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 at age 22 in 1891.
• Gandhi moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
• He went on to live in South Africa for 21 years.
• It was here that Gandhi raised a family and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
• 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.
• 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 was a successful lawyer, who used nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for Indias independence from British rule. He also inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn as a mark of identification with Indias rural poor, and undertook long fasts as a means of both introspection and political protest. After independence was granted in 1947, religious violence broke out in many parts of the newly formed Indian Dominion, and Gandhi undertook several hunger strikes to try to stop it. He died on January 30, 1948.

Explore the life and impactful legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, a prominent leader in the Indian independence movement and an inspiration for civil rights and freedom movements worldwide. Learn about his legal career, nonviolent resistance, and his efforts to achieve self-rule for India.