Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or more respectfully known as the Mahatma, the father of the Indian nation was born in the town of Porbander in Gujarat on 2 October 1869. He had his schooling in nearby Rajkot, where his father served as the adviser to the local ruler.

At thirteen he was married to Kasturba [or Kasturbai], who was even younger. His father died before Gandhi could finish his schooling. In 1888, Gandhi set sail for England, where he had decided to pursue a degree in law. Gandhi left behind his son and wife.

In London, Gandhi encountered theosophists, vegetarians, and others who were disenchanted not only with industrialism, but also with the legacy of Enlightenment thought. They themselves represented the fringe elements of English society. Gandhi was powerfully attracted to them, as he was to the texts of the major religious traditions. It is in London that he was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita. He was called to the bar in 1891, and even enrolled in the High Court of London; but later that year he left for India.

After one year of law practice, Gandhi decided to accept an offer as a legal adviser from an Indian businessman in South Africa, Dada Abdulla. His stay in South Africa lasted for over twenty years. The Indians who had been living in South Africa were without political rights, and were generally known by the derogatory name of 'coolies'. It is in South Africa that he first coined the term satyagraha when he emerged as a leader of the Indian community in South Africa.

Satyagraha signifies his theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya (celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi felt that satyagraha could be used to make the oppressor and the oppressed recognize their common bonding and humanity. In South Africa he used satyagraha in the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and their resistance to oppressive legislation and executive measures, such as the imposition of a poll tax on them, or the declaration by the government that all non-Christian marriages were to be construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi authored a short treatise entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, where he all but initiated the critique, not only of industrial civilization, but also of modernity in all its aspects.

Gandhi returned to India in early 1915, and was never to leave the country again except for a short trip that took him to Europe in 1931. Though he was not completely unknown in India, Gandhi followed the advice of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it upon himself to acquire a familiarity with Indian conditions. He traveled widely for one year. Over the next few years, he became involved in numerous local struggles, such as at Champaran in Bihar.

His He built up a considerable reputation, and his rapid ascendancy to the helm of nationalist politics is signified by his leadership of the opposition to repressive legislation known as the "Rowlatt Acts" in 1919. By this time, Rabindranath Tagore had already titled him 'Mahatma' or 'Great Soul'.

When 'disturbances' broke out in the Punjab, leading to the massacre of a large crowd of unarmed Indians at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote the report of the Punjab Congress Inquiry Committee. Over the next two years, Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement, which called upon Indians to withdraw from British institutions, to return honors conferred by the British, and to learn the art of self-reliance; though the British administration was at places paralyzed, the movement was suspended in February 1922 when a score of Indian policemen were brutally killed by a large crowd at Chauri Chaura, a small market town in the United Provinces. Gandhi himself was arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of sedition, and sentenced to imprisonment for six years.

Owing to his poor health, Gandhi was released from prison in 1925. Over the following years, he worked hard to preserve Hindu-Muslim relations. He fasted many times when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out.

In early 1930, as the nationalist movement was revived, the Indian National Congress, the preeminent body of nationalist opinion, declared that it would now be satisfied only with complete independence (purna swaraj). On March 2, Gandhi addressed a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him that unless Indian demands were met, he would be compelled to break the "salt laws". Predictably, the British did not meet his demands. On March 12, with a small group of followers, he set out towards Dandi. They arrived there on April 5th: Gandhi picked up a small lump of natural salt, and so gave the signal to hundreds of thousands of people to similarly defy the law, since the British exercised a monopoly on the production and sale of salt. This was the beginning of the civil disobedience movement: Gandhi himself was arrested, and thousands of others were also hauled into jail. It is to break this deadlock that Irwin agreed to hold talks with Gandhi, and subsequently the British agreed to hold a Round Table Conference in London to negotiate the possible terms of Indian independence. Gandhi went to London in 1931 but the negotiations proved inconclusive. On his return to India, he was once again arrested.

For the next few years, Gandhi was engaged mainly in the constructive reform of Indian society. He had vowed upon undertaking the salt march that he would not return to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he had made his home, if India did not attain its independence, and in the mid-1930s he established himself in a remote village, in the dead center of India, by the name of Segaon [known as Sevagram]. It was without electricity or running water but India's political leaders made their way here to talk to Gandhi about the future of the independence movement.

During World War II, Gandhi and the Congress leadership assumed a neutral position. They were clearly critical of fascism, but they could not support British imperialism either.

In 1942, Gandhi issued the last call for independence from British rule. On the grounds of what is now known as August Kranti Maidan, he delivered a speech, asking every Indian to lay down their life, if necessary, in the cause of freedom. He gave them this mantra: "Do or Die"; at the same time, he asked the British to 'Quit India'. The response of the British government was to place Gandhi under arrest, and virtually the entire Congress leadership was to find itself behind bars, not to be released until after the conclusion of the war.

A few months after Gandhi and Kasturba had been placed in confinement in the Aga Khan's Palace in Pune, Kasturba passed away: this was a terrible blow to Gandhi, following closely on the heels of the death of his private secretary of many years, the gifted Mahadev Desai.

The new government that came to power in Britain under Clement Atlee was committed to the independence of India, and negotiations for India's future began in earnest. Gandhi declared his opposition to divide India but stayed away from the negotiations.

In the last years of his life, he walked from village to village in riot-torn Noakhali, where Hindus were being killed in retaliation for the killing of Muslims in Bihar, and nursed the wounded and consoled the widowed; and in Calcutta he came to constitute, in the famous words of the last viceroy, Mountbatten, a "one-man boundary force" between Hindus and Muslims. When the moment of freedom came, on 15 August 1947, Gandhi was nowhere to be seen in the capital, though Nehru and the entire Constituent Assembly were to salute him as the architect of Indian independence, as the 'father of the nation'.

The last few months of Gandhi's life were spent mainly in Delhi. There he divided his time between the 'Bhangi colony', where the sweepers and the lowest of the low stayed, and Birla House, the residence of one of the wealthiest men in India and one of the benefactors of Gandhi's ashrams. Hindu and Sikh refugees had streamed into the capital from what had become Pakistan, and there was much resentment, which easily translated into violence, against Muslims. It was partly in an attempt to put an end to the killings in Delhi that Gandhi was to commence the last fast unto death of his life. The fast was terminated when representatives of all the communities signed a statement that they were prepared to live in "perfect amity".

A few days later, in the early evening hours of 30 January 1948, Gandhi met with India's Deputy Prime Minister and his close associate in the freedom struggle, Vallabhai Patel, and then proceeded to his prayers. At 10 minutes past 5 o'clock, Gandhi started walking towards the garden where the prayer meeting was held. It was there that a Hindu fundamentalist by the name of Nathuram Godse assassinated him.

Gandhi revolutionized war and its practices. Though thoughts such as loving one's enemy and non-violence did exist before, he was the first to use them in large scale. By using non-violence, he was able to not only save many lives but also make the Indian Independence Struggle a mass based struggle.