Bedtime Biography: An Autobiography summary

Mohandas Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar – a coastal city in Gujarat, India. He was the youngest child of Karamchand and Putlibai, who were modest but upright people. In a country where caste determined much about one’s life, he was born into a merchant class known as the Modh Bania.   At school, young Gandhi was strongly influenced by the traditional Indian folktales that formed part of the curriculum. They often carried messages of the importance of filial piety and right moral behavior. These messages combined with the integrity modeled by his parents helped to shape Gandhi’s ethical code. 

To this was added something rather unusual at that time: a respect for people from backgrounds different from his own. Unlike many of their peers, Gandhi’s parents didn’t socialize exclusively with other Hindus. He was raised in a home in which Parsis, Jains, and Muslims were also welcome. This exposure nurtured a more holistic view of the importance of inclusion in Indian society. 

Gandhi’s life would change when he left India for the first time. He completed high school in 1887, and was now faced with choices about his professional future. An old family friend encouraged him to go to England to study law at University College London. This seemed to offer a guarantee of a solid and prosperous future for him and his family. 

But the decision to travel to England was fraught with complications. Gandhi’s mother was afraid that the temptations openly available in a Western country would corrupt the young man. To address this, another family friend who’d become a Jain monk guided him in taking a vow to abstain from meat, alcohol, and women while he was in England. Then, Gandhi was summoned to appear before a meeting of his caste, the Modh Bania, whose members tried to forbid him from making the journey. They claimed that traveling abroad violated the caste’s religious beliefs, and threatened him with expulsion. 

Fortunately, circumstances soon called for another major change in Gandhi’s life, which would lead him to an opportunity to practice law in South Africa. He was originally offered a one-year position by Dada Abdullah and Co., a company that needed help with a major court case there. But, here too, he found just as much injustice and division as he saw in India.

At the time, South Africa was home to an increasingly large population of indentured Indian laborers, who, like the local Black population, were forced to endure and function within the terrorizing machinations of colonialism. Gandhi’s experiences with racism during his time there – including being thrown off a train for refusing to give up his first-class seat to a white person – eventually led him to offer legal representation to many in his community.

By the early 1900s, Gandhi and his family had settled in the city of Bombay. At this point, he was a well-established public figure, and friends and followers in South Africa wrote to ask him to return to help with the ongoing struggle of the Indian community there. He consented, and returned to Natal in 1903. When he got there, he founded a weekly newspaper called the Indian Opinion to bring India’s attention to the plight of their countrymen in South Africa, and help improve Indian civil rights there. He also established the Phoenix Settlement, a site for communal living just north of the city of Durban, Natal. John Ruskin’s 1860 publication Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism that argues for social economy and things like a living wage, was his inspiration for the settlement. 

In the next few years, Gandhi would again lead an ambulance corps of Indian volunteers, serving the British when they went to war with the Zulu, and would help care for Indians affected by an outbreak of plague at a mine in Johannesburg.

You’ve reached the end of this Bedtime Biography. Thank you for listening. Why not pause listening now so you can stay in a relaxed state? And if you’re off to bed now, I wish you a good night’s sleep.