Early life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, on the coast of Gujarat in western India. His father was the chief minister of the small princely state of Porbandar; his mother was the youngest of his father’s four wives. The family belonged to the Modh Bania merchant caste of Gujarati Hindu tradition, with strict vegetarian and religiously observant practices. Gandhi was married at age 13 to Kasturba Makhanji (also 13), in an arranged Hindu marriage that lasted 62 years until her death in 1944.
Gandhi was sent to London in 1888 (at age 19) to study law. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1891 and returned briefly to India. His early legal practice was unsuccessful. In 1893 he accepted a one-year contract to work for a Gujarati-Indian commercial firm in Natal, South Africa. The single year became 21.
South Africa, 1893–1914
The South African period was the political-personal turning point of Gandhi’s life. He encountered the systematic legal discrimination against Indian residents in South Africa — the colour-bar legislation, the disenfranchisement, the head taxes, the immigration restrictions — and progressively developed both his methodological commitment to nonviolent civil resistance (satyagraha) and his political-organizational capacity.
The major South African campaigns were:
Natal Indian Congress (founded 1894). The first sustained political organization of Indian South Africans, modelled on the Indian National Congress.
The struggle against the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act (1906–1914). The Act required all Indians in the Transvaal to register, be fingerprinted, and carry registration documents. Gandhi developed the systematic use of mass passive resistance, mass arrest, and sustained refusal to comply. The campaign — which involved approximately 7,500 Indians, many imprisoned — was substantially successful: the Smuts-Gandhi Agreement of 1914 substantially reduced the discriminatory provisions.
By the time Gandhi returned permanently to India in January 1915, he was a substantially recognized international figure for Indian political activism and the developing methodology of nonviolent civil resistance.
India: the independence struggle
Gandhi’s first years back in India were spent traveling and observing. He joined the Indian National Congress — the political organization founded in 1885 that had become the major channel for Indian nationalist activity — in 1915 and progressively took on senior leadership roles through the late 1910s. The political moment was the post-WWI Indian disillusionment with British rule: the Indian wartime contribution (over 1 million troops served, approximately 75,000 died) had not produced the political reforms Indian Congress had expected.
The major campaigns of the Indian independence struggle:
Champaran satyagraha (1917) — Gandhi’s first Indian campaign, a successful action on behalf of indigo farmers in Bihar against British plantation managers’ exploitation.
The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–1922). The first sustained mass Indian campaign of nonviolent resistance to British rule. Gandhi called for systematic Indian withdrawal from British schools, courts, legislative councils, and government employment. The movement involved millions of Indians and substantially destabilized British administrative capacity in India. Gandhi suspended the movement in February 1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident in which a protest crowd killed 22 policemen — the suspension demonstrated his commitment to nonviolent methodology even when popular momentum demanded otherwise.
The Salt March (March–April 1930). Gandhi led approximately 80 followers on a 240-mile march from his ashram at Sabarmati to the coastal town of Dandi, where on 6 April 1930 he ceremonially gathered salt from the seashore in defiance of the British salt-tax monopoly. The march was a media-strategic masterpiece: international press coverage made the Indian independence movement a substantial global political phenomenon. Approximately 80,000 Indians were arrested in the wider civil-disobedience campaign that followed.
The Quit India Movement (August 1942). Gandhi’s final major Indian campaign, launched during WWII to demand immediate British withdrawal from India. The British response was the mass arrest of the entire senior Indian National Congress leadership; Gandhi was imprisoned at the Aga Khan Palace from August 1942 until May 1944. The movement produced substantial mass mobilization but was militarily suppressed by the British wartime administration.
Independence and assassination
The combination of the Indian independence movement, the post-WWII British economic exhaustion, and the changed international political-strategic environment produced British acceptance that Indian independence was unavoidable. The Indian Independence Act of July 1947 created the two new dominions of India and Pakistan at midnight on 15 August 1947. Partition was accompanied by mass communal violence that killed approximately 1–2 million people and displaced approximately 12–15 million.
Gandhi spent the partition period attempting to suppress the communal violence in person — in Calcutta during the August 1947 riots, then in Delhi from September 1947. His public commitment to inter-communal reconciliation and his political pressure for the equitable treatment of Indian Muslims produced substantial hostility among Hindu nationalist groups, which considered him a traitor to Hindu interests.
Gandhi was assassinated at the Birla House in New Delhi on the evening of 30 January 1948, shot three times at point-blank range by Nathuram Godse, a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and editor of a Hindu nationalist newspaper, who considered Gandhi insufficiently loyal to Hindu interests during partition. Gandhi died within thirty minutes. He was 78. Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were tried, convicted, and executed by hanging on 15 November 1949.
Gandhi’s last words, as recorded by his attendants, were Hē Ram (“Oh, Ram”) — invoking the Hindu deity.
Legacy
Gandhi’s substantive political-methodological innovation was the systematic use of nonviolent mass civil resistance as a sustained political-strategic instrument against substantially more powerful state opponents. The methodology produced direct subsequent inheritances: the American Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s explicitly modelled itself on Gandhi’s example; the South African anti-apartheid movement under Nelson Mandela (in its early nonviolent phase) similarly. The general principle of organized nonviolent resistance has been a continuously deployed political instrument from the post-WWII period to the present.
Gandhi’s specific religious-ethical commitments (his vegetarianism, his celibacy from 1906 onward, his religious-syncretic personal practice, his commitment to manual labour and swadeshi economic self-sufficiency) were substantially less politically influential. His political-symbolic role in modern Indian national identity is foundational; his image is on the Indian rupee and is the central symbol of Indian secular nationalism. His 2 October birthday is celebrated annually as International Day of Non-Violence.