Mahatma Gandhi: Life and Legacy

• Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, India.
• He trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891.
• After two uncertain years in India, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
• He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years.
• It was here that Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
• In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India and soon set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination.
• Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding womens rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving swaraj or self-rule.
• Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with Indias rural poor.
• He began to live in a self-sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest.
• Bringing anti-colonial nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in calling for the British to quit India in 1942.
• He was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
• Gandhis vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism was challenged in the early 1940s by a Muslim nationalism which demanded a separate homeland for Muslims within British India.
• In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
• As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal.
• Abstaining from the official celebration of independence, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress.
• In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence.
• The last of these, begun in Delhi on January 12, 1948, also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.

Mahatma Gandhi is considered to be one of the most influential political figures in the world, and his philosophy of nonviolent resistance is still used by activists today. His campaigns for civil rights, womens rights, and self-rule are credited with helping to lead India to independence from British rule.