Mahatma Gandhi, byname of
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, India—died January 30, 1948, Delhi),
Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer who became the leader of the nationalist movement against the British rule of India. As such, he came to be considered the father of his country. Gandhi is internationally esteemed for his doctrine of
nonviolent protest (satyagraha) to achieve political and social progress.
In the eyes of millions of his fellow Indians, Gandhi was the Mahatma
(“Great Soul”). The unthinking adoration of the huge crowds that
gathered to see him all along the route of his tours made them a severe
ordeal; he could hardly work during the day or rest at night. “The woes
of the Mahatmas,” he wrote, “are known only to the Mahatmas.” His fame
spread worldwide during his lifetime and only increased after his death.
The name Mahatma Gandhi is now one of the most universally recognized
on earth.
Youth
Gandhi was the youngest child of his father’s fourth wife. His father—Karamchand Gandhi, who was the
dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in western India (in what is now Gujarat
state) under British suzerainty—did not have much in the way of a
formal education. He was, however, an able administrator who knew how to
steer his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power.
Gandhi’s mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion,
did not care much for finery or jewelry, divided her time between her
home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and
nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas
grew up in a home steeped in
Vaishnavism—worship of the Hindu god Vishnu—with a strong tinge of
Jainism,
a morally rigorous Indian religion whose chief tenets are nonviolence
and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal. Thus, he took
for granted
ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects.
The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became
dewan of Rajkot,
another princely state. Though Mohandas occasionally won prizes and
scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre.
One of the terminal reports rated him as “good at English, fair in
Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting.”
He was married at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. A diffident
child, he shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He
loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by
then ailing father (who died soon thereafter) or helping his mother with
her household chores.
Mahatma Gandhi Arrives in the U.K. (1931) | British Pathé

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He had learned, in his words, “to carry out the orders of the elders,
not to scan them.” With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising
that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked
by secret atheism,
petty thefts, furtive smoking, and—most shocking of all for a boy born
in a Vaishnava family—meat eating. His adolescence was probably no
stormier than that of most children of his age and class. What was
extraordinary was the way his youthful transgressions ended.
“Never again” was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he
kept his promise. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior, he concealed a
burning passion for self-improvement that led him to take even the
heroes of Hindu mythology, such as
Prahlada and
Harishcandra—legendary embodiments of truthfulness and sacrifice—as living models.
In 1887 Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination of the University of Bombay (now University of Mumbai) and joined Samaldas College in Bhavnagar (Bhaunagar). As he had to suddenly switch from his native language—Gujarati—to English, he found it rather difficult to follow the lectures.
Meanwhile, his family was debating his future. Left to himself, he
would have liked to have been a doctor. But, besides the Vaishnava prejudice against vivisection,
it was clear that, if he was to keep up the family tradition of holding
high office in one of the states in Gujarat, he would have to qualify
as a barrister. That meant a visit to England,
and Mohandas, who was not too happy at Samaldas College, jumped at the
proposal. His youthful imagination conceived England as “a land of
philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization.” But there were
several hurdles to be crossed before the visit to England could be
realized. His father had left the family little property; moreover, his
mother was reluctant to expose her youngest child to unknown temptations
and dangers in a distant land. But Mohandas was determined to visit
England. One of his brothers raised the necessary money, and his
mother’s doubts were allayed when he took a vow that, while away from
home, he would not touch wine, women, or meat. Mohandas disregarded the
last obstacle—the decree of the leaders of the Modh Bania subcaste (Vaishya
caste), to which the Gandhis belonged, who forbade his trip to England
as a violation of the Hindu religion—and sailed in September 1888. Ten
days after his arrival, he joined the
Inner Temple, one of the four London law colleges (The Temple).
Sojourn in England and return to India
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young gandhi |
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Gandhi took his studies seriously and tried to brush up on his English and Latin by taking the University of London matriculation examination. But, during the three years he spent in England, his main preoccupation was with personal and moral issues rather than with academic ambitions. The transition from the half-rural atmosphere of Rajkot to the cosmopolitan
life of London was not easy for him. As he struggled painfully to adapt
himself to Western food, dress, and etiquette, he felt awkward. His
vegetarianism
became a continual source of embarrassment to him; his friends warned
him that it would wreck his studies as well as his health. Fortunately
for him he came across a vegetarian restaurant as well as a book
providing a reasoned defense of vegetarianism, which henceforth became a
matter of conviction for him, not merely a legacy
of his Vaishnava background. The missionary zeal he developed for
vegetarianism helped to draw the pitifully shy youth out of his shell
and gave him a new poise. He became a member of the executive committee
of the London Vegetarian Society, attending its conferences and
contributing articles to its journal.
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childhood pic of gandhi |
In the boardinghouses and vegetarian restaurants of England, Gandhi
met not only food faddists but some earnest men and women to whom he
owed his introduction to the Bible and, more important, the
Bhagavadgita, which he read for the first time in its English translation by Sir Edwin Arnold. The
Bhagavadgita (commonly known as the
Gita) is part of the great epic the
Mahabharata and, in the form of a philosophical poem, is the most-popular expression of Hinduism. The English vegetarians were a motley crowd. They included socialists and humanitarians such as Edward Carpenter, “the British Thoreau”; Fabians such as George Bernard Shaw; and Theosophists such as Annie Besant.
Most of them were idealists; quite a few were rebels who rejected the
prevailing values of the late-Victorian establishment, denounced the
evils of the capitalist and industrial society,
preached the cult of the simple life, and stressed the superiority of
moral over material values and of cooperation over conflict. Those ideas
were to contribute substantially to the shaping of Gandhi’s personality
and, eventually, to his politics.
Painful surprises were in store for Gandhi when he returned to India in July 1891. His mother had died in his absence, and he discovered to his dismay that the barrister’s degree was not a guarantee of a lucrative career. The legal profession was already beginning to be overcrowded, and Gandhi was much too diffident to elbow his way into it. In the very first brief he argued in a court in Bombay (now Mumbai), he cut a sorry figure. Turned down even for the part-time job of a teacher in a Bombay high school,
he returned to Rajkot to make a modest living by drafting petitions for
litigants. Even that employment was closed to him when he incurred the
displeasure of a local British officer. It was, therefore, with some
relief that in 1893 he accepted the none-too-attractive offer of a
year’s contract from an Indian firm in Natal,
South Africa.
Years in South Africa
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college time gandhi pic |
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Africa was to present to Gandhi
challenges
and opportunities that he could hardly have conceived. In the end he
would spend more than two decades there, returning to India only briefly
in 1896–97. The youngest two of his four children were born there.
Emergence as a political and social activist
Gandhi was quickly exposed to the racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. In a Durban
court he was asked by the European magistrate to take off his turban;
he refused and left the courtroom. A few days later, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and left shivering and brooding at the rail station in Pietermaritzburg.
In the further course of that journey, he was beaten up by the white
driver of a stagecoach because he would not travel on the footboard to
make room for a European passenger, and finally he was barred from
hotels reserved “for Europeans only.” Those humiliations were the daily
lot of Indian traders and labourers in Natal, who had learned to pocket
them with the same resignation with which they pocketed their meagre
earnings. What was new was not Gandhi’s experience but his reaction. He
had so far not been conspicuous
for self-assertion or aggressiveness. But something happened to him as
he smarted under the insults heaped upon him. In retrospect the journey
from Durban to Pretoria struck him as one of the most-creative
experiences of his life; it was his moment of truth. Henceforth he would
not accept injustice as part of the natural or unnatural order in South
Africa; he would defend his dignity as an Indian and as a man.

While in Pretoria, Gandhi studied the conditions in which his fellow
South Asians in South Africa lived and tried to educate them on their
rights and duties, but he had no intention of staying on in South
Africa. Indeed, in June 1894, as his year’s contract drew to a close, he
was back in Durban, ready to sail for India. At a farewell party given
in his honour, he happened to glance through the
Natal Mercury and learned that the Natal Legislative Assembly was considering a bill to deprive Indians of the right to vote.
“This is the first nail in our coffin,” Gandhi told his hosts. They
professed their inability to oppose the bill, and indeed their ignorance
of the politics of the colony, and begged him to take up the fight on
their behalf.
Until the age of 18, Gandhi had hardly ever read a newspaper. Neither
as a student in England nor as a budding barrister in India had he
evinced much interest in politics. Indeed, he was overcome by a
terrifying stage fright whenever he stood up to read a speech at a
social gathering or to defend a client in court. Nevertheless, in July
1894, when he was barely 25, he blossomed almost overnight into a
proficient political campaigner. He drafted petitions to the Natal
legislature and the British government and had them signed by hundreds
of his compatriots. He could not prevent the passage of the bill but
succeeded in drawing the attention of the public and the press in Natal,
India, and England to the Natal Indians’ grievances. He was persuaded
to settle down in Durban to practice law and to organize the Indian community. In 1894 he founded the
Natal Indian Congress, of which he himself became the indefatigable secretary. Through that common political organization, he infused a spirit of solidarity in the heterogeneous
Indian community. He flooded the government, the legislature, and the
press with closely reasoned statements of Indian grievances. Finally, he
exposed to the view of the outside world the skeleton in the imperial
cupboard, the discrimination practiced against the Indian subjects of
Queen Victoria in one of her own colonies in Africa. It was a measure of
his success as a publicist that such important newspapers as
The Times of London and
The Statesman and
Englishman of Calcutta (now Kolkata) editorially commented on the Natal Indians’ grievances.
In 1896 Gandhi went to India to fetch his wife, Kasturba
(or Kasturbai), and their two oldest children and to canvass support
for the Indians overseas. He met prominent leaders and persuaded them to
address public meetings in the country’s
principal cities. Unfortunately for him, garbled versions of his
activities and utterances reached Natal and inflamed its European
population. On landing at Durban in January 1897, he was assaulted and
nearly lynched by a white mob.
Joseph Chamberlain,
the colonial secretary in the British Cabinet, cabled the government of
Natal to bring the guilty men to book, but Gandhi refused to prosecute
his assailants. It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek
redress of a personal wrong in a court of law.
Resistance and results
Gandhi was not the man to nurse a grudge. On the outbreak of the
South African (Boer) War
in 1899, he argued that the Indians, who claimed the full rights of
citizenship in the British crown colony of Natal, were in duty bound to
defend it. He raised an ambulance corps of 1,100 volunteers, out of whom
300 were free Indians and the rest indentured labourers. It was a
motley crowd: barristers and accountants, artisans and labourers. It was
Gandhi’s task to instill in them a spirit of service to those whom they
regarded as their oppressors. The editor of the
Pretoria News offered an insightful portrait of Gandhi in the battle zone.
The British victory in the war brought little relief to the Indians in South Africa.
The new regime in South Africa was to blossom into a partnership, but
only between Boers and Britons. Gandhi saw that, with the exception of a
few Christian missionaries and youthful idealists, he had been unable
to make a perceptible impression upon the South African Europeans. In
1906 the
Transvaal
government published a particularly humiliating ordinance for the
registration of its Indian population. The Indians held a mass protest
meeting at Johannesburg in September 1906 and, under Gandhi’s leadership, took a pledge to defy the ordinance if it became law in the teeth of their opposition and to suffer all the penalties resulting from their defiance. Thus was born
satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for
resisting adversaries without rancour and fighting them without violence.
The struggle in South Africa lasted for more than seven years. It had
its ups and downs, but under Gandhi’s leadership, the small Indian
minority kept up its resistance against heavy odds. Hundreds of Indians
chose to sacrifice their livelihood and liberty rather than submit to
laws repugnant to their conscience
and self-respect. In the final phase of the movement in 1913, hundreds
of Indians, including women, went to jail, and thousands of Indian
workers who had struck work in the mines bravely faced imprisonment,
flogging, and even shooting. It was a terrible ordeal for the Indians,
but it was also the worst possible advertisement for the South African
government, which, under pressure from the governments of Britain and India, accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi on the one hand and the South African statesman Gen.
Jan Christian Smuts on the other.
“The saint has left our shores,” Smuts wrote to a friend on Gandhi’s
departure from South Africa for India, in July 1914, “I hope for ever.” A
quarter century later, he wrote that it had been his “fate to be the antagonist
of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect.” Once, during
his not-infrequent stays in jail, Gandhi had prepared a pair of sandals
for Smuts, who recalled that there was no hatred and personal
ill-feeling between them, and when the fight was over “there was the
atmosphere in which a decent peace could be concluded.”
As later
events were to show, Gandhi’s work did not provide an enduring solution
for the Indian problem in South Africa. What he did to South Africa was
indeed less important than what South Africa did to him. It had not
treated him kindly, but, by drawing him into the vortex of its racial
problem, it had provided him with the ideal setting in which his
peculiar talents could unfold themselves.
The religious quest
Gandhi’s religious quest dated back to his childhood, the influence of his mother and of his home life in Porbandar and Rajkot, but it received a great impetus after his arrival in South Africa. His Quaker friends in Pretoria
failed to convert him to Christianity, but they quickened his appetite
for religious studies. He was fascinated by the writings of
Leo Tolstoy on Christianity, read the
Quʾrān in translation, and delved into Hindu scriptures and philosophy. The study of comparative religion,
talks with scholars, and his own reading of theological works brought
him to the conclusion that all religions were true and yet every one of
them was imperfect because they were “interpreted with poor intellects,
sometimes with poor hearts, and more often misinterpreted.”
Shrimad Rajchandra, a brilliant young Jain philosopher who became
Gandhi’s spiritual mentor, convinced him of “the subtlety and
profundity” of Hinduism, the religion of his birth. And it was the
Bhagavadgita, which Gandhi had first read in London,
that became his “spiritual dictionary” and exercised probably the
greatest single influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words in the
Gita particularly fascinated him. One was
aparigraha (“nonpossession”), which implies that people have to jettison the material goods that cramp the life of the spirit and to shake off the bonds of money and property. The other was
samabhava
(“equability”), which enjoins people to remain unruffled by pain or
pleasure, victory or defeat, and to work without hope of success or fear
of failure.
Those were not merely counsels of perfection. In the civil case that had taken him to South Africa in 1893, he had persuaded the antagonists
to settle their differences out of court. The true function of a lawyer
seemed to him “to unite parties riven asunder.” He soon regarded his
clients not as purchasers of his services but as friends; they consulted
him not only on legal issues but on such matters as the best way of
weaning a baby or balancing the family budget. When an associate
protested that clients came even on Sundays, Gandhi replied: “A man in
distress cannot have Sunday rest.”
Gandhi’s legal earnings reached a peak figure of £5,000 a year, but
he had little interest in moneymaking, and his savings were often sunk
in his public activities. In Durban
and later in Johannesburg, he kept an open table; his house was a
virtual hostel for younger colleagues and political coworkers. This was
something of an ordeal for his wife, without whose extraordinary
patience, endurance, and self-effacement Gandhi could hardly have
devoted himself to public causes. As he broke through the conventional
bonds of family and property, their life tended to shade into a community life.
Gandhi felt an irresistible attraction to a life of simplicity, manual labour, and austerity. In 1904—after reading John Ruskin’s
Unto This Last, a critique
of capitalism—he set up a farm at Phoenix near Durban where he and his
friends could live by the sweat of their brow. Six years later another
colony grew up under Gandhi’s fostering care near Johannesburg; it was
named
Tolstoy Farm for the Russian writer and moralist, whom Gandhi admired and corresponded with. Those two settlements were the precursors of the more-famous
ashrams (religious retreats) in India, at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) and at Sevagram near Wardha.
South Africa had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique
for political action but also transformed him into a leader of men by
freeing him from bonds that make cowards of most men. “Persons in
power,” the British Classical scholar
Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in the
Hibbert Journal in 1918.
Return to India
Gandhi decided to leave South Africa in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I.
He and his family first went to London, where they remained for several
months. Finally, they departed England in December, arriving in Bombay in early January 1915.
Emergence as nationalist leader
For the next three years, Gandhi seemed to hover uncertainly on the periphery
of Indian politics, declining to join any political agitation,
supporting the British war effort, and even recruiting soldiers for the
British Indian Army. At the same time, he did not flinch from
criticizing the British officials for any acts of high-handedness or
from taking up the grievances of the long-suffering peasantry in Bihar and Gujarat. By February 1919, however, the British had insisted on pushing through—in the teeth of fierce Indian opposition—the
Rowlatt Acts, which empowered the authorities to imprison without trial those suspected of sedition. A provoked Gandhi finally revealed a sense of estrangement from the British Raj and announced a satyagraha
struggle. The result was a virtual political earthquake that shook the
subcontinent in the spring of 1919. The violent outbreaks that
followed—notably the Massacre of Amritsar, which was the killing by British-led soldiers of nearly 400 Indians who were gathered in an open space in Amritsar in the Punjab region (now in Punjab
state), and the enactment of martial law—prompted him to stay his hand.
However, within a year he was again in a militant mood, having in the
meantime been irrevocably alienated by British insensitiveness to Indian
feeling on the Punjab tragedy and Muslim resentment on the peace terms
offered to Turkey following World War I.
By the
autumn of 1920, Gandhi was the dominant figure on the political stage,
commanding an influence never before attained by any political leader in
India or perhaps in any other country. He refashioned the 35-year-old
Indian National Congress
(Congress Party) into an effective political instrument of Indian
nationalism: from a three-day Christmas-week picnic of the upper middle
class in one of the principal cities of India, it became a mass
organization with its roots in small towns and villages. Gandhi’s
message was simple: it was not British guns but imperfections of Indians
themselves that kept their country in bondage. His program, the
nonviolent
noncooperation movement against the British government, included boycotts
not only of British manufactures but of institutions operated or aided
by the British in India: legislatures, courts, offices, schools. The
campaign electrified the country, broke the spell of fear of foreign
rule, and led to the arrests of thousands of
satyagrahis, who
defied laws and cheerfully lined up for prison. In February 1922 the
movement seemed to be on the crest of a rising wave, but, alarmed by a
violent outbreak in Chauri Chaura, a remote village in eastern India, Gandhi decided to call off mass civil disobedience.
That was a blow to many of his followers, who feared that his
self-imposed restraints and scruples would reduce the nationalist
struggle to pious futility. Gandhi himself was arrested on March 10,
1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He
was released in February 1924, after undergoing surgery for appendicitis. The political landscape had changed in his absence. The Congress Party had split into two factions, one under
Chitta Ranjan Das and
Motilal Nehru (the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister) favouring the entry of the party into legislatures and the other under
Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and
Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel
opposing it. Worst of all, the unity between Hindus and Muslims of the
heyday of the noncooperation movement of 1920–22 had dissolved. Gandhi
tried to draw the warring communities
out of their suspicion and fanaticism by reasoning and persuasion.
Finally, after a serious outbreak of communal unrest, he undertook a
three-week fast in the autumn of 1924 to arouse the people into
following the path of nonviolence. In December 1924 he was named
president of the Congress Party, and he served for a year.
Return to party leadership
During the mid-1920s Gandhi took little interest in active politics
and was considered a spent force. In 1927, however, the British
government appointed a constitutional reform commission under Sir John Simon, a prominent English lawyer and politician, that did not contain a single Indian. When the Congress and other parties boycotted
the commission, the political tempo rose. At the Congress session
(meeting) at Calcutta in December 1928, Gandhi put forth the crucial
resolution demanding dominion
status from the British government within a year under threat of a
nationwide nonviolent campaign for complete independence. Henceforth,
Gandhi was back as the leading voice of the Congress Party. In March
1930 he launched the Salt March, a satyagraha against the British-imposed tax on salt, which affected the poorest section of the community.
One of the most spectacular and successful campaigns in Gandhi’s
nonviolent war against the British Raj, it resulted in the imprisonment
of more than 60,000 people. A year later, after talks with the viceroy,
Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), Gandhi accepted a truce (the Gandhi-Irwin Pact), called off civil disobedience, and agreed to attend the Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress.
The conference, which concentrated on the problem of the Indian
minorities rather than on the transfer of power from the British, was a
great disappointment to the Indian nationalists. Moreover, when Gandhi
returned to India in December 1931, he found his party facing an all-out
offensive from Lord Irwin’s successor as viceroy, Lord Willingdon, who
unleashed the sternest repression in the history of the nationalist
movement. Gandhi was once more imprisoned, and the government tried to
insulate him from the outside world and to destroy his influence. That
was not an easy task. Gandhi soon regained the initiative.
In September 1932, while still a prisoner, he embarked on a fast to
protest against the British government’s decision to segregate the
so-called
untouchables
(the lowest level of the Indian caste system) by allotting them
separate electorates in the new constitution. The fast produced an
emotional upheaval in the country, and an alternative electoral arrangement was jointly and speedily devised by the leaders of the Hindu community and the untouchables and endorsed
by the British government. The fast became the starting point of a
vigorous campaign for the removal of the disabilities of the
untouchables, whom Gandhi referred to as Harijans, or “children of God.”
(That term has fallen out of favour, replaced by Dalit; Scheduled
Castes is the official designation.)
In 1934 Gandhi resigned not only as the leader but also as a member
of the Congress Party. He had come to believe that its leading members
had adopted nonviolence as a political expedient and not as the
fundamental creed it was for him. In place of political activity he then
concentrated on his “constructive programme” of building the nation
“from the bottom up”—educating rural India, which accounted for 85
percent of the population; continuing his fight against untouchability;
promoting hand spinning, weaving, and other cottage industries to
supplement the earnings of the underemployed peasantry; and evolving a
system of education best suited to the needs of the people. Gandhi
himself went to live at
Sevagram, a village in central India, which became the centre of his program of social and economic uplift.
The last phase
With the outbreak of World War II, the nationalist struggle in India entered its last crucial phase. Gandhi hated fascism and all it stood for, but he also hated war. The Indian National Congress, on the other hand, was not committed to pacifism
and was prepared to support the British war effort if Indian
self-government was assured. Once more Gandhi became politically active.
The failure of the mission of
Sir Stafford Cripps,
a British cabinet minister who went to India in March 1942 with an
offer that Gandhi found unacceptable, the British equivocation on the
transfer of power to Indian hands, and the encouragement given by high
British officials to conservative and communal forces promoting discord
between Muslims and Hindus impelled Gandhi to demand in the summer of
1942 an immediate British withdrawal from India—what became known as the
Quit India Movement.
In mid-1942 the war against the Axis Powers, particularly Japan,
was in a critical phase, and the British reacted sharply to the
campaign. They imprisoned the entire Congress leadership and set out to
crush the party once and for all. There were violent outbreaks that were
sternly suppressed, and the gulf between Britain and India became wider
than ever before. Gandhi, his wife, and several other top party leaders
(including Nehru) were confined in the Aga Khan Palace (now the Gandhi National Memorial) in Poona (now Pune). Kasturba died there in early 1944, shortly before Gandhi and the others were released.
A new chapter in Indo-British relations opened with the victory of the Labour Party in Britain 1945. During the next two years, there were prolonged triangular negotiations between leaders of the Congress, the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and the British government, culminating in the
Mountbatten Plan of June 3, 1947, and the formation of the two new dominions of India and Pakistan in mid-August 1947.
BY: Amandeep kumar