01Porbandar to South Africa
He was born at Porbandar, son of the diwan Karamchand Gandhi and Putlibai, a devout Vaishnava woman whose fasts and vows he never forgot. He studied law in London and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1891. In 1893 he went to South Africa on a case, and on the night of 7 June was thrown off a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg. He stayed twenty-one years. In 1906 in the Transvaal he led Indians in refusing to register under a humiliating law, and named the method satyagraha, holding firmly to truth. He wrote Hind Swaraj on a ship in 1909, setting out his case against modern industrial civilisation.
02Champaran to Dandi
He came home on 9 January 1915 and set up an ashram at Ahmedabad, moving it to the Sabarmati in 1917. That year he took up the cause of the indigo farmers of Champaran, then Kheda in 1918. In 1920 the Congress adopted his Non-Cooperation programme; he called it off after a mob burnt a police station at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, and was jailed that March. On 12 March 1930 he set out from Sabarmati with seventy-eight companions and walked to Dandi on the sea, where on 6 April he picked up a handful of salt in defiance of the salt law. Lakhs followed. He went to the Round Table Conference in London in 1931 and, in 1932, fasted in Yerawada jail until the Poona Pact was signed with Dr Ambedkar.
03Quit India and the last prayer
On 8 August 1942 at Gowalia Tank, Bombay, the Congress passed the Quit India resolution and he gave the call ‘Do or die’. He was held in the Aga Khan Palace at Pune, where his wife Kasturba died on 22 February 1944. In 1946–47 he walked village to village in Noakhali, and in Calcutta and Delhi fasted to stop the killings of Partition. He read the Bhagavad Gita daily and called it his mother; his Gujarati translation with notes, Anasakti Yoga, appeared in 1930, and Ramdhun was sung at his prayer meetings. On 30 January 1948, on his way to evening prayer at Birla House, he was shot by Nathuram Godse.
“Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you… The mantra is: ‘Do or die’.”
Quit India speech, Gowalia Tank, Bombay, 8 August 1942
