].
In Russian translation:
Moia zhizn’. Moscow, 1969.

A. M. D’IAKOV