Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was a leader of the protest movement against British rule in India. He stood for non-violent protest. Today he is considered the "father" of modern India. As a spiritual leader to Hindus, Gandhi was given the title Mahatma ("Great Soul"). His concern for the poor still carries a strong message for today’s world.

Early life

Gandhi was born on 2nd October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in Gujarat, India. India in those days was ruled by the British government. Gandhi grew up in a household where ahimsa (non-violence to living things), vegetarianism and fasting were all important parts of everyday life.

At the age of 19 Gandhi left India to go to London, to study law. In 1893 he went to South Africa to work in Durban, Natal. Disgusted by the appalling treatment of Indian workers in that country, he started a campaign to defend their rights.

After an anti-Indian law was passed in 1906, thousands of Indians in South Africa were brutally treated. Gandhi himself went to prison a number times. In 1914, the South African government finally agreed to some of Gandhi’s demands.

In the 1920s, people all over India stopped buying British goods. They refused to work for British employers. Sometimes they took part in acts of resistance such as lying down in front of trains to stop them running. Thousands of Indians were arrested, including, in 1922, Gandhi himself. He went to prison for two years, finally being released because of illness.

Salt March

In 1930, Gandhi launched a campaign against a tax the British government put on the sale of salt. This tax hit the poorest Indians badly. Together with 78 volunteers, Gandhi set out on a march to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat. Here, people had long been used to producing salt from seawater—until the British forced them to stop. Gandhi picked up salt grains from the beach, thus breaking the salt laws.
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Helping the poor

In 1934 Gandhi resigned from the Indian National Congress. He went to live in a village in central India, and devoted himself to helping the poor. He took up spinning and weaving by hand to encourage other people to earn money in this way.

Indian independence from Britain came finally after the end of World War II, in 1947. All his life, Gandhi had worked hard to bring Hindus and Muslims in India together. But the British decided to partition (divide up) the Indian subcontinent between states that had either mostly Hindu or mostly Muslim populations. Much violence followed as around 12 million Hindu and Muslim (and Sikh) refugees who lived on the “wrong” side of the new borders moved between the newly created nations of India and Pakistan.