3 Questions
What year did Gandhi move to South Africa?
1893
What did Gandhi wear to identify himself with India's rural poor?
A dhoti
What was the goal of Gandhi's last hunger strike?
To pressure India to pay out assets owed to Pakistan
Study Notes
- 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 about the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, from his early years in India to his leadership in the Indian independence movement and his advocacy for nonviolent resistance.
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