GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND (1869— ), Hindu nationalist leader, was born at Porbandar (Kathiawar, India) of a Bania family with official traditions. At the age of 19 he went to London, studied for a time at University college, and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple. Soon after starting practice in the Bombay High Court he was called, in 1893, on professional business, to South Africa, where he threw himself at once into a long and bitter struggle for the liberties of the Indian settlers in that country. He became leader of the opposi tion to a variety of measures taken by the local authorities to discourage Asiatic immigration and to limit the rights of citizen ship available to Asiatics already resident.
It was in the course of this movement that his conception of resistance without violence developed ; he relinquished his large income as an advocate, and founded a colony for his com patriots on Tolstoian lines near Durban. As the price he paid for his championship of the Indians' grievances, besides being more than once arrested and imprisoned he suffered frequent indignities at the hands of opponents. This neither checked his energies nor deterred him from rendering service of marked loyalty to the Government on three occasions; for he raised and commanded a Red Cross unit in the Boer War, he organized a plague hospital when the epidemic broke out in Johannesburg, and he led a stretcher-bearer party in the suppression of the Natal revolt of 1908. At last in 1914 a commission of inquiry into the Indian discontent recommended the removal of several of the worst injustices against which Gandhi had striven; and he felt justified in closing down his activities in South Africa and returning to India. There a wider field of political protest awaited him ; and he was soon at work organizing, in connection with the home rule movement, resistance to the British Government by "soul force" and non-cooperation.
In Jan. 1919 there were published two bills (subsequently known as the Rowlatt Acts) giving the Government emergency powers for dealing with revolutionary crimes and conspiracies; these had followed the proposals of a responsible commission which had investigated the subject, and the powers they conferred were safeguarded by elaborate protections against abuse. But Gandhi declared them to be an insult, intended to discredit the Indian people on the eve of ostensible political reforms, and he denounced the bills as instruments of oppression. He instituted a campaign of Satyagraha (literally, insistence on truth) or non violent disobedience to unjust laws in the first instance, enlarg ing if necessary into disobedience to any law and complete non cooperation with the Government. Spreading rapidly, the agitation burst into violence in the Punjab and elsewhere, with results which shocked Gandhi into a temporary suspension of his civil disobedience. Later in the year, he formed common cause with the Indian Mohammedans of the Khilafat party, aggrieved by the terms of peace which Great Britain was offering to Turkey; and in July 1920 he proclaimed a general campaign of "non-violent non-cooperation." Its points were the boycott of Government service, of the new legislatures and of the courts of law ; the surrender of all public offices; and the withdrawal of children from Government schools; to which were subsequently added boycott of foreign goods and the adoption of the spinning-wheel as an emblem of economic independence.
The agitation spread rapidly. The unlettered people who saw his earnestness and asceticism, and heard his simple eloquence, regarded him as a saint, and invested him with the title of Mahatma, or Great Soul. By 1921 Gandhi was at the zenith of his power. The National Congress, sitting at Christmas of that year, delegated its full authority to him, and empowered him to appoint his own successor. But signs of change were now appear ing. The unrest into which the non-cooperation movement had plunged the country culminated in a series of grave outrages, some of a racial character, of which the Moplah outbreak was the worst, and others directed against the agencies of law and order. Gandhi met them by personal penances. and by repeated postponements of the date on which he had foretold that India would be liberated from British rule. But he had generated forces which he had no power to recall or control, and plain people were getting alarmed at the consequences. Muslim support was being deflected from him by the encouragement which Lord Reading's Government was giving to Islamic sentiment over Turkey; and his closest adherents were embarrassed by his frequent changes of policy. Consequently, when he was arrested in March 1922 and put on trial for conspiring to spread disaffection with a view to overthrowing the government of the country, the coup evoked little excitement. Gandhi pleaded guilty, accepted responsibility for all that had happened and invited "the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen." Condemned to six years' simple imprisonment, he was released in Jan. 1924 of ter an operation in gaol for appendicitis, and the rest of his sentence was unconditionally remitted. He came back to a party which had chosen other leaders, and was soon to reverse his policy of boycotting the administration. Esteemed and con sulted though he continued to be by his old followers, he was no longer a power to sway the masses; at the end of 1925 he an nounced his intentions of retiring from the world for a year ; and his more recent incursions into politics have been ineffective. The nationalist movement was switched on to lines more familiar to western constitutional usage. But Gandhi's economic nostrums were unpractical and he gave way to unexpected bursts of in tolerance, as when he described the British government of India as "satanic." He renewed his agitation in Jan. 1930, urging civil disobedience by violation of the salt excise laws. He was arrested and interned at Poona on May 5. (ME.) In Jan. 1931 Gandhi was released from prison. In the same year his conversations with the viceroy led to the Delhi Pact ; and later he took part in the Round Table Conference in London. In he was again imprisoned for a short time, being released owing to the danger of his self-imposed fasting to his health.