The International Day of Non-Violence
October 2, 2023
October 2nd, 1869—at least by the Gregorian calendar—was the day Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born. (By the Vikram calendar, it was Bhadarva Vad 12, which usually fell in late September.) In 2007, the United Nations declared October 2nd as the International Day of Non-Violence. Although the official resolution makes no mention of Gandhi, his birthday is of course the reason the date was chosen.
(This seems like a reasonable place to address that hyphen in the word non-violence. While I’m a guy who likes to get facts right, I was persuaded some years ago to excise the hyphen from Gandhi’s writings. Chris Moore-Backman pointed out that while Gandhi always used the hyphenated word, that form was “increasingly understood to represent the most rudimentary expression of nonviolence,” i.e. simply abstaining from violence. “Nonviolence (no hyphen) has come to denote the holistic and comprehensive approach to nonviolent living and struggle” in the Gandhian tradition. Which is the concept I’m trying to communicate.)1
Gandhi was born in Portbandar, India, a small town surrounded on three sides by the Arabian Sea. The Gandhi’s home had been in the family for a hundred years, and from the third story the harbor was visible. His father, Karamchand “Kaba” Gandhi, was a diwan, or minister, to the peninsula’s prince. It was an influential role, and a promotion would move the family to Rajkot around 1876.
Monia, as the little boy with curly hair was known, was the youngest of Kaba’s six children by four wives. The first two wives had each died not long after childbirth, the third became ill and gave permission for him to take another, Putliba. I feel like I’ve mentioned this before, but there was a huge age disparity. Karmachand was at least forty, while his new bride was still a child. Perhaps Putliba was a teenager by the time she gave birth to the first of her four children in 1862, but records are fuzzy.
Gandhi, too, was a pre-teen when he married Kasturba in 1882. Most biographies state the marriage took place at 13, since that’s what is given in the Autobiography, but today seems an appropriate time to address that question, too. The answer depends on how you count. In the European tradition, we start counting a child’s age at zero; only after a full year are they one. Some Asian traditions, including Gandhi’s, count inclusively, producing an sum one higher. He was aware of the difference, and in London, had no trouble subtracting a year during an interview to explain he’d been married at the age of 12.
A more troubling question for the young man, 21 years and eight months after his birth, was his current age. The newly minted lawyer was committed to truth, but unwilling to make himself appear younger. Therefore, he answered truthfully, “I am now about twenty-two.”
Other than tradition, can you make an argument for NOT counting age inclusively?
The Gandhian Iceberg (Chris Moore-Backman, 2018) p. 16n