Mahatma Gandhi
Key Facts
- Né le 2 octobre 1869 à Porbandar (Inde) ; avocat formé à Londres
- Développe le Satyagraha (résistance non-violente) en Afrique du Sud dès 1893
- Mène la Marche du Sel en mars 1930 : 388 km à pied jusqu'à la mer
- Emprisonné à plusieurs reprises par les autorités britanniques, près de 6 ans cumulés
- Guide l'Inde vers l'indépendance, proclamée le 15 août 1947
- Assassiné le 30 janvier 1948 à New Delhi par un nationaliste hindou extrémiste
- Inspirateur de Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela et des mouvements de non-violence dans le monde
Biography
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as the Mahatma ("Great Soul"), was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, in present-day Gujarat, India. The son of a local prime minister, he studied law in England and was called to the bar in London in 1891. An ordinary man at first, he was to be profoundly shaken by a founding experience that would shape his entire political philosophy.
In 1893, Gandhi went to South Africa to practise as a lawyer and there encountered the daily violence of racial discrimination. Thrown off a first-class train carriage despite holding a valid ticket, he spent the night on the platform at Pietermaritzburg station: he would later describe this moment as the turning point of his life. He spent twenty-one years in South Africa developing the concept of Satyagraha, a Sanskrit term meaning "the force of truth" or active nonviolent resistance, grounded in peaceful civil disobedience.
Returning to India in 1915, Gandhi took the helm of the independence movement within the Indian National Congress. He organised landmark campaigns: the refusal to pay tax in the Champaran region (1917), the boycott of British cloth in favour of hand-spun khadi, and above all the Salt March (1930), during which he walked 388 kilometres to the Arabian Sea to symbolically pick up salt without paying the colonial tax. These actions earned him several stints in prison, totalling nearly six years of detention.
In 1947, Britain granted independence to India, but the partition of the subcontinent between India and the newly created Pakistan unleashed a wave of intercommunal violence that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Gandhi, broken by the tragedy, travelled to conflict zones, fasted to demand peace and sought to unite Hindus and Muslims. On 30 January 1948, in New Delhi, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist extremist who blamed him for being too sympathetic to Muslims.
Gandhi's legacy is vast and universal. His method of nonviolent resistance inspired Martin Luther King Jr. in the American civil rights struggle, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and liberation movements across the world. The United Nations proclaimed 2 October, his birthday, the International Day of Non-Violence. To this day, his image, his round glasses and his spinning wheel have become universal symbols of peace and human dignity.