Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town on the Kathiawar Peninsula in what was then the Kathiawar Agency of the British Raj and is now part of the Indian state of Gujarat.¹² His father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi, served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state, an administrative role in the local region.¹³ His mother, Putlibai, Karamchand's fourth wife, came from a devout Hindu background heavily influenced by Jain traditions of non-injury to living beings, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance among adherents of different creeds. In his autobiography, Gandhi noted that classic Indian stories and his mother's piety left a lasting impression on his youth, teaching him the values of love and adherence to truth.

In May 1883, at the age of 13, Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji Kapadia (commonly known as Kasturba) in an arranged child marriage, following the custom of the region. Their first child, born when Gandhi was 16, survived only a few days. The couple subsequently had four sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900.

An unremarkable student during his early schooling in Porbandar and Rajkot, Gandhi graduated from high school in 1887 and briefly attended Samaldas Arts College in Bhavnagar. At the encouragement of a family friend and with financial support from his older brother Laxmidas, Gandhi decided to travel to England to train as a barrister. Before departing, he made a solemn vow to his mother that he would abstain from meat, alcohol, and women while abroad. In September 1888, at age 18, he sailed from Bombay to London, studying law at the Inner Temple and attending classes at University College London.¹⁴ In London, he joined the London Vegetarian Society, which introduced him to idealistic circles and prompted him to read both the Bhagavad Gita and Christian texts.¹⁵ Called to the bar in June 1891 at age 22, he immediately sailed back to India, where he learned that his mother had died while he was in London. His subsequent attempts to establish a law practice in Bombay and Rajkot met with little success, as he proved too diffident to cross-examine witnesses in court.

In April 1893, at age 23, Gandhi accepted a one-year contract from Dada Abdulla & Co., an Indian merchant firm, to serve as a legal adviser at their office in Durban, in the British colony of Natal, South Africa.¹⁶ At the time, South Africa's Indian population of roughly 62,000 consisted largely of indentured laborers brought on five-year contracts to work on sugar plantations, mines, and railways, alongside formerly indentured "free Indians" and a smaller Muslim merchant class. Across the British colonies and Boer republics, Indians were denied voting rights, subjected to residential restrictions, and treated as racial inferiors.

Shortly after arriving in May 1893, while traveling to Pretoria on legal business, Gandhi experienced a series of racial humiliations that altered the course of his life. Despite holding a valid first-class ticket, he was forcibly ejected from a train compartment at Pietermaritzburg railway station by railway officials after refusing to move to the third-class van. On the same journey, he was beaten by a stagecoach driver for refusing to travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger and was barred from hotels reserved for white patrons in Johannesburg. When his legal contract concluded in 1894, he prepared to return to India, but at a farewell gathering he learned that the Natal Legislative Assembly was preparing to pass the Franchise Amendment Bill to strip Indians of the right to vote. Persuaded by the local community to stay and lead the opposition to the legislation, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, transforming the fragmented Indian diaspora into a unified political force.

Over the next two decades, Gandhi remained in South Africa, briefly returning to India in 1896 to bring his wife and children to Natal. Upon his return to Durban in January 1897, a white mob attacked and nearly lynched him, though he refused to press charges against his assailants. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and the Bambatha Rebellion (1906), he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps to serve as stretcher-bearers for the British army, arguing that Indians who claimed the full rights of British citizenship were obligated to help defend the Empire. Influenced by John Ruskin's book Unto This Last and the Christian anarchism of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, Gandhi established two cooperative agricultural settlements where residents performed manual labor and lived communally: the Phoenix Settlement near Durban in 1904 and Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg in 1910.

In September 1906, after the British colonial government of the Transvaal promulgated the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance—requiring all Indians to register with authorities, submit to fingerprinting, and carry registration certificates at all times—Gandhi organized a mass protest meeting in Johannesburg.¹⁷¹⁸ There he introduced a new methodology of protest, calling on attendees to defy the ordinance and suffer the legal penalties rather than submit or use violence. Finding the English phrase "passive resistance" inadequate, he coined the Sanskrit term satyagraha (combining satya, "truth," and agraha, "firmness" or "holding fast") to signify "truth-force" or "soul-force".¹⁹²⁰ In January 1908, Gandhi was arrested and sentenced to two months in prison for refusing to register, the first of many prison sentences he served alongside thousands of fellow resisters who publicly burned their registration certificates. The struggle culminated in 1913, when Gandhi led a cross-border march of striking Indian miners and women protesting both an annual £3 poll tax on ex-indentured laborers and a supreme court ruling that invalidated non-Christian Indian marriages. In 1914, negotiations between Gandhi and General Jan Smuts produced the Indian Relief Act, which abolished the £3 tax and recognized traditional Indian marriages.

Gandhi returned to India permanently in January 1915 at the age of 45, bringing with him an international reputation as a nationalist theorist and organizer. Establishing an ashram at Ahmedabad in Gujarat—later relocated to the banks of the Sabarmati River—he spent his first year traveling across India by third-class rail on the advice of his political mentor, Gopalkrishna Gokhale, to observe the living conditions of ordinary Indians.²¹ It was during this period that the poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore popularized the title Mahatma for Gandhi.²²

By the time Gandhi emerged from prison in 1944, the political landscape of India had shifted dramatically. During the war, while Congress leaders were jailed, the All-India Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah had consolidated support among Indian Muslims for its 1940 Lahore Resolution demanding an independent Muslim homeland, Pakistan. Gandhi held 14 meetings with Jinnah in Bombay in September 1944 in an unsuccessful effort to bridge their differences, rejecting Jinnah's "two-nation theory"—which held that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct nations—and insisting that change of religion did not alter nationality.

Following the end of World War II, Britain's Labour government initiated talks to transfer power. When negotiations over the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan broke down, Jinnah called for "Direct Action Day" on 16 August 1946, triggering four days of catastrophic Hindu-Muslim rioting in Calcutta known as the Great Calcutta Killings, in which between 4,000 and 5,000 people died. The violence quickly spread to the Noakhali district of eastern Bengal (in present-day Bangladesh), where Muslim mobs massacred Hindus, followed by retaliatory massacres of Muslims by Hindus in Bihar and massive bloodshed across Punjab.³² Rejecting the partitioning of India as a spiritual tragedy, the 77-year-old Gandhi left the political negotiations in New Delhi and traveled to Noakhali in November 1946. For four months, he walked barefoot from village to village across devastated terrain, living in Muslim and Hindu homes to restore mutual trust and quell the violence.³³ Reluctantly, the Congress leadership, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, concluded that accepting Viceroy Lord Mountbatten's plan for the Partition of India was the only way to avert a full-scale civil war.

When India and Pakistan achieved independence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947, Gandhi did not participate in the official celebrations in New Delhi. Instead, he was in Calcutta, residing in Hydari Manzil, an abandoned house in a poor neighborhood alongside Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former Muslim League premier of Bengal, fasting and praying to stop communal killings. In early September 1947, when fresh rioting broke out in Calcutta, Gandhi undertook a 73-hour fast that brought the city to a halt and convinced riot leaders to lay down their weapons at his feet, prompting Mountbatten to hail him as a "one-man boundary force" who had achieved in Bengal what 55,000 soldiers could not achieve in Punjab. Returning to New Delhi in September, Gandhi found the capital overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing Pakistan and Muslims being driven from their homes into camps. On 13 January 1948, at age 78, he began his final fast in Delhi, demanding an end to anti-Muslim violence in the capital, the safe return of mosques converted into temples, and the payment by the Indian government of 550 million rupees owed to Pakistan under the partition settlement. Both the Indian cabinet and communal leaders capitulated to his demands, and he broke his fast on 18 January.

Twelve days later, on the afternoon of 30 January 1948, Gandhi walked across the garden of Birla House (now Gandhi Smriti), a mansion in central New Delhi where he was staying, to conduct his customary multi-faith evening prayer meeting. At 5:17 p.m., as Gandhi ascended the steps to the raised lawn, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a 37-year-old Hindu nationalist from Pune, stepped out from the crowd, bowed to him, and fired three bullets into Gandhi's chest and stomach at point-blank range from a Beretta M1934 semi-automatic pistol. Carried back into Birla House, Gandhi died shortly thereafter. That evening, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation by radio, declaring that "the light has gone out of our lives." Godse, a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and an active member of the Hindu Mahasabha who had edited radical nationalist newspapers, did not attempt to flee and was apprehended on the spot.³⁴ At his trial, Godse argued that Gandhi's doctrine of nonviolence and alleged appeasement of Muslims had emasculated Hindus and caused the vivisection of the Hindu motherland. Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were convicted of murder and executed by hanging at Ambala Central Jail on 15 November 1949; five other conspirators, including Godse's brother Gopal Godse, received life sentences, while the Hindu nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was acquitted due to a lack of corroborating evidence.³⁵

Gandhi did not leave behind a rigid, systematic academic doctrine; rather, he described his life as a continuous series of "experiments with truth," the title he gave his autobiography.³⁶ His thought synthesized traditional Indian religious concepts—drawn from Vaishnava Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism—with Western moral and social criticism from figures such as Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and the American essayist Henry David Thoreau. At the center of his philosophy were two interdependent principles: satya (truth) and ahimsa (nonviolence or non-injury).³⁷ Derived from the Sanskrit sat ("that which exists"), satya represented for Gandhi both relative honesty in human conduct and the ultimate reality, leading him to declare not merely that "God is Truth," but that "Truth is God". Because no human being can claim possession of absolute truth, Gandhi reasoned that no one is justified in inflicting violence to impose their view on another; therefore, ahimsa is the only legitimate means to pursue satya. Far from passive submission to evil, Gandhi defined ahimsa as active, sacrificial love toward one's opponent, aimed at converting the wrongdoer through voluntary self-suffering rather than coercion.

In his seminal 1909 treatise Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), written aboard a ship returning from London to South Africa, Gandhi articulated a radical critique of modern Western industrial civilization.³⁸ He argued that British rule in India was sustained not by the sword, but by Indians' own cooperation with colonial institutions and their seduction by Western materialism. Consequently, true swaraj meant not merely replacing British rulers with Indian rulers while retaining British-style parliaments, armies, and factories, but rather individual moral self-mastery (swaraj over oneself) and decentralized political and economic self-reliance rooted in India's 700,000 villages.

To realize this vision, Gandhi promoted the concept of sarvodaya ("the welfare of all" or "universal upliftment"), a term he coined after translating Ruskin's Unto This Last. Rejecting both unbridled industrial capitalism and the violent class warfare of Marxism, Gandhi advocated an economic theory of "trusteeship," whereby wealthy industrialists and landlords would voluntarily regard their surplus wealth as a trust held on behalf of the poor. Central to his economic program was swadeshi—reliance on locally produced goods—symbolized by the charkha (spinning wheel) and the production of khadi. By requiring all Congress members to spin cotton thread daily, Gandhi sought to bridge the divide between educated urban elites and rural peasants, restore dignity to manual labor, and provide supplementary employment to impoverished villagers. In his personal life, Gandhi practiced strict asceticism: he wore a simple hand-spun loincloth (dhoti) and shawl to identify with India's poorest peasants, adhered to a strict vegetarian diet, observed a weekly day of silence, and in 1906, at age 37, took a lifelong vow of brahmacharya (celibacy and spiritual self-restraint) to dedicate himself wholly to public service.

Both during his lifetime and in subsequent historical scholarship, Gandhi's political tactics, social views, and personal practices have been the subject of intense debate.³⁹ In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars examining Gandhi's early writings from South Africa highlighted that during the 1890s and early 1900s, he shared many of the racial prejudices of his era regarding indigenous Black Africans.⁴⁰ In petitions and articles written to colonial authorities, the young Gandhi repeatedly used the derogatory colonial term "Kaffir" and objected to British policies that classified civilized Indians alongside native Africans, campaigning for separate entrances and facilities for Indians rather than challenging racial segregation as a whole. While critics such as Arundhati Roy and South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed have argued that Gandhi in South Africa was an empire loyalist focused narrowly on Indian interests at the expense of Black Africans, historians such as Ramachandra Guha and Rajmohan Gandhi contend that Gandhi outgrew these early prejudices over time, pointing to his later statements in the 1920s through the 1940s condemning white supremacy and linking Indian freedom with the liberation of Black Africans.⁴¹⁴²

Gandhi's approach to caste and untouchability generated his most profound ideological clash in India, notably with B. R. Ambedkar. While Gandhi campaigned tirelessly to abolish untouchability, declaring it a sin against Hinduism, dining with Dalits, and insisting that ashram residents perform their own sanitation work, he initially defended the idealized fourfold Vedic varna system as an egalitarian, hereditary division of labor free of hierarchy. In his 1936 treatise Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar fiercely criticized Gandhi's position, arguing that untouchability was an inseparable product of the caste system and Hindu scripture itself, and condemning Gandhi's use of the term Harijan and the 1932 Poona Pact fast as paternalistic measures that denied Dalits independent political power. By the mid-1940s, however, Gandhi's position had evolved considerably; he ceased defending varna, refused to attend weddings unless they were inter-caste marriages involving a Dalit partner, and personally urged Nehru to include Ambedkar in independent India's first cabinet as Law Minister.

From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Gandhi faced criticism over his uncompromising commitment to nonviolence and his religious framing of politics. Revolutionary nationalists such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh argued that Gandhi's suspension of mass movements after outbreaks of violence, and his reluctance to exploit British weakness militarily during World War II, delayed Indian independence. Outside India, critics including Martin Buber and George Orwell questioned the viability of satyagraha against totalitarian regimes, particularly after Gandhi suggested before and during World War II that German Jews and the British people should offer nonviolent resistance to Adolf Hitler rather than take up arms. Conversely, Hindu nationalists led by Savarkar and Godse accused him of betraying Hindu interests through his concessions to Muslim leaders, while Muslim League leaders accused him of infusing the Congress movement with Hindu religious imagery—such as Ram Rajya (the ideal rule of Lord Rama)—that alienated Muslim minorities. Within his own family and circle, Gandhi's authoritarian treatment of his eldest son Harilal and his late-life brahmacharya experiments in Noakhali and Bihar—in which he slept naked beside young female attendants, including his grandniece Manu, to test his spiritual mastery over sexual desire amid communal carnage—provoked dismay and resignations among several of his closest associates.

Despite the controversies surrounding his life, Gandhi remains one of the most influential political and moral figures of the 20th century.⁴³ Within India, his birthday, 2 October, is celebrated annually as Gandhi Jayanti, one of the country's three national holidays, and the day of his assassination, 30 January, is observed as Martyrs' Day (Shaheed Diwas).⁴⁴ His portrait has appeared on all denominations of Indian rupee banknotes since 1996, and his cremation site at Raj Ghat on the banks of the Yamuna River in New Delhi is a major national memorial visited by foreign dignitaries. Following his death, sarvodaya activists led by Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan continued his constructive program through the Bhoodan (land-gift) movement, persuading landlords to donate millions of acres of land to landless peasants, while later Indian environmental and social campaigns, such as the Chipko movement of the 1970s, drew directly on satyagraha tactics.

Internationally, Gandhi's methodology of nonviolent civil disobedience reshaped the global repertoire of political protest. In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted Gandhian principles during the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott and throughout the American civil rights movement, traveling to India in 1959 and describing Christ as having furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.⁴⁵ In South Africa, the African National Congress initially modeled its 1952 Defiance Campaign against apartheid on Gandhian satyagraha, and both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu credited Gandhi as a foundational influence on the anti-apartheid struggle and post-apartheid reconciliation. Other global leaders and movements that drew inspiration from Gandhi's philosophy and tactics include Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Cesar Chavez in the American farmworkers' movement, Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, the 14th Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.

Although Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times—in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and days before his assassination in January 1948—he was never awarded the prize. Following his death in 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee declined to award a Peace Prize for that year, stating that "there was no suitable living candidate," and subsequent committees have publicly acknowledged the omission of Gandhi as the greatest regret in the history of the prize. On 15 June 2007, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution establishing 2 October as the International Day of Non-Violence in honor of his enduring global legacy.