Something about him touched hearts all over the world. People who didn't know where India was, didn't know what the issues were. There was something about him that touched their lives. He was a man of many faces. He had this tremendously Pakistan and very mischievous and could be very, it sounds awfully disrespectful to say naughty or wicked.
He was a leader. Of one-fifth the world's people. He had an extraordinary capacity to talk to this massive crowd on a one-to-one basis. I think everybody sitting there thought that Gandhiji was talking to him. Playful father and friend.
In some of the caricatures, they made him look like a monkey. And grandfather used to laugh at that. Sometimes joke and say, here's your monkey. I'm coming in now. Inspiration for future generations.
Mahatma Gandhi feels non-violence is difficult to carry unless you have some conviction. Rebel for a just cause. He says, yes, we will go to prison.
We will take a vow to God that we will go to prison and we will stay there until this law. ...murder country. And he even said to one of his associates that I shall die at the hands of an assassin. And when I do, please remember that if I accept that bullet courageously, with the name of God on my lips, only then believe that I will...
There is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. I may not deny the law or the lawgiver. I know little about it for him to be God, the heart and transform it. It is proof in the transformed conduct and character of those. Who have felt the real presence of God within.
An ancient and mystical land. Ghandiske Gandhi saw his life as a search for ultimate truths. Constantly evolving, seeking alternate ways of thinking and living. He called his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. His long journey of self-transformation began.
in 1869 from this middle-class house in the Indian port city of Porbandar. From his earliest days, Gandhi was stirred by a role model of extraordinary discipline and devotion. Deeply religious, his mother was given to frequent and extended episodes of fasting. Once, in the rainy season, she vowed not to eat until the sun shone.
Poor Gandhi and the other members of the family would constantly be looking out of the window because they wanted their mother to eat because she was starving. And she said, don't worry about me, I'm perfectly fine. If God doesn't want me to eat today, I shan't eat.
Gandhi revered his mother for her saintliness, but was not yet ready to follow her example. The youngest of four children, he indulged in childish pastimes, stealing change to buy cigarettes. Fearful of his stern father, a prominent local politician, he nervously confessed to the petty theft. Instead of punishing his son, he embraced him for having the courage to say the truth and to confess.
And both of them cried. And Grandfather writes in his biography that it was like washing away the impurities. the tears that both of them shed. But when you have this kind of discipline through love, it builds the humanity within you. And I think that's what happened with Gandhi.
In keeping with Hindu tradition, at age 13, Gandhi was married to a young girl of the same age. Initially, he was a jealous and possessive husband. At age 16, he faced his first great conflict between duty and desire.
One night, while nursing his sick father, he slipped upstairs to share his wife's bed. At this moment, his father died. Servant comes to him and says your father is gone. Gandhi says his first impulse was my God what have I done. For all of his life he says he refers back to that incident.
When he deserted his father, when he did not fulfill his duty, his responsibility to his parent. And that became the basis of much of his sense of duty and responsibility. That he must be the son of all society.
Be the diligent and dutiful person serving humankind. At age 17, Gandhi left his wife and family behind to attend law school in London. Immensely shy and naive, he found the bustle of the big city thoroughly intimidating.
Unaware of things like elevators, so he walks into what he thinks is a... room in the hotel and suddenly the room is moving and he's frightened as though he's going up. Here he's on an elevator.
The door is open and he can't conceive of it. For a time, his highest ambition was to become an English gentleman. He sported a top hat and silver-tipped cane, took lessons in dancing, violin, and French, but no superficial skill could hide his inexperience and insecurity. Even after obtaining a law degree, he doubted his ability to practice. Later writing, there was no end to my helplessness and fear.
He goes to India, takes up his first case, and finds that when in the court of law, he simply is not able to open his mouth before the judge. He froze, and he was deeply distressed by it. Humiliated.
He began searching for an escape. Salvation came in the form of a job offer from South Africa. As he said, it was in that godforsaken country that I found my God. Just days after arriving in his new country, Gandhi experienced an epiphany. Unaware of discrimination against Indians in British-run South Africa, he innocently booked...
first class passage on a train to Pretoria. A white passenger spots him, complains to the conductor, and insists that he be placed in a third class compartment even though he has the first class ticket. Gandhi resists.
At the first major stop, Peter Maritzburg, he's thrown off the train, and I mean thrown brutally off the train by the conductor. That humiliation was really what sparked off his desire for change. And he spent the whole night sitting on the platform wondering how to get justice.
Gandhi later described that long, shivering winter night as the most creative experience of his life. He considered returning to India and rejected it as an act of cowardice. He considered accepting the discrimination, but everything in him rebelled against submitting. He considered physically attacking his oppressors and gave that up as impractical.
There was only one choice left, to stay and resist. The very next day, he boarded another train. The next week, he organized a meeting of Indian immigrants. In his 24th year, Gandhi's concerns had grown beyond himself to encompass a greater cause.
This made him feel... That he had a destiny, that he had to stay, he had to fight for the rights of his people and eventually for the rights of all black people. Now that, I think, was really the beginning of the Mahatma, where Mohandas Gandhi really begins to emerge as a Mahatma, a great soul. In the South Africa of the 1890s, Africans and Indians alike endured the whims of their white masters, living under laws denying them the right to vote, own property, or even walk the streets after dark. Dedicated to righting those wrongs, Gandhi was at first woefully naive in the ways of power politics.
As a lawyer he believes that we change the laws, we change human behavior. And so from 1893 to 1906 he is bound and determined in the law courts to do something. Now the problem is that the British are smarter than he is during this time and every time he changes one law, another law is put into place in order to make the discrimination work in another manner.
Victimized by white South Africans, Gandhi resolved to act as a unifying force. He began developing communities of people from different races and religions, all brought together to live as equals. He insisted on treating his own family, which soon included four young sons, no differently than anyone else.
Despite his abhorrence of British oppression, until 1906 Gandhi considered himself a faithful member of the empire. Even singing God Save the Queen and teaching it to his children. So loyal, in fact, that he served as a stretcher bearer alongside British troops in the Boer War and the Zulu Uprising of 1906. It was actually the experiences in the Zulu War which really brought him very close to inhuman violence. Because that was when he realized that this war was not just a war between two people, but it was a real massacre. He recoiled as British Gatling guns slaughtered Zulus armed with spears.
He saw the pleasure soldiers took in killing, and he collected the shattered bodies of wounded left to die in agony. He begins to think. The Zulus are being dominated by the British in this way. What does domination mean? And he thinks about his own domination in his family, and particularly of his wife.
He has been married, aged 13, and he has been at times what he calls a cruel, a jealous, a dominating husband. And it's this fascinating mode then of thinking, triggered by the Zulu rebellion, seeing how the British... Dominating the Zulus, and he takes it within himself, how am I guilty of this dominating kind of behavior?
And he says, I'm guilty of it in my own marriage, in my relationship with Kasturba. Within the Hindu tradition is the ideal of a man who has so conquered his sexuality that he achieves a childlike innocence. Only by mastering his own desires, Gandhi decided, could he best serve humanity. At age 37, he took the Hindu vow of Brahmacharya, permanent celibacy. So if he was totally pure, then there'll be no impurity, no violence, no aggression around him.
In 1906, he immediately followed his personal transformation with a stunning political insight. New laws decreed that all Indians must be registered and fingerprinted. The provisions included having Indian women stripped for white police, so body marks could be noted on the registration form. Incensed, 3,000 Indians met in Johannesburg to plan a course of action. Suddenly, a Muslim merchant stands up and he shakes his fist and he says, BY G- God, I will go to prison before I obey this law.
And Gandhi hadn't thought of this before, had not thought of going to prison. But he knew instinctively that this was the right way to go. And he gets up and he says, we will take a vow to God that we will go to prison and we will stay there until this law is withdrawn.
Gandhi's speech sparked off an historically untimely... unprecedented act of mass civil disobedience. Following his lead, protesters endured repeated police beatings, bravely accepting their suffering without retaliation. He realized for the first time in his life that when human heart is closed, you can't touch the human head.
There is no use reasoning with a person whose heart is full of prejudice. If reason is not enough, violence is not good, what do you do? And he discovers in South Africa for the first time a method of non-violent resistance.
You stand up against your opponent, tell him that you will not give in, but you also reassure him that you will do him no harm. Gandhi coined the term Satyagraha, a combination of two Sanskrit words meaning truth and the pursuit of, to describe his revolutionary concept. The goal of non-violence was as old as human philosophy. Gandhi's insight was to apply the ideal to practical...
political situations madhav gandhi feel in order to implement genuine non-violence the first in your own mind the peace or as the spirit of reconciliation must develop you see without that is how can you implement genuine non-violence in 1913 general jan smuts The English puppet chief in South Africa passed laws decreeing Hindu and Muslim marriages invalid. Gandhi jumped on the blunder to inspire a wider revolt. Grandfather typically came home one day and told my grandmother that you are no longer my wife, you are my concubine.
And she fled up and said, what are you talking about? And so he explained. that this is the law and so our marriage is no longer recognized and we are living together illegally.
Traditionally, Indian women were restricted to the home. Gandhi attacked such customs as another form of oppression and called on women to shoulder public responsibilities. In one crafty stroke, he had helped to emancipate millions and added a powerful new tool to his arsenal.
The marriage laws touched off a national strike. 50,000 indentured laborers took up the cause and walked off their jobs. General Smuts relented, rescinding the marriage laws. Gandhi had proved that willpower could overcome brute force. Eager to challenge England on his home ground, In 1915, at age 45, he returned to an India strangling under the yoke of imperialism.
For two centuries, the British had systematically plundered India's natural resources. Deprived of raw material, native industries withered away. India was the largest, most populous, and most profitable outpost in the empire. And they brought India down to such a point where we couldn't even manufacture a little safety pin.
We didn't have the capacity to make a little safety pin. That was the state at which they had reduced us over the years of exploitation. By 1915, 300 million Indians bowed before just 100,000 English invaders. Never in history.
had so few ruled so many from so far away. Despairing of ever regaining their freedom, Indians collaborated in their own enslavement, providing soldiers and police to enforce the will of their white masters. Gandhi challenged his countrymen to resist, telling them that those who behave like worms should expect to be trampled on. And that's when Gandhi said, when shall we learn to rebel against ourselves? We have become so dependent that we must learn to rebel against ourselves, get rid of our psychology of dependency, of getting things by bribery rather than bravery.
We can't rebel against the government unless we first learn to rebel against ourselves. Time and again, British authorities unwittingly played into Gandhi's hands by inflaming public opinion. In 1919, he protested oppressive new laws by inciting a national While he coordinated the rebellion from Bombay, hundreds of miles to the north, 2,000 Indians crowded into the enclosed village square of Amritsar. Unknown to them, two days earlier, General Reginald Dyer had decreed a ban on mass meetings.
Without warning, Dyer marched 50 Indian troops into the square and ordered them to open fire with rifles, and gatling guns. For 10 minutes, the soldiers cut down the trapped and terrified crowd, killing 379 people and wounding over 1,000. The only reason he stopped firing was they ran out of ammunition. He said if he had more ammunition, they would have still gone on firing into the crowd, firing to kill the people. The ambition was to teach the Indians a lesson, that they cannot defy the British and get away with it.
Dyer followed the massacre by issuing an infamous crawling decree. Local Indians had two choices, get down on their bellies and wriggle like worms, or be flogged to death. Enraged Indians...
screamed for vengeance. With a population advantage of 4,000 to one, they could have executed the white foreigners in a matter of days. The massacre at Amritsar in 1919 threatened to touch off a bloodbath between Britons and Indians demanding revenge. Gandhi stepped in and he said, no, we cannot be to the British what General Dyer has been to us. We have to show them that we can rise beyond that kind of hate.
He never allowed anybody to consider the British to be enemies. He said they are not our enemies, they are our friends, and they need to be liberated as much as we need to be liberated. Over the next three years, Gandhi transformed the Indian nationalist cause into a mass movement.
He built upon the outrage generated by Amritsar to unify Hindu and Muslim, laborer and merchant. And he won the enduring affection of ordinary Indians by becoming one of them, embracing the same simple clothes, scant food, and meager comforts as the poorest of the poor. To promote self-reliance, he exhorted Indians to wear their traditional simple white cloth and to spin it themselves. Western made clothes were cast off into giant bonfires. As he said, foreign cloth signified our cultural dependence on the West.
And it also implied that we were indirectly accomplices in our own enslavement. Therefore burning foreign cloth was a way of purging ourselves. Gandhi insisted on spending one hour each day personally spinning yarn.
Other Indian leaders ridiculed the practice in the midst of a national crisis Gandhi might be found at his spinning wheel. But he saw the fundamental importance of connecting with the masses. His unique stature as the champion of all Indians kept him the unquestioned leader of India for a quarter century.
While inciting open revolt with one hand, with the other, he had to prevent his followers from succumbing to the allure of bloodshed. Many times he called off campaigns when they threatened to become violent, angering friends and colleagues. Gandhi is unique because he, as a political leader, showed that this non-violent attitude could work politically.
Each time he proved that once he seized the moral high ground, He must not lose it, and it could be lost through an act of violence on the part of his community, the Indians. He knew the political effectiveness of that moral high ground. But his public duties carried a high personal price. His four sons often felt neglected and resented him for his long absences in prison. The oldest, Har-Ilao, rebelled in ways seemingly designed to inflict pain on his parents, becoming an alcoholic and a prostitute.
From Gandhi's point of view, he lost his son. And there were times towards the end of his life when he said of Harilal, he's no longer my son. It's an awful comment for a father dedicated to nonviolence to make.
But the personal cost was tremendous. Gandhi grieved for his son, but no personal concern could deter him from the mission of freeing 300 million Indians. In 1930, at age 61, He unveiled a bold new plan to rebel against attacks many found unjust. The British levy on salt.
It was illegal for Indians to make or sell salt. That lucrative franchise was reserved for foreigners. To dramatize the revolt, he planned to march 240 miles to the Arabian Sea and there make salt.
His colleagues in the Indian National Congress begged him to reconsider, convinced that his scheme would fail. The governing British were equally confident that their old nemesis was courting ridicule. On March 12th, he set off with 80 followers on a journey that would capture the conscience of the world and change the course of history.
Gandhi's 1930 salt march covered just 10 miles a day, allowing interest to build and giving foreign reporters time to come to India and cover the spectacle firsthand. So for 24 days, passing through thousands of villages, creating an enormous political theatre. And as soon as the news spread... Not only the whole of India was emotionally and intellectually engaged, but the whole world. Large number of American news reporters said, this is incredible.
By the time he gets to the seashore on April 6th, there are hundreds of thousands of Indians with him. And when he reaches down... And picks up that handful of salt and says, with this salt, I resist the might of the British Empire.
Join me in this struggle of right against might. The response was electric. Across the country, merchants, farmers and housewives openly made and sold salt. Thousands were jailed.
including Gandhi, police brutally clubbed protesters, further enraging and unifying the Indian people. Gandhi knew that non-violent resistance requires its followers to show their courage, thus appealing to the best in human nature. He had taught Indians to rebel against their oppressors and against themselves.
Under intense international pressure, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, released Gandhi and invited him to negotiate. Gandhi went directly from prison to the Viceroy's palace, an honored guest of sorts. So they gave him a glass of warm water, which is what he had asked for, and he put it down on the table and quietly took out something from his loincloth. And the curious Viceroy said, what is it?
He said, Your Excellency, don't tell this to anybody. It is the salt that I have illegally manufactured. He quietly put it in water, stirred it.
The next year, Gandhi journeyed to London for a conference on India's future. As always, he traveled third class. and performed his daily disciplines.
In London he created a public relations bonanza, staying with the poor in the East End, winning affection wherever he went. Children followed him, shouting, Gandhi, where's your trousers? To Buckingham Palace for royalty, he was criticized for appearing before the king in a loincloth. The king, replied Gandhi, was wearing enough for both of us.
India spread his message through daily prayer meetings. ...dependence that we want. An ordinary power meeting could have these hundreds of thousands of people. You'd look, sort of, just out of a corner of your eyes, and not one person was not gazing at him. Absolutely, the attention wrapped.
Gandhi admitted to it, and at times found mass adoration exhilarating. More often, however, constant crush of disciples was simply overbearing. I recall on many occasions when I was traveling with him, at every station there would be thousands of people in the middle of the night shouting, Long live Gandhi!
Long live Gandhi! And they would go on shouting until the train passed. The result of all that din was that he could never sleep. He was surrounded by a loyal entourage who lived according to his dictates. At times, he required celibacy from his married disciples.
And in the last years of his life, he engaged in tests of willpower that shocked his greatest admirers, sleeping naked with young Hindu girls. The idea, he explained, was to challenge his discipline and thereby heighten his commitment. For Indians, he was a near deity.
For Imperial Britain, the enemy. In August 1942, he demanded immediate independence, declaring, here is a mantra, a short one that I give you. It is, do or die, we shall either free India or die in the attempt.
The night of Gandhi's 1942 Quit India speech, he and the entire Congress were arrested. At 73 and in failing health, for the next two years, he would lead the rebellion from prison. In 1944, his wife, Kasturba, his life companion of 62 years, died in his arms. Gandhi was devastated.
A year later, an exhausted Britain admitted it no longer had the resources to rule India. But the prospect of independence brought old divisions to the fore. Hindus and Muslims, long suspicious rivals, turned to open hatred. The Muslim minority insisted on a separate country, what became Pakistan.
After a lifetime spent unifying people, Gandhi saw his beloved homeland sliced in two. I think that he really did break Gandhiji's heart, the idea that India would be divided. He would sometimes find impossible solutions because his heart wanted what was right, but the world won't allow what is right to happen very often. He kept faith with his principles and urged others to do the same. Even when it slowed negotiations with the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, he maintained his long-time discipline of silence.
One day each week. My father came really to look upon him as a saint, but he could be most exasperating to deal with. If it was a crisis point, my father asked him to come and have discussions, and it was all desperate. I remember my father's expression when Gandhiji comes into the room with his finger to his lips.
My father says, oh no, it is not a day of silence, is it? On August 14th, 1947, Indians celebrated their independence. Gandhi, seeing the growing rift between Hindu and Muslim, asked a friend, why do they rejoice? I see only rivers of blood.
Partition immediately brought mass migrations. Hindus fleeing to India. Muslims escaping to Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees marched desperately.
Without food, without water. Devastated by privation. Torn by ancient animosities.
Two great religions. erupted into mutual massacre. Both sides were acting as much out of fear as of anger.
And I remember standing on the platform as it pulled in the station, and there was nobody stirring on the train, but there was blood oozing from the doors. And when they opened the doors, well, it looked like a butcher shop, except the meat had pieces of... clothing on them.
Eventually a half million people would perish. Gandhi's horror at the carnage was heightened by searing guilt. He personally had failed to convert his people to non-violence. The last time I talked with him I found him really depressed and he said I can't see anything around me.
There's darkness everywhere. Men are behaving like beasts. And he said, no, worse than beasts, because beasts don't kill their own. And he said, I'm going to go on a hunger strike until this stops, until Hindus and Muslims become brothers again.
There was so much anger among the refugees that there were large demonstrations. Saying to hell with Gandhi, let Gandhi die, let Gandhi die, to hell with him. The second day, there was a very timid counter-demonstration.
And the third day, the counter-demonstration got bigger, and the anti-Gandhi demonstration got smaller. And on the fourth day, the same trend continued, until finally, the streets were thronged with people cheering for Gandhi. And after a week... Muslims could walk the streets of Delhi in perfect safety. Gandhi's hunger strike rescued New Delhi.
But at the India-Pakistan border, civil war raged on. He embarked upon a pilgrimage of peace across his hate-torn land, walking barefoot from village to ravaged village, enduring angry mobs, thorns thrown in his path, rising at four each morning to struggle against the tide of fear and bloodshed. And I think there is not a single Indian who had not felt ashamed and proud. Ashamed that he had been so deeply let down by many of them.
And proud that from amongst them, in these days of darkest brutality, sprang a figure who made them proud to be an Indian. Who atoned for them. Almost a Christ-like figure.
That's when Gandhi said, there is nothing. My entire life and my death achieved. And he deliberately went about unprotecting, trying situations.
And he even said to one of his associates, that I shall die at the hands of an assassin. And when I do... Please remember that if I accept that bullet courageously with the name of God on my lips, only then believe.
On January 30th, 1948, the 78-year-old Gandhi walked to his daily prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House in New Delhi. From among the crowd, a young Hindu man emerged. Bowed to Gandhi and shot him three times.
In the instant before death took him, Gandhi murmured, Rama, the Indian word for God. The shock was so appalling that I remember the tears streaming down my face. I'd only met him half.
But the impact and the magnetism. person was so enormous that one really felt acute personal bereavement as though one's own father had died and everybody in india felt the same there was a sea of people around the house and one of my strongest memories was seeing pundit naru standing on the little stone wall with tears coming down his eyes saying The father of our country is dead and breaking down in tears. The sorrow and shock of his murder wrenched India from the grip of madness.
Violence ceased. Overnight, one million people poured into Delhi for Darshan, the blessing of being near him. All through that night, people came out.
On foot, in bullet carts, ice under, sea of humanity followed the beer about, sea of nation. The actual flame was lit. I think three quarters of a million throats cried out, Gund, he is immortal.
The greatest legacy of a man is the kind of life which was designed to incarnate one single principle, the principle of non-violence. Freed India. In the 50 years since, it has transformed the world. As Martin Luther King later said, Christ gave me the message.
Gandhi gave me the method. His ashes were taken via a special third-class train to the ocean. There to be spread upon the waves.
Home for a soul who never lost his faith in God. Or man. In the midst of death, life persists.
In the midst of untruth, darkness, light. Hence I gather that God's life, light, he is love. He.