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Happy Birthday, Bapu
By Willy | October 2, 2009
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.
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