Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in the small Gujarati port of Porbandar to a Modh Bania merchant family — his father a chief minister of the princely state. Married at thirteen, he sailed for London at eighteen, was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, and at twenty-three took a one-year contract in South Africa that lasted twenty-one. There — first when he was thrown off the Pietermaritzburg train for refusing to leave a first-class car — he developed ('truth-force'), the disciplined nonviolent resistance that would become his life's instrument. Returning to India in January 1915 at forty-five, he picked up the spinning wheel as a deliberate symbol of the boycott of British cloth and within five years was leader of the Indian National Congress. Across the next thirty years he led three great campaigns: Non-Cooperation (1920–22), the Salt March of 1930 — a 240-mile twenty-four-day walk to Dandi to make salt from the sea in defiance of the British monopoly, which mobilised millions and put Indian independence onto the world's front pages — and Quit India in 1942. He was jailed for a total of about seven years, fasted to near death seventeen times to discipline his own followers as much as the British, lived like the poorest of his countrymen on goat's milk and dates, and refused every public office. India became free at midnight on 15 August 1947 — at the price of partition into India and Pakistan and the displacement and killing of perhaps two million people. On 30 January 1948, walking to evening prayer in the garden at Birla House in Delhi, he was shot three times at point-blank range by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who held him responsible for the partition. He was seventy-eight. His ashes were scattered into the rivers of India. His example shaped Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, the Velvet Revolution, and most subsequent nonviolent movements.
All Figures
Leader of Independence
Mahatma Gandhi
1,869 CE – 1,948 CE
Pioneer of nonviolent resistance.
Watch the 48s episodeLifetime
Date source not yet attached to this catalogue record.
Epoch Episode · ~48s
Epoch Episode · 6 scenes · ~48sEpoch+
Deeper Dive
Notable Works
Places
- PorbandarGujarat, IndiaBirthplace. Coastal princely state on the Arabian Sea.1869–1888
- LondonEnglandReading law at the Inner Temple. Discovered the Bhagavad Gita in English translation while in London.1888–1891
- South Africa (Durban, Johannesburg, Tolstoy Farm)Natal & TransvaalTwenty-one years. Developed satyagraha and the ashram model here.1893–1914
- Sabarmati AshramAhmedabad, IndiaHis base for thirteen years. The Salt March began from here.1917–1930
- SevagramMaharashtra, IndiaHis final ashram, in a malarial village in central India by choice.1936–1948
- Raj GhatDelhi, IndiaHis cremation site, on the bank of the Yamuna. A simple black marble platform with his last words: Hē Rām.1948–
In Their Own Words
Be the change that you wish to see in the world.
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Hē Rām.
Read Deeper
- Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–19482018by Ramachandra GuhaDefinitive biography (volume 2)
- The Essential Gandhi1962by M. K. Gandhi (ed. Louis Fischer)Anthology
- Gandhi Before India2013by Ramachandra GuhaDefinitive biography (volume 1)