Early life

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born into a Hindu family in Porbandar, Gujarat,
India. They were descendants of traders (the word "Gandhi" means grocer). He was
the son of Karamchand Gandhi, the dewan (Chief Minister) of Porbandar, and
Putlibai, Karamchand's fourth wife, a Hindu of the Vaishnava sect. Growing up with a
devout Vaishnava mother and surrounded by the Jain influences of Gujarat, Gandhi
learned from an early age the tenets of noninjury to living beings, vegetarianism,
fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between members of various
creeds and sects. At the age of 13 Gandhi married Kasturba Makharji, who was the
same age as he. They had four sons: Harilal Gandhi, born in 1888; Manilal Gandhi,
born in 1892; Ramdas Gandhi, born in 1897; and Devdas Gandhi, born in 1900.

Gandhi was a mediocre student in his youth at Porbandar and later Rajkot, and
barely passed the matriculation exam for the University of Bombay in 1887, joining
Samaldas College. He did not stay there long, however, as his family felt he must
become a barrister if he was to continue the family tradition of holding high office in

Gujarat. Unhappy at Samaldas College, he leapt at the opportunity to study in

England, which he viewed as "a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of
civilization."

At the age of 19, Gandhi went to University College, of the University of London, to
train as a barrister. His time in London, the Imperial capital, was influenced by a vow
he had made to his mother on leaving India to observe the Hindu precepts of
abstinence from meat and alcohol. Although Gandhi experimented with becoming
"English", taking dancing lessons for example, he couldn't stomach his landlady's
mutton and cabbage. She pointed him towards one of London's vegetarian
restaurants. Rather than simply going along with his mother's wishes, he read about,
and became intellectually converted to, vegetarianism. He joined the Vegetarian
Society, was elected to its Executive Committee, and founded a local chapter. He
later credited this with giving him valuable experience in organising and running
institutions. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical
Society, which had been founded in 1875 by H.P. Blavatsky to further universal
brotherhood. The Theosophists were devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu
Brahmanistic literature. They encouraged Gandhi to read the Bhagavad Gita.
Although he hadn't shown a particular interest in religion before then, he began to
read works of, and about, Hinduism, Christianity, and other religions.

He returned to India after being admitted to the British bar. He tried to establish a
law practice in Bombay, but had limited success. By this time, the legal profession
was overcrowded in India, and Gandhi was not a dynamic figure in a courtroom. He
applied for a part-time job as a teacher at a Bombay high school, but was turned
down. He ended up returning to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for
litigants, but was forced to close down that business as well when he ran afoul of a
British officer. In his autobiography, he describes this incident as a kind of
unsuccessful lobbying attempt on behalf of his older brother. It was in this climate
that he accepted a year-long contract from an Indian firm to a post in Natal, South
Africa.

Civil rights movement in South Africa

At this point in his life, Gandhi was a mild-mannered, diffident, politically indifferent
individual. He had read his first newspaper at age 18 and was prone to horrible stage
fright when speaking in court. South Africa changed him dramatically as he faced the
humiliation and oppression that was commonly directed at Indians in that country.
One day in court in the city of Durban, the magistrate asked him to remove his
turban, which he refused to do and then stormed out of the courtroom. Several days
later, he began a journey to Pretoria that would serve as the catalyst for his activism.
First, he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg because he had refused to move
from first class to third class when asked in spite of the fact that he was travelling on
a first class ticket. Later, now travelling by stagecoach, he was beaten by a driver for
refusing to travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger. In
addition to these specific incidents, he suffered other hardships on the journey as
well, including being barred from many hotels on account of his race. This experience
led him to more closely examine the hardships his people suffered in South Africa
during his time in Pretoria.

When Gandhi's contract was up, he prepared to return to India. However, at a

farewell party in his honor in Durban, he happened to glance at a newspaper and
learned that a bill was being considered by the Natal Legislative Assembly to deny
the vote to Indians. When he brought this up with his hosts, they lamented that they

did not have the expertise necessary to oppose the bill and implored Gandhi to stay
and help them, which he did. He circulated several petitions to both the Natal
Legislature and the British government in opposition to the bill. Though unable to
halt the bill's passage, his campaign was successful in drawing attention to the
grievances of Indians in South Africa. Supporters convinced him to remain in Durban
and continue to fight against the injustices levied against Indians in South Africa, and
he founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 with himself as secretary. Through this
organization, he organized the Indian community of South Africa into a
heterogeneous political force and inundated government and press alike with
statements of Indian grievances and evidence of British discrimination in South
Africa. Gandhi returned briefly to India in 1896 to bring his wife and children to live
with him in South Africa. When he returned in January, 1897, a white mob attacked
and tried to lynch him. In an early indication of the personal values that would shape
his later campaigns, he refused to press charges on any member of the mob, stating
that it was one of his principles not to seek redress for a personal wrong in a court of

law.

At the onset of the South African War, Gandhi argued that the Indians must support
the war effort in order to legitimize their claims to full citizen rights, and he
organized a volunteer ambulance corps composed of 300 free Indians and 800
indentured laborers. At the conclusion of the war, however, the situation for the
Indians did not improve; in fact, it continued to deteriorate. In 1906, the Transvaal
government promulgated a new act that called for compulsory registration of the
colony's Indian population. At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg in
September, 1906, Gandhi adopted, for the first time, his platform of satyagraha
(devotion to the truth), or nonviolent protest, calling on his fellow Indians to defy the
new law and suffer the punishments for doing so rather than resisting through
violent means. This plan was adopted and led to a seven-year struggle in which
thousands of Indians were jailed (including Gandhi himself on many occasions),
flogged, or even shot, for striking, refusing to register, and engaging in other forms
of nonviolent resistance. While the government was successful in repressing the
Indian protesters, the public outcry stemming from the harsh methods employed by
the South African government in the face of peaceful Indian protesters finally forced
South African general Jan Christian Smuts to negotiate a compromise with Gandhi.

During his years in South Africa, Gandhi drew inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita and
the writings of Leo Tolstoy, who in the 1880s had undergone a profound conversion
to a personal form of Christian anarchism. Gandhi translated Tolstoy's "Letter to a
Hindu," [1] (http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_a_Hindu_-_Leo_Tolstoy)
written in 1908 in response to aggressive Indian nationalists. The two corresponded
until Tolstoy's death in 1910. The letter by Tolstoy applies Hindu philosophy from the
Vedas and the sayings of Krishna to the growing Indian nationalism. Gandhi was also
inspired by the American writer Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on “Civil
Disobedience." Gandhi's years in South Africa were his formative years as a socio-
political activist, when the concepts and techniques of civil disobedience and non-
violent resistance were developed. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Gandhi
decided to return to India, bringing all that he had learned from his experiences in
South Africa with him.