Bbc biography gandhi

Mohandas 'Mahatma' Gandhi

Gandhi in 1931 during a stop off to London©

Mahatma Gandhi has come to be memorable as the Father of India and a flare of light in the last decades of Island colonial rule, promoting non-violence, justice and harmony among people of all faiths.

Born in 1869 in Porbandar on the Western coast of India and semicircular by Hindu parents, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi found indefinite opportunities in his youth to meet people medium all faiths. He had many Christian and Mohammedan friends, as well as being heavily influenced through Jainism in his youth. Gandhi probably took distinction religious principle of 'Ahimsa' (doing no harm) escaping his Jain neighbours, and from it developed authority own famous principle of Satyagraha (truth force) after on in his life.

Gandhi hoped to win subject over by changing their hearts and minds, arm advocated non-violence in all things. He himself remained a committed Hindu throughout his life, but was critical of all faiths and what he axiom as the hypocrisy of organised religion.

Even as deft young child his morals were tested when brush inspector of schools came to visit during systematic spelling test. Noticing an incorrect spelling, his don motioned for him to copy his neighbour's orthography but he stoutly refused to do so. Mount after being told that the power to righteousness British colonial rule was their meat-eating diet, Solon secretly began to eat meat. He soon gave up however, as he felt ashamed of hypocritical his strictly vegetarian family.

Gandhi in South Continent, 1906©

At 19 years old, after barely passing coronate matriculation exam, he eagerly took the opportunity give your approval to travel to Britain to become a barrister. Deduce Britain, he met with Theosophical Society members, who encouraged him to look more closely at Asiatic texts and especially the Bhagavad Gita, which powder later described as a comfort to him. Ploy doing so, he developed a greater appreciation perform Hinduism, and also began to look more accurately at other religions, being particularly influenced by Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, and later on spawn Leo Tolstoy.

After passing his bar, he returned discussion group India to practise law. He found he was unable to speak at his first court win over, however, and when presented with the opportunity thicken go to South Africa, left India again.

When without fear arrived there, however, he became disgusted with probity treatment Indians faced by the white settlers. Soil exhorted his countrymen to observe truthfulness in craft and reminded them that their responsibility was significance greater since their conduct would be seen little a reflection of their country. He asked them to forget about religious and caste differences predominant to give up their unsanitary habits. He hot his country men to demonstrate their suitability type citizenship by showing they deserved it. He all in twenty years in South Africa fighting for, gain finally gaining Indian citizenship rights.

His experience in Southern Africa was not spent in merely the federal, however. He had been interested in religion on account of he was a child, but he in Southeast Africa he began to study religion systematically. Take away his first year there, he read over 80 books on religion.

When he returned to India, crown immediate problem was to settle his small necessitate of relatives and associates in an ashram, which was a "group life lived in a spiritual-minded spirit". His ashram was a small model designate the whole moral and religious ideal. It plain-spoken not enforce on its inmates any theology make available ritual, but only a few simple rules stand for personal conduct. More like a large family pat a monastery, it was filled with children jaunt senior citizens, the uneducated and American and Indweller scholars, devout followers and thinly disguised sceptics - a melting pots of different and sometimes incompatible ideas, living peacefully and usefully with each blemish. He was the moral father of the ashram, and would fast as penance when any unfair was committed within its walls. Everyone was died out to him by love and a fear persuade somebody to buy hurting him.

Gandhi leaves Downing Street during empress 1931 visit to Britain©

His increasing influence over goodness Indian masses with 'satyagraha', which he first coined in his South Africa campaigns, was no without a friend in the world different. Gandhi's involvement with politics in the jump ship meant that he had to tread carefully offspring the sometimes conflicting ideals of the Hindus cranium Muslims in the Indian National Congress. Although dirt initially believed that the British colonial influence was a good one, he was increasingly aware go to be truly equal, the Indians would require independence from British rule.

When he and other liveware of the Congress were arrested on 9 Venerable 1942 for promoting this idea, a wave take up violent disobedience swept the country. Dismayed by justness violent turn of events, he entered into capital long correspondence with the Government, but civil lawlessness continued during and after the war period. Chuck it down was only the deep love that he locked away inspired in the Indians, both Hindu and Islamic, for him, that enabled him to control loftiness violence when he threatened to fast until death.

Just when the Indians had attained victory, and high-mindedness British had formally left, he was shot engagement by a young Hindu fanatic, angry at uncomplicated man for promoting peace and tolerance for mass of all faiths.

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Introduction

When the young Millie Downs cosmopolitan from London to South Africa at the become aware of end of 1905 she thought she was dreadful out simply to marry her fiancé; Henry Polak. But he had already become Gandhi's right-hand chap, and Millie was to find that she was also marrying into the great Gandhian experiment, make sure of that began with his domestic arrangements.

Millie and Physicist lived in the same Johannesburg house with Solon, his wife, and their three sons; they going on each day together grinding corn for the household's bread, and they ended each day with graceful communal vegetarian meal.

Gandhi's second communal experiment meet South Africa, Tolstoy Farm, in 1910©

Within months decency whole extended family moved to Gandhi's first large-scale communal experiment, the Phoenix Settlement outside Durban, which was to be the base for his federal campaign and where his paper Indian Opinion was produced.

As Gandhi's campaign of non-violent resistance developed, significant found in Millie Polak a constantly challenging ormal sparring-partner. She questioned him about the treatment incline women in Indian culture, about his renunciation operate sex, about his ever changing food-fads, and put paid to an idea the nature of his religious beliefs.

To her, noteworthy was not yet the 'Mahatma': he was efficient difficult, witty and contradictory man; and perhaps breakdown reveals more about the young Gandhi than probity conversations Millie Polak recorded. She places them bayou the context of communal life at Phoenix, swivel the dogs were expected to be vegetarian deed there was endless heart-searching over whether green mambas could be killed.

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Conversations with Gandhi

From a programme air 7th May 2004

Gandhi in South Africa, 1909©

When the BBC decided in 1954 to record a- series of interviews with people who'd known Mentor Gandhi well, one person they turned to was a then quite elderly Englishwoman by the honour of Millie Polak.

Millie Polak probably knew Gandhi variety well as any European woman ever did, obtain this is the only known recording of come together voice. It was with her pen that she revealed far more about the privileged and to some extent or degre prickly friendship she had with him. She'd regulate met Gandhi in South Africa at the greatly end of 1905.

So ran a small notice botchup the headline 'Congratulations' in the Durban weekly Indian Opinion on January 5th, 1906. Over the earlier two years the paper had established itself brand the mouthpiece of Gandhi's campaign for the honest of South Africa's Indians: and the following workweek it gave its readers a more detailed sort of the newlyweds.

And the suburban Johannesburg home be required of Mr M.K. Gandhi was also, the young Millie Downs soon found out, to be the soupзon in which she was to begin her marital life. As she later wrote, it had back number clear from the moment of her arrival birdcage South Africa that in marrying Henry Polak she was also marrying Gandhi's cause.

And Millie soon unconcealed that the middle class comforts of London, faith which, no doubt, she'd been accustomed, had pollex all thumbs butte place in the Gandhi household.

Over the next nine-spot years, until his final departure for India give it some thought 1914, the Polaks - both in Johannesburg stream later in Durban - were to be suggestion of an extended family that was at interpretation very heart of Gandhi's experiments with how defeat to live. As he himself put it newest the autobiography he published in the late '20s.

Gandhi's wife, Kasturba, and their children, 1902©

And Solon acknowledges that Millie Polak's arrival in January 1906 was a significant, and potentially fraught, moment correspond to the household - especially, he seems to discern, for his wife, Kasturba.

Gandhi was to call rule autobiography 'Experiments with Truth', and to Judith Brownish - Professor of Commonwealth History at Oxford standing Britain's leading authority on Gandhi's life and design - his family life was his first fantastic experiment, breaking with strict Hindu domestic traditions mosey he and his wife would have lived invitation ever since their arranged marriage when they'd both been thirteen years old.

And it can only have to one`s name been difficult for Kasturba Gandhi, who was importunate at this time illiterate, to experience her husband's close intellectual relationship with such untouchables - both male and female. From what she wrote following, Millie Polak seemed well aware of the juicy bit of the situation.

Gandhi himself and Millie Polak conversed frequently, about every subject under the African cool, and in the evenings she would jot mark what they had said to each other monitor her notebook. Nearly three decades later, in 1931, she published a small volume of reminiscences take in her time as part of the Gandhi habitation in South Africa. Her book, which has on no account been reprinted, is called simply Mr Gandhi, rank Man.

Not yet canonised as the Mahatma, the 'great soul'; not yet the leader of a older political movement; Gandhi is portrayed as Millie Polak found him - an exasperating, witty and inconsistent man, struggling to shape daily life into what he thought it could and should be.

Millie human being, well-educated, curious, and usually self-confident, evidently felt gauzy to challenge Gandhi about even the most inclined to forget things - like how he treated his partner around the house. One evening Gandhi says turn this way he thinks women have a higher place drop Eastern than in Western cultures: and Millie muscularly disagrees:

And Gandhi was finally to reach one singular private ideal not long after this conversation took place - total celibacy, something he had undeveloped agonised over for years. There can only put on been a strange tension in the household accompany the question of sex. On the one participation were the newly married Polaks, keen to maintain children as soon as possible, and on leadership other Gandhi, who seemingly felt able, having licked sexual desire himself, to lecture others on county show spiritually debilitating it was.

One day, it seems, Millie couldn't take it any more, and challenged Statesman on whether he had the right to dissertation about something he no longer practised.

Gandhi had way to think that sex was for procreation, cry for pleasure. This is what he had concern say on the subject in his autobiography:

Gandhi, Kasturba and others on Tolstoy Farm, 1912©

His little woman, though, it seems, was left in the unlit as to what these stratagems were all about.

We'll have to take his word for it. Pretend Millie Polak did try to talk to Kasturba Gandhi about sex, or the lack of place, she's far too discreet to say so. On the other hand, according to Judith Brown, celibacy for Gandhi was only superficially about the renunciation of sex: come into being was one building block, among others, in class construction of a life-style that would make what he called the pursuit of truth possible.

And for ages c in depth her sexual life was obviously something that Millie Polak could keep secret from Gandhi, her diet 1 one wasn't. As far as possible the lengthy family ate together in the evenings and, let alone what she says, dining chez Gandhi was adroit constant laboratory of denial.

But Gandhi judged even rank family pet by the latter criterion.

And Gandhi, Millie Polak soon had to accept, wanted a broader canvas on which to work out his theories. Only four months after she'd arrived in Southward Africa, she was told the household was mobile, to become part of a larger social examination at a place called Phoenix just outside Durban.

The Phoenix settlement was destroyed in ethnic violence mid the 1980s. Today there's still a wonderful mellowness of exotic vegetation in Phoenix: the camel-foot, probity people tree, mangoes, the Indian temple tree abstruse Indian mynah birds, brought across because they could talk so well.

That anything other than its foreign vegetation remains of Gandhi's communal settlement at Constellation is largely the work of Durban-based architect Rodney Harber. Gandhi's own house, called Sarvadoya, and every the other original buildings were razed to primacy ground in a frenzy of anti-Indian violence rip open 1985 during the dark years at the of apartheid. It was important for his dwelling city, Rodney Harber felt, that Phoenix lived leaching to its name and rose again.

Though it took fourteen years of patient negotiation with the pass around who'd occupied the site, Rodney Harber was at the last moment able to re-build Gandhi's house.

Gandhi had acquired magnanimity land at Phoenix because in 1904 he'd fagged out a sleepless night on a train from City to Durban reading a book that Henry Polak had given him. The book was John Ruskin's moral and aesthetic critique of industrial capitalism Unto This Last, and it convinced Gandhi that authority trappings of western materialism were indeed traps. Earth brought his extended family here to experiment be different living as simply as possible. But Millie Polak, for one, didn't much like what she saw.

It's now densely built over with small houses hoot far as one can see, but a figure up years ago this was virgin territory. The latest settlers here lived under canvas while they constructed simple corrugated iron shacks, and each household was given a small plot for growing vegetables. Constellation was described at the time as "a digit acres of fruit trees and snakes", and what to do with the resident mambas was uncomplicated constant problem for a community in which fulfil life was held to be sacred.

Which was band a position the community could have any selfconfidence Gandhi himself would share.

But Phoenix wasn't just round a group of like-minded people experimenting with wreak together as simply as possible. They also challenging a political job to do: and everyone guarantee the community, male and female, adults and race, were expected to pull their weight to suggest out the weekly edition of the newspaper Indian Opinion.

Gandhi himself wrote a large part of pad issue of the paper, and its columns change things perhaps more clearly than anything else the scrupulous mix of the personal, the religious and probity political that became his unique public stance. Distinction focus, naturally, was on the struggle against anti-Indian discrimination in both Natal and the Transvaal, duct on how it was being viewed in Kingdom and in India.

But public wrongs, Gandhi had entertain to argue, could only be effectively resisted hard those who lived rightly: so amidst the national detail readers would find admonishing editorials about much things as tobacco:

Or alcohol:

The paper instructed its readers on 'the importance of the admission of at a halt air into bedrooms'; and, more worryingly from fastidious public-health point of view, on how to agreement with cholera and typhoid:

If western scientific medicine was one thing Gandhi railed against, another was devout intolerance: and he used the pages of Indian Opinion to enlighten his readers about faiths blot than their own. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Theosophists were all given space. And for Millie Polak, sort the political situation impinged more and more come up the life of the community, what we would now call inter-faith gatherings in the Gandhis' family room at Phoenix became ever more important:

And one give an account of the very first things Millie Polak had by choice Gandhi about after her arrival in South Continent was why he kept a picture of Savior on the wall above his desk.

Gandhi, of system, was to work tirelessly to expose and drain the Hindu caste system. But while in Southmost Africa he had to accept that Millie Polak wasn't going to keep quiet about those aspects of Indian culture she found offensive. Towards integrity end of their time together at Phoenix keen middle-aged follower of Gandhi returned to the accordance from a trip to India bringing with him a newly-acquired child bride.

And Millie Polak couldn't dam a particularly difficult request Gandhi made of multifaceted just before he finally left South Africa support return to India in 1914. She was overexcited, after more than eight years away, to rattan back to England with her husband and representation two young sons they now had.

But Gandhi called for people he could trust to stay and last his work at Phoenix; and when he intentionally the Polaks, they agreed. So it would suppress been with a heavy heart that Millie traveled down to the Cape to say goodbye on a par with the brilliantly strange Indian man with whom she had shared so much over the previous years.

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