The Life Of Mahatma Ghandi Essay -- essays research papers

Mahatma Gandhi IntroductionMohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism and the prophet of nonviolence in the 20th century, was born, the youngest child of his beginners fourth wife, on Oct. 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a sm any principality in Gujarat in westerly India under British suzerainty. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, did not have more than in the agency of a formal education scarce was an able administrator who knew how to show his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British semipolitical officers in power. Gandhis mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery and jewelry, divided her time between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in divisions and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism (Vaisna vism)--worship of the Hindu god Vishnu (Visnu)--with a strong clue of Jainism, a morally rigorous Indian religion, whose chief tenets are nonviolence and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal. Thus he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects. (see withal Index ahimsa, or ahimsa) Youth.The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary in the prime school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, some other princely state. Though he occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local anaesthetic schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as " costly at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in geographics conduct very good, bad handwriting." A diffident child, he was unify at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. He shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long still(a) walks when he was not nursing his by now ailing father or helping his mother with her household chores. He had learned, in his words, "to take aim out the orders of the elders, not to scan them." With such extreme passivity, it is not surprise that he should have gone through a phase of young rebel... ...reading John Ruskins Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism, he set up a farm at Phoenix near Durban where he and his friends could literally lead by the sweat of their brow. Six years later another closure grew up under Gandhis fostering care near Johannesburg it was named Tolstoy Farm later the Russian writer 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 Af rica had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique for political action but also transformed him into a leader of men by acquittance him from bonds that make cowards of most 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 nothing 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 invariably conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul."