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Questions and Answers
What year did Mahatma Gandhi return to India?
What type of clothing did Gandhi adopt as a mark of identification with India's rural poor?
What was the indirect goal of Gandhi's last hunger strike in 1948?
Study Notes
- Mahatma Gandhi was born in 1869 in Gujarat, India.
- He trained in law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the bar in 1891.
- Gandhi moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
- In 1915, aged 45, he 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 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.
- Gandhi was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.
- In 1947, Britain granted independence to India and the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.
- As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal.
- Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress.
- In the months following, he undertook several hunger strikes to stop the religious violence.
- The last of these, begun in Delhi on 12 January 1948 when he was 78, also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.
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Description
Test your knowledge on Mahatma Gandhi, a key figure in India's fight for independence through nonviolent civil disobedience. Learn about his early life, leadership of the Indian National Congress, and his efforts to ease poverty, expand women's rights, and achieve self-rule. Explore his unconventional lifestyle choices and the impact of his actions on the partition of India.
