MAHATMA GANDHI - 1 - ANSWERS

1. A. John Ruskin.  

"Unto This Last" is a non-fiction on economy by John Ruskin, first published in 1860. The book had a profound impact on Gandhi's social and economic outlook. Gandhiji discovered the book in 1904 through Henry Polak. Later in 1908, he translated the book to Gujarati under the title of "Sarvodaya" (Well Being of All).

2. C. Aga Khan Palace, Pune.

Mahatma Gandhi, his wife Kasturba Gandhi and his secretary Mahadev Desai were confined in the palace from 9 August 1942 to 6 May 1944, following the launch of Quit India Movement. Kasturba Gandhi and Mahadev Desai died during their captivity period in the palace and have their tombs located over there (in pic below).

3. D. Boer War

The Second Boer War (11 October 1899 – 31 May 1902) was fought between the British Empire and two Boer states, the Republic of Transvaal and the Orange Free State, over the Empire's oppression in South Africa. In 1900, during the Boer War, Gandhi volunteered to form a group of stretcher-bearers known as the “Natal Indian Ambulance Corps” or simply “Indian Ambulance Corps”.    

Gandhi was awarded the "Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal" in 1915 for his work during Boer War by Lord Hardinge, the then Viceroy of India which he eventually returned in 1920 in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

4. B. Harilal

Mahatma Gandhi once confessed that the greatest regret of his life was that there were two people he had not been able to convince. One was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whose demand for a separate homeland for Muslims led to the partition of India and Pakistan in August, 1947 and the end of the dream of a united, independent India. The other person was his own eldest son Harilal. Harilal, an alcoholic gambler trading in imported British clothes even as his father was urging a boycott of foreign goods, even publicly converted to Islam and named himself Abdulla Gandhi. However later in 1936, on his mother Kasturba Gandhi's request he converted back to Hinduism through the Arya Samaj and adopted a new name, "Hiralal". Harilal, who died of tuberculosis four months after his father's death, at age of 59, did appear at his father's funeral but he was in such a derelict condition that few recognized him.

“Gandhi, My Father” (2007), directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, brought alive the 'Father of the Nation' more as a human being than the deified Mahatma. Akshaye Khanna played the role of Harilal Gandhi in the film. 

5. B. Leo Tolstoy

One of the writers who most deeply guided Gandhi’s political, spiritual and philosophical evolution, Leo Tolstoy, experienced his own dramatic transformation, from landed aristocrat to social radical and also renounced property and position to advocate strenuously for social equality. Gandhi eagerly read Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, the novelist’s statement of Christian anarchism. The book, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “left an abiding impression on me.” After further study of Tolstoy’s religious writing, he “began to realize more and more the infinite possibilities of universal love.”

It was in England where Gandhi first read “A Letter to a Hindu,” Tolstoy’s 1908 reply to a note from Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das on the question of Indian Independence. Tolstoy divides his lengthy, thoughtful “Letter” into short chapters, each of which begins with a quotation from the Vedas. It so affected Gandhi that, in 1909, he wrote to Tolstoy, thus beginning a correspondence between the two that lasted through the following year until Tolstoy's death. The meeting of two great minds and spirits, has been eventually collected in “Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi” and rivaled only by Albert Einstein’s correspondence with Sigmund Freud on violence and human nature.

In 1910, Gandhi established, with the help of his friend Hermann Kallenbach, an idealistic community and they named it "Tolstoy Farm" after Leo Tolstoy near Johannesburg. There he nurtured his policy of peaceful resistance.