Clemens scheitz biography of mahatma gandhi

However, Gandhi agreed to the partition and spent the day of Independence in prayer mourning the partition. Away from the politics of Indian independence, Gandhi was harshly critical of the Hindu Caste system. He launched many campaigns to change the status of untouchables. Although his campaigns were met with much resistance, they did go a long way to changing century-old prejudices.

At the age of 78, Gandhi undertook another fast to try and prevent the sectarian killing. After 5 days, the leaders agreed to stop killing. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. Gandhi said his great aim in life was to have a vision of God. He sought to worship God and promote religious understanding. He sought inspiration from many different religions: Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and incorporated them into his own philosophy.

On several occasions, he used religious practices and fasting as part of his political approach. Gandhi felt that personal example could influence public opinion. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. Last updated 1 Feb Interesting and unusual facts about Mahatma Gandhi. Hindus — Famous Hindus from the era of the Mahabharata to modern day India. Indians of the Independence Movement. He stood out in his time in history. Non violence as he practised it was part of his spiritual learning usedvas a political tool.

I just dipped into this ti find out about the salt march. Upon returning to India in mid, he set up a law practice in Bombay, but met with little success. He soon accepted a position with an Indian firm that sent him to its office in South Africa. Along with his wife, Kasturbai, and their children, Gandhi remained in South Africa for nearly 20 years.

Did you know? The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60, people, including Gandhi himself. Gandhi was appalled by the discrimination he experienced as an Indian immigrant in South Africa. When a European magistrate in Durban asked him to take off his turban, he refused and left the courtroom. On a train voyage to Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and beaten up by a white stagecoach driver after refusing to give up his seat for a European passenger.

In , after the Transvaal government passed an ordinance regarding the registration of its Indian population, Gandhi led a campaign of civil disobedience that would last for the next eight years. He had two brothers and a sister. At age of 13, Mohandas was married to year-old Kastubai Makhanji Kapadia as was the custom at that time. His father passed away in , and the same year he and his wife lost their first child.

The Gandhi couple later had four sons over the years. Gandhi Ji received his primary education in Rajkot where his father had relocated as dewan to the ruler Thakur Sahib. He went to Alfred high school in Rajkot at the age of In , at the age of 18, Gandhi Ji graduated from a high school in Ahmedabad. He later enrolled at a college in Bhavnagar but dropped out later.

He had also joined and eventually dropped out of a college in Bombay. He then went to London in to pursue law at the university college.

Clemens scheitz biography of mahatma gandhi

After completing his studies, he was invited to be enrolled at Inner temple to become a barrister. In , he moved to Durban, South Africa, on a one-year contract to sort out the legal problems of Abdullah, a Gujarati merchant. The British had colonized and settled in the Natal and Cape provinces of South Africa during the s and 50s. Boer means farmer settler in Dutch and Afrikaans.

The governance of colonial regions Natal and Cape was controlled by the minority white population which enforced segregation between government-defined races in all spheres. Indian immigration to South Africa began in the s, when whites recruited indentured Indian labour Girmityas , especially from south India, to work on sugar plantations.

Later many Indian merchants, mostly meman Muslims also migrated. By the s, the children of the ex-indentured labourers had settled down in South Africa making up the third group. His journey from Durban to Pretoria witnessed the famous incident when he was thrown out of a first-class compartment by a white man at Pietermaritzburg station.

Upon arriving at Johanessburg, he was refused rooms in the hotels. These experiences motivated him to stay in South Africa for a longer period to organize the Indian workers to enable them to fight for their rights. He started teaching English to the Asian population there and tried to organize them to protest against the oppression. He founded the Natal Indian Congress and moulded the Indian community into a unified political force.

During this time, Gandhi volunteered to form a group of stretcher-bearers as the Natal Indian ambulance corps. It consisted of indentured labourers and was funded by the Indian community and helped treatment and evacuation of wounded British soldiers. Gandhi Ji thought that helping the British war efforts would win over the British imperial government and earn sympathy for the plight of Indians there.

Till , it was the moderate phase of the struggle for the Indians in South Africa. During this time, Gandhi concentrated on petitioning and sending memorials to the legislatures, the colonial secretary in London, and the British parliament. The failure of moderate methods led to the second phase of the struggle, civil disobedience or the Satyagraha.

He started two settlements- the Phoenix settlement in Durban and the Tolstoy farm in Johanessburg for helping the needy and initiate a communal living tradition. His first notable resistance was against the law passed by the government, making it compulsory for Indians to take out certifications of registrations that held their fingerprints and was compulsory to carry it on the person at all times.

Gandhi formed a Passive Resistance Association against this. Gandhi and his followers were jailed. Gandhi ran a thriving legal practice, and at the outbreak of the Boer War, he raised an all-Indian ambulance corps of 1, volunteers to support the British cause, arguing that if Indians expected to have full rights of citizenship in the British Empire, they also needed to shoulder their responsibilities.

After years of protests, the government imprisoned hundreds of Indians in , including Gandhi. Under pressure, the South African government accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts that included recognition of Hindu marriages and the abolition of a poll tax for Indians. In Gandhi founded an ashram in Ahmedabad, India, that was open to all castes.

Wearing a simple loincloth and shawl, Gandhi lived an austere life devoted to prayer, fasting and meditation. In , with India still under the firm control of the British, Gandhi had a political reawakening when the newly enacted Rowlatt Act authorized British authorities to imprison people suspected of sedition without trial. In response, Gandhi called for a Satyagraha campaign of peaceful protests and strikes.

Violence broke out instead, which culminated on April 13, , in the Massacre of Amritsar. Troops led by British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer fired machine guns into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators and killed nearly people. Gandhi became a leading figure in the Indian home-rule movement. Calling for mass boycotts, he urged government officials to stop working for the Crown, students to stop attending government schools, soldiers to leave their posts and citizens to stop paying taxes and purchasing British goods.

Rather than buy British-manufactured clothes, he began to use a portable spinning wheel to produce his own cloth. The spinning wheel soon became a symbol of Indian independence and self-reliance. Gandhi assumed the leadership of the Indian National Congress and advocated a policy of non-violence and non-cooperation to achieve home rule. After British authorities arrested Gandhi in , he pleaded guilty to three counts of sedition.

Although sentenced to a six-year imprisonment, Gandhi was released in February after appendicitis surgery. When violence between the two religious groups flared again, Gandhi began a three-week fast in the autumn of to urge unity. He remained away from active politics during much of the latter s. Wearing a homespun white shawl and sandals and carrying a walking stick, Gandhi set out from his religious retreat in Sabarmati on March 12, , with a few dozen followers.

By the time he arrived 24 days later in the coastal town of Dandi, the ranks of the marchers swelled, and Gandhi broke the law by making salt from evaporated seawater. The Salt March sparked similar protests, and mass civil disobedience swept across India. Approximately 60, Indians were jailed for breaking the Salt Acts, including Gandhi, who was imprisoned in May