Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869,
in Porbandar, a small coastal town in northwest India. His father, Karamchand
Gandhi, was a local politician, serving as prime minister to a
number of local Indian princes; his mother, Putlibai, was Karamchand's
fourth wife, married when her husband was already in his forties.
Neither of his parents was well educated: his mother was illiterate,
and his father, Gandhi wrote later in life, "had no education save
for experience." Nevertheless, they were well-to-do by the standards
of the rural region in which they lived, owning several houses in
Porbandar and the neighboring towns of Rajkot and Kutiana, and
they were able to afford a nurse and a good education for the young
Gandhi.
The year of Gandhi's birth fell in the midst of the Victorian
era, when the British Empire was approaching its apogee. A clever
journalist had observed in 1817 that "the sun never sets upon the
British flag," and by the latter half of the 19th century, that
bold declaration was true. In addition to their vast domains in
India, the British controlled both ends of the Mediterranean; they
held key positions in the South Pacific at Malaya and Singapore;
they dominated an entire continent with their hold on Australia
and New Zealand; and they ruled the Dominion of Canada, which made
up half of North America. In addition, during Gandhi's youth,
British adventurers such as Cecil Rhodes were busy bringing most
of Africa under Queen Victoria's rule as well.
This vast realm was held together by a peculiar mixture
of commercial greed, missionary zeal, and rivalry with other Europeanpean
powers, along with the frequently expressed notion that Britain
had a unique "civilizing mission" embarked upon for the benefit
of the rest of the world. It was, in a sense, an informal empire,
having no official standing under the English constitution, and
the British public was remarkably ignorant about the administration
of their realm. But it held together remarkably well, and by the
1870s, the British governed a quarter of the world's land and population,
more than the Roman or Spanish Empires at their height.
India was the "jewel in the crown" of Victoria's Empire.
British rule in India, referred to as the Raj by the men who built
and sustained it, had begun with the penetration of the continent
by the British East India Company in the 18th century. At that
time, the subcontinent was governed by a decaying Islamic dynasty,
the Mughals, whose power had declined to such a degree they had
difficulty enforcing their rule beyond their capital of Delhi.
Largely to secure their trade routes, the English traders used
private armies to expand their political control, and by the time
the British government took over from the East India Company in
the 1860s and established a regular system of Imperial rule, the
British had replaced the Mughals as overlords of the entire region.
For Britain, the benefits of the Raj were obvious–Imperial
administration provided a wide and fertile field of employment
for their young men, control of the subcontinent gave them geopolitical
dominance over a wide arc of territory, and exports of Indian raw
materials helped offset the trade deficit that a small industrialized
island like Great Britain accrued. For the numerous Indian peasantry,
deeply religious, bound to the land, and tied down by the strictures
of the caste system, the change of rulers made little practical
difference–it is important to remember that the idea of the "Indian
nation" is essentially a modern invention, and that before the
arrival of the British, the vast subcontinent had neither a common
language nor a history of democratic self-rule. For most Indians,
the British conquest was merely a matter of trading a corrupt ruling
class for a more efficient one.
Even at the height of Imperial Britain's dominance, however, only
two-thirds of India was governed directly from London. The rest
was held by a collection of traditional Indian potentates, princes,
and rajas, some corrupt, others forward- looking, who had sworn
allegiance to the British Crown and were allowed a reasonable degree
of autonomy in local affairs. It was in one of these princely
states that Gandhi was born, educated, and–at the age of thirteen–married,
to a local girl of the same age named Kasturbai. Child marriage
was–and still is, in some regions–an accepted facet of daily life
in India, and while later in life Gandhi would attack the practice
as cruel and inhumane, he seems to have welcomed the wedding, and,
in his words, "I lost no time in assuming the authority of a husband
. . . (she) could not go out without my permission." Needless
to say, the adolescent couple went through quarrelsome stretches,
often not speaking to one another for long periods of time.
Gandhi was a shy and fearful child. Short and spindly,
he shied away from athletics, and his lack of physical prowess
was matched by his difficulties in school. Though in later years
he would read the Bible, Tolstoy, and the Bhagavad-Gita with
great enthusiasm, the young Gandhi labored over the multiplication
tables and never rose above academic mediocrity. His religious
imagination, which would inspire observers around the world in years
to come, was also decidedly limited in his childhood years. His
household was a remarkable center of religious diversity: his mother
was a devout Hindu, and his father's friends, a diverse group that
included Muslims, Parsis, and Jains, often debated religious and
philosophical matters in the house. (Given Gandhi's later philosophical
convictions, it is noteworthy that Jainism was particularly strong
in his region, since that movement preaches the preciousness of
all life, and the necessity of avoiding the killing of any living
creature, however small.) But while many of the ideas that percolated
around the young Gandhi found their way into his religious convictions
later in life, as a young man he had no religious convictions at
all–the subject bored him, in his own words, he found the "glitter
and pomp" of Hindu temples distasteful, and if anything, leaned
"somewhat toward atheism."
In 1885, Karamchand Gandhi passed away, and his relatives decided
that the young Mohandas was his most likely successor as head of
the family. With that in mind, they agreed that the young man
should go to England and study for the bar there–with an English
law degree under his belt, they assumed, Gandhi would have no difficulty
following in his father's footsteps as a local politician. But
a journey to Europeanpe was a significant step, and his mother Putlibai
worried about the corrupting effect that England would have upon
her son's morals. To calm her fears, Gandhi swore an oath to avoid
wine and meat (both proscribed by the Hindu faith) while overseas,
and after the family had gathered enough money, he made his way
to Bombay to sail for Southampton in England.
In Bombay, a remarkable event occurred: The elders of
Gandhi's caste, the Modh Banias (a merchant caste, neither as high
as the priestly Brahmins nor as low as the shunned untouchables)
learned of the proposed trip and objected. No member of their
caste could go to England, they solemnly declared, because such
a trip would inevitably involve impurity, and Hinduism could not
be practiced in Europeanpe. By this point, however, Gandhi was
determined to go, and so he allowed himself to be expelled from
his caste. For the remainder of his life, he would be "out-caste",
an appropriate condition for a man who labored hard to put an end
to caste divisions in India. All obstacles now removed, Gandhi
sailed for England in September of 1888, at the age of nineteen.
Among the loved ones he left behind was his three-month-old first
child, a boy named Harilal.
