# Bedtime Biography: An Autobiography by M.K. Gandhi - Blinkist

Introduction

Bedtime Biographies are best when listened to.

Check out the audio version to get the full experience!

It’s astonishing to think about the influence just a small handful of people have had on the world.

The fields of art, culture, and politics – to name just a few – have all been shaped in meaningful ways by exceptional individuals whose gifts, work, or energy made them stand out from the rest.

Few people have had more of an impact on their nations, and their times, than the late Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more popularly known as Mahātmā, meaning Great Soul.

He helped lead his beloved India to political independence, and made nonviolent resistance known all over the world as an effective means of political protest.

Take a few deep breaths, relax, and let’s get into the story of this remarkable man’s life.

Chapter 1

Mohandas Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar – a coastal city in Gujarat, India.

He was the youngest child of Karamchand and Putlibai, who were modest but upright people.

In a country where caste determined much about one’s life, he was born into a merchant class known as the Modh Bania.

At school, young Gandhi was strongly influenced by the traditional Indian folktales that formed part of the curriculum.

They often carried messages of the importance of filial piety and right moral behavior.

These messages combined with the integrity modeled by his parents helped to shape Gandhi’s ethical code.

To this was added something rather unusual at that time: a respect for people from backgrounds different from his own.

Unlike many of their peers, Gandhi’s parents didn’t socialize exclusively with other Hindus.

He was raised in a home in which Parsis, Jains, and Muslims were also welcome.

This exposure nurtured a more holistic view of the importance of inclusion in Indian society.

At the same, though, young Gandhi was, in many ways, a typical boy of his background and era, who was expected to engage in the social and cultural practices of the time.

When he was just 13 years old, he was married to his bride, Kasturbai, a girl of 14.

Child marriage was very much the norm for Gandhi’s time, place, and caste.

In fact, he and two other boys in his family were all married at once to their young brides.

Then as now, weddings were a major event in the life of an Indian family, and for the larger community.

And so, at the time, the young Gandhi was happy to marry.

As an adult, though, he spoke out against the practice of child marriage, and asserted that people had the right to enter into marriage freely, without coercion.

He recognized that in order to do so they needed to be mature enough to give informed consent – something children simply can’t do.

While he may have possessed a surprisingly well-developed ethical sense, and followed the general social expectations of the time by marrying at 13, he did go through a period of adolescent rebellion.

Under the influence of a restless, disobedient school friend, the teenage Gandhi would do things like smoke, visit a brothel, and eat meat, though his family was strictly vegetarian.

And so although the meat-eating phase didn’t last, and he didn’t indulge in what was on offer at the brothel, the young man’s path to being a “Great Soul” was clearly not smooth.

As an adult, Gandhi was critical of himself for these failings of his youth.

He also cast a critical eye on his behavior in the early years of his marriage, recognizing the fundamental issues in his treatment of his wife, Kasturbai, whose illiteracy only added to her subjugated status.

As a teenager, he viewed her solely as a means of satisfying his sexual desires.

He lamented that he never used the time with her to teach her to read and write instead.

He also reflected that his immature grapplings with the concept of Truth caused some trouble in his marriage.

He wished to be faithful to Kasturbai, as he wished to know Truth – the means by which the Divine made itself known in the world.

But he was jealous and possessive of Kasturbai, unsure that she was equally faithful to him.

His jealousy was, in fact, groundless.

Gandhi’s most painful and pointed lesson about the danger of giving lust too much power came when he was 16.

His father, Karamchand, or “Kaba,” was on his deathbed, with young Gandhi by his side.

By this point, he’d already confessed some of his adolescent sins to his father in a letter, which Kaba had accepted with compassion.

Their bond was strong.

Yet, in this sombre and intimate moment, lust drove him from the bedside of his dying father and into his wife’s bedroom.

By the time he returned, his father had passed.

Chapter 2

Gandhi’s life would change when he left India for the first time.

He completed high school in 1887, and was now faced with choices about his professional future.

An old family friend encouraged him to go to England to study law at University College London.

This seemed to offer a guarantee of a solid and prosperous future for him and his family.

But the decision to travel to England was fraught with complications.

Gandhi’s mother was afraid that the temptations openly available in a Western country would corrupt the young man.

To address this, another family friend who’d become a Jain monk guided him in taking a vow to abstain from meat, alcohol, and women while he was in England.

Then, Gandhi was summoned to appear before a meeting of his caste, the Modh Bania, whose members tried to forbid him from making the journey.

They claimed that traveling abroad violated the caste’s religious beliefs, and threatened him with expulsion.

Gandhi was undeterred.

He was indeed expelled from his caste, but he sailed to England anyway, where he did, of course, encounter the temptations that so worried his mother.

Chief among these was the enticement to eat meat.

Much to his relief, however, he found a vegetarian restaurant near his boarding house in Bayswater that allowed him to honor that part of his vow.

This would eventually lead him to gain experience in running an organization when he founded a local chapter of the Vegetarian Society.

Another useful skill he was forced to develop in his time in London was how to live on a tight budget.

But most important to him was his prime reason for having come to England in the first place: to study law.

Gandhi, never a standout student as a young boy, found that he flourished at university.

He handled the law curriculum easily, passed his final exams with no trouble, and was called to the bar on June 10, 1891, after just 32 months in England.

With his educational goals fulfilled, on June 12, 1891, only two days after being registered as a barrister, Gandhi sailed for home.

But his arrival in India was greeted with sorrow: his mother had died earlier in the year, and his older brother had kept the news from him for fear the grief would interrupt his studies.

There was one slight comfort during this mournful time: Gandhi learned that there’d been a split within his caste, and one sect of it was willing to re-admit him to the Modh Bania.

His life was far from set, though.

While he was officially a barrister, he had no experience in applying law to cases, nor was he familiar with anything but British law.

So, he headed to Bombay to study further and gain the experience he’d need to turn himself into a practicing lawyer.

Although he eventually reached the point where he was ready to take on court cases, he quickly found that this path was harder than he’d anticipated.

While time and experience eventually made Gandhi a seasoned public speaker, his effectiveness as a young lawyer was severely compromised by his shyness.

Life in Bombay was expensive, so Gandhi returned to his home in Rajkot, Gujarat, hoping to finally start working as a lawyer.

But he found the courts in Rajkot corrupt.

After he accidentally offended a minor British diplomat, he worried that the man might interfere with his ability to get work, because he was connected to the court in which Gandhi was to conduct most of the cases in Rajkot.

This dilemma led to depression and stress at the prospect of trying to establish himself professionally in the city.

Chapter 3

Fortunately, circumstances soon called for another major change in Gandhi’s life, which would lead him to an opportunity to practice law in South Africa.

He was originally offered a one-year position by Dada Abdullah and Co.

, a company that needed help with a major court case there.

But, here too, he found just as much injustice and division as he saw in India.

At the time, South Africa was home to an increasingly large population of indentured Indian laborers, who, like the local Black population, were forced to endure and function within the terrorizing machinations of colonialism.

Gandhi’s experiences with racism during his time there – including being thrown off a train for refusing to give up his first-class seat to a white person – eventually led him to offer legal representation to many in his community.

Before this, however, he settled the case for which he’d been sent to South Africa in the first place by his client, Dada Abdullah.

Thanks to Gandhi, Abdullah’s case was settled in Abdullah’s favor – and out of court, through arbitration.

A win by every account.

But what was even more notable about this win was that Gandhi arranged for the losing party to pay back his client in installments so he wouldn’t suffer bankruptcy.

This was typical of the sense of compassion and justice Gandhi had sought to cultivate in himself his whole life.

The combination of these attributes and his experiences of racism and segregation in South Africa are what contributed to his emergence as an activist.

Gandhi began to speak to groups from Pretoria’s Indian community about truthful conduct in business and the need to improve the lot of Indians in South Africa.

Many of the people he addressed were Memon Muslims, but he encouraged all Indians in the area to look beyond their differences and form an association to further their common interests.

His years in South Africa also saw him deepen and refine his knowledge of religion and his own ethics and beliefs, as friends helped him learn more about Islam and Christianity.

He perceived the strengths and weaknesses in every belief system, as well as the fundamental problems with Hinduism’s caste system.

And last but certainly not least, his interest in nonviolent resistance was fed by Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

All of this helped shape his growing profile as a public proponent of the power of nonviolent resistance for political change.

While he’d expected to spend just one year in South Africa, it would be three years before Gandhi returned to India, and to his wife and children, in 1896.

He’d been kept in South Africa by a desire to fight punitive and racist measures against Indians taken by the South African authorities in the province of Natal.

For example, the government had deprived Indians living there of their right to elect members to the country’s legislative assembly.

It also sought to impose a £25 annual tax on indentured Indians – something Gandhi helped defeat through the Natal Indian Congress, an organization he founded.

The cause of South Africa’s Indian community remained at the forefront of Gandhi’s activities once he was back home.

He raised awareness and support for their issues by traveling to meet with members of the press and others, and published the Green Pamphlet to spread the word further.

When he returned to South Africa in 1897, this time bringing his family along, he was a recognized leader in the local Indian community.

But, having previously tussled with the government, his profile brought trouble.

Upon his arrival, an attempt was made on his life as an angry white mob tried to lynch him.

Fortunately, he escaped – and refused to press any charges.

Why?

Because he felt that his would-be attackers had been deliberately lied to by the Natal government about his activities in order to whip up feeling against him.

When the British Empire and the Afrikaner States declared war on each other in 1899, Gandhi set aside his sympathies for the Afrikaner farmers, who he felt were oppressed, in favor of demonstrating his loyalty to the Empire.

He founded the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps, which involved roughly 1,000 Indian South Africans, including Gandhi himself, to support the British forces in the war effort.

His and the community’s service here gained positive national attention.

At this point in his law career, Gandhi was established and prosperous, with a profile of some respect in South Africa.

He grew concerned that he’d give in to the temptations and greed that comes with prosperity, and decided that it was time for him and his family to return to India.

There, he became a volunteer with the Indian National Congress party, doing menial tasks that reinforced a sense of humility while also allowing him to see how the Congress worked.

He also got the opportunity to present a resolution on the rights of South African Indians to the Congress.

Though the experience was nerve-wracking to a man who was still essentially very shy, his presentation won the members over, and the resolution passed unanimously.

The party’s senior leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, mentored Gandhi during his time with the party and introduced him to a number of well-off, influential Indians.

But his increasing concern for the country’s poor was already becoming evident, and was strengthened when he traveled across the country as a third-class train passenger after his time with the Congress ended.

On the journey, he saw how the poor were treated and the daily issues they faced, like the dangerously high levels of poor sanitation.

Gandhi’s vision of himself as a driver for change in his country was becoming very clear – as was the approach he intended to take to effect that change.

Central to this approach was ahimsa, or nonviolence.

The principle of ahimsa returned to the focus on Truth – the essence of God – that had motivated Gandhi from his youth.

Hindu scripture dictated that all people are a reflection of Truth, making them deserving of empathy and compassion.

He later added noncooperation to the nonviolent approach as part of his strategy for dismantling the systems of inequality that plagued his country.

As this philosophy coalesced in his mind, he also sought to free himself completely from the sexual drive that had tormented and distracted him all his married life.

And so he and his wife Kasturbai, who’d already borne four sons, took the vow of brahmacharya in 1906, which dictated that one remain celibate.

Kasturbai, tellingly or not, didn’t object.

Gandhi also altered his eating habits, now subsisting mainly on a diet of fruit and nuts.

Systematically and conscientiously, he was making profound changes to his life, so that his entire focus could be on serving others.

By the early 1900s, Gandhi and his family had settled in the city of Bombay.

Chapter 4

At this point, he was a well-established public figure, and friends and followers in South Africa wrote to ask him to return to help with the ongoing struggle of the Indian community there.

He consented, and returned to Natal in 1903.

When he got there, he founded a weekly newspaper called the Indian Opinion to bring India’s attention to the plight of their countrymen in South Africa, and help improve Indian civil rights there.

He also established the Phoenix Settlement, a site for communal living just north of the city of Durban, Natal.

John Ruskin’s 1860 publication Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism that argues for social economy and things like a living wage, was his inspiration for the settlement.

In the next few years, Gandhi would again lead an ambulance corps of Indian volunteers, serving the British when they went to war with the Zulu, and would help care for Indians affected by an outbreak of plague at a mine in Johannesburg.

1907 was the year when Gandhi first applied a form of nonviolent resistance to a public bid for change, which he called Satyagraha – from sat, for truth, and agraha, for firmness.

The Transvaal government had passed the Asiatic Registration Act, forcing Indians in the South African province to carry registration papers at all times or risk deportation.

The use of Satyagraha against this unjust law was inspired by Gandhi’s years of study of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Ruskin, all of whom advocated for nonviolent noncooperation as a means of addressing inequality.

This philosophy was a culmination of Gandhi’s commitment to Truth and his ideals of pacifism, resistance to injustice, and nonviolent civil disobedience.

The concept would continue to evolve, and would appear frequently in his published writings.

With the outbreak of World War I and dealing with bad health in his middle age, he returned to India, where he was regarded as a hero.

Once there, he soon set about establishing the Satyagraha Ashram in the city of Ahmedabad, and modelled it on the Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, where people could live a simple, communal life.

Two years into the life of the ashram, Gandhi was approached to take on a case involving the tinkathia system.

Under it, farmers in Champaran, Bihar were forced to plant indigo on their rented properties on behalf of their landlords, which, in essence, turned them into the landowners’ serfs.

When the price of indigo plummeted, landlords agreed to release their tenants from the obligation – provided the tenants pay higher rents.

This was clear extortion.

Gandhi began an inquiry into the state of farmers in Champaran.

This challenge to the power structure got him arrested.

But with the local people’s support, and his own impassioned statement to the court on why he was in Champaran – and would not leave quietly, as the government wanted him to – led authorities to dismiss the case against him.

Not only that, but his inquiry continued, drawing large crowds and recording over 8,000 statements.

A report submitted to the local government led to the repeal of tinkathia in 1918.

A couple of years later, in 1919, Gandhi’s Satyagraha would truly be put to the test.

This time, the crisis was the imminent passage of the Rowlatt Act.

Among other things, it would give the British the ability to arrest and detain Indians for up to two years without trial.

Though he was weak from a life-threatening bout of dysentery, Gandhi immediately responded.

He, along with other leaders, called for protest in the form of a hartal – a general strike accompanied by fasting and prayer.

This act of nonviolent noncooperation first took place in Delhi on March 30, 1919, and then swept right across India on April 6, 1919, following a speech he gave in Mumbai.

It was remarkable.

Gandhi would later recall the hartal as “a wonderful spectacle.

”  Unfortunately, it did little to stop the passing of this egregious colonial law.

More gravely, violent demonstrations overshadowed Gandhi’s attempts at Satyagraha: on that day – April 6, 1919, one of the protests against the Acts saw deadly clashes between protesters and police.

Gandhi called off the protest and embarked upon three days of penitential fasting, shaken and shocked by what had happened.

He felt partly responsible for the violence, as he realized that many of the people who had heeded his call to participate in Satyagraha had not studied the principles of ahimsa and nonviolence.

This meant they couldn’t take part in an informed and peaceful way.

And so to remedy this disconnect, he started a weekly column in a local newspaper where he explained these principles and their value.

When Gandhi returned to India from another spell in South Africa early in World War I, he’d assumed a major leadership role in the Indian National Congress.

From this prominent platform, he was even better-positioned to promote the Indian Independence Movement.

For instance, he organized the printing and selling of banned books, such as the Gujarati translation of Ruskin’s book Unto This Last, to raise money for the Movement.

In 1920, the annual meeting of the Congress at Nagpur passed a resolution calling for an end to cooperation with the colonial government of the British Empire.

The Independence Movement now had sharper teeth than ever.

The magnitude of this resolution was huge.

It was a direct appeal to India’s population of over 250 million to boycott all things British.

And at the time, much of India’s structure was British – including its legal and educational institutions.

Indians who were employed by the colonial government were even urged to quit their jobs.

The boycott also included British textiles.

The occupiers were exporting raw materials from India to England and sending back finished articles of clothing for sale at inflated prices.

Gandhi urged that Indians should instead make their own homespun garments out of khadi, a simple woven cloth.

Men and women all over India were encouraged to learn how to spin and weave as a massive act of resistance.

Gandhi also saw this as a constructive means to allow the millions of his countrymen who were grindingly poor to provide clothing for themselves.

Khadi has become an enduring sign of independence, and of respect for Gandhi, in India.

Gandhi’s autobiography ends well before India’s independence in August 1947 and his own violent death in January 1948 at the hands of a Hindu nationalist who condemned his fair treatment of Muslims.

But his impact on the world stretched from his own lifetime right across the twentieth century, influencing such civil-rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr.

and Cesar Chavez.

In hindsight, we can now see Gandhi’s blind spots, too – his far-sightedness regarding religious differences and nonviolence did not extend to his attitudes toward Black people and women, for example.

But the power of his core convictions – that people have the right to independence and dignity, and can achieve it without violence – resonates still.

The End

You’ve reached the end of this Bedtime Biography.

Thank you for listening.

Why not pause listening now so you can stay in a relaxed state?

And if you’re off to bed now, I wish you a good night’s sleep.