Mahatma Gandhi

• Chart pointers (PVNR): Libra ascendant (standard reading); Arudha Lagna in Cancer with Moon in own sign (the saintly public image), Rahu+Mars also there (his detractors); Jupiter in Aries, 10th from AL ("peaceful war"); Sun in 3rd-from-AL → death by firearm.

• Kind of work: trained barrister who became a political-spiritual mass leader and social reformer — work of communication, dharma and public leadership (3rd/9th/10th), not commerce.
• Fame: among the most famous human beings of the 20th century; worldwide, enduring renown — far beyond his country.
• Position / power: held no official government post, ever — yet exercised supreme moral authority over an entire nation and its leaders (a king-maker without a throne).
• Wealth: voluntarily renounced all personal wealth; lived in ashram poverty, owned almost nothing, though he directed the finances of a vast movement.
• Legal / negative: repeatedly imprisoned (sedition, civil disobedience — total ~6+ years jailed); reviled by a Hindu-nationalist minority; assassinated.
• Health: frequent prolonged fasts; appendicitis surgery (1924); recurrent malaria.
• Death: violent — shot dead at 78.

• 1869 — born into a Modh Bania (merchant-caste) family; father Karamchand was diwan (chief minister) of Porbandar.
• 1883 — married Kasturba (Kasturbai Makhanji) at age 13 in an arranged child marriage.
• 1885 — his father died; Gandhi was a shy, unremarkable student.
• 1888 — first son born (died days later); sailed to London to study law at the Inner Temple, vowing to his mother to avoid meat, alcohol and women.
• 1891 — called to the bar; returned to India; struggled as a barrister in Bombay (too timid to speak in court).
• 1893 — sailed to South Africa for a legal case. The turning point: thrown off a first-class train carriage at Pietermaritzburg for being Indian — the humiliation that politicized him.
• 1894 — founded the Natal Indian Congress; began two decades of fighting racial discrimination against Indians in South Africa.
• 1899–1902 — organized an Indian ambulance corps in the Boer War.
• 1906 — took the lifelong vow of brahmacharya (celibacy); launched his first mass satyagraha against the Asiatic Registration ("Black") Act, coining the term satyagraha (truth-force).
• 1909 — wrote Hind Swaraj.
• 1913 — led the great march of Indian miners; jailed.
• 1914–15 — left South Africa; returned to India (Jan 1915) a celebrated figure; toured the country on his mentor Gokhale's advice.
• 1917 — Champaran satyagraha (Bihar) on behalf of exploited indigo farmers — his first Indian civil-disobedience victory.
• 1918 — led the Kheda peasant tax revolt and the Ahmedabad mill workers' strike (his first hunger fast as a weapon).
• 1919 — opposed the repressive Rowlatt Act; the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (13 April 1919) turned him fully against British rule.
• 1920 — launched the Non-Cooperation Movement; took control of the Indian National Congress; promoted khadi (homespun cloth) and the spinning wheel (charkha) as symbols of self-reliance.
• 1922 — abruptly suspended the movement after the Chauri Chaura violence; arrested, tried for sedition, sentenced to 6 years (released 1924 after appendicitis surgery).
• 1930 — the Salt March / Dandi March (12 March – 6 April), walking 240 miles to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly — the iconic act of mass civil disobedience; ~60,000 jailed.
• 1931 — the Gandhi–Irwin Pact; attended the Second Round Table Conference in London (met mill workers, royalty, the press; in his loincloth).
• 1932 — imprisoned; undertook a fast unto death against separate electorates for "untouchables," leading to the Poona Pact with B. R. Ambedkar; campaigned for Harijan (Dalit) uplift.
• 1942 — launched the Quit India Movement ("Do or Die," 8 August); imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace, Pune.
• 22 February 1944 — wife Kasturba died while imprisoned with him.
• 1944 — released on health grounds (malaria).
• 15 August 1947 — Indian independence, but partitioned into India and Pakistan amid horrific communal bloodshed. Gandhi, anguished, boycotted the Delhi celebrations and instead worked to quell riots in Bengal (Noakhali, Calcutta), fasting to stop the killing.
• 13–18 January 1948 — his last fast, in Delhi, to force communal peace and the release of Pakistan's funds.
• 30 January 1948 — assassinated at a prayer meeting at Birla House, Delhi, shot three times at close range by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who blamed him for concessions to Muslims. His last words: "Hé Rām."

Nature & personality

• Radical simplicity: loincloth, spinning wheel, ashram life, hand-grinding his own food, cleaning latrines himself to break caste taboos. Vegetarian, teetotaller, celibate after 1906. A relentless self-experimenter (The Story of My Experiments with Truth), constantly testing diet, fasting, sexuality and faith. Disarmingly humble yet iron-willed; turned personal moral discipline into a political method. Could be exacting and unconventional with his own family.

Family

• Wife Kasturba (married 62 years); four surviving sons — Harilal (estranged, alcoholic, converted briefly to Islam), Manilal, Ramdas, Devdas. His relationship with eldest son Harilal was a lifelong sorrow.

Career & mission

• Barrister → civil-rights organizer in South Africa (1893–1914) → leader of the Indian independence movement (1915–1948). Pioneered non-violent mass resistance that later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Editor of Young India and Harijan.

Death & legacy

• His assassin Godse and co-conspirator Apte were tried and hanged (1949). Gandhi became the global icon of non-violence; 2 October is observed as the International Day of Non-Violence. Never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (a noted omission).

• Image (AL): Moon-in-own-sign in Cancer AL = the compassionate saint; the Rahu+Mars there = the minority who distrusted him.
• Life-theme: Jupiter in Aries (10th from AL) = waging a war-like struggle by wholly peaceful means; A10 (work) + A8 (suffering) together in the 6th = a life where every act of work was fused with suffering; he renounced all comfort.
• Timing: PVNR uses the Chaturashiti Sama Dasha (10th lord in the 10th) as clearest for his events.
• Death: Sun in the 3rd-from-AL → death by firearm in an open/garden setting — confirmed.

PVNR SJC lessons — Lesson 59 (Arudha image, career, firearm death). Life events from the public historical record.