Biography of mohandas k gandhi autobiography

Like when your mother told you that you needed to wait three hours after eating before swimming. No one believes these kind of ideas anymore. Is the truth of nonviolence that Gandhi lived, not believed but lived - is that truth not believable or livable anymore? Where do people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and so many others get the notion that the only response to hatred is love?

Look around you? Do you think this is still possible? In this world? Some biographies inspire but the good ones challenge. What would it be like for you and me to fight the biggest battle, the one Gandhi fought, the one that takes place inside of you, the one between your Self and the anger that fills you? And what would it take for you to believe that that's the one battle that will truly make this world a better place?

One of the most influential people to have ever lived. This book should be essential reading for anyone working in the legal sector, in social justice and human rights, and anyone remotely interested in contemporary history and the great men and women of our time. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, always.

Gandhi was an inspiring figure of the twentieth century, a man whose quest to live in accord with God's highest truth led him to initiate massive campaigns against racism, violence, and colonialism. From his youthful rebellion against vegetarianism, to his successful law practice in South Africa, his struggle with his own sexual excesses, and his leadership of the movement to free India from British biography of mohandas k gandhi autobiography, Gandhi describes the story of his life as a series of spiritual ''experiments'' and explains how he developed his concept of active nonviolent resistance, which propelled the Indian struggle for independence and inspired countless other nonviolent struggles.

Translated from the original in Gujarati by Mahadev Desai. Narrator - Bill Wallace Gasp! And there he was, meeting teh Blavatsky and Annie Besant I picked this up primarily wanting to know the reverse of Letter To A Hindu, not particularly wishing to find the spiritual but not willing to diss that aspect out of hand when faced full-on. This is wonderful, we get to find that the man was, as a youngster, a thief, a liar, and a con artist.

From such humble beginnings came a great human being. Blinking marvellous read. Fully recommended. Hajer Fahad. Erik Graff. Having read Fischer's biography of him in high school led to reading a whole lot of Gandhi's own writing in college--until, that is, hitting his commentaries on the Gita--starting with his early autobiographical My Experiments with Truth.

My primary interest in Gandhi was his pacifism and his reasons for it. The United States' invasion of the south of Vietnam had been going on since my childhood and I had become a draft counselor in college and, ultimately, a draft resister after I'd started filling out the conscientious objector forms and found that I certainly didn't qualify by governmental criteria.

This, of course, raised questions. The C. I was no theist in their sense, nor was Gandhi. What would he have to say? Well, on that score Gandhi was a disappointment. His pacifism appeared rooted in his character and in his emotional feeling for such traditions and behavior. I shared the emotion and found Gandhi a kindred soul, but I failed to find an intellectually satisfying argument which could hold up against, say, a sociopath's or a politician's reasonings.

What I did find was a very engaging fellow, conversant with the West and their traditions, as well as with his own culture, a cosmopolitan from the other side of the world who conveys a sense of utter guilelessness yet whom you know was a practical and very successful politician on terms substantially of his own choosing. In this light, an anecdote: When Gandhi, instopped for an audience with Italy's head of state, he was met by Mussolini and his family.

As ever, Gandhi was scantily attired and accompanied by his goat. Mussolini's sons sniggered. After the audience the Duce is reported to have glared at them, saying "that man and his goat are shaking the British Empire. Sidharth Vardhan. Author 23 books followers. A ridiculously long essay about a man I think is overrated: Gandhi is hands down one of the most overrated people in the world.

It might be true for most people tagged as 'great' but the way people in India obsesses for Gandhi either considering him really great or awesome on one hand or calling him wicked on other without being willing to see any shades of grey in him is really too much. To be honest there are two Gandhis - one is the real Gandhi and the other is the idea of him that is attached to an almost ridiculous faithfulness to non-violence and truth which features in movies like 'Lage Raho Munna Bhai'.

The idea Gandhis more biography of mohandas k gandhi autobiography ofcourse, I wonder how many of us have ever imagined Gandhi as a young man, This later idea Gandhi is something I like because it doesn't have to suffer from limitations of the original person who is, after all, a human. Gandhi the god The problem is that, even in his own time, this idea Gandhi raised him to the level of God who was frequently troubled by 'darshan seekers'.

The stupid habits Indians have of making people into Gods is something Mr. Ambedkar warned the country against it in his famous speech while presenting Constitution of India and Bhagat Singh warned against in his essay 'Why I am an atheist? Calling someone a God, of course, means that you put him or her beyond all criticism which was Bhagat Singh's main objection.

Rama is the best example in this context. He is God and so incapable of mistakes. As long as you think of Rama as a human being, Ramayana makes a very fascinating piece of literature IMO. Make him God and the book is hijacked by moralists trying to justify his actions. Gandhi himself hated God-like status. Those like Bhagat Singh, S. Bose, B.

Ambedkar and Jinnah and to comparatively less extent Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru who had a bit of personal intelligence of their own soon grew to oppose Gandhi but most of the country still carried that blind devotion in them. And speaking of a Gandhi capable of mistakes, most of his loved values can be traced to a single incidence of his childhood.

The time he secretly from his father and shock! His strong conscience must have traumatized him and thus born are an inclination towards three things that he later justified as values driven from his 'experiments' and study of religious literature - truth he confessed his crimenon-violence his father punished him by being in pain himself and vegetarianism.

Vegetarianism and Brahmacharya There are more chapters devoted to vegetarianism than to other two values. We get chapters on chapters on how he experimented with his diets, how his wife and one of the four children almost died because of how they share his obsession for vegetarianism. Later his obsession for vegetarianism got attached to his love for self-help which might as well be defined as opposite of 'division of labor' - to quote an example, he thinks that instead of engaging domestic help and putting their time to more productive use, the lawyers should wash their own clothesdistaste for sexuality this might seem hypocritical given that how he abused his child-bride during their adolescence, but remember people change and cleanliness a value I admire.

Refer Modi for more details, though unlike him, Gandhi wasn't just pulling a political stunt to result in his obsession for brahmacharya. I don't get the appeal of this brahmacharya thing - you give up food, sex and almost everything sweet, sexy and beautiful to get a few more years of life. I mean why would you need them? What is the fun of such a life anyway?

Both Gandhi and his prose seem so dry of life. He has no love for books other than self-help or religion and art, the rare chapters where he talks about his family, it is either a confession to something he did and now considers wrong or in relation to his 'experiments', there are never any stories where a kid was just so cute and he couldn't help mentioning it through the book is alternatively titled 'an autobiography'.

One of his last 'experiments' with Brahamchariya that happened too long after the book was finished is something getting a lot of ridicule. It involved sleeping figurtively in same room with girls to test whether he feels sexual instincts - not caring about how traumatic the experience might for these girls. Of course, the girls afterward declared that there was nothing sexual between them Gandhi and them, but one wonders if Gandhi considered the possiblty that his experiment might actually fail?

Non-Violence He somehow derived his love for non-violence from Geeta which was, really, a very long justification of the bloodiest war of its time. But really those religious justifications for ideas of vegetarianism and non-violence are redundant, he just couldn't stand the idea of violence, even against animals He would probably call an act done in self-defense violence too when even Buddhists who are similarly obsessed with non-violence have developed self-defense arts.

Like any other ideal, it suffers from many practical disadvantages. Of course, this love for non-violence doesn't stop him from asking youth of the country to fight for Britain in World War I. What else can an imperial government ask? You won't get any aggressive revolts, but you get soldiers ready to die for you. Gandhi's argument that it is wrong to betray empire in the hour of its need is foolish in the fact that first world war was just a wrestling match among European Imperial powers who turned on each other because there were no other territories left to conquer.

His letter to Hitler is the childish thing the idealist goody two shoes are prone to do seeing the world in their own image. It is cute but his advice to Jews in concentration camps to commit suicide in protest against cruelties done to them is plain disgusting. Satyagraha What I can't understand is why he called his methods of non-violence 'Satyagraha' thus confusing Satya or truth with non-violence.

He does have a ridiculous obsession for truth too though. One of those values you can admire. But the methods that go by name of Satyagrahas of his, despite having a poetical name is nothing more than methods a stubborn child would use to gets its demands fulfilled by its parents I won't eat till my demands are fulfilled, I won't cooperate or listen to you till my demands are fulfilled and so on.

It is only at the time of civil disobedience movement that his methods appealed a little to me and the time of independence when he was able to prevent a lot of bloodshed in riots to a great extent by making tours to Bengal and asking people to give up arms which they did but the book was written several years before those times. One of the arguments against aggressive methods is that it can often be a slippery slope but the same seems to be true for Gandhi's non-violent tools.

The strikes, fasts etc continue to be popular among Indians even when more democratic methods are available - another thing Ambedkar warned against in speech mentioned above. The third and last warning, if you are interested, was to make India a social democracy and not just settle for political equality - something else ignored by Indians to their own disadvantage A man of boxes To me personally, Gandhi lived in certain kind of box or boxes which he couldn't think out of despite his having traveled three continents.

He couldn't think beyond religions he learned much from religions. Christ's quote 'turn the other cheek' is often attributed to Gandhi in India' - in fact, he believed that everyone should have his or her thinking confined to box of religion he or she were born in and respect other boxes. Much of what is intellectual in him is limited to the range defined by Hinduism.

He is untouched from writers like Dostoevsky or political philosophers like Marx, the only famous writer he refers to is Tolstoy and again it is the later religious parables of Tolstoy that Gandhi is interested in and not Anna Karenina or War and Peace. The other box he takes a lot of time to break is probably created by the education system he was raised in - which made him believe that British rule is overall for good of colonies.

No obviousness of racism in South Africa, the famines of India, the drain of wealth from India would make him see the truth of British rule for most of his life. He demanded domainian staus not seeing that it was sort of respect British government gave to only those countries that had a white population in far more significant percentage of the population than ever could be the case with India.

When he withdrew non-cooperation, he argued India was not ready for independence - as British were ever ready to rule India. There is the box of traditionalism. His go-to tools like Charkha and handicrafts are pre-industrialisation. And he seems to show no interest in industrialization. The schools need not care much about textbooks. All his philosophy about studies while focusing much on the study of languages, religion, moral values, and physical exercises has little to tell about teaching sciences and arts a craft which can be useful is different and gets attention.

There is also focus of his own circles in as far as the South African part is concerned more than half of book is devoted to his life in South Africathere is almost no mention of black Africans. Consistency of Politicians None of us is same forever - same as we were years ago, at least no one who is constantly learning can be. This unfortunate occurrence became known as the Jallianwala Bagh biography of mohandas k gandhi autobiographyit outraged the British public almost as much as Indian society.

The authorities in London eventually condemned Dyer's conduct, forcing him to resign in disgrace. The effect the massacre had on Indian society became even more profound as more moderate politicians, like Gandhi, now began to wholeheartedly support the idea of Indian independence, creating an intense climate of mutual hostility. After the massacre, Gandhi eventually obtained permission to travel to Amritsar and conduct his own investigation.

He produced a report months later and his work on the report motivated him to contact a number of Indian politicians, who advocated for the idea of independence from British colonial rule. After the massacre, Gandhi attended the Muslim Conference being held in Delhi, where Indian Muslims discussed their fears that the British government would abolish the Ottoman Caliphate.

Indian Muslims considered the Caliphs as heirs of Mohammed and spiritual heads of Islam. While the British government considered abolition a necessary effort to restore order after the First World War, the Muslim population of the British Empire viewed it as an unnecessary provocation. Gandhi urged them not to accept the actions of the British government.

He proposed a boycott of British goods, and stated that if the British government continued to insist on the abolition of the Caliphate, Indian Muslims should take even more drastic measures of non-cooperation, involving areas such as government employment and taxes. During the months that followed, Gandhi continued to advocate for peace and caution, however, since Britain and the Ottomans were still negotiating their peace terms.

Unlike more nationalistic politicians, he also supported the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms for India, as they laid the foundation for constitutional self-government. Eventually, other politicians who thought the reforms did not go far enough had to agree with Gandhi simply because his popularity and influence had become so great that the Congress could accomplish little without him.

While the British government remained determined to abolish the Ottoman Caliphate, they also continued to enforce the Rowlatt Act resolutely. Even Gandhi became less tolerant towards British colonial policies and in Aprilhe urged all Indians, Muslim and Hindu, to begin a "non-cooperation" protest against British policies by giving up their Western clothing and jobs in the colonial government.

As a personal example, on 1 August, he returned the kasar-i-hind medal that he had received for providing medical service to wounded British soldiers during the Second Boer War. He also became the first president of the Home Rule League, a largely symbolic position which confirmed his position as an advocate for Indian Independence.

In SeptemberGandhi also passed an official constitution for the Congress, which created a system of two national committees and numerous local units, all working to mobilize a spirit of non-cooperation across India. Gandhi and other volunteers traveled around India further establishing this new grass roots organization, which achieved great success.

ByGandhi decided that the initiative of non-cooperation had to transform into open civil disobedience, but in MarchLord Reading finally ordered Gandhi's arrest after a crowd in the city of Chauri Chaura attacked and assassinated the local representatives of British colonial government. Gandhi, who had never encouraged or sanctioned this type of conduct, condemned the actions of the violent crowds and retreated into a period of fasting and prayer as a response to this violent outburst.

However, the colonial government saw the event as a trigger point and a reason for his arrest. The British colonial authorities placed Gandhi on trial for sedition and sentenced him to six years in prison, marking the first time that he faced prosecution in India. Because of Gandhi's fame, the judge, C. Broomfield, hesitated to impose a harsher punishment.

He considered Gandhi clearly guilty as charged, given the fact that Gandhi admitted his guilt of supporting non-violent, open civil disobedience and even went as far as requesting the heaviest possible sentence. Such willingness to accept imprisonment conformed to his philosophy of satyagraha, so Gandhi felt that his time in prison only furthered his commitment and goals.

The authorities allowed him to use a spinning wheel and receive reading materials while in prison, so he felt content. He also wrote most of his autobiography while serving his sentence. However, in Gandhi's absence, Indians returned to the jobs they had previously spurned and their every day routines. Even worse, the unity between Muslims and Hindus, which Gandhi advocated so passionately, had already begun to fall apart to the point where the threat of violence loomed large over many communities with mixed population.

The campaign for Indian independence could not continue while Indians themselves suffered disunity and conflict, all the more difficult to overcome in a huge country like India, which had always suffered religious divisions, as well as divisions by language, and even caste. Gandhi realized that the British government of the time, had lost the will and power to maintain their empire, but he always acknowledged that Indians could not rely simply on the weakening of Britain in order to achieve independence.

He believed that Indians had to become morally ready for independence. He planned to contribute to such readiness through his speeches and writing, advocating humility, restraint, good sanitation, as well as an end to child marriages. After his imprisonment ended, he resumed his personal quest for purification and truth. He ends his autobiography by admitting that he continues to experience and fight with "the dormant passion" that lie within his own soul.

He felt ready to continue the long and difficult path of taming those passions and putting himself last among his fellow human beings, the only way to achieve salvation, according to him. To conquer the subtle passions is far harder than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms,". Gandhi writes in his "Farewell" to the readers, a suitable conclusion for an autobiography that he never intended to be an autobiography, but a tale of experiments with life, and with truth.

The autobiography is noted for its lucid, simple and idiomatic language and its transparently honest narration. In his essay " Reflections on Gandhi "George Orwell argued that the autobiography made clear Gandhi's "natural physical courage", which he saw as later confirmed by the circumstances of his assassination ; his lack of feelings of envy, inferiority, or suspiciousness, the last of which Orwell thought was common to Indian people; and his lack of racial prejudice.

In a interview, Gujarati writer Harivallabh Bhayani mentioned this work as the most important work, together with Govardhanram Tripathi 's Saraswatichandrato have emerged in Gujarat in the last 50 years. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Wikiquote Wikidata item. Autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Background [ edit ]. Publication history [ edit ]. Contents [ edit ]. Summary [ edit ]. Translator's preface [ edit ].

Introduction [ edit ]. Part I [ edit ]. Part II [ edit ]. Part III [ edit ]. Part IV [ edit ]. Part V [ edit ]. Reception [ edit ]. Influences [ edit ]. Editions in print [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Citations [ edit ].

Biography of mohandas k gandhi autobiography

Gandhi's experiments with truth : essential writings by and about Mahatma Gandhi. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin. My Inventions: Autobiography of Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla. Mohandas Gandhi. Next set of slides. Although accepting of his status as a great innovator in the struggle against racism, violence, and, just then, colonialism, Gandhi feared that enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding.

He says that he was after truth rooted in devotion to God and attributed the turning points, successes, and challenges in his life to the will of God. His attempts to get closer to this divine power led him to seek purity through simple living, dietary practices he called himself a fruitariancelibacy, and ahimsaa life without violence. It is in this sense that he calls his book The Story of My Experiments with Truthoffering it also as a reference for those who would follow in his footsteps.

A reader expecting a complete accounting of his actions, however, will be sorely disappointed. It is the most revealing study of the human soul that I have ever read. Its place among the classics of autobiography cannot be in doubt. From the Publisher All royalties earned on this book are paid to the Navajivan Trust, founded by Gandhi, for use in carrying on his work.

He followed the philosophies of pacifism, believing in the importance of the nonviolent approach to protesting. He first experienced institutional racial discrimination in South Africa, which spurred him to his first actions in leading group-based nonviolent civil disobedience. He later returned to India and led protests against British colonialism, excessive taxation, and racial discrimination.

Known as 'the Father of the Nation," Gandhi was instrumental in the fight for religious pluralism and Indian independence. He was assassinated in Read more. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! About the authors Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

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Please try again later. Verified Purchase. I have a great respect for Gandhi and I read this book to get a clearer understanding of the man. I reject the pedestal he has been placed upon, a fate no one deserves. Here are his words and thoughts, foreign in many ways to those of the west and unfamiliar with of man of his time and place. Readers who cannot understand his era or upbringing will likely be disappointed or confused by his account.

Print length. Publication date. See all details. Next slide of product details. Similar items that may deliver to you quickly. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Previous set of slides. Mohandas Gandhi. M K Gabdhi. Mohandas Karamchand Mahatma Gandhi. Perfect Paperback. Mahatma Gandhi. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Next set of slides. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

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