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, London, and was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891.
• He moved to South Africa in 1893 and lived there for 21 years.
• In 1915, he returned to India and soon set about organizing peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination.
• He assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921 and 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.
• 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 was a successful lawyer and political ethicist who used nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for Indias independence from British rule and to later inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. He is best known for his philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which he developed while living in South Africa. His campaigns for social justice and human rights have been influential in the history of India and the world.