The Mahatma . Behind his physical appearance and his Buddha air, there was an amazing political mind, extraordinary strength and a completely original social ideology to face the English empire: the fight without violence . This is how India became independent more than half a century ago. He was called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but he is remembered all over the world as Mahatma Gandhi , meaning Great Soul.
Mahatma Gandhi’s creed of nonviolence
This is how Mahatma Gandhi found the keys to his unprecedented civil resistance to English rule.
The son of a wealthy upper-caste family, Mahatma Gandhi felt his
meek culture coincide with harsh reality in 1906, the year of the first anti-British demonstration in India. And he imagined Jainism (one of the 50 millennial Hindu cults) as the ethic of the fledgling Congress Party. Philosophy and politics united and influence the conscience of the oppressed as if it were a blank page.
And after practicing law in South Africa, he set up a farm-school in India where children without distinction of creed or status learned Hindi, English and Sanskrit, mathematics, agriculture and spinning-wheel weaving, crowning ten years of study with a walk through the whole country. The students had to respect the Jain code proposed by Gandhi himself:
1) Vow of truth. It is not enough not to lie. “We do not admit any lies, not even for the benefit of the country.”
2) Vow of non-violence or ahimsa, which means “do not harm”.
3) Vow of frugality.
4) Vow not to steal. “It is also theft to use things that we do not need.”
5) Vow of non-possessiveness. Have only the essentials to live.
The character and position of Mahatma Gandhi is to be considered from the point of view of the impact that his creation and position on the violence, inequalities and passion for peace have had on the world that make up a new social ideology for the entire world .