Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar in the princely state of Kathiawar, India. A quiet and unremarkable student, he was so painfully shy that he would bolt from the classroom rather than speak aloud. At eighteen he sailed to London against the wishes of his caste elders, vowing to his mother to abstain from meat, wine, and women, and enrolled at the Inner Temple to study law. The cosmopolitan city opened his mind to vegetarianism, Theosophy, and the works of Tolstoy and Ruskin—seeds that would eventually grow into his philosophy of nonviolence.

In 1893 Gandhi traveled to South Africa to work as a lawyer, expecting to stay a year. On his very first train journey he was forcibly ejected from a first-class carriage at Pietermaritzburg simply because he was Indian—an act of humiliation that he later called the most decisive moment of his life. Rather than retreat to India in shame, he resolved to fight the racial discrimination entrenched in South African law. Over the next twenty-one years he developed satyagraha—literally "truth-force" or "soul-force"—a method of nonviolent resistance that used moral courage, peaceful protest, and willingness to suffer as weapons against injustice.

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915 as a hero, greeted by the great poet Rabindranath Tagore who would later bestow on him the title "Mahatma"—Great Soul. On the advice of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he spent a year traveling third class across India to understand the suffering of ordinary people before entering politics. He joined the Indian National Congress and quickly distinguished himself by championing the causes of impoverished indigo farmers in Champaran and mill workers in Ahmedabad, winning concrete concessions through disciplined nonviolent campaigns and demonstrating to a colonized nation that satyagraha could work on Indian soil.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi set out from his ashram at Sabarmati with seventy-eight disciples on a 241-mile march to the sea at Dandi. The British salt laws forbade Indians from collecting or selling salt without paying a heavy tax—a small injustice with enormous symbolic power. When Gandhi bent down on April 6 and picked up a lump of natural salt from the beach, he broke the law and invited the world to watch. The march electrified India and the international press; tens of thousands joined in across the country, making salt illegally in a mass act of civil disobedience that exposed the moral bankruptcy of colonial rule and forced Britain onto the defensive.

With World War II raging and Britain demanding Indian support without offering independence in return, Gandhi launched his most radical campaign on August 8, 1942. Standing before the All India Congress Committee in Bombay, he delivered an electrifying call to action: "Do or Die—we shall either free India or die in the attempt." The Quit India Movement demanded immediate British withdrawal and triggered the largest mass arrest in Indian history—Gandhi and virtually the entire Congress leadership were imprisoned within hours. Though the British suppressed the uprising harshly, the movement shook the foundations of empire and made clear that the colonial project in India was unsustainable.

Gandhi spent nearly six years of his life behind British bars—in South Africa and India combined—wearing imprisonment as a badge of moral authority rather than shame. When other weapons failed, he turned to the fast, placing his own frail body on the line as a sacrifice to appeal to the conscience of his opponents and his own people alike. His most dramatic fast came in 1932 when he starved himself to protest the British decision to create a separate electorate for untouchables, which he feared would permanently divide Hindu society; the fast ended only when a compromise was reached. These fasts terrified both the British and Indian leaders, for a dead Gandhi would have been catastrophic for anyone who claimed his mantle.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, India won the independence Gandhi had devoted his life to achieving—but it came at a price he considered unbearable. Britain's partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan unleashed one of the largest and bloodiest mass migrations in human history: roughly twelve to fifteen million people uprooted and between five hundred thousand and two million killed in religious violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. While the rest of India celebrated, Gandhi fasted and walked through the riots of Calcutta and Noakhali, placing his body between mobs as a human peace offering, achieving in days what battalions of police could not. He called independence without unity "a spiritual tragedy."

On the evening of January 30, 1948, Gandhi walked through the garden of Birla House in New Delhi toward his daily prayer meeting, leaning on the shoulders of two young grandnieces. Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who blamed Gandhi for the concessions made to Muslims and for Partition, stepped forward from the crowd, bowed slightly, and fired three shots at point-blank range. Gandhi fell, murmuring what witnesses heard as "Hey Ram"—Oh God. He was seventy-eight years old. The world mourned: Albert Einstein wrote that generations to come would scarcely believe that such a man in flesh and blood had ever walked upon this earth.