The Eternal Gandhi

By Raj Kumar

Gandhi's life story unfolds from his early influences to his student days in London; how the racial prejudices that he faced in South Africa and the books of Leo Tolstoy, Adolf Just and others shaped the future Mahatma to use Satyagraha (Truth force) as a potent force both in South Africa to secure the Indians' rights there and later in India to achieve freedom from British Rule; his experiments with Satya (Truth) and his concept of Brahmacharya (Continence); his constant fasts to achieve his goals; his work in the social upliftment of the untouchables (lower caste people) who he called Harijan (children of God); his various marches, prayer meetings, public speeches and parleys with Viceroys; his agony at Hindu-Muslim communal tension and later partition of India along religious lines into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan and finally his crown achievement in the form of freedom for India. The Mahatma lives on in the public mind for those who seek to achieve their goals using peace and truth as potent forces not just in India but all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raj Kumar
• Release date: Mar 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458109378

Raj Kumar

Dr. Raj Kumar, FRSC, is currently working as Dean of School of Health Sciences, and a Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Natural Products, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda, India. He obtained his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry (2007) from NIPER, Mohali, India and completed his postdoctoral fellowship (2007-2008) at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Maryland where he co-invented a fused heterocycle RK-33 (Raj Kumar-33) molecule for the treatment of Lung Cancer. Dr. Kumar has published more than 90 peer-reviewed research papers (h index = 33; Scopus) in leading Medicinal/Organic/Pharmaceutical Chemistry Journals with a cumulative impact factor > 300. Dr. Kumar has been featured in the list of top 2% international scientists “Updated Science-wide Database of Stanford Citation Indicators” released by Stanford University, USA and published by Elsevier BV on 19th October 2021. His research interests focus on the design and synthesis of novel fused heterocycles of biological importance.

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Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth ~ Albert Einstein

The Eternal Gandhi

by

Raj B Kumar

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PUBLISHED BY:

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The Eternal Gandhi

Copyright 2011 by Raj B Kumar

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Early Years (1869-1887)

Chapter 2: Student in London (1887-1893)

Chapter 3: Prejudice in South Africa (1893-1901)

Chapter 4: Satyagraha in South Africa (1901-1914)

Chapter 5: Mission: Free India (1914-1920)

Chapter 6: Freedom Struggle I (1920-1930)

Chapter 7: Freedom Struggle II (1930-1940)

Chapter 8: Finally, Freedom! (1940-1948)

Chapter 1: The Early Years (1869-1887)

Birth and Parentage

October 2, 1869: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the future Mahatma, was born in a small room in a three-storey house in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula in Western India. The house is still preserved as a national monument.

Gandhi was the fourth and the last child of his father's fourth and last marriage (Karamchand Gandhi, his father, who was in the state service as a Dewan, married four times, having lost his wife each time by death).

The little Gandhi's warmest affection went to his mother Putlibai and he always remembered her saintliness and her deeply religious nature.

He sometimes feared his father Karamchand who was truthful, brave and generous, but short-tempered.

School Days

Gandhi was sent to elementary school in Porbandar. The fact that I recollect nothing more of those days than having learnt ... to call our teacher all kinds of names, would suggest that my intellect must have been sluggish, and my memory raw, the adult Mahatma in his autobiography accuses the six-year-old Gandhi.

When he was seven, his family moved to Rajkot, a state on the Kathiawar peninsula. There he attended a primary school and later, at the age of 12, joined the Alfred High School.

Gandhi recollects in his autobiography: I could have been only a mediocre student ... I used to be very shy and avoided all company.

Boyhood Impressions

He had a 'distaste' for any extra reading beyond his schoolbooks. "But somehow my eyes fell on a book purchased by my father. It was Shravana Pitribhakti Nataka [A play about Shravana's devotion to his parents]. I read it with intense interest." Soon little Gandhi chanced to see a picture of Shravana carrying, in slings fitted to his shoulders, his blind parents on a pilgrimage. The book and the picture left an indelible impression on his mind.

Just about this time, Gandhi secured his father's permission to see a play performed by a theater company. It was about the legendary Indian king Harishchandra who suffered untold hardships to uphold a pledge given to a sage. This play Harishchandra captured my heart, writes Gandhi in his autobiography. It haunted me and I must have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number. 'Why should not all be truthful like Harishchandra?' was the question I asked myself day and night. To follow truth ... was the one ideal it inspired in me.

Marriage

While Gandhi was still in high school, he was married, at the age of thirteen, to Kasturba. She was also of the same age (Child marriage was a custom that crept into the Hindu society during the pre-British medieval period. It was legally abolished in 1927).

For a boy of 13, marriage meant only a round of feasts, new clothes to wear and a strange docile companion to play with.

Shame of Lust

But Gandhi soon felt the impact of sex, which he has described with admirable candor. He was tormented by the shackles of lust. On one occasion, when his father was on his deathbed, the guilt of sexual lust impressed itself indelibly on Gandhi's mind.

Kasturba had become pregnant at fifteen and she was now in an advanced stage. Nevertheless, every night whilst my hands were busy massaging my father's legs Gandhi states in his autobiography, my mind was hovering about the bedroom and that too at a time when religion, medical science and common sense alike forbade sexual intercourse.

One night around 10.30 p.m., Gandhi's uncle relieved him of his duty of massaging Karamchand. I was glad and went straight to the bedroom. My wife, poor thing, was fast asleep. But how could she sleep when I was there? I woke her up. A few minutes later the servant knocked at the door and urgently summoned Gandhi. He jumped out of bed, but when he reached the sick room, his father was dead. If passion had not blinded me, Gandhi ruminated forty years later, I should have been spared the torture of separation from my father during his last moments … the shame of my carnal desire at the critical moment of my father's death ... is a blot I have never been able to efface or forget.

Kasturba's baby died three days after birth. This doubled his sense of guilt.

Failings in Teens

The 'failings' that Gandhi lists during his early teens include surreptitious meat-eating feasts in the company of a resourceful Muslim friend (Gandhi's family was strictly vegetarian); a visit to a brothel arranged by the same friend where Gandhi was shown the door by the prostitute when he sat tongue-tied on her bed. He got fond of smoking stealthily and stealing money for purchasing cigarettes. He also clipped off a gold bit from his older brother Lakshmidas' armlet to pay off a debt incurred by that brother. An attempt to commit suicide did not succeed. I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it ... The thought of suicide ultimately resulted in ... bidding good bye to the habit of smoking … Ever since I have been grown up, I have never desired to smoke and have always regarded the habit of smoking as barbarous, dirty and harmful.

Rama-Nama

The boy Gandhi failed to get to know of religion as there was no religious teaching in schools. Going to the temple did not appeal to him. An affectionate old servant maid had merely taught him to repeat Rama-nama (name of Lord Rama) to cure his fear of ghosts and spirits at a tender age. Later, the daily reading of the Ramayana by a great devotee in the presence of Gandhi's ailing father thrilled the 13-year-old Gandhi. It was around that time that a Gujarati didactic couplet gripped Gandhi's mind and heart. Its precept: return good for evil, became his guiding principle.

At the age of 18, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had passed the matriculation examination from the Kathiawar High School in Rajkot in December 1887, and in the next month joined college at Bhavnagar, about 100 miles from Rajkot. But he found the studies difficult and the atmosphere uncongenial. In three months, he returned to Rajkot.

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Chapter 2: Student in London (1887-1893)

Sails to England to Study Law

A family friend counseled that Gandhi could become a barrister in three years if he went to England to study law. Gandhi jumped at the proposal. His mother however feared that her young son might go astray in a distant land. Her objection was overcome when another family adviser, a Hindu turned Jain monk, offered to administer to the boy three vows, namely, not to touch wine, women and meat, which Gandhi readily took.

Brushing aside fresh obstacles posed by his caste men at Bombay, Gandhi bought a steamer ticket to London and got rid of his tuft lest, when I was bareheaded, it should expose me to ridicule and make me look a barbarian in the eyes of the Englishmen (Autobiography).

On September 4, 1888, the 18-year-old Gandhi sailed for England. Kasturba had borne him a male child and they had named him Harilal. Now the voyage to England gave Gandhi a long and healthy separation from his wife and helped him to recover from the guilt of lust.

Student Days in London

On September 29, 1888, Gandhi arrived at the New Tilbury Docks, twenty miles down the Thames from London, took the train to London and booked a room in the Victoria Hotel, one of London's luxury hotels, where he stayed for the first two days.

Gandhi was dazzled by the magnificence of the hotel and humiliated by his naiveté in wearing the wrong clothes for the season. On the splendor of the place, Gandhi later recorded in his Guide to London drafted in 1893, When I first saw my room in the Victoria Hotel, I thought I could pass a lifetime in that room.

On the advice of his Indian colleagues, Gandhi took a room initially in a suburb and underwent a basic initiation in English manners with the help of another student. He moved to a suite of rooms the next year and then to a single room.

Aping the Englishman

During the early period of his stay in London, Gandhi went through a phase, which he described as aping the English gentleman. He took lessons in French and in elocution and learnt ballroom dancing. He purchased a violin and found a teacher, but after three months gave up the effort and sold the violin.

Vegetarianism

Being a strict vegetarian, his food problem was solved when he chanced upon a vegetarian restaurant in Farrington Street where he also bought a copy of Salt's A Plea for Vegetarianism and was greatly impressed by it. He had been a vegetarian because of the promise he had made to his mother. From then on he became a vegetarian by choice and conviction.

The interest in vegetarianism brought Gandhi into contact with the London Vegetarian Society. He became a member of that Society's Executive Committee in September 1890 and attended its meetings regularly until his departure from London on June 12, 1891. A series of six articles by Gandhi on Indian Vegetarians appeared weekly in the Society's magazine The Vegetarian during February-March 1891, followed by three on Some Indian Festivals.

Bhagavad Gita

Alongside vegetarians, another group of British friends interested in the Theosophical Movement induced Gandhi to ponder over religious questions. Two English friends sought Gandhi's help in reading the Bhagavad Gita in the Sanskrit original. I felt ashamed, Gandhi confessed, "as I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit nor in Gujarati." Thus, it was through Theosophy that Gandhi was induced to study his heritage.

Respect for all Religions

About the same time, a Christian friend introduced him to the Bible. Gandhi found it difficult to wade through the Old Testament, which put him to sleep, but he fell in love with the New Testament and especially with the Sermon on the Mount. He also read Sir Edwin Arnold's rendering of the Buddha's life, The Light of Asia, as well as the chapter on the Prophet of Islam in Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship.

The attitude of equal respect for all religions and the desire to understand the best in each was now strengthened. But the real Gandhi, the Gandhi of history, did not even hint of his existence in the years of his study in London and long after.

Eiffel Tower Disappoints

From London, Gandhi once went to Paris to see the Great Paris Exhibition of 1890. The Eiffel Tower there disappointed him. There is no art about the Eiffel Tower - the toy of the exhibition. So long as we are children, we are attracted by toys, and the Tower was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets, wrote Gandhi in his autobiography.

Decades later in India, Gandhi