Mahatma Gandhi: Life and Legacy

• Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, India.
• He trained as a lawyer and moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.
• 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.
• 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.
• In the months following independence in 1947, Gandhi undertook several hunger strikes to stop 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 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 most famous for his campaigns against untouchability and for calling for the British to leave India in 1942. He is also well-known for his fasts and for his philosophy of nonviolent resistance.