Mahatma Gandhi's Life and Legacy

• 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.

Test your knowledge about the life and achievements of Mahatma Gandhi, a prominent figure in India's fight for independence and a pioneer of nonviolent resistance. Learn about his early life, his work in South Africa, his leadership of the Indian National Congress, and his principles of nonviolence and self-sufficiency.