Indian lawyer, anticolonial leader, and the 20th century's central theorist and practitioner of mass nonviolent political action. Gandhi trained as a barrister in London, spent twenty-one years in South Africa (1893–1914) developing the method he called satyagraha — "truth-force" or "soul-force" — in a sustained campaign against the disabilities imposed on Indian laborers and merchants there, and returned to India in 1915 to lead what became the largest anticolonial movement of the 20th century. Between 1915 and Indian independence in August 1947 Gandhi led three major national campaigns — non-cooperation (1920–22), civil disobedience / the Salt March (1930), and Quit India (1942) — and spent more than six years of his life in prison for them.
The distinctive move was the philosophical-political fusion. Satyagraha is not, for Gandhi, a tactic chosen for expediency but a discipline grounded in a particular metaphysics: truth (satya) is the nature of reality, nonviolence (ahimsa) is the method adequate to truth, and political action that uses violence to achieve just ends necessarily corrupts those ends. Gandhi developed the position from Hindu sources (the Bhagavad Gita, Jain ahimsa), from his reading of Tolstoy (whose The Kingdom of God Is Within You he called overwhelming and with whom he corresponded), from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," from the Sermon on the Mount, and from Ruskin's Unto This Last. The synthesis proved capable of moving millions of people and of providing, through Martin Luther King Jr., the theoretical and tactical backbone of the American civil-rights movement.
The achievement is complicated by its costs. Gandhi's handling of caste — his late campaigns against untouchability arrived after B.R. Ambedkar had spent years forcing the question, and his commitment to an integrated Hindu reform rather than separate Dalit political existence produced a long and unresolved quarrel between the two — remains disputed. Partition, which his nonviolence could not prevent, killed a million people and displaced fifteen million. He was assassinated in Delhi in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who considered him too accommodating to Muslims. His writing — enormous in quantity, collected in one hundred volumes of the Collected Works — is mostly practical and occasional; the compressed statement is the autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–29).