Teachings and Philosophies of Gandhi
Teachings and Philosophies of Gandhi
The roots of civil disobedience exercised today stem from Gandhi's teachings, philosophy and practices. Mohandas Karamchad Gandhi, a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma meaning great soul, was born in 1869 in India. Gandhi was a great humanist, a social reformer of fight imperialism morally and non-violently.
In the early twentieth century, India was a colony of the British Empire. Many people lived in poverty because the British took all the wealth. After school Gandhi went to London and studied Law in a university. He became a lawyer. The idea of offering moral and non-violent resistance to injustice was born when a young man Gandhi, a fresh barrister from England, was thrown out of a train in 1893, while traveling from Durban to Pretoria in South Africa. He had a first class ticket, but was asked to leave the compartment and shift to a third-class coach. He was not a white man therefore; he did not have a right to be traveling first class. He refused to leave voluntarily. He was pushed out and he had to spend the cold night in the Maritzburg railroad station.
He started a project called ashram where he had the idea of people from different religions lived together in peace and freedom. It was here in South Africa that he perfected the techniques of 'Ahimsa' and 'Satyagraha', meaning non-violent mass action and civil disobedience. He led the struggle against racial discrimination and imperial domination for almost 20 years. To be one of the people in poverty, he traveled through the country by train and in third class wagon. He also attained a hobby of spinning. He had an opinion that a lot of poverty in India was the result of all the clothes that were produced in and imported from Great Britain to India. Gandhi encouraged the people not to buy any more British clothes but to produce and buy their own Indian clothes. After that, many people started to boycott British goods. People in the British factories got unemployed.
Another very important step to independence was that he asked the whole nation to strike for one day. And they did. Nothing worked on that day. There was virtually no traffic, mail was not delivered, factories were not working, the telegraph lines did not work and the British in India were cut off their mother country.
Gandhi returned to India...