India: Delhi – 2 Day Tour

🕊️ The Man Who Took On An Empire — And Won

We visited Raj Ghat on a warm Delhi morning, and it turned out to be one of those quietly powerful experiences that you really weren’t expecting. No rollercoasters. No gift shop selling Gandhi fridge magnets. Just a black marble slab, some fresh flowers, and the weight of an extraordinary life pressing down on you.

So who exactly was this chap, and why is half of India turning up here on a Tuesday?

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — the man the world would come to call Mahatma, meaning “great soul” — was born on 2nd October 1869 in Porbandar, a small coastal town in Gujarat, into a Hindu merchant caste family. His father was a local administrator, his mother deeply religious. Not exactly the makings of a revolutionary. He trained as a barrister in London in the late 1880s — so he spent his formative years eating bad English food and arguing in wigs, much like the rest of us — before heading to South Africa in 1893, where the resident Indian community was being treated with the sort of casual contempt that the British Empire had rather made its speciality.

It was there, in South Africa, that Gandhi first road-tested what would become his signature move: nonviolent civil disobedience. The Indians living in South Africa faced severe legal discrimination — they couldn’t vote, were forced to carry passes, and were barred from walking on pavements in some areas. Rather than reach for the pitchforks, Gandhi organised peaceful resistance campaigns and spent several stints in prison for his trouble. He called his philosophy Satyagraha — roughly translated as “truth-force” or “soul-force.” The British presumably filed it under “nuisance.”

He returned to India in January 1915, arriving back to a hero’s welcome, and promptly set about making himself thoroughly inconvenient to the colonial administration once again. He organised peasants and farmers in Bihar and Gujarat to protest against crushing land taxes and discriminatory treatment by British landlords. He led mill workers in Ahmedabad during a 1918 dispute. He was, in short, everywhere at once, and the Empire was finding him rather hard to ignore.

In 1921, Gandhi assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress, transforming what had been a fairly genteel debating society for educated Indians into a genuine mass movement. He campaigned for the abolition of untouchability, for Hindu-Muslim unity, for the promotion of homespun cloth as an act of economic defiance against British textile imports, and for complete self-rule — swaraj.

His most iconic act came in March 1930, when, at the age of sixty, he led a 400-kilometre march from his ashram in Sabarmati to the coastal village of Dandi to protest the British salt tax — a law that prevented ordinary Indians from collecting or selling salt and forced them to buy it from the government at a taxed price. The Dandi Salt March, completed on 6th April 1930, was an act of such elegant simplicity — a thin elderly man in a dhoti walking to the sea to pick up a handful of salt — that it made the British look magnificently absurd. The world’s press thought so too.

He was imprisoned, repeatedly. In both South Africa and India, across several decades, Gandhi spent a cumulative total of around six years behind bars. He treated prison as an administrative inconvenience rather than a deterrent. In 1942, with the Second World War in full swing and Britain rather distracted, Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, demanding immediate British withdrawal. The response was swift: he was arrested within hours and locked up in the Aga Khan Palace in Pune until 1944.

Throughout all of this, Gandhi lived with remarkable simplicity. He spun his own cloth, wore sandals he made himself, ate very little, and fasted regularly — sometimes as a form of political protest, sometimes apparently just for the fun of it. He lived in self-sufficient communities called ashrams, which were rather more austere than your average English country retreat.

Eventually, exhausted and humiliated after two centuries of trying, Britain granted India independence on 15th August 1947. It should have been a moment of pure triumph. It wasn’t. The British Indian Empire was partitioned into two separate dominions — a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan — and the chaos that followed was catastrophic. Roughly ten to twenty million people were displaced as Hindus and Sikhs fled into India and Muslims fled into Pakistan. Religious violence erupted on a terrible scale, with estimates of the death toll ranging from two hundred thousand to two million people. It remains one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century.

Gandhi was devastated. He had spent his life preaching Hindu-Muslim unity, and here was the sub-continent tearing itself apart. He travelled to the worst-affected areas, fasted to try to stop the killing, and pleaded for calm. Some Indians felt he had been too accommodating of the Muslim League’s demands and too willing to accept partition. Feelings ran very high.

Among those who blamed Gandhi was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist from Pune who believed Gandhi had weakened India by being too sympathetic to Muslims and too ready to accept division. On 30th January 1948, at a prayer meeting in New Delhi, Godse approached Gandhi and fired three bullets into his chest at close range. Gandhi died almost immediately. He was seventy-eight years old.

Godse was arrested, tried, and executed by hanging on 15th November 1949, along with a co-conspirator. He never expressed remorse.

Which brings us back to the black marble slab.

The memorial at Raj Ghat is, by the standards of what you might expect for one of the twentieth century’s most consequential figures, almost shockingly understated. A simple rectangular plinth of polished black granite, inscribed with Gandhi’s last words — He Ram (“Oh God”) — and almost always adorned with fresh flowers and garlands. No grand statues, no soaring columns, no eternal flame of the Olympic-opening-ceremony variety. Well, actually there is an eternal flame — quietly burning in one corner — but even that is modest. It suits him, somehow.

The site itself sits on the western bank of the Yamuna River, a little outside the chaotic heart of Old Delhi, in a broad, peaceful garden. Many Indians come here not as tourists but as something closer to pilgrims, and you could feel that distinction quite clearly as we walked through.

Getting There and Visiting

Raj Ghat is located between the ring road and the Yamuna River, roughly four kilometres from Janpath market if you’re in that part of the city. The official address is Gandhi Smriti, Raj Ghat, New Delhi — though frankly any autorickshaw driver in Delhi will know it immediately and take you there without needing a postcode.

The memorial is open every day of the week, from 6:30 in the morning until 6 in the evening. If you happen to be there on a Friday, there’s a special prayer meeting held at 5:30 in the afternoon, which is worth attending if you can arrange it.

Getting there is straightforward enough. The nearest Metro station is on the Violet Line — the Delhi Metro station at Raj Ghat itself — which leaves you about 800 metres away on foot. Alternatively, Indraprastha station on the Blue Line is around two kilometres distant, and Chandni Chowk on the Yellow Line is about three kilometres, should you fancy a longer wander through some genuinely spectacular chaos on the way.

We’d strongly recommend going reasonably early, before the heat of the day builds and before the tour groups arrive in force. Take your time. It’s worth it.