Mahatma Gandhi: Quit India Speech

About the Author

Mahatma Gandhi was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat on October 2, 1869, and was educated in both India and England. His activism first came to prominence during his career as a lawyer for an Indian firm in Durban, South Africa, from 1893 to 1914. His fight against racial discrimination in South Africa began with prayers and petitions, but by 1907 he had invented the strategy of passive resistance, which he called satyagraha. Hardly a slave to tradition, he believed in changing and modifying his satyagraha techniques. Because of the evolution of his ideology, he titled his autobiography An Experiment with Truth. However, his core belief in truth, nonviolence, and the goal of swaraj (political self-determination for India) remained unchanged throughout his life.

Soon after his return to India in 1914, he started working toward unification of the then-divided Indian National Congress. First, he championed the cause of indigo plantation workers in the northern state of Bihar and the plight of textile mill workers in Ahmadabad in his native Gujarat. During the 1920s he successfully reorganized the Congress as a mass-based political organization, and he expanded its social composition by bringing in the peasantry as members. By combining the struggle against British imperialism with social and economic justice, he emerged as Mahatma, which literally means “great soul.”

In 1921 and 1930 Gandhi launched two countrywide civil-disobedience movements that focused on social reconstruction measures. He also endeavored, albeit with limited success, to keep India's diverse religious and ethnic groups unified, despite nascent forces of religious and cultural separatism. Because of the growing strength of these separatist forces in the early 1940s, it is not surprising much of his Quit India Speech directly addressed discord between Hindus and Muslims.

Gandhi did not live to see the final fruits of his efforts. Just six months later, on January 30, 1948, he was taking his nightly walk in New Delhi when he was shot and killed by an assassin, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse. Later that year Godse and a co-conspirator were executed for the crime. Gandhi's birthday, October 2, is a national holiday in India, and the United Nations has proclaimed October 2 the International Day of Non-Violence.