Kunle filani biography of mahatma gandhi

He would never in his childhood have had a European staying in the house, it would have been unheard of. This household [was certainly not] easy for his wife She worried deeply about having to share her house with people who are in Hindu terms untouchable, whether they happen to be Indian Christians or foreigners. And it can only have been difficult for Kasturba Gandhi, who was still at this time illiterate, to experience her husband's close intellectual relationship with such untouchables - both male and female.

From what she wrote later, Millie Polak seemed well aware of the delicacy of the situation. Gandhi himself and Millie Polak conversed frequently, about every subject under the African sun, and in the evenings she would jot down what they had said to each other in her notebook. Nearly three decades later, inshe published a small volume of reminiscences about her time as part of the Gandhi household in South Africa.

Her book, which has never been reprinted, is called simply Mr Gandhi, the Man. Not yet canonised as the Mahatma, the 'great soul'; not yet the leader of a major political movement; Gandhi is portrayed as Millie Polak found him - an exasperating, witty and contradictory man, struggling to shape daily life into what he thought it could and should be.

Millie herself, well-educated, curious, and usually self-confident, evidently felt able to challenge Gandhi about even the most sensitive things - like how he treated his wife around the house. One evening Gandhi says that he thinks women have a higher place in Eastern than in Western cultures: and Millie strongly disagrees:. And Gandhi was finally to reach one particular private ideal not long after this conversation took place - total celibacy, something he had privately agonised over for years.

There can only have been a strange tension in the household over the question of sex. On the one hand were the newly married Polaks, keen to have children as soon as possible, and on the other Gandhi, who seemingly felt able, having conquered sexual desire himself, to lecture others on how spiritually debilitating it was. One day, it seems, Millie couldn't take it any more, and challenged Gandhi on whether he had the right to talk about something he no longer practised.

Gandhi had come to think that sex was for procreation, not for pleasure. This is what he had to say on the subject in his autobiography:. We'll have to take his word for it. If Millie Polak did try to talk to Kasturba Gandhi about sex, or the lack of it, she's far too discreet to say so. But, according to Judith Brown, celibacy for Gandhi was only superficially about the renunciation of sex: it was one building block, among others, in the construction of a life-style that would make what he called the pursuit of truth possible.

And while her sexual life was obviously something that Millie Polak could keep secret from Gandhi, her dietary one wasn't. As far as possible the extended family ate together in the evenings and, from what she says, dining chez Gandhi was a constant laboratory of denial. And Gandhi, Millie Polak soon had to accept, wanted a broader canvas on which to work out his theories.

Only four months after she'd arrived in South Africa, she was told the household was moving, to become part of a larger social experiment at a place called Phoenix just outside Durban. The Phoenix settlement was destroyed in ethnic violence during the s. Today there's still a wonderful mixture of exotic vegetation in Phoenix: the camel-foot, the people tree, mangoes, the Indian temple tree and Indian mynah birds, brought across because they could talk so well.

That anything other than its exotic vegetation remains of Gandhi's communal settlement at Phoenix is largely the work of Durban-based architect Rodney Harber. Gandhi's own house, called Sarvadoya, and all the other original buildings were razed to the ground in a frenzy of anti-Indian violence in during the dark years at the tail-end of apartheid.

It was important for his home city, Rodney Harber felt, that Phoenix lived up to its name and rose again. Though it took fourteen years of patient negotiation with the people who'd occupied the site, Rodney Harber was finally able to re-build Gandhi's house. Gandhi had acquired the land at Phoenix because in he'd spent a sleepless night on a train from Johannesburg to Durban reading a book that Henry Polak had given him.

The book was John Ruskin's moral and aesthetic critique of industrial capitalism Unto This Lastand it convinced Gandhi that the trappings of western materialism were indeed traps. He brought his extended family here to experiment with living as simply as possible. But Millie Polak, for one, didn't much like what she saw. It's now densely built over with small houses as far as one can see, but a hundred years ago this was virgin territory.

The original settlers here lived under canvas while they constructed simple corrugated iron shacks, and each household was given a small plot for growing vegetables. Phoenix was described at the time as "a hundred acres of fruit trees and snakes", and what to do with the resident mambas was a constant problem for a community in which all life was held to be sacred.

But Phoenix wasn't just about a group of like-minded people experimenting with living together as simply as possible. They also had a political job to do: and everyone in the community, male and female, adults and children, were expected to pull their weight to bring out the weekly edition of the newspaper Indian Opinion. Gandhi himself wrote a large part of each issue of the paper, and its columns show perhaps more clearly than anything else the particular mix of the personal, the religious and the political that became his unique public stance.

The focus, naturally, was on the struggle against anti-Indian discrimination in both Natal and the Transvaal, and on how it was being viewed in Britain and in India. But public wrongs, Gandhi had come to argue, could only be effectively resisted by those who lived rightly: so amidst the kunle filani biography of mahatma gandhi detail readers would find admonishing editorials about such things as tobacco:.

The paper instructed its readers on 'the importance of the admission of fresh air into bedrooms'; and, more worryingly from a public-health point of view, on how to deal with 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 space. And for Millie Polak, as the political situation impinged more and more on the life of the community, what we kunle filani biography of mahatma gandhi 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 her arrival in South Africa was why he kept a picture of Jesus on the wall above his desk.

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

And Millie Polak couldn't resist a particularly difficult request Gandhi made of her just before he finally left South Africa to return to India in She was anxious, after more than eight years away, to get back to England with her husband and the two young sons they now had. But Gandhi needed people he could trust to stay and continue his work at Phoenix; and when he asked the Polaks, they agreed.

So it would have been with a heavy heart that Millie travelled down to the Cape to say goodbye to the brilliantly strange Indian man with whom she had shared so much over the previous years. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.

Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. See also. Religion and Ethics home Interfaith calendar Ethics guides. Gandhiserve Gandhi Smirti Gandhi's Ashram. Mohandas 'Mahatma' Gandhi Last updated When I first met him he would dress as an average middle class man of the professional classes would dress Millie archive, continued And one of the things I used to question with him so often was: why did he always want to choose the most unpleasant way of doing anything?

It is with great pleasure that we announce the marriage of Mr H. Polak and Miss M. Downs, who recently arrived from London, at Johannesburg on Saturday. We offer our heartiest best wishes to the pair. The Indian Opinion. Mr Polak is the Transvaal representative of Indian Opinion. The lady whom he has married was born in London, and at the age of 18 she began work in connection with the Christian Socialistic movement.

She is in thorough sympathy with the cause of Indians in South Africa. An informal reception for the couple was held last week at the home of Mr M. Gandhi, which was attended by a large number of friends and well-wishers. My first impression of Mr Gandhi was of a medium-sized man, rather slenderly built. His voice was soft, rather musical, and almost boyishly fresh.

I particularly noticed this as we chatted of the little things of my journey and proceeded to his home. The household, I learned, consisted of Mr Gandhi, his wife and three sons, aged eleven, nine and six, a young Englishman engaged in the telegraph service, a young Indian ward of Mr Gandhi's, and Mr Polak. My addition to the family completed its possibilities of accommodation.

Millie: Within a few days, we seemed to have settled into our new life. After 5 days, the leaders agreed to stop killing. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. Gandhi said his great aim in life was to have a vision of God. He sought to worship God and promote religious understanding. He sought inspiration from many different religions: Jainism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and incorporated them into his own philosophy.

On several occasions, he used religious practices and fasting as part of his political approach. Gandhi felt that personal example could influence public opinion. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. Last updated 1 Feb Interesting and unusual facts about Mahatma Gandhi. Hindus — Famous Hindus from the era of the Mahabharata to modern day India. Indians of the Independence Movement. He stood out in his time in history. Non violence as he practised it was part of his spiritual learning usedvas a political tool.

I just dipped into this ti find out about the salt march. Gandhi was a lawyer who did not make a good impression as a lawyer. His success and influence was mediocre in law religion and politics. He rose to prominence by chance. He was neither a good lawyer or a leader circumstances conspired at a time in history for him to stand out as an astute leader both in South Africa and in India.

The British were unable to control the tidal wave of independence in all the countries they ruled at that time. Gandhi was astute enough to seize the opportunity and used non violence as a tool which had no teeth but caused sufficient concern for the British to negotiate and hand over territories which they had milked dry. Tools Tools.

Kunle filani biography of mahatma gandhi

Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Redirected from Kunle filani. Nigerian educator and artist. This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.

Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. He was never in agreement for the country to be partitioned. His demeanour played a key role in pacifying the people and avoiding a Hindu-Muslim riot during the partition of the rest of India. Gandhiji was on his way to address a prayer meeting in the Birla House in New Delhi when Nathuram Godse fired three bullets into his chest from close range killing him instantly.

Throughout his life, in his principles practices, and beliefs, he always held on to non-violence and simple living. He influenced many great leaders and the nation respectfully addresses him as the father of the nation or Bapu. He worked for the upliftment of untouchables and called them Harijan meaning the children of God. Gandhian Philosophy inspired millions of people across the world.

Hence, his impact on the global stage is still very profound. Gandhiji was a prolific writer and he has written many articles throughout his life. Enroll Now. Around 1 million aspirants learn from the ClearIAS every month. Our courses and training methods are different from traditional coaching. We give special emphasis on smart work and personal mentorship.

Gandhi the greatest freedom fighter? It is an irony that Gandhi was a British stooge, he partitioned India and was responsible for death of millions of Hindus and Sikhs during partition. How he and Nehru got Bose eliminated is another story. He slept with many women by his own confession. He never went to kala Pani and enjoyed luxury of British even in jails in India.

He is not even close to be a father of post India It would be Bose anyday. And he is the one who did all kinds of absurd fantasies mentioned in his own autobiography. His non-violence theory was hypocritic and foolish teaching oppressed instead of oppressor! Your email address will not be published. Subscribe Now. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is popularly known as Mahatma Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi is revered in India as the Father of the Nation. Table of Contents Toggle. Comments Gandhi the greatest freedom fighter? So true … Bro I literally agree with all of this…. Please try to look at things with an open mind. Gandhi the greatest freedom fighter. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Featured on.

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