biography of Nathuram Godse
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by the late 1940s, Mahatma Gandhi was an icon both in his native India and across the globe for his activism in working toward freeing his country from British colonial rule. His nonviolent ideals and leadership of the Indian Independence movement had gained him hundreds of thousands of devoted followers.
But some of his beliefs also gained him opponents — and Nathuram Godse, the man who killed Gandhi, was ultimately the most zealous opponent of them all.
Late in the afternoon of Jan. 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse walked up to Gandhi before a prayer service in New Delhi and shot him three times in the chest. With that, the great leader was dead, but the infamy of the man who killed Gandhi lives on to this day.
The Early Life Of Nathuram Godse, The Man Who Killed Gandhi
Nathuram Godse was born on May 19, 1910, to parents Vinayak and Lakshmi in an orthodox Brahmin family in India. Godse was the fifth child and the fourth son, but his three brothers before him had all died in infancy.
Because only his sister had survived, his parents believed that their male children were cursed, with the only way to get rid of the curse was to raise their next son as a girl. So when Godse was born, he was named Ramchandra, his nose was pierced so he could wear a nose ring, and he was raised as a girl.
His name was shortened to “Ram” and his parents began to call him “Nathuram” which means “Ram who wears a nose ring.” Finally, after his younger brother was born, his parents began to raise him as a boy.
As a child, his family believed that he had special oracular powers. He would sit in front of the family goddess, fall into a trance, and reportedly serve as a medium between his family and the family’s deity.
Even though he was raised as a girl in his early upbringing, Godse grew into a burly young man who took pride in his athletic abilities. Meanwhile, he enjoyed reading but was not a good student. In fact, he ended up failing his matriculation exam, which was an essential qualification in order to earn a low-grade government job.
Around the same time, Godse had been influenced by Gandhi and his movement for non-cooperation with the British. Godse’s brother, Gopal, told TIME that he and his brother at one point in their youth were avid followers of Gandhi, saying, “In our school days Gandhi was our idol.”
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