Indian · 1869–1948
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar, Gujarat, trained as a barrister in London, and spent twenty-one years in South Africa, where a series of racial humiliations turned a nervous lawyer into a political organiser. There he developed satyagraha, a method of mass disobedience built on refusing both compliance and violence. Returning to India in 1915, he reorganised the Congress into a peasant movement, led the non-cooperation campaign, walked to the sea at Dandi to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly, and fasted repeatedly against communal violence and untouchability. He wrote constantly: newspaper columns, Hind Swaraj, and an autobiography serialised in Gujarati between 1925 and 1929 that records his failures more thoroughly than his victories. He was assassinated in Delhi in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who considered him too accommodating to Muslims. His writing on nonviolence shaped movements led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.