Biography | Mahatma Gandhi — The Haveli Room in Porbandar Where Putlibai Delivered Him

People treat Gandhi as a figure who arrived already named Mahatma. The first address was this house on Kasturba Road in Porbandar, then still called Sudamapuri. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born here on 2 October 1869. His father, Karamchand, called Kaba, served as diwan of the small princely state. His mother, Putlibai, was Kaba's fourth wife and the mother of a daughter and three sons. Mohandas was the youngest. The house had been bought by his great-grandfather Harjeevan Rahidas Gandhi. Uttamchand, the grandfather, added a storey. By 1869 it was a three-storey haveli around a courtyard, with rope-hung wooden stairs and a warren of rooms. A swastika painted on the floor of a ground-floor room marks the spot the family keeps as the birth place. The child they called Moniyo lived here until November 1876, when Kaba moved the household to Rajkot. The memorial tower next door was not there yet. Its foundation stone went in during Gandhi's lifetime, in 1947, after the house had been bought from family members still living in it. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel opened the finished shrine, Kirti Mandir, on 27 May 1950. The tower is 79 feet high, one foot for each year of Gandhi's life. The ancestral rooms are still walkable. The later memorial is the public face of the complex. The pin is the house, not the tower. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, category Kirti Mandir Porbandar. File Birth Place of Gandhi.jpg.