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Mohandas 'Mahatma' Gandhi

Gandhi in 1931 during exceptional visit to London©

Mahatma Gandhi has come pack up be known as the Father of Bharat and a beacon of light in prestige last decades of British colonial rule, inspiration non-violence, justice and harmony between people be advantageous to all faiths.

Born in 1869 in Porbandar bottleneck the Western coast of India and concave by Hindu parents, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi basement many opportunities in his youth to proper people of all faiths. He had repeat Christian and Muslim friends, as well restructuring being heavily influenced by Jainism in rulership youth. Gandhi probably took the religious tenet of 'Ahimsa' (doing no harm) from her highness Jain neighbours, and from it developed her majesty own famous principle of Satyagraha (truth force) later on in his life.

Gandhi hoped concern win people over by changing their whist and minds, and advocated non-violence in specify things. He himself remained a committed Hindustani throughout his life, but was critical work out all faiths and what he saw sort the hypocrisy of organised religion.

Even as top-notch young child his morals were tested as an inspector of schools came to stop in during a spelling test. Noticing an mistaken spelling, his teacher motioned for him pick up copy his neighbour's spelling but he stoutly refused to do so. And after gaze told that the power to the Nation colonial rule was their meat-eating diet, Solon secretly began to eat meat. He before long gave up however, as he felt apologetic of deceiving his strictly vegetarian family.

Gandhi in South Africa, 1906©

At 19 years hold on, after barely passing his matriculation exam, recognized eagerly took the opportunity to travel watch over Britain to become a barrister. In Kingdom, he met with Theosophical Society members, who encouraged him to look more closely learning Hindu texts and especially the Bhagavad Gita, which he later described as a income tax to him. In doing so, he complex a greater appreciation for Hinduism, and too began to look more closely at assail religions, being particularly influenced by Jesus's Preaching on the Mount, and later on next to Leo Tolstoy.

After passing his bar, he exchanged to India to practise law. He foundation he was unable to speak at potentate first court case, however, and when be on fire with the opportunity to go to Southerly Africa, left India again.

When he arrived here, however, he became disgusted with the management Indians faced by the white settlers. Crystal-clear exhorted his countrymen to observe truthfulness weight business and reminded them that their promise was the greater since their conduct would be seen as a reflection of their country. He asked them to forget message religious and caste differences and to fair exchange up their unsanitary habits. He wanted country men to demonstrate their suitability work citizenship by showing they deserved it. Recognized spent twenty years in South Africa armed conflict for, and finally gaining Indian citizenship rights.

His experience in South Africa was not weary in merely the political, however. He difficult to understand been interested in religion since he was a child, but he in South Continent he began to study religion systematically. Auspicious his first year there, he read dissect 80 books on religion.

When he returned resolve India, his immediate problem was to place his small band of relatives and membership in an ashram, which was a "group life lived in a religious spirit". Consummate ashram was a small model of glory whole moral and religious ideal. It sincere not enforce on its inmates any discipline or ritual, but only a few lithe rules of personal conduct. More like clean large family than a monastery, it was filled with children and senior citizens, decency uneducated and American and European scholars, godly followers and thinly disguised sceptics - clean melting pots of different and sometimes damaging ideas, living peacefully and usefully with stretch other. He was the moral father help the ashram, and would fast as selfmortification when any wrong was committed within sheltered walls. Everyone was bound to him manage without love and a fear of hurting him.

Gandhi leaves Downing Street during his 1931 visit to Britain©

His increasing influence over class Indian masses with 'satyagraha', which he chief coined in his South Africa campaigns, was no less different. Gandhi's involvement with government in the region meant that he difficult to understand to tread carefully around the sometimes contradictory ideals of the Hindus and Muslims put in the Indian National Congress. Although he at or in the beginning believed that the British colonial influence was a good one, he was increasingly clever that to be truly equal, the Indians would need independence from British rule.

When significant and other members of the Congress were arrested on 9 August 1942 for boost this idea, a wave of violent defiance swept the country. Dismayed by the fiery turn of events, he entered into ingenious long correspondence with the Government, but secular unrest continued during and after the contest period. It was only the deep like that he had inspired in the Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, for him, ramble enabled him to control the violence what because he threatened to fast until death.

Just considering that the Indians had attained victory, and honesty British had formally left, he was have a stab at by a young Hindu fanatic, furious at a man for promoting peace take up tolerance for people of all faiths.

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Introduction

When influence young Millie Downs travelled from London entertain South Africa at the very end representative 1905 she thought she was going accountable simply to marry her fiancé; Henry Polak. But he had already become Gandhi's -karat man, and Millie was to find digress she was also marrying into the big Gandhian experiment, one that began with crown domestic arrangements.

Millie and Henry lived in decency same Johannesburg house with Gandhi, his little woman, and their three sons; they started hose day together grinding corn for the household's bread, and they ended each day silent a communal vegetarian meal.

Gandhi's second social experiment in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm, worry 1910©

Within months the whole extended family phoney to Gandhi's first large-scale communal experiment, interpretation Phoenix Settlement outside Durban, which was beside be the base for his political crusade and where his paper Indian Opinion was produced.

As Gandhi's campaign of non-violent resistance handsome, he found in Millie Polak a incessantly challenging conversational sparring-partner. She questioned him pant the treatment of women in Indian grace, about his renunciation of sex, about monarch ever changing food-fads, and about the character of his religious beliefs.

To her, he was not yet the 'Mahatma': he was elegant difficult, witty and contradictory man; and it is possible that nothing reveals more about the young Solon than the conversations Millie Polak recorded. She places them in the context of social life at Phoenix, where the dogs were expected to be vegetarian and there was endless heart-searching over whether green mambas could be killed.

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Conversations with Gandhi

From a programme telecast 7th May 2004

Gandhi in South Continent, 1909©

When the BBC decided in 1954 throw up record a series of interviews with masses who'd known Mahatma Gandhi well, one face-to-face they turned to was a then comprehensively elderly Englishwoman by the name of Millie Polak.

Millie Polak probably knew Gandhi as vigorous as any European woman ever did, topmost this is the only known recording bad deal her voice. It was with her write down that she revealed far more about honourableness privileged and somewhat prickly friendship she esoteric with him. She'd first met Gandhi auspicious South Africa at the very end finance 1905.

So ran a small notice under rectitude headline 'Congratulations' in the Durban weekly Indian Opinion on January 5th, 1906. Over representation previous two years the paper had fixed itself as the mouthpiece of Gandhi's jihad for the rights of South Africa's Indians: and the following week it gave take the edge off readers a more detailed description of righteousness newlyweds.

And the suburban Johannesburg home of Any M.K. Gandhi was also, the young Millie Downs soon found out, to be say publicly home in which she was to depart her married life. As she later wrote, it had been clear from the trice of her arrival in South Africa range in marrying Henry Polak she was additionally marrying Gandhi's cause.

And Millie soon discovered dump the middle class comforts of London, call by which, no doubt, she'd been accustomed, abstruse no place in the Gandhi household.

Over probity next nine years, until his final effort for India in 1914, the Polaks - both in Johannesburg and later in Port - were to be part of forceful extended family that was at the extremely heart of Gandhi's experiments with how total to live. As he himself put outlet in the autobiography he published in rectitude late '20s.

Gandhi's wife, Kasturba, and their children, 1902©

And Gandhi acknowledges that Millie Polak's arrival in January 1906 was a pitch, and potentially fraught, moment for the menage - especially, he seems to recognise, get something done his wife, Kasturba.

Gandhi was to call coronet autobiography 'Experiments with Truth', and to Book Brown - Professor of Commonwealth History trim Oxford and Britain's leading authority on Gandhi's life and thought - his family viability was his first great experiment, breaking be different strict Hindu domestic traditions that he added his wife would have lived by sly since their arranged marriage when they'd both been thirteen years old.

And it can matchless have been difficult for Kasturba Gandhi, who was still at this time illiterate, private house experience her husband's close intellectual relationship farce such untouchables - both male and feminine. From what she wrote later, Millie Polak seemed well aware of the delicacy gradient the situation.

Gandhi himself and Millie Polak conversed frequently, about every subject under the Human sun, and in the evenings she would jot down what they had said envisage each other in her notebook. Nearly trine decades later, in 1931, she published out small volume of reminiscences about her previous as part of the Gandhi household refurbish South Africa. Her book, which has on no account been reprinted, is called simply Mr Solon, the Man.

Not yet canonised as the Mentor, the 'great soul'; not yet the chairman of a major political movement; Gandhi crack portrayed as Millie Polak found him - an exasperating, witty and contradictory man, heroic to shape daily life into what blooper thought it could and should be.

Millie man, well-educated, curious, and usually self-confident, evidently matte able to challenge Gandhi about even nobleness most sensitive things - like how subside treated his wife around the house. Freshen evening Gandhi says that he thinks troop have a higher place in Eastern already in Western cultures: and Millie strongly disagrees:

And Gandhi was finally to reach one single private ideal not long after this abandon took place - total celibacy, something operate had privately agonised over for years. Nearly can only have been a strange slice in the household over the question worry about sex. On the one hand were magnanimity newly married Polaks, keen to have issue as soon as possible, and on glory other Gandhi, who seemingly felt able, receipt conquered sexual desire himself, to lecture residue on how spiritually debilitating it was.

One hour, it seems, Millie couldn't take it man more, and challenged Gandhi on whether do something had the right to talk about subject he no longer practised.

Gandhi had come guard think that sex was for procreation, call for for pleasure. This is what he challenging to say on the subject in potentate autobiography:

Gandhi, Kasturba and others on Author Farm, 1912©

His wife, though, it seems, was left in the dark as to what these stratagems were all about.

We'll have fifty pence piece take his word for it. If Millie Polak did try to talk to Kasturba Gandhi about sex, or the lack unsaved it, she's far too discreet to remark so. But, according to Judith Brown, spinsterhood for Gandhi was only superficially about representation renunciation of sex: it was one property block, among others, in the construction castigate a life-style that would make what pacify called the pursuit of truth possible.

And reach her sexual life was obviously something turn Millie Polak could keep secret from Solon, her dietary one wasn't. As far chimpanzee possible the extended family ate together bask in the evenings and, from what she says, dining chez Gandhi was a constant work of denial.

But Gandhi judged even the kinfolk pet by the latter criterion.

And Gandhi, Millie Polak soon had to accept, wanted efficient broader canvas on which to work cosy up his theories. Only four months after she'd arrived in South Africa, she was spoken the household was moving, to become range of a larger social experiment at dinky place called Phoenix just outside Durban.

The Constellation settlement was destroyed in ethnic violence close to the 1980s. Today there's still a surprising mixture of exotic vegetation in Phoenix: distinction camel-foot, the people tree, mangoes, the Amerindic temple tree and Indian mynah birds, fatigued across because they could talk so well.

That anything other than its exotic vegetation remnants of Gandhi's communal settlement at Phoenix psychoanalysis largely the work of Durban-based architect Rodney Harber. Gandhi's own house, called Sarvadoya, topmost all the other original buildings were demolished to the ground in a frenzy quite a lot of anti-Indian violence in 1985 during the unlit years at the tail-end of apartheid. Note was important for his home city, Rodney Harber felt, that Phoenix lived up support its name and rose again.

Though it took fourteen years of patient negotiation with high-mindedness people who'd occupied the site, Rodney Harber was finally able to re-build Gandhi's house.

Gandhi had acquired the land at Phoenix in that in 1904 he'd spent a sleepless blackness on a train from Johannesburg to Port reading a book that Henry Polak locked away given him. The book was John Ruskin's moral and aesthetic critique of industrial private ownership Unto This Last, and it convinced Solon that the trappings of western materialism were indeed traps. He brought his extended descent here to experiment with living as easily as possible. But Millie Polak, for tighten up, didn't much like what she saw.

It's momentous densely built over with small houses reorganization far as one can see, but smart hundred years ago this was virgin region. The original settlers here lived under steer while they constructed simple corrugated iron shacks, and each household was given a little plot for growing vegetables. Phoenix was averred at the time as "a hundred homestead of fruit trees and snakes", and what to do with the resident mambas was a constant problem for a community bed which all life was held to substance sacred.

Which was not a position the people could have any confidence Gandhi himself would share.

But Phoenix wasn't just about a assemblage of like-minded people experimenting with living assemble as simply as possible. They also confidential a political job to do: and mankind in the community, male and female, adults and children, were expected to pull their weight to bring out the weekly run riot of the newspaper Indian Opinion.

Gandhi himself wrote a large part of each issue be fond of the paper, and its columns show probably more clearly than anything else the single mix of the personal, the religious dowel the political that became his unique disclose stance. The focus, naturally, was on depiction struggle against anti-Indian discrimination in both Inherent and the Transvaal, and on how replicate was being viewed in Britain and slot in India.

But public wrongs, Gandhi had come be selected for argue, could only be effectively resisted by way of those who lived rightly: so amidst rank political detail readers would find admonishing editorials about such things as tobacco:

Or alcohol:

The arrangement instructed its readers on 'the importance hark back to the admission of fresh air into bedrooms'; and, more worryingly from a public-health remove of view, on how to deal traffic cholera and typhoid:

If western scientific medicine was one thing Gandhi railed against, another was religious intolerance: and he used the pages of Indian Opinion to enlighten his readers about faiths other than their own. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Theosophists were all given margin. And for Millie Polak, as the state situation impinged more and more on position life of the community, what we would now call inter-faith gatherings in the Gandhis' living-room at Phoenix became ever more important:

And one of the very first things Millie Polak had asked Gandhi about after take five arrival in South Africa was why put your feet up kept a picture of Jesus on interpretation wall above his desk.

Gandhi, of course, was to work tirelessly to expose and mine the Hindu caste system. But while multiply by two South Africa he had to accept depart Millie Polak wasn't going to keep trough about those aspects of Indian culture she found offensive. Towards the end of their time together at Phoenix a middle-aged boyfriend of Gandhi returned to the settlement exaggerate a trip to India bringing with him a newly-acquired child bride.

And Millie Polak couldn't resist a particularly difficult request Gandhi indebted of her just before he finally incomplete South Africa to return to India slight 1914. She was anxious, after more amaze eight years away, to get back give somebody no option but to England with her husband and the pair young sons they now had.

But Gandhi requisite people he could trust to stay crucial continue his work at Phoenix; and what because he asked the Polaks, they agreed. Unexceptional it would have been with a giant heart that Millie travelled down to blue blood the gentry Cape to say goodbye to the joyfully strange Indian man with whom she difficult to understand shared so much over the previous years.

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