Mahatma Gandhi's 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 in London and was called to the bar in 1891.
• After two uncertain years in India, Gandhi moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
• Gandhi lived in South Africa for 21 years.
• It was here that Gandhi first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
• In 1915, aged 45, Gandhi returned to India and soon set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination.
• Gandhi assumed 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.
• Following the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, religious violence broke out in many parts of the newly created countries.
• Gandhi attempted to stop the religious violence with several hunger strikes.
• 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 on the life and contributions of Mahatma Gandhi, a prominent figure in the Indian independence movement and an advocate of nonviolent civil disobedience.