Born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi was an Indian activist who advocated nonviolence, peace, and unity in creating an independent Indian nation. He was assassinated on January 30, 1948, in New Delhi, India.

In July 1914, Mohandas K. Gandhi and his family left South Africa to return to their native India. This small, frail-looking man had one determined goal: to achieve, through nonviolent civil disobedience, freedom for India from oppressive British rule. Gandhi had given up a successful law practice and Western ideals in South Africa, and for seven years had tested his spiritual principles of satyagraha ("holding on to truth", or "soul force") and ahimsa (nonviolence) in a struggle to repeal laws discriminating against Indians. He returned to India with the dedication to apply these beliefs on an immense scale: to inspire millions of both poverty-stricken and wealthy Indians, Brahmins and "untouchables," to resist the British, not with arms, but with love and active non-cooperation. For over thirty years he led innumerable satyagraha actions and, despite imprisonment and violence from the English, never bore his oppressors any malice. Finally, following World War II, it became an untenable proposition for the British to maintain their domination over India; they granted independence in 1947. Gandhi's principles of satyagraha and ahimsa have inspired many other leaders in liberation struggles around the world as well, such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s direction of the American civil rights movement. Gandhi has been called by Lewis Mumford "the most important religious figure of our time.

" When Gandhi was once asked his secret, he responded simply: "renounce and enjoy."

The certainty and determination with which Gandhi lived the second half of his life was vastly different than his early years. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the son of a statesman and his fourth wife. As a young man he had a violent temper, was very shy and self-conscious, and was a less than average student. At age 13, while still in high school, Gandhi married a young girl named Kasturbai. Passionate and jealous, Gandhi thought he was her superior and teacher; it was only much later that he realized that it was Kasturbai, through her patience and enduring love and forgiveness, who had taught him much. Gandhi went to college and, after failing at every subject, withdrew after only five months. An uncle persuaded him to go to England to study law, and after his family raised the money by selling many personal possessions, including Kasturbai's jewelry, Gandhi left his wife and child to pursue his studies.

In London, Gandhi maintained the vows he had given his mother to abstain from meat, alcohol, and women; but while he found his law studies easy, he remained lonely and socially inept. After he returned to India, Gandhi proved totally inadequate as a lawyer. He was so self-conscious and awkward that no one would give him a case—the one time he did appear in court, he could not utter a single word. Feeling like a failure, Gandhi was a offered a minor clerical position with a firm in South Africa and jumped at the chance. While there he decided to work on improving his demeanor, and approached the task with his customary dedication.

He learned some self-confidence in helping to resolve an out of court settlement for a bitter legal dispute involving his firm. Commenting on the joy of that moment, Gandhi said: "I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men's hearts."

Gandhi began trying to approach all situations as a way of rendering service rather than gaining personal profit. Within a few years, he was a successful lawyer with a good income. He brought his wife and children to live with him, and urged them to adopt his newly acquired Western lifestyle. But at the same time that he was embracing these new values, Gandhi began to notice the suffering of the Indian community in South Africa, and he was moved to help them. One time, he recounted, "a leper came to my door. I had not the heart to dismiss him with a meal. So I offered him shelter, dressed his wounds and began to look after him." A transformation was occurring within Gandhi. He was reading the world's scriptures and beginning to simplify his life, discarding the materialist values he had espoused only a few years before. Outside the city of Durban a small community was growing around him, based on service to others. He was still authoritative in his marriage, however, refusing gifts of jewelry for his wife as well as himself—though he later said "I have never regretted the step. It has saved us from many temptations." Because his relationship with Kasturbai had been stormy, Gandhi gradually learned that rather than demand his "rights" he needed to try to fulfill his responsibilities to the relationship.

An incident occurred in Gandhi's first year in South Africa from which his later methods of nonviolent resistance were born. While traveling in a first-class train compartment he was asked to go to the third-class compartment; when he refused, he was forced to leave the train. During that long night in the cold train station, Gandhi resolved never to yield to force nor use force to win a cause. "I object to violence," Gandhi said, "because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." He began applying his methods to protest South Africa's new racial laws oppressing Indians, most of which were eventually repealed. "Civil disobedience," he said, "is the inherent right of a citizen.... Above all, [it] must have no ill will or hatred behind it."

After 20 years in South Africa, Gandhi felt compelled to return to India and apply ahimsa and satyagraha to the struggle against British rule. "We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence," Gandhi said. "But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence." He traveled from the Himalayas to Ceylon with his message of selflessness and love. One of the first to listen was Jawaharlal Nehru, who later became the first prime minister of independent India; Nehru gave up all of his Western values and possessions to work for independence. Disturbed by the inequities of India's caste system, Gandhi also gave the lowest caste "untouchables" a new name, Harijans—the children of God.

He refused to enter temples that were closed to low caste Indians, saying: "There is no God here. If God were here, everyone would have access. He is in every one of us." Temple doors began to open to all. Gandhi was given the honorific title of Mahatma, meaning "Great Soul."

During World War I, Gandhi began urging Indians to participate in a program of civil disobedience against the British. These protests for independence continued for many years, during which thousands were arrested for noncooperation. Gandhi himself was tried for sedition, and he turned the trial into a condemnation of imperialism. Gandhi's protests, spontaneous, unpredictable, and guided by intuition, confounded the British, as did the protestors' courage in the face of superior arms. "A satyagrahi bids goodbye to fear. He is therefore never afraid of trusting the opponent," Gandhi stated. "....It is never the numbers that count; it is always the quality, more so when the forces of violence are uppermost."

A turning point in the independence struggle came in 1930, when Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha brought India's situation to world attention. After 10 years of limited compromise and continued repression by the British, Gandhi decided to lead a 24-day march to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt. At dawn he picked up a pinch of salt from the sand, and millions around the country began to ignore the law banning home-made salt. Despite brutal police reprisals, the country celebrated. Gandhi was soon arrested, as he would be many times over the next years, and he approached prison with the same joy he did everything else.

Many British were won over the cause and joined him in the struggle. All people were the same to Gandhi. "I believe that if one man gains spiritually," Gandhi said, "the whole world gains with him and, if one man falls, the whole world falls to that extent."

From prison, Gandhi was invited to London for a conference to decide India's fate. He had asked all Indians to wear homespun cloth—Khadi—and boycott all foreign cloth, to break the British monopoly on clothing production, and khadi became a symbol of independence, linking rich and poor Indians together. While in London Gandhi wore only khadi, even when visiting Buckingham Palace. He also spoke to British textile workers in Lancashire who were put out of work by the boycott, and won many of them over to the cause. Gandhi felt the love and truth he spoke touched people's hearts: "[Satyagraha] is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct or so swift in working."

By 1945, the British realized they could no longer hold India, and conceded independence to the country. In September 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister. On the eve of independence, however, Muslims and Hindus began killing each other, each fearing the others would seize power after the English left. Thousands died in Calcutta alone. Gandhi, disheartened at the killing, went with followers into the afflicted villages to live peacefully; they transformed the areas where they went. Eventually, however, the country was to split into India and Pakistan.

In the midst of this chaos, Gandhi was aware that his love and tolerance infuriated some people.

He said: "If someone killed me and I died with a prayer for the assassin on my lips and God's remembrance and consciousness of His living presence in the sanctuary in my heart, then alone would I be said to have had the non-violence of the brave." These words proved prophetic, for on January 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a high caste Brahmin and publisher of a weekly Hindu magazine shot Gandhi point-blank as the Mahatma rose to address a crowd at a New Delhi prayer meeting. Gandhi died 25 minutes later.

Tributes from around the world poured in after Gandhi's death. U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall said that "Mahatma Gandhi was the spokesman for the conscience of all mankind." Albert Einstein commented: "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." One of the most fitting statements came from Prime Minister Nehru, who in telling India of Mahatma Gandhi's death, said: "The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country, and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts."