Mahatma Gandhi's Life and Work

Study Notes

Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar, Gujarat, India.
He trained as a lawyer and started his own law practice in India but was unsuccessful.
In 1893, Gandhi moved to South Africa to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
In South Africa, Gandhi began to employ nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
In 1915, aged 45, Gandhi returned to India and soon set about organizing 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.
Gandhi 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, had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.
Mahatma Gandhi died on January 30, 1948, in India.