Mahatma Gandhi
Indian lawyer, political activist and spiritual leader (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869–1948), born in Porbandar, in present-day Gujarat, into a Hindu merchant-caste family, trained in law in London, who developed his earliest techniques of nonviolent resistance over more than twenty years in South Africa, where he led campaigns against the legal discrimination of the Indian community under the racial segregation regime, coining there the term satyagraha ('truth force' or 'firm adherence to truth') to describe his distinctive method of civil resistance grounded in active nonviolence (ahimsa) and self-inflicted voluntary suffering rather than violence toward the oppressor. Returning to India in 1915, Gandhi rapidly became the undisputed moral and strategic leader of the Indian independence movement, transforming an elite political struggle into a genuinely popular mass movement through emblematic campaigns such as the 1930 Salt March — a nearly 400-kilometre walk to defy the British colonial monopoly on salt production — and the 1942 Quit India movement, while philosophically developing satyagraha not as a mere political tactic but as a universal ethical principle grounded in the conviction that the means employed in political struggle must be morally consistent with the ends pursued, and that true victory consists in converting the adversary, not destroying him. Philosophically influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, by the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and, decisively, by his personal correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi also advocated a constructive programme of simple living, local economic self-sufficiency (swadeshi) and interreligious harmony between Hindus and Muslims, an ideal that led him into profound disagreement with the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu extremist who considered him too conciliatory toward Muslims, Gandhi is venerated in India as 'Father of the Nation' (Mahatma, 'great soul', an honorific title bestowed on him by Rabindranath Tagore) and is regarded as one of the most influential ethical and political figures of the twentieth century, his philosophy of nonviolent resistance having directly inspired social justice movements worldwide, including the American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.