Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Early Life and Education

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a princely state on the Kathiawar peninsula of present-day Gujarat. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, served as diwan (chief minister) to the local ruler; his mother, Putlibai, followed Pranami Vaishnavism, a tradition emphasising vegetarianism and ahimsa (nonviolence) that shaped Gandhi's later ethical outlook. He was married to Kasturba Makhanji Kapadia in 1883, both aged 13, in an arranged child marriage typical of the region and period. In 1888 Gandhi travelled to London to study law at the Inner Temple, was called to the bar in 1891, and returned to India, where his legal practice initially struggled. In 1893 he accepted a contract to work for an Indian firm in Natal, South Africa.

South Africa and the Origins of Satyagraha (1893–1914)

In South Africa, Gandhi encountered systematic racial discrimination against the Indian community, an experience crystallised when he was thrown off a first-class train carriage at Pietermaritzburg despite holding a valid ticket. He remained to organise the Indian community, founding the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and later establishing communal settlements, Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm, that combined political organising with experiments in simple communal living. During a 1906 campaign against compulsory registration of Indians in the Transvaal, he coined the term satyagraha ("truth-force") for a discipline of nonviolent civil resistance distinct from passive resignation. Over the following years his campaigns won concessions from the South African government, culminating in a 1914 agreement with General Jan Smuts that addressed several core Indian grievances before Gandhi departed for India.

Return to India and Early Campaigns (1915–1919)

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915 and, on the advice of his political mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale of the Indian National Congress, spent a year travelling the country before entering active politics. His first major Indian campaign came in 1917 at Champaran in Bihar, where he supported indigo farmers against the exploitative tinkathia system imposed by British planters; a related campaign followed in 1918 in Kheda, Gujarat, over tax relief for farmers hit by crop failure, and the same year he intervened in a mill workers' dispute in Ahmedabad. These local successes established Gandhi's method and national profile ahead of the confrontation to come. In 1919 the British government passed the Rowlatt Act, permitting detention without trial; the resulting protests culminated on 13 April 1919 in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar, where troops under General Reginald Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, killing several hundred people. The massacre marked Gandhi's shift from advocating moderate constitutional reform to organising mass resistance against British rule.

Non-Cooperation and the Khilafat Movement (1920–1922)

In 1920 Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement, calling on Indians to boycott British institutions, titles, and goods while promoting swadeshi and hand-spun khadi cloth as symbols of self-reliance. He linked the campaign to the Khilafat Movement, a parallel agitation among Indian Muslims to preserve the Ottoman caliphate after the First World War, in an explicit effort to build Hindu-Muslim political unity. The alliance drew millions into open political activity for the first time but proved fragile; the Khilafat cause collapsed after Turkey itself abolished the caliphate in 1924, and communal tensions, including the 1921 Moplah (Mappila) uprising in Malabar, in which a peasant revolt against landlords turned into serious Hindu-Muslim violence, exposed the limits of the alliance. Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement in February 1922 after a mob in Chauri Chaura, United Provinces, burned a police station and killed 22 policemen, judging the country not yet disciplined enough for sustained nonviolent struggle; the decision frustrated younger Congress leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Gandhi was arrested and tried for sedition in March 1922, in a proceeding remembered as the Great Trial, and served roughly two years of a six-year sentence before early release.

The Salt March and Civil Disobedience (1930–1934)

Gandhi returned to the political forefront in 1930 with the Civil Disobedience Movement, launched by the Salt March, a roughly 240-mile walk from his Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi between 12 March and 6 April 1930, where he broke British salt-tax law by producing salt from seawater. The campaign spread rapidly into tax refusals, boycotts, and further acts of civil disobedience across India, prompting mass arrests, including Gandhi's own. He attended the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1931 to negotiate constitutional change, without securing independence. In 1932, negotiating from prison, he reached the Poona Pact with B. R. Ambedkar, replacing a British proposal for separate electorates for the "depressed classes" (Dalits) with a system of reserved seats within the general electorate, a compromise Ambedkar accepted under pressure but continued to criticise.

Quit India and the Path to Partition

In August 1942, with Japanese forces advancing in Southeast Asia, Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, demanding immediate British withdrawal. He and much of the Congress leadership were arrested within hours and Gandhi was held at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune until 1944; his wife Kasturba died in detention there in February 1944. Through the mid-1940s, negotiations over India's political future were increasingly shaped by Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League and its demand for a separate Muslim-majority state. Gandhi opposed partition to the end, but Britain, Congress, and the League ultimately agreed to it; independence and the partition of India and Pakistan took effect on 15 August 1947, accompanied by large-scale communal violence and mass migration across the new border. Gandhi spent the following months moving between riot-affected areas, including Calcutta and Delhi, working to halt the violence.

Assassination

On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot at close range at a prayer meeting at Birla House in New Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who held Gandhi responsible for concessions to Muslims and for the loss of territory in Partition. Godse was tried and executed in 1949. Gandhi's life and thought are documented extensively in his own writing, notably the autobiography An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and in the roughly hundred-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi compiled after his death. His methods influenced subsequent nonviolent movements internationally, including the American civil rights campaign led by Martin Luther King Jr. and anti-apartheid organising in South Africa.