Gandhi studied law at the Inner Temple in London after being born and raised in a Hindu household in coastal Gujarat. He was admitted to the bar in June 1891 at the age of 22. 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 lucrative legal practice. He then spent the next 21 years residing in South Africa. Gandhi raised his family here and started using peaceful resistance in a fight for civil rights. He returned to India in 1915 at the age of 45 and immediately started organizing peasants, farmers, and city laborers to protest against discrimination and an excessive land tax.
He used nonviolent resistance to spearhead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and later served as an inspiration for movements for civil rights and freedom around the globe.
Gandhi spearheaded national efforts for reducing poverty, advancing women's rights, fostering interethnic and interreligious harmony, and most importantly achieving Suraj or self-rule after taking over the Indian National Congress in 1921. Gandhi selected the short, hand-spun dhoti as a symbol of his affiliation with India's rural underclass. As a kind of reflection and political protest, he started to live in an autonomous residential community, consume basic fare, and keep extended fasts. Gandhi popularized anti-colonial nationalism among ordinary Indians by leading them in the 400 km (250 mi) Dani Salt March in 1930 and the 1942 demand that the British leave India. He spent many years and several incarcerations in both South Africa and India.
Early in the 1940s, Muslim nationalism, which desired a separate homeland for Muslims within British India, posed a threat to Gandhi's vision of an independent India based on religious diversity. Britain recognized India's independence in August 1947, but the British Indian Empire was divided into Pakistan and India, each with a majority of Muslims. Religious conflict erupted as numerous uprooted Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs arrived in their new homes, notably in the Punjab and Bengal. Gandhi visited the devastated districts and refrained from participating in the ceremonial celebration of independence to lessen suffering. He staged repeated hunger strikes in the months that followed to put an end to the religious bloodshed.
The latest of these, which was launched in Delhi on January 12, 1948, when he was 78 years old, likewise had the subversive intention of getting India to release some monetary assets owed to Pakistan. Although the Indian government and the religious rioters made concessions, several Hindus in India held the opinion that Gandhi had been overly adamant in his defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims, particularly those under siege in Delhi.
One of them was Natural Gorse, a ferocious Hindu nationalist from western India, who on January 30, 1948, at an interfaith prayer gathering in Delhi, shot Gandhi three times in the chest.
Gandhi's birthday, 2 October, is observed as an international day of nonviolence and as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday in India. Gandhi was known as papa and is regarded as the Father of the Nation in India.
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