The Life Of Mahatma Ghandi Essay -- essays research papers

Mahatma Gandhi entrywayMohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism and the prophet of nonviolence in the 20th century, was born, the youngest child of his fathers fourth wife, on Oct. 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in Gujarat in western India below British suzerainty. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, did not shake much in the way of a clod education and was an able administrator who knew how to steer his way betwixt the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power. Gandhis mother, Putlibai, was altogether absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery and jewelry, divided her sequence between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism (Vaisnavism)--worship of the Hin du god Vishnu (Visnu)--with a strong tinge of Jainism, a virtuously rigorous Indian religion, whose chief tenets are nonviolence and the belief that e genuinelything in the universe is eternal. Thus he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, abstain for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects. (see also Index ahimsa, or ahimsa) Youth.The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the first rudiment in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. though he occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as "good at English, medium in Arithmetic and weak in Geography conduct very good, bad handwriting." A diffident child, he was married at the grow of 13 and thus lost a yea r at school. He shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He love to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by now ailing father or service of process his mother with her household chores. He had learned, in his words, "to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them." With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebel... ...reading John Ruskins Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism, he set up a farm at Phoenix safe Durban where he and his friends could literally live by the stew of their brow. Six years later another colony grew up under Gandhis fostering care near Johannesburg it was named Tolstoy Farm after the Russian source and moralist, whom Gandhi admired and corresponded with. Those two settlements were the precursors of the more famous ashrams (ashramas) in India, at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) and at Sevagram near Wardha. South Africa had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique for political action but also alter him into a leader of men by freeing him from bonds that make cowards of closely men. "Persons in power," Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in the Hibbert Journal in 1918, "should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares zip for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul."