Spinnrad bewegung gandhi biography

- By Ben Cosgrove

Few public figures of the 20th century were and remain as instantly recognizable to literally billions of people around the globe as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, born on October 2, 1869, and no single picture has become more closely associated with his life, and his way of life, than Margaret Bourke-White’s 1946 portrait of the civil-disobedience pioneer beside his cherished spinning wheel.

In 1946, during the run-up to the historic 1947 partition and independence from Great Britain for both India and Pakistan Bourke-White spent time in India working on a feature, ultimately titled “India’s Leaders,” that would run in the May 27, 1946, issue of LIFE.

She made hundreds of photographs, including many of Gandhi himself: with his family; at his spinning wheel; at prayer. More than a dozen of her pictures ran in the