In the eyes of millions of his fellow Indians, Gandhi was the Mahatma (“Great Soul”). The unthinking adoration of the huge crowds that gathered to see him all along the route of his tours made them a severe ordeal; he could hardly work during the day or rest at night. “The woes of the Mahatmas,” he wrote, “are known only to the Mahatmas.” His fame spread worldwide during his lifetime and only increased after his death. The name Mahatma Gandhi is now one of the most universally recognized on earth.

As lauded a figure as Gandhi has become, his actions and beliefs didn’t escape the criticism of his contemporaries. Liberal politicians thought he was proposing too much change too quickly, while young radicals lambasted him for not proposing enough. Muslim leaders suspected him of lacking evenhandedness when dealing with Muslims and his own Hindu religious community, and Dalits (formerly called untouchables) thought him disingenuous in his apparent intention to abolish the caste system . He cut a controversial figure outside India as well, although for different reasons. The English—as India’s colonizers—harboured some resentment toward him, as he toppled one of the first dominoes in their global imperial regime. But the image of Gandhi that has lasted is one that foregrounds his dogged fight against the oppressive forces of racism and colonialism and his commitment to nonviolence.

Gandhi’s father was a local government official working under the suzerainty of the British Raj, and his mother was a religious devotee who—like the rest of the family—practiced in the Vaishnavist tradition of Hinduism . Gandhi married his wife, Kasturba , when he was 13, and together they had five children. His family stayed in India while Gandhi went to London in 1888 to study law and to South Africa in 1893 to practice it. He brought them to South Africa in 1897, where Kasturba would assist him in his activism, which she continued to do after the family moved back to India in 1915.

Within India, Gandhi’s philosophy lived on in the messages of reformers such as social activist Vinoba Bhave . Abroad, activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. , borrowed heavily from Gandhi’s practice of nonviolence and civil disobedience to achieve their own social equality aims. Perhaps most impactful of all, the freedom that Gandhi’s movement won for India sounded a death knell for Britain’s other colonial enterprises in Asia and Africa. Independence movements swept through them like wildfire, with Gandhi’s influence bolstering existing movements and igniting new ones.

Gandhi’s family practiced a kind of Vaishnavism , one of the major traditions within Hinduism , that was inflected through the morally rigorous tenets of Jainism —an Indian faith for which concepts like asceticism and nonviolence are important. Many of the beliefs that characterized Gandhi’s spiritual outlook later in life may have originated in his upbringing. However, his understanding of faith was constantly evolving as he encountered new belief systems. Leo Tolstoy ’s analysis of Christian theology, for example, came to bear heavily on Gandhi’s conception of spirituality, as did texts such as the Bible and the Quʾrān , and he first read the Bhagavadgita —a Hindu epic—in its English translation while living in Britain.

Initially, Gandhi’s campaigns sought to combat the second-class status Indians received at the hands of the British regime. Eventually, however, they turned their focus to bucking the British regime altogether, a goal that was attained in the years directly after World War II. The victory was marred by the fact that sectarian violence within India between Hindus and Muslims necessitated the creation of two independent states—India and Pakistan—as opposed to a single unified India.

Mahatma Gandhi , byname of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , (born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, India—died January 30, 1948, Delhi), Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer who became the leader of the nationalist movement against the British rule of India . As such, he came to be considered the father of his country . Gandhi is internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest ( satyagraha ) to achieve political and social progress.

Youth

Gandhi was the youngest child of his father’s fourth wife. His father—Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in western India (in what is now Gujarat state) under British suzerainty—did not have much in the way of a formal education. He was, however, an able administrator who knew how to steer his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power.

Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery or jewelry, divided her time between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism—worship of the Hindu god Vishnu—with a strong tinge of Jainism, a morally rigorous Indian religion whose chief tenets are nonviolence and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal. Thus, he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects.

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The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. Though Mohandas occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as “good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting.” He was married at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. A diffident child, he shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by then ailing father (who died soon thereafter) or helping his mother with her household chores.

He had learned, in his words, “to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them.” With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking, and—most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family—meat eating. His adolescence was probably no stormier than that of most children of his age and class. What was extraordinary was the way his youthful transgressions ended.

“Never again” was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he kept his promise. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior, he concealed a burning passion for self-improvement that led him to take even the heroes of Hindu mythology, such as Prahlada and Harishcandra—legendary embodiments of truthfulness and sacrifice—as living models.

In 1887 Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination of the University of Bombay (now University of Mumbai) and joined Samaldas College in Bhavnagar (Bhaunagar). As he had to suddenly switch from his native language—Gujarati—to English, he found it rather difficult to follow the lectures.

Meanwhile, his family was debating his future. Left to himself, he would have liked to have been a doctor. But, besides the Vaishnava prejudice against vivisection, it was clear that, if he was to keep up the family tradition of holding high office in one of the states in Gujarat, he would have to qualify as a barrister. That meant a visit to England, and Mohandas, who was not too happy at Samaldas College, jumped at the proposal. His youthful imagination conceived England as “a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization.” But there were several hurdles to be crossed before the visit to England could be realized. His father had left the family little property; moreover, his mother was reluctant to expose her youngest child to unknown temptations and dangers in a distant land. But Mohandas was determined to visit England. One of his brothers raised the necessary money, and his mother’s doubts were allayed when he took a vow that, while away from home, he would not touch wine, women, or meat. Mohandas disregarded the last obstacle—the decree of the leaders of the Modh Bania subcaste (Vaishya caste), to which the Gandhis belonged, who forbade his trip to England as a violation of the Hindu religion—and sailed in September 1888. Ten days after his arrival, he joined the Inner Temple, one of the four London law colleges (The Temple).