Mahatma Gandhi was known as the Father of India. He is probably one of the most influential political leaders the world has ever seen. He was also a spiritual leader who was utterly against violence of any kind and was very much for honesty and peace. He showed this by example. He was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in porbandar Gujarat India on 2nd October 1869. His family were merchants.
At the age of nineteen he went to England and studied law, which was unheard of at the time. Because he was Indian he was ignored by the other students. Well before he left India he had undergone an arranged marriage to Kasturba Makhanji. They would have four sons.
As soon as he had completed his training as a barrister he went back to India. There he set up his own law practice in Bombay. However he did not find this easy being a shy man he found it extremely difficult to speak in court and when he was offered a job as a legal adviser in Natal South Africa he took it. The discrimination in South Africa against black people and Indians would have a radical effect on Gandhi. When his contract ended he stayed on at the request of some Indians in the country. He tried to help them stop a bill preventing them from voting. Although he was unable to stop it he had brought attention to their plight. His protests in South Africa landed him in Jail on many occasions.
He went back to India and from 1916 onwards pestered for its independence. He also stood up for the rights of Indians particularly those who were poor. He encouraged them to create there own textiles and to boycott any foreign imports. In 1922 Gandhi was jailed for six years but due to an appendicitis which had to be operated on he was released after two years.
In 1930 he protested about the tax on salt. He marched 248 miles (400 kilometres) to make his own salt, by going to the sea and collecting the water leaving the water to then evaporate which would mean only the salt was left. It proved a successful protest.
Gandhi would often fast to help bring attention to various causes and injustices. When World War II broke out he put even more pressure on Britain to leave India and demanded independence for his country. He was imprisoned again in 1942 and this is when he suffered the loss first of his secretary after a heart attack at the age of forty - two. Then his wife died having spent eighteen months being imprisoned. Again he was released because of health problems. The process for India to be given independence began after the end of the war. Gandhi was firmly against India being partitioned into Pakistan and India.
On 30th January 1948 Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Hindu, Nathuram Godse. For a man who had such utter respect for people whatever there religion who believed in peace, non - violence and truth, it was a huge loss. But his inspiration continued in Dr Martin Luther King Jr, the American Baptist minister and political leader, Steve Biko, the South African anti- apartheid activist and Aung San Suu Kyi the Burmese pro - democracy activist. He also inspired the American civil rights movement and South African civil rights. We now live in a world so dominated by violence perhaps we to can learn from Gandhi.
© Children's Web Magazine 2006