Gandhi

Gandhi lived during an age dominated by European imperial expansion and by profound political, economic and social change. When he was born in 1869, most of the Indian subcontinent was governed by the British Crown following the transfer of power from the East India Company after the uprising of 1857. British authority rested on a large colonial administration, military power and cooperation with Indian princely states and local elites. Railways, ports and new systems of communication connected the country more closely, but the colonial economy also tied Indian agriculture and industry to the commercial priorities of the British Empire.

Indian society itself was extraordinarily diverse. Languages, religions, regional identities and caste communities shaped everyday life, while the benefits of education and economic development were distributed unevenly. Traditional social structures coexisted with new universities, newspapers, professional classes and political organizations. By the late nineteenth century an educated Indian middle class was increasingly debating representation, social reform and the meaning of national identity.

South Africa, where Gandhi spent the formative political years from 1893 to 1914, presented another face of the imperial world. Indian merchants and indentured labourers lived within societies structured by racial inequality and discriminatory laws. Political rights, movement, residence and economic activity could depend upon racial classification. These conditions gave Gandhi direct experience of how legal systems could formalize social inequality and provided the setting in which his methods of organized civil resistance gradually developed.

When Gandhi returned to India, the country was being transformed by the First World War, growing nationalist politics and increasing dissatisfaction with colonial rule. Repressive measures and episodes such as the Amritsar massacre of 1919 severely damaged faith in gradual reform under British authority. During the following decades, nationalist politics expanded from relatively limited educated circles into a much broader movement involving workers, farmers, merchants, women and villagers.

At the same time, the independence movement contained competing visions of India's future. Some leaders emphasized parliamentary institutions and industrial modernization; others advocated socialism or revolutionary struggle. Questions of caste, economic inequality and relations between religious communities were increasingly difficult to separate from the struggle against colonial rule. The Indian National Congress and the Muslim League developed different political demands, and by the 1940s the dispute over political representation and the future constitutional structure of the subcontinent had become acute.

The Second World War weakened Britain economically and politically while intensifying demands for self-government throughout its empire. In 1947 British rule ended, but the creation of India and Pakistan was accompanied by communal violence and one of the largest population movements of the twentieth century. Gandhi's final months therefore unfolded in a world very different from the one in which his political career had begun: colonial rule was disappearing, but religious conflict and the human cost of partition threatened the unity he had long advocated.

These circumstances shaped Gandhi profoundly. Racial discrimination in South Africa pushed him from legal petition toward organized resistance; colonial rule in India led him to adapt that resistance for mass politics; poverty and social hierarchy expanded his concerns beyond national independence; and the violence between religious communities strengthened his conviction that political freedom without coexistence and social reform would remain incomplete.