Huge demonstrations ensued, and despite the arrests of 100,000 home rule advocates by British authorities, the balance finally tipped toward Indian independence. Britain refused and arrested him yet again. Undeterred, he began the Quit India movement, a campaign to get Britain to voluntarily withdraw from India during World War II. He protested discrimination against the “untouchables,” India’s lowest caste, and negotiated unsuccessfully for Indian home rule. Imprisoned for a year because of the Salt March, he became more influential than ever. Britain responded brutally to the resistance, mowing down 400 unarmed protesters in the Amritsar Massacre.īy then, Gandhi had become a national icon, and was widely referred to as Mahatma, Sanskrit for great soul or saint. He began to push for independence from the United Kingdom, and organized resistance to a 1919 law that gave British authorities carte blanche to imprison suspected revolutionaries without trial.

Gandhi brought Satyagraha to India in 1915, and was soon elected to the Indian National Congress political party. Along the way, he developed a public persona and a philosophy of truth-focused, non-violent non-cooperation he called Satyagraha. Gandhi organized Indian resistance, fought anti-Indian legislation in the courts and led large protests against the colonial government. In 1894, Natal stripped all Indians of their ability to vote. Gandhi was shocked when he was thrown out of train cars, roughed up for using public walkways, and segregated from European passengers on a stagecoach.

Natal was home to thousands of Indians whose labor had helped build its wealth, but the colony fostered both formal and informal discrimination against people of Indian descent. In 1893, at the age of 24, the new attorney moved to the British colony of Natal in southeastern Africa to practice law.

Mahatma gandhi was born on