Madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma

Instead, the final plan called for the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines into two independent states—predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. Violence between Hindus and Muslims flared even before independence took effect on August 15, Afterwards, the killings multiplied. Gandhi toured riot-torn areas in an appeal for peace and fasted in an attempt to end the bloodshed.

Some Hindus, however, increasingly viewed Gandhi as a traitor for expressing sympathy toward Muslims. InGandhi endured the passing of his father and shortly after that the death of his young baby. A second son was born in India Kasturba gave birth to two more sons while living in South Africa, one in and one in Godse knelt before the Mahatma before pulling out a semiautomatic pistol and shooting him three times at point-blank range.

The violent act took the life of a pacifist who spent his life preaching nonviolence. Godse and a co-conspirator were executed by hanging in November Additional conspirators were sentenced to life in prison. Satyagraha remains one of the most potent philosophies in freedom struggles throughout the world today. Martin Luther King. Winston Churchill.

Nelson Mandela. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Who Killed JFK? Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. A History of Presidential Assassination Attempts. Gandhi hoped to win people over by changing their hearts and minds, and advocated non-violence in all things. He himself remained a committed Hindu throughout his life, but was critical of all faiths and what he saw as the hypocrisy of organised religion.

Even as a young child his morals were tested when an inspector of schools came to visit during a spelling test. Noticing an incorrect spelling, his teacher motioned for him to copy his neighbour's spelling but he stoutly refused to do so. And after being told that the power to the British colonial rule was their meat-eating diet, Gandhi secretly began to eat meat.

He soon gave up however, as he felt ashamed of deceiving his strictly vegetarian family. At 19 years old, after barely passing his matriculation exam, he eagerly took the opportunity to travel to Britain to become a barrister. In Britain, he met with Theosophical Society members, who encouraged him to look more closely at Hindu texts and especially the Bhagavad Gita, which he later described as a comfort to him.

In doing so, he developed a greater appreciation for Hinduism, and also began to look more closely at other religions, being particularly influenced by Jesus 's Sermon on the Mount, and later on by Leo Tolstoy. After passing his bar, he returned to India to practise law. He found he was unable to speak at his first court case, however, and when presented with the opportunity to go to South Africa, left India again.

When he arrived there, however, he became disgusted with the treatment Indians faced by the white settlers. He exhorted his countrymen to observe truthfulness in business and reminded them that their responsibility was the greater since their conduct would be seen as a reflection of their country. He asked them to forget about religious and caste differences and to give up their unsanitary habits.

He wanted his country men to demonstrate their suitability for citizenship by showing they deserved it. He spent twenty years in South Africa fighting for, and finally gaining Indian citizenship rights. His experience in South Africa was not spent in merely the political, however. He had been interested in madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma since he was a child, but he in South Africa he began to study religion systematically.

In his first year there, he read over 80 books on religion. When he returned to India, his immediate problem was to settle his small band of relatives and associates in an ashram, which was a "group life lived in a religious spirit". His ashram was a small model of the whole moral and religious ideal. It did not enforce on its inmates any theology or ritual, but only a few simple rules of personal conduct.

More like a large family than a monastery, it was filled with children and senior citizens, the uneducated and American and European scholars, devout followers and thinly disguised sceptics - a melting pots of different and sometimes opposing ideas, living peacefully and usefully with each other. He was the moral father of the ashram, and would fast as penance when any wrong was committed within its walls.

Everyone was bound to him by love and a fear of hurting him. His increasing influence over the Indian masses with 'satyagraha', which he first coined in his South Africa campaigns, was no less different. Gandhi's involvement with politics in the region meant that he had to tread carefully around the sometimes conflicting ideals of the Hindus and Muslims in the Indian National Congress.

Although he initially believed that the British colonial influence was a good one, he was increasingly aware that to be truly equal, the Indians would need independence from British rule. When he and other members of the Congress were arrested on 9 August for promoting this idea, a wave of violent disobedience swept the country. Dismayed by the violent turn of events, he entered into a long correspondence with the Government, but civil unrest continued during and after the war period.

It was only the deep love that he had inspired in the Indians, both Hindu and Muslimfor him, that enabled him to control the violence when he threatened to fast until death. Just when the Indians had attained victory, and the British had formally left, he was shot at by a young Hindu fanatic, angry at a man for promoting peace and tolerance for people of all faiths.

But he had already become Gandhi's right-hand man, and Millie was to find that she was also marrying into the great Gandhian experiment, one that began with his domestic arrangements. Millie and Henry lived in the same Johannesburg house with Gandhi, his wife, and their three sons; they started each day together grinding corn for the household's bread, and they ended each day with a communal vegetarian meal.

Within months the 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 political campaign and where his paper Indian Opinion was produced. As Gandhi's campaign of non-violent resistance developed, he found in Millie Polak a constantly challenging conversational sparring-partner.

She questioned him about the treatment of women in Indian culture, about his renunciation of sex, about his ever changing food-fads, and about the nature of his religious beliefs. To her, he was not yet the 'Mahatma': he was a difficult, witty and contradictory man; and perhaps nothing reveals more about the young Gandhi than the conversations Millie Polak recorded.

She places them in the context of communal life at Phoenix, where the dogs were expected to be vegetarian and there was endless heart-searching over whether green mambas could be killed. When the BBC decided in to record a series of interviews with people who'd known Mahatma Gandhi well, one person they turned to was a then quite elderly Englishwoman by the name of Millie Polak.

Millie Polak probably knew Gandhi as well as any European woman ever did, and this is the only known recording of her voice. It was with her pen that she revealed far more about the privileged and somewhat prickly friendship she had with him. She'd first met Gandhi in South Africa at the very end of So ran a small notice under the headline 'Congratulations' in the Durban weekly Indian Opinion on January 5th, Over the previous two years the paper had established itself as the mouthpiece of Gandhi's campaign for the rights of South Africa's Indians: and the following week it gave its readers a more detailed description of the newlyweds.

And the suburban Johannesburg home of Mr M. Gandhi was also, the young Millie Downs soon found out, to be the home in which she was to begin her married life. As she later wrote, it had been clear from the moment of her arrival in South Africa that in marrying Henry Polak she was also marrying Gandhi's cause. And Millie soon discovered that the middle class comforts of London, to which, no doubt, she'd been accustomed, had no place in the Gandhi household.

Over the next nine years, until his final departure for India inthe Polaks - both in Johannesburg and later in Durban - were to be part of an extended family that was at the very heart of Gandhi's experiments with how best to live. As he himself put it in the autobiography he published in the late '20s. And Gandhi acknowledges that Millie Polak's arrival in January was a significant, and potentially fraught, moment for the household - especially, he seems to recognise, for his wife, Kasturba.

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

Judith Brown: I think the earliest experiments are private and religious, and he doesn't become a prominent public experimenter until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The result is that he does get used to living with Europeans on terms of complete equality, breaking down old barriers of racism on the European side, but on the Indian side breaking down barriers of caste and ideas of purity and pollution.

He would never in his childhood have had a European staying in the house, it would have been unheard of. This household [was certainly not] easy for his wife She worried deeply about having to share her house with people who are in Hindu terms untouchable, whether they happen to be Indian Christians or foreigners. And it can only have been difficult for Kasturba Gandhi, who was still at this time illiterate, to experience her husband's close intellectual relationship with such untouchables - both male and female.

From what she wrote later, Millie Polak seemed well aware of the delicacy of the situation. Gandhi himself and Millie Polak conversed frequently, about every madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma under the African sun, and in the evenings she would jot down what they had said to each other in her notebook. Nearly three decades later, inshe published a small volume of reminiscences about her time as part of the Gandhi household in South Africa.

Her book, which has never been reprinted, is called simply Mr Gandhi, the Man. Not yet canonised as the Mahatma, the 'great soul'; not yet the leader of a major political movement; Gandhi is portrayed as Millie Polak found him - an exasperating, witty and contradictory man, struggling to shape daily life into what he thought it could and should be.

Millie herself, well-educated, curious, and usually self-confident, evidently felt able to challenge Gandhi about even the most sensitive things - like how he treated his wife around the house. One evening Gandhi says that he thinks women have a higher place in Eastern than in Western cultures: and Millie strongly disagrees:. And Gandhi was finally to reach one particular private ideal not long after this conversation took place - total celibacy, something he had privately agonised over for years.

There can only have been a strange tension in the household over the question of sex.

Madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma: Citizenship: Burkina Faso.

On the one hand were the newly married Polaks, keen to have children as soon as possible, and on the other Gandhi, who seemingly felt able, having conquered sexual desire himself, to lecture others on how spiritually debilitating it was. One day, it seems, Millie couldn't take it any more, and challenged Gandhi on whether he had the right to talk about something he no longer practised.

Gandhi had come to think that sex was for procreation, not for pleasure. This is what he had to say on the subject in his autobiography:. We'll have to take his word for it. If Millie Polak did try to talk to Kasturba Gandhi about sex, or the lack of it, she's far too discreet to say so. But, according to Judith Brown, celibacy for Gandhi was only superficially about the renunciation of sex: it was one building block, among others, in the construction of a life-style that would make what he called the pursuit of truth possible.

And while her sexual life was obviously something that Millie Polak could keep secret from Gandhi, her dietary one wasn't. As far as possible the extended family ate together in the evenings and, from what she says, dining chez Gandhi was a constant laboratory of denial. 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 South Africa, she was told the household was moving, to become part of a larger social experiment at a place called Phoenix just outside Durban. The Phoenix settlement was destroyed in ethnic violence during the s. Today there's still a wonderful mixture of exotic vegetation in Phoenix: the camel-foot, the people tree, mangoes, the Indian temple tree and Indian mynah birds, brought across because they could talk so well.

That anything other than its exotic vegetation remains of Gandhi's communal settlement at Phoenix is largely the work of Durban-based architect Rodney Harber. Gandhi's own house, called Sarvadoya, and all the other original buildings were razed to the ground in a frenzy of anti-Indian violence in during the dark years at the tail-end of apartheid.

It was important for his home city, Rodney Harber felt, that Phoenix lived up to its name and rose again. Manager [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Hidden categories: All articles with dead external links Articles with dead external links from February Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata BLP articles lacking sources from October All BLP articles lacking sources.

Toggle the table of contents. Madinda Ndlovu. Add languages Add topic. Township Rollers. He was a Hindu himself, a madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma believer and also deeply immersed in Hindu traditions. But in South Africa, his closest associates were Muslims. In India, he tried to bring about a compact between these two large and sometimes disputatious communities.

Ultimately, he failed—because Partition happened and Hindus and Muslims turned on each other. It was an effort of will, at his age, to compose himself, get himself back on track and then undertake this foot march through eastern Bengal. All the trauma of his life, and particularly this sense of failure he has, is not unconnected to the experiment in celibacy.

Gandhi thought that because he was not absolutely pure in his own mind, and had not completely tamed his own sexual urges, he was in some ways responsible for the fact that society was turning on itself. It was an article of faith, maybe even an egoistic delusion that Gandhi had, that social peace depended on his inner purity. He is an anthropologist.

His writing is factual and dispassionate. If a playwright were to deal with those last months, they would write something very different and more dramatic, more soaked in emotions. He was an American journalist who visited Gandhi at his ashram in Tell me more. Louis Fischer wrote more than one book on Gandhi. This book is set inagain, a time of great political turmoil and anxiety.

The Second World War was on. In the national movement had been going on for a long time and several significant concessions were granted by the British. There was a partial devolution of powers to Indians and there were Congress governments in seven out of nine provinces. India would have slowly shed British rule and may have still owed some kind of symbolic allegiance to the Crown, in the way Australia or Canada do.

The war queered the pitch completely, however, because the British had their backs to the wall.

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Gandhi and the Congress were confronted with a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, for all his political differences with Imperial rule, Gandhi had enormous personal sympathy with the British people. He had many British friends; he had studied in London, and he loved London to distraction. When the Luftwaffe bombed London, he actually wept at the thought of Westminster Abbey coming under German bombs.

This was rejected by the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, who was a diehard imperialist—and whose viceroy in India, Linlithgow, was as reactionary as Churchill was. I want to help the British, but I want my people to be free. Unlike Nirmal Kumar Bose, Fischer is a journalist and a keen observer.

Madinda ndlovu biography of mahatma: Citizenship: Ghana.

He deals less in analysis and more in description. The food was awful. After a week of eating squash and boiled vegetables Fischer was waiting to go back to Bombay and have a good meal at the Taj Mahal Hotel. The book conveys the essential humanity of Gandhi and his down-to-earth character. He lived in this simple village community, with bad food and no modern conveniences at all.

Both were critical periods in the life of Gandhi and in the history of the world. They are more based on documentation and scholarship. One last thing about Fischer which may be of interest to your readers with a more general interest in the history of 20th century politics: Fischer began as a Communist. He spent many years in Russia and married a Russian woman.

He spoke fluent Russian, and like several American madinda ndlovu biographies of mahatma of his time was rather credulous about the Russian Revolution. Fischer was one of the contributors to the volume called The God That Failedalong with Arthur Koestler and other writers who were disenchanted by Communism. So Fischer is a person with wide international experience.

So from that point of view, I think his book is particularly useful. There are three major aspects to this. One is that spinning is a way of breaking down the boundaries between mental labour and manual labour and dissolving caste distinctions. In the Indian caste system, the upper caste Brahmins read books and are temple priests, and the Kshatriyas own land and give orders and fight wars.

Then you have the Vaishyas, who are businessmen. Manual labour is despised in the Indian caste system, and Gandhi wanted to say that everyone should work with their hands. The second aspect is that Gandhi believed in economic self-reliance. We were importing cloth from England, particularly Manchester. Each of us will spin something.

The third aspect of it is that he is cultivating a spirit of solidarity among his fellow freedom fighters, and spinning is a way of doing that constructively and non-violently. How do fascists inculcate solidarity among the community? By marching up and down to show their enemies how menacing they can be. Consider spinning the Gandhian alternative to a fascist marchpast.

It was at once a program of social equality, of breaking down caste distinctions, of economic self-renewal and of nationalist unity: everyone will do the same thing. Well, it was rejected by his own closest disciple and anointed heir, Jawaharlal Nehru. When India became independent, Nehru launched the country firmly on the path to economic modernization, which included industrialization.

She was the one who persuaded Gandhi that women must join the Salt March too. She really was a quite remarkable person who deserves a good biography of her own. Some of that continues. Dennis Dalton is a retired American professor who is now in his eighties. He did a PhD in England in the s and later on taught at Columbia. In the s and s he wrote a series of pioneering articles on Gandhi, which greatly impressed me when I read them.

The first thing is that it is absolutely grounded in primary research. Unlike other Gandhi scholars, Dalton does not restrict himself to the collected works.