The Indian lawyer, political ethics, and anti-colonialist Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (ISO: Mōhanadāsa Karamachand Gāndhī;[pron 1] 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) led the successful struggle for India's independence from British control through peaceful resistance. He served as an inspiration for global campaigns for independence and civil rights. The title Mahātmā (derived from Sanskrit, meaning 'great-souled, venerable'), which was initially bestowed upon him in South Africa in 1914, is presently utilized globally.
Gandhi studied law at the Inner Temple in London after being born and nurtured in a Hindu household in coastal Gujarat. At the age of 22, he was admitted to the bar in June 1891. He traveled to South Africa in 1893 to represent an Indian merchant in a legal dispute after spending two uncertain years in India, where he was unable to establish a prosperous legal practice. He later spent twenty-one years living in South Africa. Gandhi reared a family there and used nonviolent resistance for the first time in the civil rights movement. At the age of 45, he went to India in 1915 and quickly got to work organizing peasants, farmers, and urban laborers to oppose unfair land taxes and discrimination.
After taking over as the Indian National Congress's leader in 1921, Gandhi oversaw national campaigns to abolish untouchability, promote women's rights, reduce poverty, foster interethnic and religious harmony, and, most importantly, achieve swaraj, or self-rule. Gandhi selected the hand-spun yarn short dhoti as a symbol of his identification with India's rural poor. He started to fast for extended periods of time, eat plain food, and live in an independent residential community as a way to express his political disapproval and engage in introspection. Gandhi popularized anti-colonial nationalism among regular Indians, inspiring them to stage the 400-kilometer (250-mile) Dandi Salt March in 1930 to protest the British salt tax and demand that the British leave India.
Early in the 1940s, Muslim nationalism threatened Gandhi's vision of an independent India founded on religious plurality by calling for a separate homeland for Muslims inside British India. Following Britain's declaration of independence in August 1947, the British Indian Empire was split into two dominions: India, which is predominantly Hindu, and Pakistan, which is predominantly Muslim. Religious violence broke out as a large number of displaced Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus traveled to their new homes, particularly in Bengal and Punjab. Gandhi tried to ease suffering by visiting the impacted districts and skipped the official independence celebrations.
He went on multiple hunger strikes to put an end to the religious bloodshed in the months that followed. At the age of 78, he started the final one in Delhi on January 12, 1948. Some Hindus in India began to believe that Gandhi had been too staunch in his support of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims. Among them was Nathuram Godse, a radical Hindu nationalist from Pune, western India, who on January 30, 1948, at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi, shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
October 2, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, is observed globally as the International Day of Nonviolence and as Gandhi Jayanti, an official national holiday in India. In post-colonial India, Gandhi is revered as the Father of the Nation. In the decades that followed the Indian independence struggle, he was also frequently referred to as Bapu, which is a Gujarati term for "father," which is akin to "papa" or “daddy”.
