Astro-Rayological Interpretation & Charts
Quotes
Biography
Images and Physiognomic Interpretation

to Volume 3 Table of Contents

A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

A certain degree of physical harmony and comfort is necessary, but above a certain level it becomes a hindrance instead of a help. Therefore the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare.

A clean confession, combined with a promise never to commit the sin again, when offered before one who has the right to receive it, is the purest type of repentance.

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

A dissolute character is more dissolute in thought than in deed. And the same is true of violence. Our violence in word and deed is but a feeble echo of the surging violence of thought in us.

A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.

Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it.

Action expresses priorities.

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

Ahimas is the attribute of the soul, and therefore, to be practiced by everybody in all affairs of life. If it cannot be practiced in all departments, it has no practical value.

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.

All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

An eye for an eye makes us all blind.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

An opponent is entitled to the same regard for his principles as we would expect others to have for ours. Non-violence demands that we should seek every opportunity to win over opponents.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

Better far than cowardice is killing and being killed in battle.

Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

Human kind has to get out of violence only through nonviolence. Hatred can be overcome only by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred.

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

I believe that a man is the strongest soldier for daring to die unarmed.

I believe that cunning is not only morally wrong but also politically inexpedient, and have therefore always discountenanced its use even from the practical standpoint.

I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.

I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.

I may live without air and water, but not without Him. You may pluck out my eyes, but that cannot kill me. You may chop off my nose but that will not kill me. But blast my belief in God, and I am dead.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery.

Infinite striving to be the best is man's duty; it is its own reward. Everything else is in God's hands.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

It is my own firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.

It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, i.e. hate, ruled us we should have become extinct long ago. And yet, the tragedy of it is that the so-called civilized men and nations conduct themselves as if the basis of society was violence.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

It may be long before the law of love will be recognised in international affairs. The machineries of government stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another.

Let us all be brave enough to die the death of a martyr, but let no one lust for martyrdom.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Man can never be a woman's equal in the spirit of selfless service with which nature has endowed her.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

My life is my message.

My life is one indivisible whole, and all my activities run intoone another, and they all have their rise in my insatiable love of mankind.

My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.

My trust is solely in god. And I trust men only because I trust God. If I had no God to rely upon, I should be like Timon, a hater of my species.

My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family, that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty, and that this defence prevails, though the world be against the individual resister.

Non-violence and cowardice go ill together. I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true non-violence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.

Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

Prayer is a confession of one's own unworthiness and weakness.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

Proved right should be capable of being vindicated by right means as against the rude i.e. sanguinary means. Man may and should shed his own blood for establishing what he considers to be his right. He may not shed the blood of his opponent who disputes his 'right'.

Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive.

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem.

The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

The hardest metal yields to sufficient heat. Even so must the hardest heart melt before sufficiency of the heat of non- violence. And there is no limit to the capacity of non-violence to generate heat.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

The law of sacrifice is uniform throughout the world. To be effective it demands the sacrifice of the bravest and the most spotless.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.

We must become the change we want to see in the world.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948), known popularly as Mahatma Gandhi (Mahatma - Sanskrit: "great soul"), was one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian state and an influential advocate of Satyagraha (non-violent protest) as a means of revolution. (See also: Mahatmas.)
He helped bring about India's independence from British rule, inspiring other colonial peoples to work for their own independence and ultimately dismantle the British Empire and replace it with the Commonwealth. Gandhi's principle of satyagraha, often roughly translated as "way of truth" or "pursuit of truth," has inspired generations of democratic and anti-racist activists including Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela. He often stated his values were simple, drawn from traditional Hindu beliefs: truth (satya), and non-violence (ahimsa).

born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, India. He was the son of a Karamchand Gandhi, the dewan (Chief Minister) of Porbander, and Putliba, Karamchand's fourth wife. They were descendents of traders (The word "Gandhi" means grocer). At the age of 13 Gandhi married Kasturbai, who was of his same age. They had four children, all sons: Harilal Gandhi born in 1888, Manilal Gandhi born in 1892, Ramdas Gandhi born in 1897 and Devdas Gandhi born in 1900.
At the age of 19, Gandhi went to University College, in the University of London to train as a lawyer. He went to Durban, South Africa to practice law in 1893 and began his political career by lobbying against laws discriminating against Indians in South Africa, inspired by an incident in which he was physically thrown off a train in Pietermaritzburg, after refusing to move to the third class coach, while travelling on a first class ticket. Gandhi was arrested on November 6, 1913 while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa.
Gandhi drew inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of Leo Tolstoy, who in the 1880s had undergone a profound conversion to a personal form of Christian anarchism. Gandhi translated Tolstoy's "Letter to a Hindu" [1] which was written in 1908 in response to aggressive Indian nationalists, and the two corresponded until Tolstoy's death in 1910. The letter by Tolstoy uses Hindu philosophy taken from the Vedas and sayings of the Hindu God Lord Krishna to present his view of that state of growing Indian nationalism.
During World War I, Gandhi returned to India, where he campaigned for Indians to join the British Indian Army.
Movement for Indian independence
After the war, he became involved with the Indian National Congress and the movement for independence. He gained worldwide publicity through his policy of civil disobedience and the use of fasting as a form of protest, and was repeatedly imprisoned by the British authorities (for example on March 18, 1922 he was sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience but served only 2 years).
Gandhi's other successful strategies for the independence movement included swadeshi policy - the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that all Indians should wear khadi - homespun cloth, instead of relying on British-made textiles. Gandhi advocated that Indian women, rich or poor, should spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. This was a strategy to include women in the independence movement at a time when many thought that such activities were not 'respectable' for women to engage in.
His pro-independence stance hardened after the Amritsar Massacre in 1920.
One of his most striking actions was the salt march known as the Dandi March, that started on March 12, 1930 and ended on April 5, when he led thousands of people to the sea to collect their own salt rather than pay the salt tax. On May 8, 1933 Gandhi began a fast that would last 21 days to protest British 'oppression' in India. In Bombay, on March 3, 1939 Gandhi fasted again in protest of the autocratic rule in India.
World War II
Gandhi became even more vocal in his demand for independence during World War II, drafting a resolution calling for the British to Quit India, which soon sparked the largest movement for Indian independence ever, with mass arrests and violence on an unprecedented scale. Gandhi and his supporters made clear that they would not support the war effort unless India was granted immediate independence. During this time, he even hinted an end for his otherwise unwavering support of non-violence, saying that the 'ordered anarchy' around him was 'worse than real anarchy'. He was then arrested in Bombay by British forces on August 9, 1942 and was held for two years.
Partition of India and Assassination
Gandhi had great influence among the Hindu and Muslim communities of India. It is said that he ended communal riots through his mere presence. Gandhi was vehemently opposed to any plan which partitioned India into two separate countries (the plan was eventually adopted, creating a Hindu-dominated India, and a Muslim-dominated Pakistan). On the day of the power transfer, Gandhi did not celebrate independence with the rest of India, but mourned partition alone in Calcutta instead. He was assassinated in New Delhi on January 30, 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu radical who held him responsible for weakening the new government by insisting on a payment to Pakistan. Godse was later tried, convicted, and executed.
It is indicative of Gandhi's long struggle and search for God that his dying words were a popular two-word mantra to the Hindu conception of God as Rama: "Hai Ram!" It is seen as an inspiring signal of his spirituality as well as his idealism regarding the possibility of unificatory peace. While there are some who are skeptical about this, the vast majority of evidence and witnesses, as well as popular opinion, support this utterance as truly having occurred. (External links)
Principles
Gandhi's philosophies and his ideas of satya and ahinsa had been influenced by the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu beliefs as well as practiced Jain religion. The concept of 'nonviolence' (ahimsa) was a long-standing one in Indian religious thought and saw many revivals with Hindu, Buddhist and Jain contexts. Gandhi explains his philosophy and way of life in his autobiography The Story of my Experiments with Truth.
He was a strict vegetarian and had written books on the subject while studying law in London (where he met vegetarian campaigner Henry Salt at meetings of the Vegetarian Society). It might be added that the idea of vegetarianism was a deeply ingrained one in Hindu and Jain society in India, and that in his native land of Gujarat most Hindus were vegetarian. He experimented with different diets and believed that a diet should be enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of the body. He also abstained from taking food for periods of time, and he used this practice of fasting also as a political weapon.
Gandhi gave up sexual intercourse at the age of 36 and became totally celibate while still married, a course deeply influenced by the Hindu idea of brahmacharya, or spiritual and practical purity, largely associated with celibacy.
Gandhi spent a day of the week in silence. He would abstain from speaking and he believed it brought him inner peace. These were drawn from such Hindu understandings of the power of 'mouna' and 'shanti'. On such days he communicated with others by writing on paper.
After returning to India from a successful lawyer career in South Africa, he gave up his clothing that represented wealth and success. His idea was to adopt a kind of clothing whereby he can be accepted by even the poorest person in India. He advocated use of home-spun cloth (khadi). Gandhi and his followers followed the practice of weaving their own cloth using a spinning-wheel and wearing a dress made of that. He also advocated others use spinning wheels to spin clothes. This was a threat to the British establishment - while Indian workers were often idle due to unemployment, they bought their clothing from foreign English industrial manufacturers - if Indians spun their own clothes, this would leave British industry idle. The spinning wheel was later incorporated into the flag of the Indian National Congress.
Gandhi was against conventional education as taught in schools and believed that children learn best from parents and from the society. While in South Africa, Gandhi along with other elders formed a group of teachers and directly imparted education to the children.
Artistic depictions
The most famous artistic depiction of his life is the film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley (interestingly half-Gujarati) in the title role. Another film that deals with Gandhi's 21 years of life in South Africa is The Making of the Mahatma directed by Shyam Benegal and starring Rajit Kapur.
In the United States, there are statues of Gandhi outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, in Union Square Park in New York City and near the Indian Embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Nobel Peace Prize nominations
M.K.Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated five times for the same between 1937 and 1948. Decades later however, the omission was publicly regretted by the Nobel Committee. When the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi".

Throughout his lifetime, Gandhi's activities attracted a wide range of comment and opinion. For example, as a subject of the British Empire, Winston Churchill once referred to Gandhi as a "brown fakir." Conversely, Albert Einstein said of Gandhi, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

, Political Leader / Activist
• Born: 2 October 1869
• Birthplace: Porbandar, India
• Death: 30 January 1948 (assassination)
• Best Known As: Non-violent leader of Indian independence
Mohandas K. Gandhi studied law in England, then spent 20 years defending the rights of immigrants in South Africa. In 1914 he returned to India and became the leader of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi urged non-violence and civil disobedience as a means to independence from Great Britain, with public acts of defiance that landed him in jail several times. In 1947 he participated in the postwar negotiations that led to Indian independence. He was shot to death by a Hindu fanatic in 1948.
Gandhi is sometimes compared with fellow humanitarians Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (mohän'd?s ku'r?mchund' gän'de) , 1869–1948, Indian political and spiritual leader, b. Porbandar.
In South Africa
Educated in India and in London, he was admitted to the English bar in 1889 and practiced law unsuccessfully in India for two years. In 1893 he went to South Africa, where he was later joined by his wife and children. There he became a successful lawyer and leader of the Indian community and involved himself in the fight to end discrimination against the country's Indian minority. In South Africa he read widely, drawing inspiration from such sources as the Bhagavad-Gita, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, and his personal philosophy underwent significant changes. He abandoned (c.1905) Western ways and thereafter lived abstemiously (including celibacy); this became symbolized in his eschewal of material possessions and his dress of loincloth and shawl. While in South Africa he organized (1907) his first satyagraha [holding to the truth], a campaign of civil disobedience expressed in nonviolent resistance to what he regarded as unjust laws. So successful were his activities that he secured (1914) an agreement from the South African government that promised the alleviation of anti-Indian discrimination.
Return to India
He returned (1915) to India with a stature equal to that of the nationalist leaders Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Gandhi actively supported the British in World War I in the hope of hastening India's freedom, but he also led agrarian and labor reform demonstrations that embarrassed the British. The Amritsar massacre of 1919 stirred Indian nationalist consciousness, and Gandhi organized several satyagraha campaigns. He discontinued them when, against his wishes, violent disorder ensued.
His program included a free, united India; the revival of cottage industries, especially of spinning and the production of handwoven cloth (khaddar); and the abolition of untouchability (see caste). These ideas were widely and vigorously espoused, although they also met considerable opposition from some Indians. The title Mahatma [great soul] reflected personal prestige so high that he could unify the diverse elements of the organization of the nationalist movement, the Indian National Congress, which he dominated from the early 1920s.
In 1930, in protest against the government's salt tax, he led the famous 200-mi (320-km) march to extract salt from the sea. For this he was imprisoned but was released in 1931 to attend the London Round Table Conference on India as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. When the Congress refused to embrace his program in its entirety, Gandhi withdrew (1934), but his influence was such that Jawaharlal Nehru, his protégé, was named leader of the organization.
Indian Independence
In 1942, after rejection of his offer to cooperate with Great Britain in World War II if the British would grant immediate independence to India, Gandhi called for satyagraha and launched the Quit India movement. He was then interned until 1944. Gandhi was a major figure in the postwar conferences with the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, and Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah that led to India's independence and the carving out of a separate Muslim state (Pakistan), although Gandhi vigorously opposed the partition.
When violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi resorted to fasts and tours of disturbed areas to check it. On Jan. 30, 1948, while holding a prayer and pacification meeting at New Delhi, he was fatally shot by a Hindu fanatic who was angered by Gandhi's solicitude for the Muslims. After his death his methods of nonviolent civil disobedience were adopted by protagonists of civil rights in the United States and by many protest movements throughout the world.

Mahatma Gandhi - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"Father of the nation" —Mahatma Gandhi
Born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, Gujarat, India Died January 30, 1948, New Delhi, IndiaGandhi redirects here. For other uses, see Gandhi (disambiguation).
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948) (Devanagari: ??????? ??????? ?????), called Mahatma Gandhi, was the charismatic leader who brought the cause of India's independence from British colonial rule to world attention. His philosophy of non-violence, for which he coined the term satyagraha has influenced both nationalist and international movements for peaceful change.
By means of non-violent civil disobedience, Gandhi helped bring about India's independence from British rule, inspiring other colonial peoples to work for their own independence, ultimately dismantling the British Empire to replace it with the Commonwealth of Nations. Gandhi's principle of satyagraha (from Sanskrit satya: truth, and graha: grasp/hold), often translated as "way of truth" or "pursuit of truth", has inspired other democratic activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and the 14th Dalai Lama. He often said that his values were simple; drawn from traditional Hindu beliefs: truth (satya), and non-violence (ahimsa). His auto-biography, "The story of my experiments with truth" reveals his inner persona and reflections on his early life.
Early life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born into a Hindu family in Porbandar, Gujarat, India. They were descendants of traders (the word "Gandhi" means grocer). He was the son of Karamchand Gandhi, the dewan (Chief Minister) of Porbandar, and Putlibai, Karamchand's fourth wife, a Hindu of the Vaishnava sect. Growing up with a devout Vaishnava mother and surrounded by the Jain influences of Gujarat, Gandhi learned from an early age the tenets of non-injury to living beings, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between members of various creeds and sects. At the age of 13 Gandhi married Kasturba Makharji, who was the same age as he. They had four sons: Harilal Gandhi, born in 1888; Manilal Gandhi, born in 1892; Ramdas Gandhi, born in 1897; and Devdas Gandhi, born in 1900.
Gandhi was a mediocre student in his youth at Porbandar and later Rajkot, barely passing the matriculation exam for the University of Bombay in 1887, and joining Samaldas College. He did not stay there long, however, as his family felt he must become a barrister if he were to continue the family tradition of holding high office in Gujarat. Unhappy at Samaldas College, he leapt at the opportunity to study in England, which he viewed as "a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization."
At the age of 19, Gandhi went to University College, of the University of London, to train as a barrister. His time in London, the Imperial capital, was influenced by a vow he had made to his mother upon leaving India to observe the Hindu precepts of abstinence from meat and alcohol. Although Gandhi experimented with becoming "English", taking dancing lessons for example, he could not stomach his landlady's mutton and cabbage. She pointed him towards one of London's vegetarian restaurants. Rather than simply go along with his mother's wishes, he read about, and intellectually converted to vegetarianism. He joined the Vegetarian Society, was elected to its Executive Committee, and founded a local chapter. He later credited this with giving him valuable experience in organising and running institutions. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 by H.P. Blavatsky to further universal brotherhood. The Theosophists were devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu Brahmanistic literature. They encouraged Gandhi to read the Bhagavad Gita. Although he had not shown a particular interest in religion before, he began to read works of and about Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions.
He returned to India after being admitted to the British bar. Trying to establish a law practice in Bombay, he had limited success. By this time, the legal profession was overcrowded in India, and Gandhi was not a dynamic figure in a courtroom. He applied for a part-time job as a teacher at a Bombay high school but was turned down. He ended up returning to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants but was forced to close down that business as well when he ran afoul of a British officer. In his autobiography, he describes this incident as a kind of unsuccessful lobbying attempt on behalf of his older brother. It was in this climate that he accepted a year-long contract from an Indian firm to a post in Natal, South Africa.
Civil rights movement in South Africa
At this point in his life, Gandhi was a mild-mannered, diffident, politically indifferent individual. He had read his first newspaper at age 18 and was prone to horrible stage fright when speaking in court. South Africa changed him dramatically as he faced the humiliation and oppression that was commonly directed at Indians in that country. One day in court in the city of Durban, the magistrate asked him to remove his turban, which he refused to do, and then stormed out of the courtroom. Several days later, he began a journey to Pretoria that would serve as the catalyst for his activism. First, he was literally thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg after refusing to move from first class to third class while travelling on a first class ticket. Later, travelling by stagecoach, he was beaten by a driver for refusing to travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger. He suffered other hardships on the journey as well, including being barred from many hotels on account of his race. This experience led him to more closely examine the hardships his people suffered in South Africa during his time in Pretoria.
When Gandhi's contract was up, he prepared to return to India. However, at a farewell party in his honor in Durban, he happened to glance at a newspaper and learned that a bill was being considered by the Natal Legislative Assembly to deny the vote to Indians. When he brought this up with his hosts, they lamented that they did not have the expertise necessary to oppose the bill and implored Gandhi to stay and help them. He circulated several petitions to both the Natal Legislature and the British government in opposition to the bill. Though unable to halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the grievances of Indians in South Africa. Supporters convinced him to remain in Durban to continue fighting against the injustices levied against Indians in South Africa. He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 with himself as secretary. Through this organization, he formed the Indian community of South Africa into a heterogeneous political force, inundating government and press alike with statements of Indian grievances and evidence of British discrimination in South Africa. Gandhi returned briefly to India in 1896 to bring his wife and children to live with him in South Africa. When he returned in January 1897, a white mob attacked and tried to lynch him. In an early indication of the personal values that would shape his later campaigns, he refused to press charges on any member of the mob, stating it was one of his principles not to seek redress for a personal wrong in a court of law.
At the onset of the South African War, Gandhi argued that Indians must support the war effort in order to legitimize their claims to full citizenship, organising a volunteer ambulance corps of 300 free Indians and 800 indentured laborers. At the conclusion of the war, however, the situation for the Indians did not improve, but continued to deteriorate. In 1906, the Transvaal government promulgated a new act compelling registration of the colony's Indian population. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg that September, Gandhi adopted his platform of satyagraha (devotion to the truth), or non-violent protest, for the first time, calling on his fellow Indians to defy the new law and suffer the punishments for doing so rather than resist through violent means. This plan was adopted, leading to a seven-year struggle in which thousands of Indians were jailed (including Gandhi himself on many occasions), flogged, or even shot, for striking, refusing to register, or engaging in other forms of non-violent resistance. While the government was successful in repressing the Indian protesters, the public outcry stemming from the harsh methods employed by the South African government in the face of peaceful Indian protesters finally forced South African General Jan Christian Smuts to negotiate a compromise with Gandhi.
During his years in South Africa, Gandhi drew inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of Leo Tolstoy, who in the 1880s had undergone a profound conversion to a personal form of Christian anarchism. Gandhi translated Tolstoy's "Letter to a Hindu," [1] (http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_a_Hindu_-_Leo_Tolstoy) written in 1908 in response to aggressive Indian nationalists. The two corresponded until Tolstoy's death in 1910. The letter by Tolstoy applies Hindu philosophy from the Vedas and the sayings of Krishna to the growing Indian nationalism. Gandhi was also inspired by the American writer Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on “Civil Disobedience." Gandhi's years in South Africa as a socio-political activist were when the concepts and techniques of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance were developed. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Gandhi decided to return to India, bringing all that he had learned from his experiences in South Africa with him.
Movement for Indian independence

As he had done in the South African War, Gandhi urged support of the British War effort in World War I and was active in recruiting Indians to serve in the military. He did speak out against specific incidents of British oppression and supported the peasantry of Bihar and Gujarat, but he did not entirely break with the British, remaining on the periphery of the Indian nationalist movement. This changed in February 1919, when the Rowlatt Bills, empowering the government to imprison those accused of sedition without trial, were passed. Gandhi called for a satyagraha that soon led to violent outbreaks across the country, most notably the massacre of 400 Indians by the British army in the town of Amritsar, and martial law. The violence led Gandhi to end the struggle, but he had succeeded in placing himself at the center of the Indian national movement.
In April 1920, Gandhi was elected president of the All-India Home Rule League. He was invested with executive authority on behalf of the Indian National Congress in December 1921. Under Gandhi's leadership, the Congress was reorganized and given a new constitution, with the goal of swaraj (independence). Membership in the party was opened to anyone prepared to pay a token fee. A hierarchy of committees was set up to improve discipline and control over a hitherto amorphous and diffuse movement, transforming the party from an elite organization to one of mass national appeal. Gandhi expanded his non-violence platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his advocacy that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian women, rich or poor, to spend time each day spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. This was a strategy to include women in the movement at a time when many thought that such activities were not 'respectable' for women. In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British educational institutions and law courts, to resign from government employment, to refuse to pay taxes, and to forsake British titles and honours. This new program enjoyed wide-spread appeal and success, empowering the Indian people as never before, yet just as the movement reached its apex, it ended abruptly as a result of a violent clash in the town of Chauri Chaura, Uttar Pradesh, in February 1922. Fearing that the movement was about to take a turn towards violence, and convinced that this would be the undoing of all his work, Gandhi called off the campaign of mass civil disobedience. Now vulnerable, Gandhi was arrested on March 10, 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years. This was not the first time he had been jailed, but it was to be his longest term of imprisonment. Beginning on March 18, 1922, he only served about two years of the sentence, being released in February 1924 after an operation for appendicitis.
Without Gandhi's forceful personality to keep his colleagues in check, the Indian National Congress began to splinter during his years in prison, splitting into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favoring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move. Furthermore, cooperation among Hindus and Muslims, which had been strong at the height of the nonviolence campaign, was breaking down. Gandhi attempted to bridge these differences through many means, including a three-week fast in the autumn of 1924, but with limited success.
Gandhi stayed out of the limelight for most of the 1920s, taking little interest in politics, but returned to the fore in 1928. The year before, the British government appointed a new constitutional reform commission under Sir John Simon numbering not a single Indian in its ranks. The result was a boycott of the commission by Indian political parties. Gandhi pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status within a year or face a new campaign of non-violence with complete independence for the country as its goal. Making good on his word in March 1930, he launched a new satyagraha against the tax on salt, highlighted by the famous Dandi March from March 21 to April 6, 1930, marching 400 kilometres (248 miles) from Ahmedabad to Dandi to make his own salt. Thousands of Indians joined him on this march to the sea. This campaign was one of his most successful, resulting in the imprisonment of over 60,000 people. The government, represented by Lord Irwin, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The Gandhi-Irwin pact was signed in March 1931. In it, the British Government agreed to set all political prisoners free in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. Furthermore, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists as it focused on Indian minorities rather than the transfer of power. Furthermore, Lord Irwin's successor, Lord Willingdon, embarked on a new campaign of repression against the nationalists. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government attempted to destroy his influence by completely isolating him from his followers. This tactic was not successful. When the government decided to segregate the untouchables by placing them in separate electorates under the new constitution, Gandhi embarked on a fast in September 1932, successfully forcing the government to adopt a more equitable arrangement. This began a new campaign by Gandhi to improve the lives of the untouchables, whom he named Harijans, the children of God. On May 8, 1933 Gandhi began a 21-day fast to protest British oppression in India. In the summer of 1934, three unsuccessful attempts were made on his life.
By 1934, Gandhi had become discouraged with his collegues in the Indian National Congress, believing that they only saw non-violence as an expediency rather than a way of life. Therefore, he resigned as party leader and left the party entirely. His chosen successor in Congress was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become Prime Minister. They disagreed openly over the path to an independent India, yet Gandhi trusted Nehru over his authoritarian rival Sardar Patel to build the institutions to guarantee the liberty of India's citizens. Gandhi devoted his efforts in these years to a new program to educate rural India. He continued his fight against untouchability, promoted handspinning and other cottage industries, and attempted to create a new system of education suited to the rural areas. He lived simply during these years at a village in central India called Sevagram. He staged another fast at the end of the decade in Bombay on March 3, 1939.
World War II
World War II broke out in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Gandhi was fully sympathetic with the victims of fascist aggression. After lengthy deliberations with colleagues in the Congress, he declared that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied in India herself. He said he would support the British if they could show him how the war's aims would be implemented in India after the war. The British government's response was entirely negative. They began fomenting tension between Hindus and Muslims. As the war progressed, Gandhi increased his demands for independence, drafting a resolution calling for the British to Quit India. This sparked the largest movement for Indian independence to date, with mass arrests and violence on an unprecedented scale. Gandhi and his supporters made it clear they would not support the war effort unless India were granted immediate independence. He even hinted at an end for his otherwise unwavering support for non-violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" around him was "worse than real anarchy". Following this, he was arrested in Bombay by British forces on August 9, 1942, and held for two years.
Partition of India and assassination
Gandhi had great influence among the Hindu and Muslim communities of India. It is said that he ended riots through his mere presence. He was vehemently opposed to any plan that partitioned India into two separate countries. Nevertheless, partition was eventually adopted, creating, in 1947, a secular but Hindu-majority India, and an Islamic Pakistan. On the day of the power transfer, Gandhi did not celebrate independence with the rest of India, but was alone in Calcutta, mourning partition.
He was assassinated in Birla house, New Delhi, on January 30, 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu radical who held him responsible for weakening the new government by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan. Godse was later tried, convicted, and executed.
It is indicative of Gandhi's long struggle and search for God that his dying words were said to have been an homage to the Hindu conception of God, Rama: "He Ram!" (Oh God!). This is seen as an inspiring signal of his spirituality as well as his idealism regarding the possibility of a unifying peace. While some are sceptical of this, evidence from a number of witnesses supports the claim that he made this utterance (see External links).
Principles
Gandhi's philosophy and his ideas of satya and ahimsa were influenced by the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu beliefs, the Jain religion and the pacifist Christian teachings of Leo Tolstoy. The concept of 'non-violence' (ahimsa) has a long history in Indian religious thought and has had many revivals in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain contexts. Gandhi explains his philosophy and way of life in his autobiography The Story of my Experiments with Truth. In applying these principles, Gandhi did not balk from taking them to their most logical extremes. In 1940, when invasion of the British Isles by the armed forces of Nazi Germany looked imminent, Gandhi offered the following advice to the British people:
I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them. (Non-Violence in Peace and War)
Although he experimented with eating meat upon first leaving India, he later became a strict vegetarian. He wrote books on the subject while in London, having met vegetarian campaigner Henry Salt at gatherings of the Vegetarian Society. The idea of vegetarianism is deeply ingrained in Hindu and Jain traditions in India, and, in his native land of Gujarat, most Hindus were vegetarian. He experimented with various diets and concluded that a vegetarian diet should be enough to satisfy the minimum requirements of the body. He abstained from eating for long periods, using fasting as a political weapon.
Gandhi gave up sexual intercourse at the age of 36, becoming totally celibate while still married. This decision was deeply influenced by the Hindu idea of brahmacharya—spiritual and practical purity—largely associated with celibacy. He announced this to his wife, rather than discussing it with her.
Gandhi spent one day of each week in silence. He believed that abstaining from speaking brought him inner peace. This influence was drawn from the Hindu principles of mouna (silence) and shanti (peace). On such days he communicated with others by writing on paper. For three and a half years, from the age of 37, Gandhi refused to read newspapers, claiming that the tumultuous state of world affairs caused him more confusion than his own inner unrest.
Returning to India from South Africa, where he had enjoyed a successful legal practice, he gave up wearing Western-style clothing, which he associated with wealth and success. He dressed to be accepted by the poorest person in India. He advocated the use of homespun cloth (khadi). Gandhi and his followers adopted the practice of weaving their own clothes from thread they themselves spun, and encouraged others to do so. This was a threat to the British establishment. While Indian workers were often idle due to unemployment, they had always bought their clothing from English industrial manufacturers. If Indians made their own clothes, it would deal a harsh blow to British industry. The spinning wheel was later incorporated into the flag of the Indian National Congress.
The honorific title Mahatma
The word "Mahatma," while often mistaken for Gandhi's given name, is taken from the Sanskrit term of reverence "mahatman," meaning “great souled.” The title "Mahatma" was accorded Gandhi in 1915 by his admirer Rabindranath Tagore (the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature). It was given in response to Gandhi conferring the title of "Gurudev" (great teacher) upon Tagore. As stated in his autobiography, Gandhi never accepted the title because he found himself unworthy of it.
The wide acceptance of this title outside India may in part reflect the complexities of the relationship between India and Britain during Gandhi's lifetime. Such acceptance is consistent with the widespread perception of his deeply held religious beliefs and commitment to non-violence.
Artistic depictions
The best-known artistic depiction of his life is the film Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley (who, interestingly, is himself half-Gujarati) in the title role. The Making of the Mahatma, directed by Shyam Benegal and starring Rajat Kapur, is a film about Gandhi's 21 years of life in South Africa. However, the film has since been criticised by post-colonial scholars who argue that it depicts Gandhi as single-handedly bringing India to Independence, and ignores other prominent figures (both elite and subaltern) in the anti-colonial struggle.
In the United Kingdom, there are several prominent statues of Gandhi, most notably in Tavistock Gardens, London, near University College London, where he studied law.
In the United States, there are statues of Gandhi outside the Ferry Building in San Francisco, in Herman Park, Houston Garden Center in Houston, in Union Square Park in New York City, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, and near the Indian Embassy in the Dupont Circle neighbourhood of Washington, DC.
There are statues in honour of Gandhi in other cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon and San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago. The government of India donated a statue to the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to signify their support for the future Canadian Museum for Human Rights. [2] (http://www.mbchamber.mb.ca/news/News%2004/mccattendsunveilingofgandhistatue.htm)
Miscellaneous
Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, though he was nominated for it five times between 1937 and 1948. Decades later however, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission. When the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". The official Nobel e-museum has an article discussing the issue.[3] (http://www.nobel.se/peace/articles/gandhi/index.html)
Throughout his lifetime, Gandhi's activities attracted a wide range of comment and opinion. For example, as a subject of the British Empire, Winston Churchill once stated "It is...nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace." Conversely, Albert Einstein said of Gandhi: "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this, ever in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth." Nobel Laureate and former Israel Premier Shimon Peres once commented that Mahatma Gandhi "belonged to the future not to the past."
Mahatma Gandhi's work is not forgotten by his descendants. His grandsons, Arun Gandhi and Rajmohan Gandhi, and his great grandson, Tushar Gandhi, are also socio-political activists, promoting non-violence around the world.
Mahatma Gandhi is not related to the Gandhi political family who adopted the Gandhi surname when Indira Gandhi married Feroze Gandhi.