ABSTRACT
The Mahatma was born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Porbandar, now in the State of Gujarat, on 2 October 1869. Gandhi's Hindu background taught him about the basic elements that constituted the physical and material world – namely, earth, water, fire, ether and space, which he saw ritually invoked in home worship as well as in meditational practices. During his education in England, Gandhi rediscovered the virtues of his family's vegetarianism, albeit on the moral grounding articulated by Henry Salt, and inspired by Shelley, Thoreau, Whitman and Ruskin. Gandhi's overall social and environmental philosophy is based on what human beings need rather than what they want. His early introduction to the teachings of Jains, theosophists, Christian sermons, Ruskin and Tolstoy, and most significantly Bhagavad Gita, were to have profound impact on development of Gandhi's holistic thinking on humanity, nature and their ecological interrelation. Gandhi was also adamant about the need for a rigorous ethic of non-injury in the treatment of animals.
