Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). Vaishnavite Hindu. Born in Porbander, India, a true devotee of "selfless action," in the tradition of the Bhagavad-gita. Profoundly influenced by Henry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and the Sermon on the Mount, he was a London matriculate, studied law at Inner Temple, and was called to the bar in 1891. In 1893 he went to Durban, Natal, took leadership of the 20-year non-violent struggle for civil rights of Indians in South Africa, and in 1915 returned to India. He was engaged until 1947 in a nonviolent Satyagraha campaign of civil resistance to attain Indian independence. He spent 249 days in South African prisons, 2089 days in Indian jails, and fasted 12 times as vicarious penance. He was the architect of India’s freedom through nonviolence and an unusual combination of saint, lawyer, and politician. He sought to apply the principles of "truth-force, nonviolence, chastity," nonattachment to possessions, and renunciation, all for the attainment of complete self-rule for India through indigenous self-sufficiency, the removal of untouchability for Harijans (God’s children, his name for outcastes), Hindu-Muslim unity, and village uplift. He aimed to free India through the moral emancipation of her people and the awakening of the soul. Regarding religion he wrote: "All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth; but all are imperfect and liable to error. … We would think it our duty to blend into our faith every acceptable feature of other faiths." He was assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu zealot in 1948

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Mahatma-Gandhi[/tags]

 

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