About this stamp
Six Stamps for the 150th Anniversary
India Post issued six ₹25 stamps and a sheet on 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, the youngest child of Karamchand and Putlibai. He married Kasturbai Makhanji Kapadia in May 1883, studied law in London and was called to the bar in June 1891.
South Africa and the Freedom Struggle
In 1893 he went to South Africa, where he spent 21 years; thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg, he helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and, at a mass meeting in Johannesburg on 11 September 1906, first used the method he called Satyagraha. He returned to India in 1915 at Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s request. His campaigns at Champaran (1917) and Kheda (1918), against the Rowlatt Act (1919) and the Salt March to Dandi with 78 volunteers (12 March to 6 April 1930) made him the leader of the national movement, and in 1942 he called on the British to Quit India. He was assassinated in 1948; more than two million people joined his funeral procession.
His Legacy
The brochure remembers the abolition of untouchability in the Constitution, khadi as the national fabric, the three wise monkeys that stand for his ideals of truth and non-violence, and leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela who drew on his methods. The first day cover marks the Swachh Bharat Mission, launched on 2 October 2014 to make India open-defecation free by his 150th birth anniversary.
On the Sheet
The six octagonal stamps show Gandhi as a boy, as a young man, with Kasturba, with the spinning wheel, in old age, and the three wise monkeys. On the sheet each stamp sits above a strip of historical photographs from that part of his life. The stamps and brochure were designed by Sankha Samanta, with text by Pallab Bose; the first day cover is based on a design from the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation. 800,000 of each stamp and 200,000 sheets were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
The Stamps on This Sheet
- Gandhi as a Boy
- Gandhi as a Young Man
- Gandhi and Kasturba
- Gandhi and the Spinning Wheel
- Gandhi in Old Age
- The Three Wise Monkeys
For More Information
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