Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill

Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill were two of the leading figures of this century. They came from very different backgrounds and represented different traditions and ideals, with Gandhi fighting against many of the British views that men like Churchill represented.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born at Porbandar, Kathiawar in 1869. He was the youngest son in a family of three sons and one daughter. Mohan was an ordinary child who was halting in his speech and nearly frightened of his own shadow, and much of what he saw in the external world puzzled him. He was not a very good student, and books did not interest him. He was left largely to himself by his classmates. At home, the family rigidly observed the Hindu pieties (Shahani, 1961, 1-3).

Mohan was betrothed to Kasturbai Makanji at the age of seven and was married to her at the age of 14. He was educated in India and then went to England in 1888 to study law at the Inner Temple. He returned to India in 1891 and started practicing law, but he found it difficult to earn a living. He went to South Africa as a lawyer for an Indian firm in 1891, and he was persuaded to remain in the Indian community there to help its members overcome discrimination. He was soon successful as both a lawyer and a politician and established several ashrams, or religious communities, in that country. He founded a newspaper and organized an Indian congress. He devised his technique of non-violent resistance in 1906 for an effort

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opponent. Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person" (Moon 52-53). Gandhi was then 45 years of age. He established an ashram near Ahmadabad and worked for the causes of Indian peasants and mill workers. He did not at first oppose the British rule of India, and he helped recruit Indians for World War I. He planned his first all-India satyagraha campaign in 1919 when the British passed the Rowlatt Act continuing the wartime curtailment of Indian civil liberties. When some Indians resorted to mob violence, the British took harsh reprisals, including a massacre at Amritsar in which 379 Indians were killed. Gandhi was now a firm opponent of the British Empire. He would begin his second satyagraha in 1920 with a boycott of British cloth. He was arrested in 1922 for sedition and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in 1924 and became the president of the Indian National Congress (Homer, 1996). Gandhi and his nonviolent methods had much to do with creating a consensus against the rule of the British and allowed the people to express their dissatisfaction in a way that appealed to the conscience of the world. The violence in the 1922 campaign was a disservice to the caus

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