Mohandas Gandhi was born in Porbandar, India, in 1869. As a young man, he studied law in London and became a lawyer. Then he took a job in South Africa. One night there, a train worker ordered him to leave the first-class car because of the color of his skin, although he had a ticket. Gandhi sat in the cold station all night and thought. That night changed his life.
He decided to fight unfair laws in a new way: without violence. People can refuse to obey, he said, but they must stay peaceful, even when they are hit. For twenty years he led Indians in South Africa in this quiet kind of fight. In 1915, he returned home to India, which was then part of the British Empire.
Gandhi lived simply. He wore plain white clothes that he made himself, and he walked everywhere. In 1930, the British said Indians could not make their own salt. Gandhi walked almost four hundred kilometers to the sea, with thousands of people behind him, and picked up salt from the beach. The whole world watched. He went to prison many times, and he was never afraid of it.
In 1947, India finally won its independence. But then Hindus and Muslims began to fight each other, and this broke Gandhi's heart. He stopped eating to ask for peace, and people listened to the thin old man. In January 1948, an angry man shot Gandhi as he walked to evening prayers. India cried for its father.
People called him Mahatma — the great soul. His peaceful way of fighting later inspired Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Gandhi showed the world that a quiet man without an army can defeat an empire.