Gandhi's Mastery of Self

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Mohandas K. Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in Gujarat, India. He grew up with typical and mundane experiences as a child except that he was influenced early on by his father's and paternal grandfather's sense of high integrity and his mother's deep devotion to God. By age 13 he was married to Kasturibai also 13 years old. To support his family, he decided to follow his brother's footsteps and become a lawyer; he studied law at London and returned back to India. When he couldn't find a job in the courts of Bombay, he sailed to South Africa to practice law.

Richard Attenborough, who made the film on Gandhi, an experience that changed the subsequent 20 years of his life, writes:

"It was there that he developed his creed of passive resistance against injustice, Satyagraha meaning "truthforce," and was frequently jailed as a result of the protests that he led. Before he returned to India with his wife and children in 1915, he had radically changed the lives of Indians living in Southern Africa."

From 1916 through 1948 Gandhi led several civil disobedience movements as part of his Satyagraha until complete independence from British rule. He never wavered in his unshakable belief in nonviolent protest and religious intolerance. When his Muslim and Hindu compatriots committed acts of violence, whether against the British who ruled India, or against each other, he fasted until the fighting ceased. Independence, when it came in 1947, was not a military victory, but a triumph of human will."

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