Kasturba Gandhi

Kasturba Gandhi was married at thirteen, went to prison repeatedly in two countries, and died in detention while her husband was held in the same palace. She was born in Porbandar to a merchant family, married Mohandas Gandhi when both were children, and was illiterate when he began teaching her - a process he later described with some shame, since he had also tried to control her reading and her movements. In South Africa she was jailed in 1913 with hard labour for taking part in the campaign against a ruling that invalidated Hindu and Muslim marriages, and it was the arrest of the women that turned the strike into a mass movement. She ran the ashrams, which meant settling quarrels and cooking for hundreds, and refused Gandhi's instruction that everyone including her clean the latrines only until she agreed with him. She was arrested for the last time in 1942 after the Quit India resolution and held at the Aga Khan Palace, where she died of heart failure eighteen months later with Gandhi beside her. She was jailed at least four times in India in addition to the South African sentences. In 1917 she worked among the indigo cultivators at Champaran, teaching hygiene and running a school while Gandhi negotiated. Gandhi wrote openly in his autobiography about having tried to dominate her and about her quiet refusal to be dominated, calling her his teacher in that. She refused penicillin in her final illness, which her sons had obtained; whether Gandhi discouraged it is still argued over. She died on 22 February 1944 and was cremated in the palace grounds. Gandhi was released three months later.

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