§ 2
His real name is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was born in a little semi-independent state in the northwestern part of India, at Porbandar, the “White City” on the sea of Oman, October 2, 1868. He comes of an ardent and active race, which to this day has been split by civil strife; a practical race, commercially keen, which established trade relations all the way from Aden to Zanzibar. Gandhi’s father and grandfather were both leaders of the people and met with persecution because of their independent spirit. Both were forced to flee for safety, their lives in peril. Gandhi’s family was well-to-do and belonged to a cultivated class of society, but it was not of superior caste. His parents were followers of the Jaïn school of Hinduism, which regards ahimsa,6 the doctrine of non-injury to any form of life, as one of its basic principles. This was the doctrine which Gandhi was to proclaim victoriously throughout the world. The Jaïnists believe that the principle of love, not intelligence, is the road which leads to God. The Mahatma’s father cared little for wealth and material values, and left scarcely any to his family, having given almost everything away to charity. Gandhi’s mother was a very devout woman, a sort of Hindu St. Elisabeth, fasting, giving alms to the poor, and nursing the sick. In Gandhi’s family the Ramayana was read regularly. His first teacher was a Brahman who taught him to memorize the texts of Vishnu.7 In later years Gandhi expressed regret at not being a better Sanskrit scholar, and one of his grievances against English education in India is that it makes the natives lose the treasures of their own language. Gandhi became, however, a profound student of Hindu scriptures, although he read the Vedas and the Upanishads in translation only.8
While still a boy he passed through a severe religious crisis. Shocked at the idolatrous form sometimes assumed by Hinduism, he became, or imagined he became, an atheist, and to prove that religion meant nothing to him he and some friends went so far as to eat meat, a frightful sacrilege for a Hindu. And Gandhi nearly perished with disgust and mortification.9 He was engaged at the age of eight and married at the age of twelve.10 At nineteen he was sent to England to complete his studies at the University of London and at the law school. Before his leaving India, his mother made him take the three vows of Jaïn, which prescribe abstention from wine, meat, and sexual intercourse.
He arrived in London in September, 1888, and after the first few months of uncertainty and deception, during which, as he says, he “wasted a lot of time and money trying to become an Englishman,” he buckled down to hard work and led a strictly regulated life. Some friends gave him a copy of the Bible, but the time to understand it had not yet come. But it was during his stay in London that he realized for the first time the beauty of the Bhagavad Gitâ. He was carried away by it. It was the light the exiled Hindu had been seeking, and it gave him back his faith. He realized that for him salvation could lie only in Hinduism.11
He returned to India in 1891, a rather sad home-coming, for his mother had just died, and the news of her death had been withheld from him. Soon afterward he began practicing law at the Supreme Court of Bombay. He abandoned this career a few years later, having come to look upon it as immoral. But even while practicing law he used to make a point of reserving the right to abandon a case if he had reason to believe it unjust.
At this stage of his career he met various people who stirred in him a presentiment as to his future mission in life. He was influenced by two men in particular. One of them was the “Uncrowned King of Bombay,” the Parsi Dadabhai, and the other Professor Gokhale. Gokhale was one of the leading statesmen in India and one of the first to introduce educational reforms, while Dadabhai, according to Gandhi, was the real founder of the Indian nationalist movement. Both men combined the highest wisdom and learning with the utmost simplicity and gentleness.12 It was Dadabhai who, in trying to moderate Gandhi’s youthful ardor, gave him, in 1892, his first real lesson in ahimsa by teaching him to apply heroic passivity—if two such words may be linked—to public life by fighting evil, not by evil, but by love. A little later we will discuss this magic word of ahimsa, the sublime message of India to the world.