Born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat on October 2, 1869, and educated in law at University College, London, he acquired the position of 'Father of the Nation (Rashtrapita). later. He led the Indian freedom movement since 1920, when another great Indian patriot, Bal Gangadhar Tilak died.

 He studied law in London, returned to India and attempted to establish a law practice in Bombay, with little success. Two years later an Indian firm with interests in South Africa retained him as their legal adviser in its office in Durban. His arrival in Durban proved lucky for him for the simple reason that it introduced  him with the condition of his countrymen. This was the time when he realised what it meant to be in the clutches of the tyrants known as the British. This is because after his arrival there, Gandhi found himself treated as a member of an inferior race. He was appalled at the widespread denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South Africa. He threw himself into the struggle for elementary rights for Indians.

It was during 1896, that he was bashed by  the South African people for some reason. There he found his policy of  "Passive Resistance" and began non-cooperation with the South African government. Part of the inspiration for this policy came from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on Gandhi was profound. Gandhi considered the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate for his purposes, however, and coined another term, Satyagraha (Sanskrit, "truth and firmness"). Gandhi equated salvation ( 'Moksha ', as he calls , it ) with self-realisation . He equated self-realisation with the realisation of God . He equated God with Truth. Thus , he gave his unique interpretation of Advaita Vedanta .

Gandhi defined God as truth . By ' Truth ' he does not mean subjective or relative truth , but the absolute truth , ' the Eternal principle ' , that is God. As he says , " I worship God as truth only .I have not yet found him but I am seeking after him  and daily the conviction is growing upon me that he alone is real & all else is unreal ".(The story of my experiment with Truth ,P.4)

The idea of Styagraha is the logical culmination of the ideals of Truth & non-violence.Gandhi used Styagraha - passive resistance- as a strategy very successfully during the freedom struggle & in fact , it remains the most important aspect of the Gandhian thought .The novelty of this concept was the re-interpretation of both , the political action & the political aim in religious terms.

During the Boer War, Gandhi organized ambulance corps for the British army and commanded a Red Cross unit. After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights. In 1910, he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Durban, a cooperative colony for Indians. In 1914 the government of the Union of South Africa made important concessions to Gandhi's demands, including recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for them. His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India.

Gandhi became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian campaign for home rule. Following World War I, in which he played an active part in recruiting campaigns, Gandhi, again advocating Satyagraha, launched his movement of passive resistance to Great Britain. When, in 1919, Parliament passed the Rowlatt Act, giving the Indian colonial authorities emergency powers to deal with so-called revolutionary activities, Satyagraha spread through India, gaining millions of followers. A demonstration against the Rowlatt Act resulted in a massacre of Indians at Amritsar by British soldiers; in 1920, when the British government failed to make amends, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of non-cooperation. Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such as courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children were withdrawn from government schools. Through India, streets were blocked by squatting Indians who refused to rise even when beaten by police. Gandhi was arrested, but the British were soon forced to release him.

Economic independence for India, involving the complete boycott of British goods, was made a corollary of Gandhi's Swaraj (Sanskrit, "self-ruling") movement. The economic aspects of the movement were significant, for the exploitation of Indian villagers by British industrialists had resulted in extreme poverty in the country and the virtual destruction of Indian home industries. As a remedy for such poverty, Gandhi advocated revival of cottage industries; he began to use a spinning wheel as a token of the return to the simple village life he preached, and of the renewal of native Indian industries.

Gandhi became the international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. His union with his wife became, as he himself stated, that of brother and sister. Refusing earthly possessions, he wore the loincloth and shawl of the lowliest Indian and subsisted on vegetables, fruit juices, and goat's milk. Indians revered him as a saint and began to call him Mahatma (great-souled), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence, known as Ahimsa (non-violence), was the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Great Britain too would eventually consider violence useless and would leave India. The doctrine of Ahimsa , non-violence was always at the very center of Gandhi's thought & work . He always believed in non-violence & lived by it .There was an obvious relationship between the doctrine of truth & non-violence :Satya & Ahimsa. As Gandhi says , " I made the early discovery that if I was to reach God as truth & truth alone , I could not do so expect through ".

" A perfect vision of truth can only follow a complete realisation of Ahimsa To see the universal & all-pervading spirit of truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humidity " (my experiment with truth , p.401-2).

For Gandhi , Truth & Ahimsa are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle & separate them . As he puts it , Ahimsa is the means & Truth is the end . Thus , Ahimsa becomes our supreme duty & Truth becomes God . ' Truth exists , it alone exists .It is the only God & there is but one way of realising ". ( Collected works . vol 44, p . 59)

Thus , Ahimsa is the fundamental means by which Truth can be realised , that is , Moksha can be achieved . Ahimsa includes non-violence in thought , feeling & action & also means total humidity , love , compression & service . 

From 1924, started the later phase of the Gandhian Era .Gandhi withdrew from active politics and devoted himself to propagating communal unity. However he was forced to reenter in politics in 1930 with his civil disobedience movement . A large number od men & women participated in this movement. Gandhiji called upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt. The campaign was a march to the sea, in which thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea, where they made salt by evaporating sea water. This is the famous Dandi March. Once more he was arrested. In the same year he also attended the Round Table Conference in London.

1932, Gandhi began new civil-disobedience campaigns against the British. Arrested twice, the Mahatma fasted for long periods several times; these fasts were effective measures against the British, because revolution might well have broken out in India if he had died. In September 1932, while in jail, Gandhi undertook a "fast unto death" to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. The British, by permitting the Untouchables to be considered as a separate part of the Indian electorate, were, according to Gandhi, countenancing an injustice. Although he was himself a member of the Vaisya (merchant) caste, Gandhi was the great leader of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust social and economic aspects of the caste system.

In 1934 Gandhi formally resigned from politics, being replaced as leader of the Congress party by Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi traveled through India, teaching Ahimsa and demanding eradication of "untouchability." The esteem in which he was held was the measure of his political power. So great was this power that the limited home rule granted by the British in 1935 could not be implemented until Gandhi approved it. A few years later, in 1939, he again returned to active political life because of the pending federation of Indian principalities with the rest of India. His first act was a fast, designed to force the ruler of the state of Rajkot to modify his autocratic rule. Public unrest caused by the fast was so great that the colonial government intervened; the demands were granted. The Mahatma again became the most important political figure in India.

When World War II broke out, the Congress party and Gandhi demanded a declaration of war aims and their application to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response from the British, the party decided not to support Britain in the war unless the country was granted complete and immediate independence. The British refused, offering compromises that were rejected. When Japan entered the war, Gandhi still refused to agree to Indian participation. He was interned in 1942 but was released two years later because of failing health.

By 1944 the Indian struggle for independence was in its final stages, the British government having agreed to independence on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the Muslim League and the Congress party, should resolve their differences. Gandhi stood steadfastly against the partition of India but ultimately had to agree, in the hope that internal peace would be achieved after the Muslim's demand for separation had been satisfied. India and Pakistan became separate states when the British granted India its independence in 1947. During the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta, one of the largest cities in India, and the Mahatma fasted until disturbances ceased. On January 13, 1948, he undertook another successful fast in New Delhi to bring about peace, but on January 30, 12 days after the termination of that fast, as he was on his way to his evening prayer meeting, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse.

Gandhi's death was regarded as an international catastrophe.