Today is Gandhi Day – Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, in Porbandar, India on this date in 1869. 10 things you might not know about him.
Mahatma wasn’t his name. It was a title, meaning ‘great soul’, thought to have been first applied to him by his friend Pranjivan Mehta in a letter in 1909. His actual first name was Mohandas.
Gandhi's father, Karamchand, served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state. During his tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives died young; his third was barren. She gave him permission to marry a fourth time. Mohandas was the youngest of the four children of that marriage. According to his sister, one of Gandhi’s favourite pastimes as a child was twisting Dogs’ ears. At school, he was an average student. He was shy and studious, disliking games.
He married at 13, his wife was a 14 year old called Kasturbai Kapadia. It was an arranged marriage as was the custom. He later wrote, “We didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives.” However, by the time he was 16 he’d figured it out and fathered a child, which sadly only lived a few days. The couple had four more children who would survive, before Gandhi gave up sex at the age of 37.
He went to London in 1888 to study law and was called to the bar in June 1891. While he was there, he took dancing lessons and served on the executive committee of the Vegetarian Society, having been unimpressed by how bland vegetarian food in England was. A fellow member of that committee was one Arnold Hills, who went on to found the football club that became West Ham United. When he returned to London for talks with politicians in 1931, he turned down the posh hotel he was offered and stayed in a community centre in Bromley-by-Bow.
His career as a barrister was hampered by his severe stage fright. The first time he had to cross examine someone, he got so nervous that he had to give up the case and give the client his money back.
He spent 21 years in South Africa, which was where he began his political campaigning, having experienced the racial discrimination there. Gandhi returned to India at the age of 45 in 1915. He adopted his style of wearing white loin cloth and shawl in 1921, to encourage Indians to boycott foreign-made clothes and embrace home-grown, hand-spun fabric known as khadi.
He served in the Boer War on the side of the British – but not as a soldier. He formed the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps, which was a group of volunteers who carried wounded soldiers to hospital. Gandhi hoped that if Indians showed loyalty in this way, it would help their cause for full citizenship, but any assurances the British made in that direction came to nothing.
Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy were pen pals. Tolstoy’s writings about non-violent resistance impressed Gandhi so much that, in 1909, he wrote to Tolstoy seeking guidance and advice. They continued the correspondence. It’s believed that a letter to Gandhi was the last thing Tolstoy ever wrote.
Gandhi never won a Nobel Peace Prize, despite being nominated several times. The Nobel Committee didn’t like his nationalist stance, and believed that, although Gandhi himself rejected violence in any form, many of his followers showed no such restraint and would commit violence in his name.
Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist called Nathuram Godse. Godse thought Gandhi was being too soft and shot him three times in the chest. When Prime Minister Nehru announced his death, he said that “the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere”.
