Mahatma Gandhi: Life and Contributions

• Mahatma Gandhi was born in October 1869 in Gujarat, India.
• He trained as a lawyer and moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant.
• He first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for civil rights.
• In 1915, he 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 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 12 January 1948, had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.
• Gandhi was imprisoned many times and for many years in both South Africa and India.

Test your knowledge about Mahatma Gandhi, his early life, work in South Africa, leadership of the Indian National Congress, and his efforts for poverty alleviation, women's rights, religious and ethnic amity, and self-rule. Learn about Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance and his impact on India's independence movement.