Nine months teaching and traveling in India and Nepal made for an adventure I will never forget. In my book Gandhi’s Birthday Song, I will share some of my colorful and humorous experiences. Highlights include:

• Catching Durga’s eyes — all three of them
• The mysteries of Ideal Form and More Cleanliness
• My river runneth over
• A wound that will not heal
• Dry season blues
• Spring fever, nausea, and intestinal distress
• Sexy, sexy Kathmandu
• How to catch a thief by smoking

Come back to WillyLogan.com later in the year to order your own copy.

Friends and Comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that. Nevertheless, we will never see him again as we have seen him for these many years. We will not run to him for advice and seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not to me only, but to millions and millions in this country…

(Read the full text of the speech)

In traditional Hindu fashion, Gandhi’s body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the Yamuna River.

(Read the full text of the Purna Swaraj declaration.)

On this day 120 years ago, in the United Provinces of British India, Jawaharlal Nehru was born. Pandit Nehru, as he came to be known, would grow up to be one of the leading figures in India’s struggle for independence, and independent India’s first prime minister. Among figures in the history of modern India, Nehru ranks second only to Gandhi in significance and prominence.

Cambridge-educated Nehru was the political successor of Gandhi, although the two men were opposites in many ways. While Gandhi advocated a return to ruralism and small-scale economies, Nehru was interested in industrial development and technological advancement. During the independence movement, Nehru faithfully followed Gandhi’s example of non-violence, although unlike Gandhi he did not believe in it as an ideology. Most visibly, Gandhi quit his western habits and lived as a peasant, encouraging his followers to do likewise. Nehru simplified his lifestyle to some extent, but remained a sophisticated urbanite.

Like the other leaders of the Congress party, Nehru spent many years in jail because of his non-violent protests against the British Raj. He devoted much of his time to writing. His most important works were Glimpses of World History (1934); his autobiography, published in the United States under the title Toward Freedom (1936); and The Discovery of India (1946). These books show a level of insight and erudition sadly uncommon in modern world leaders.

Ironic for the leader of one of the most religious countries in the world, throughout his life Nehru remained an atheist or agnostic. In his writings, he indicated a regret that he could not believe like his fellow countrymen and -women. Nehru’s life was marked with grief. His father, mother, and wife Kamala all died within five years of each other in the 1930s. Nehru was left with one daughter, Indira, who would also serve as prime minister of India.

After independence, Nehru steered India on a path of “non-alignment” by agreeing with the ideologies of neither the United States nor the Soviet Union. For seventeen years, Nehru led the world’s largest democracy through Partition, war with Pakistan, war with China, and famine, as well as economic and industrial development. As Gandhi’s successor, Nehru had an almost messianic popularity among the people of India. In world politics, he deeply resented Americans as neo-colonialists, but also distrusted the Soviet Union for their disrespect of human rights. Nehru died while still holding office on May 27, 1964. Both his daughter and her son were also prime ministers of India, and his family continues to influence Indian politics to this day.

Like China, India had two major Axial Age thinkers that left their mark on religion and society. One of these was Mahavira, who found enlightenment and release from the problem of suffering by extreme asceticism. His followers began known as the Jains.

India’s other great figure of the Axial Age was Siddartha Gautama, known as the Buddha. Although undoubtedly an historical figure, Gautama’s life is recorded only in accounts that are heavily mythologized. From them we can gather that he was born to a kshatriya (ruling-caste) family in what is now Nepal. Disaffected with his pleasurable princely life, he ran away to seek an answer to the problem of human suffering. Meditating under a pipal tree in Gaya, Gautama became enlightened and concluded that all suffering was caused by desire, and desire could be done away with by following a moderate path of right actions and intentions. With this realization, Gautama became the Buddha, the Enlightened One.

Buddha’s influence on Indian society was tremendous. Although not an atheist, Buddha taught that even trust in god was a form of attachment. Disdaining the caste system, Buddha allowed men and women from all classes to join his sanghas (religious communities). Buddha was himself a meat-eater, being particularly fond of pork, but later Buddhists interpreted his teachings as encouraging vegetarianism and non-violence. A meatless diet spread across India in the centuries after Buddha, becoming an integral part of Hinduism in some areas, particularly the south.

Buddhism became a part of the cultures of Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and southeast Asia, where it survives to this day. In India, Hinduism eventually absorbed Buddhism; today, Buddhism survives as a separate religion only in parts of India near Tibet. Although no longer a major religion in India, Buddhism’s marks are still visible in India, especially in the vegetarian diet.

The first of many invaders to the Indian subcontinent were the Aryans, light-skinned horsemen who worshipped a pantheon of gods related to the Greeks’ and Persians’. The Aryan’s early conquests and battles figure into the Vedas, collections of hymns that may be humanity’s oldest surviving literary works. The Vedas, composed orally under the influence of soma, a drug whose identity is no longer known, spoke of the physical concerns of this life.

The Sanskrit epics are some of humanity’s longest literary works; the Mahabharata, the longer and more influential of the two, is eight times the length of the combined works of Homer. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero Rama, who rescues his wife Sita from the demon Ravana with the help of a monkey army led by Hanuman. The Mahabharata is the national epic of India. (”Bharat,” from a legendary line of kings, is an alternate name for the modern state of India.) Less a single literary work than a library of tales, the Mahabharata consists of a central narrative intertwined, like the trunks of a banyan, with literally thousands of other stories. The central narrative concerns five brothers, the Pandavas, as they fight to regain their inheritance lost to their wicked cousins, the Kauravas. An epochal battle results from this rivalry. The battle leads to great bloodshed on both sides and the beginning of the last of four ages of Earth’s history, the Kali Yuga.

The Mahabharata remains mostly unknown in the West, because of an inaccessibility of themes, a lack of modern translations, and its imposing length. In India, however, the Mahabharata and Ramayana are still very much alive. Indian television channels broadcast retellings of the epics, and Hindus celebrate Rama’s victory on the Dussehra holiday by blowing up papier-mache statues of Ravana and the other demons.

On this day 140 years ago, Mohandas K. Gandhi was born in the seaside town of Porbandar in the region of Gujarat in India. Today, more than sixty years after his death, Gandhi is one of the most recognizable figures of 20th century history. The nationalist movement to free India from British rule did not start with Gandhi, but his leadership transformed it from a disparate collection of political and militant groups, mainly the concern of the middle classes, into a unified non-violent uprising based in India’s enormous peasant population.

Although best known for his role in the independence movement, Gandhi was much more than a politician and social activist: he was a spiritual leader and the conscience of a nation. Beginning with his career as a lawyer and social reformer fighting for the rights of ethnic Indians living in South Africa, Gandhi came to believe in the power of non-violence against hatred. He named his movement Satyagraha, or “truth force”; the name also came to be used for the independence movement. In India, Gandhi saw the whole independence movement in terms of his own sin and redemption. At the height of the non-cooperation movement’s success, in 1922, rioters set fire to a police station in Chauri Chaura, killing 22 officers. Gandhi immediately called off the movement, calling on Indians to join him in fasting to purge their souls of violence.

Gandhi’s politics focused on righting economical wrongs perpetrated by the British. The khadi movement called for Indians to spin their own thread, rather than buying, at high markup, Indian cotton which had been processed into cloth in Britain’s mills. Swadeshi dictated a boycott of British goods and economic self-sufficiency. Ideologically, Gandhi was a pre-industrialist, as he associated industrialism with the violent intrusions of the West and a loss of national identity. He hoped, however unrealistically, that India would not industrialize and its population would remain predominantly in villages.

While Gandhi has become a folk hero worldwide, his influence in India is unparalleled in history. His popularity among the middle classes as well as the peasantry was immense. Among Indians, he came to be known as Mahatma (Great Soul) or Bapu (Father). In a sense, he was the father of a nation, as India looked to him for hope and guidance. As with any great leader, his message was at times misapplied in ways he did not appreciate. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, in his book My Brother’s Face, describes a scene he witnessed on a train between Bombay and Benares. A Muslim, wearing the homespun fabric encouraged by Gandhi, accuses his Hindu fellow passengers for not ostracizing a Marwari (money changer notable for dealings with the British) from their railway carriage. The passengers in the carriage erupt with fervor, chanting “Mahatma Gandhiki Jai!” (Victory to Gandhi) over and over again for the next forty minutes, until the train reaches the next station and the Marwari disembarks.

During the course of the independence movement, Gandhi spent many years in prison, where he wrote extensively. The authoritative collection of his writings, published in the 1960s, fills 100 volumes. His most accessible work is The Story of My Experiments with Truth, an autobiography first published in 1927. Despite an advanced education in England, Gandhi’s writings were clear, simple, and easily understood by the peasantry whom he trusted to lead India into freedom.

In 1947, thirty-two years after Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, India received its independence. But with the violence of Partition, the victory was bittersweet. Gandhi undertook several fasts against communal violence; they were largely successful. Less than six months after independence, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, an extremist Hindu who disapproved of Gandhi’s championship of the lower castes. As he had done many times in life, he did so again in death: Gandhi’s death unified the nation, countering the violence of Partition.

This is the second in a series of articles about the history of India.

The most prominent remains of the Indus Valley Civilization are the ruins of two large cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both in present-day Pakistan. Both cities were built of brick on roughly the same plan, with streets laid out on a grid. Besides houses, there were public granaries and baths prefiguring bathing tanks in later Hindu temples. Cultural artifacts found at these and other Harappan sites include cylinder seals featuring hump-backed Indian cows and a fews words in a script that has yet to be deciphered.

An impressive feature of the Indus Valley Civilization is the level of sophistication it represents. As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his book The Discovery of India, “It is interesting to note that at this dawn of India’s story, she does not appear as a puling infant, but already grown up in many ways.” Indeed, it is one thing for a village to grow haphazardly into a city; it is another thing for a city to be laid out carefully from the start. This hints at a powerful central government, but for want of substantial written records, we can only guess who ruled and how.

Possibly due to the vagaries of the Indus river’s course, the Indus Valley Civilization declined at the beginning of the second millenium BC. At around this time, Aryan invaders from the northwest swept across the country. It is here that India’s prehistory ends and its recorded history really begins.

Shortly before midnight, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India and Gandhi’s political successor, delivered a speech to the Indian Constituent Assembly:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…

(Read the full text of the speech.)

It was one of the 20th century’s most tragic ironies that a non-violent independence movement led, however indirectly, to appalling violence and bloodshed. British India became independent not as one nation, but two. Under pressure by the Muslim League and its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British agreed to divide India along religious communal lines. A commission led by Cyril Radcliffe partitioned those parts of India with a Muslim majority population into the separate state of Pakistan. Violence erupted almost immediately after the announcement of the border between the two states, as communal groups attempted to clear their areas of other religious groups. Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan fled to India, and Muslims traveled the opposite direction. Roughly 14.5 million people were displaced. The death toll of Partition remains unknown; estimates range from 250,000 to 1,000,000 people of all religions, classes, and castes.

This is the first in a series of posts about the history of India.