Kamat's Potpourri: Gandhi

Timeline of Gandhi's Life

1869		Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi born in Porbandar in Gujarat.
1893		Gandhi leaves for Johannesburg for practicing law and is thrown out of a first class bogie because he is colored.
1906		Mohandas K. Gandhi, 37, speaks at a mass meeting in the Empire Theater, Johannesburg on September 11 and launches a campaign of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) to protest discrimination against Indians. The British Government had just invalidated the Indian Marriage.
1913		Mohandas Gandhi in Transvaal, South Africa leads 2,500 Indians into the in defiance of a law, they are violently arrested, Gandhi refuses to pay a fine, he is jailed, his supporters demonstrate. On November 25, and Natal police fire into the crowd, killing two, injuring 20.
1914		Mohandas Gandhi returns to India at age 45 after 21 years of practicing law in South Africa where he organized a campaign of “passive resistance” to protest his mistreatment by whites for his defense of Asian immigrants. He attracts wide attention in India by conducting a fast --the first of 14 that he will stage as political demonstrations and that will inaugurate the idea of the political fasting.
1930		A civil disobedience campaign against the British in India begins March 12. The All-India Trade Congress has empowered Gandhi to begin the demonstrations (see 1914). Called Mahatma for the past decade, Gandhi leads a 165-mile march to the Gujarat coast of the Arabian Sea and produces salt by evaporation of sea water in violation of the law as a gesture of defiance against the British monopoly in salt production
1932		Gandhi begins a "fast unto death" to protest the British government's treatment of India's lowest caste "untouchables" whom Gandhi calls Harijans -- "God's children." Gandhi's campaign of civil disobedience has brought rioting and has landed him in prison, but he persists in his demands for social reform, he urges a new boycott of British goods, and after 6 days of fasting obtains a pact that improves the status of the "untouchables" (Dalits)
1947		India becomes free from 200 years of British Rule. A major victory for Gandhian principles and non-violence in general.
1948		Gandhi is assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic at a prayer meeting

Timeline of Gandhi's Life

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