Mahatma Gandhi's Life and Achievements

• Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in Gujarat, India.
• He trained as a lawyer and began practicing in India in 1891 but was unsuccessful.
• He moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit and began using nonviolent resistance there.
• In 1915, he returned to India and led the Indian National Congress.
• Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding womens rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and achieving self-rule.
• He 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.
• In 1947, Britain granted independence to India and the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
• Gandhi did not celebrate independence, instead visiting the affected areas after it was granted.
• Gandhi undertook several hunger strikes to stop religious violence.
• The last of these, begun in Delhi on January 12, 1948, had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.

Test your knowledge of Mahatma Gandhi's life, his work as a lawyer, his leadership of the Indian National Congress, and his nonviolent resistance campaigns for various social causes.