Karamchand’s father, Ota Gandhi, had also been Porbandar’s “first minister,” as were Ota’s father and grandfather. Porbandar was one of over 500 princely states in India.

The British governed much of India directly and the rest indirectly, through chieftains or princes. He was a public official, the “first minister” to the ruler of Porbandar state, which included the town of Porbandar. Though the Gandhis belonged to the “bania,” or trader, caste (third in the hierarchy of Hindu castes, but a “high” caste still), Mohandas’s father, Karamchand, was not a trader or businessman. would acknowledge the debt he and the American civil rights movement owed to Gandhi, and there have been similar expressions from Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), the North American farmworkers’ leader from Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988), who in the 1930s raised a nonviolent army of Pashtuns not far from the Afghan–Pakistan border from Benigno Aquino (1932–1983), the chief opponent of Marcos’s military regime in the Philippines from His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet (1935–) and from Aung San Suu Kyi (1945–), the leading fighter for democratic rights in her country of Burma (Myanmar) and others. 218–220), and the participation of thousands of men and women in the nonviolent campaigns he led, first in South Africa and then in India, inspired nonviolent struggles on different continents. Though less successful in attaining two other aims of his, Hindu-Muslim amity and justice for India’s “untouchables,” Gandhi (a Hindu, like a majority of his compatriots) saw to it that independent India assured equal rights to its Muslim and other religious minorities, and to “untouchables.” He claimed that his efforts in India were relevant for “an aching, storm-tossed and hungry world” ( Collected Works, vol. Born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar in the Gujarati-speaking Kathiawar region of western India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi died in 1948, five and a half months after achieving his goal of India’s freedom from British rule.

Laxmidas karamchand gandhi