Mahatma Gandhi's Life and Legacy

Study Notes

Mahatma Gandhi was born in October 1869 in Gujarat, India.
He trained as a lawyer and began practicing in India in 1893 but was unsuccessful.
He moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit and began using nonviolent resistance there.
He returned to India in 1915 and soon led the Indian National Congress, a leading anti-colonial nationalist organization.
Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding womens rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and achieving self-rule for India.
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 the months following independence, he 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.
Gandhi died on January 30, 1948.