wife. Although Sanskritliterary sources
are replete with Gandharva marriages—
perhaps the most famous being the
marriage of King Dushyanta and
Shakuntala—it is doubtful that this
form was ever widely practiced. See also
marriage, eight classical forms.
Gandhi, Mohandas K.
(1869–1948) Leader of the Indian
National Congress, one of the architects
of the struggle for Indian independence,
and one of the best-known Indians in
history. Gandhi was born in Gujarat,
where his father was a minister to one of
the native princes. Shortly after Gandhi’s
father died, the British ousted the ruling
prince for mismanagement, and the
family lost their position. Gandhi was
sent to London to study law, and during
this time he came into contact with a
variety of new ideas that would strongly
influence his future. Ironically, one of
these influences was the Bhagavad Gita,
an important Hindu religious text from
which he drew continuing inspiration in
his later life. After returning to India in
1891, Gandhi failed in his attempt to set
up a law practice in Bombay, and he
went back to Gujarat. In 1894 Gandhi
traveled to South Africa to do some
work for a Muslim trading firm. He
intended to be gone only a short time,
but ended up staying in South Africa for
twenty years. During this time he dis-
covered his true calling, political
activism. This was sparked by his own
experience of racial discrimination—
being thrown out of a railway car
reserved for “whites only”—and was
fueled by the social, political, and legal
disadvantages suffered by South Africa’s
40,000 Indians, most of whom were illit-
erate agricultural workers. During his
time in South Africa, Gandhi developed
and refined his basic tactics: mass non-
cooperation, nonviolent resistance, will-
ingness to face imprisonment, and
skillful use of the print media to influ-
ence public opinion. In 1914 he
returned to India, where he soon
became one of the leading figures in the
struggle against the British—first for
home rule, and finally for outright inde-
pendence.
Gandhi’s deeply held moral princi-
ples shaped his entire career. He saw his
political activism not as a vehicle for
personal advancement, but as a means
for selfless action for the welfare of the
world. This stress on selfless action drew
heavily on the message of the Bhagavad
Gita, in which the god Krishnarecom-
mends a similar path to his friend and
devotee (bhakta), Arjuna. Throughout
his life Gandhi remained committed to
nonviolence. Gandhi felt strongly that
the nature of any goal would be influ-
enced by the means by which it had
been attained. Another of his funda-
mental principles was truth, as seen in
his insistence that evil and injustice had
to be resisted, even by violence when all
other means had failed. A third essential
tenet was self-control, which he consid-
ered the prerequisite to leading others.
His commitment to his principles gave
him the strength to endure imprison-
ment, injury, and more than thirty years
of struggle with the British government;
it also moved him to campaign against
many other injustices, particularly the
notion of untouchability.
When independence finally arrived
in 1947 it was tainted by the partition of
British India into India and Pakistan,
fueled in part by Muslim concerns about
their minoritystatus in an independent
Hindu India. The partition sparked a
massive exodus, in which fifteen million
people migrated from one country to
the other. It also sparked unspeakable
communal violence, in which an esti-
mated one million people died. Despite
his best efforts, Gandhi was unable to
prevent partition or to create good rela-
tions between the two countries. Within
six months of independence, Gandhi
was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a
Hindu nationalist who felt that Gandhi
was being too soft on Pakistan.
Gandhi had critics and opponents
throughout his career, many of whom
felt that he did not deserve the saint-
hood that people attributed to him.Gandhi, Mohandas K.