Gandhi, Mohandas K.

Mohandas K. Gandhi is better known as Mahatma (meaning, the “Great Soul”) Gandhi. This title was given to him not just for his leading the early 20th century movement to free India from British rule. It was given to him also for the way he led and for his saintly character.

Gandhi began his career as a somewhat shy and undistinguished lawyer who no one could suspect would develop into a world leader. In 1891, after leaving India to work in South Africa, Gandhi's life changed dramatically after he was thrown off a train for refusing to give up his first-class ticket because a white man had refused to share the same compartment space with him. For the next 23 years Gandhi led social movements in South Africa to protest unfair laws and to win better living conditions for Indians working in South Africa. Furthermore, from about 1905 on, Gandhi committed himself to leading a spiritual life, one stressing simplicity, self-denial, and compassion for others. From 1905 on, then, Gandhi became both a political and a spiritual leader.

In 1914, after returning to his native India, Gandhi became the spokesperson for Indians yearning to free themselves from British rule. He developed a new method for nonviolent resistance, the method or practice of satyagraha.

Satyagraha combines the concepts of firm and truth to mean, literally, “standing firm for truth.” For Gandhi, God is the truth element in Satyagraha, and to stand against social injustice is to stand for God. Unlike many spiritual leaders before him, Gandhi did not believe truth was revealed to him directly. Rather, he believed that truth comes through careful study, effort and experiment. Gandhi's resistance movements were, then, spiritual as well as scientific. Most important, they were nonviolent and designed so as to appeal both to the reasonableness of opponents and to their moral conscience. The latter was appealed to not just with arguments but with passive resistance by Gandhi and his followers, resistance that often resulted in their being beaten, jailed, even killed. The power of this method lay, then, in its showing the opponent (in this case, the British rulers of India), the unreasonableness and injustice of their position. No issue having to do with justice was too small or too large for Gandhi; for all such issues have to do with finding and serving God. So, Gandhi's Satyagrahas came in all sizes. They ranged from small labor strikes to nonviolent demonstrations to secure better sanitary conditions for entire cities. His most famous movement may well have been his 1930 march to the sea ending in his securing a pinch of salt from the sea in protest against a British law that gave the British a monopoly on the production of salt. The protest led, eventually, to brutal reactions on the part of the authorities which, in turn, elicited sympathy for Gandhi's cause, not only among Indians but also among the British. This was the effect that Satyagraha was designed to have. Satyagraha was, then, a powerful political tool even as it expressed the spirituality of its creator, Gandhi.

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