THE LEGACY OF Gandhi: October marks the 150th birthday of the man who stood up to the British empire and helped give birth to modern India and Pakistan.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST - Mohandas Gandhi

He was a frail man who wore glasses and a traditional Hindu loincloth called a dhoti, walked with a bamboo staff, and had a toothless grin. He looked like a simple Hindu holy man. But armed only with great courage and a strong commitment to nonviolent resistance, Mohandas Gandhi took on one of the world's mightiest empires.

For nearly 30 years, Gandhi led the movement that eventually forced Britain to grant independence to India, its most prized colony, in 1947. The subcontinent was partitioned, or divided, into two nations: India and Pakistan.

In October, celebrations will ring out across India in honor of the 150th birthday of Gandhi, known as the "Father of the Nation." Today India is the world's largest democracy, and it has the fifth largest

economy in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund. However, tensions have recently risen between the nation's Hindu majority and its Muslim minority, as well as between India and Pakistan. And many experts believe the region is moving away from the ideals for which Gandhi fought.

Yet Gandhi is still revered worldwide, not only for helping liberate the Indian subcontinent from British imperialism, but for his nonviolent protests, which inspired many other civil rights movements, including the one led by Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States (see "Gandhi & MLK," p. 20).

Gandhi envisioned a world "of neighborliness and openness to strangers," says Gyan Prakash, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of numerous books on India. "The message Gandhi stood for was that public service or politics was not just about power, but about something larger."

Gandhi's Rise

Gandhi, born on October 2, 1869, in western India, never expected to be the face of a movement. But his moment of truth, when he decided that he would dedicate his life to fighting injustice, came in 1893, when he was 24 years old. After graduating from law school, he'd been hired to work as a lawyer for an Indian trader in South Africa.

Riding the train there one day with a first-class ticket, Gandhi was asked to move to a third-class car to make room for a white passenger. When he refused, he was thrown off the train.

The incident opened Gandhi's eyes to the discrimination against non-whites that was common in South Africa, which at the time was split between British and Dutch rule. More than 150,000 Indians had been brought there as indentured servants. In certain provinces, they were forbidden to own property and vote in local elections, and they had to register with the government and have their fingerprints taken.

Gandhi spent 21 years fighting these injustices. During this time, he developed his philosophy of nonviolence: that the only way to bring about change was through peaceful demonstrations, such as boycotts, marches, and sit-ins.

"The first principle of nonviolent action," he wrote, "is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating."

After negotiating the repeal of some of South Africa's most oppressive laws targeting Indians, Gandhi brought his method of nonviolent action back to India.

British India

India had been under British rule dating back to 1757, when an army assembled by Great Britain's East India Company (a group of British investors who wanted to trade with India) defeated the governor of Bengal in a battle near Calcutta. This private company, with its own troops and powers of taxation, soon became the dominant force on a subcontinent of 400 million people. It was a brutal and often racist overseer whose indifference helped create and exacerbate famines in India in the late 1700s.

A failed uprising by Indian troops led the British Crown to dissolve the East India Company in 1858 and take control of the subcontinent, making it an official colony (see timeline, p. 20). In 1919, the British passed the Rowlatt Act, which gave the Raj (as the British administration in India was known) the power to imprison without trial anyone thought to be plotting to overthrow the government.

The Act was aimed at shutting down opposition from Indian nationalists, but it had the opposite effect: The push for Indian independence intensified, and Gandhi emerged as a national figure. He called for a day of protest, in which businesses throughout the country shut down.

The British arrested Gandhi and other protest leaders, fueling more demonstrations. At one of them, in Amritsar, British forces fired on the unarmed crowd, killing more than 400 people. The massacre galvanized Indians, and they rallied around Gandhi, calling him Mahatma ("great soul" in Sanskrit). In 1920, Gandhi organized a campaign of noncooperation with the British. Indians boycotted British goods, courts, schools, and taxes, bringing the nation to a standstill.

Gandhi was unlike other leaders of the independence movement, which had been dominated by elites. He believed India would gain independence only through a mass movement that included all Indians, rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim. He rejected modernity, wore simple clothes to identify with the poor, and advocated for the Dalits, known then as the "untouchables," the lowest caste in India's traditional social hierarchy.

The Salt March

Gandhi's most famous act of defiance began on March 12, 1930, when he led a protest against the Salt Acts, which prohibited Indians from gathering, making, or selling their own salt, forcing them instead to buy it from the British.

With 78 followers by his side, the 61-year-old Gandhi embarked on a 240-mile walk from his home in Ahmedabad to Dandi, on the shore of the Arabian Sea. At the end of the 24-day journey, known as the Salt March, Gandhi picked up a lump of salt from the mud and proclaimed to a large crowd: "With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British empire."

Gandhi was imprisoned for seven months, but tens of thousands of Indians followed his example, making salt at the seaside and submitting to beatings and arrests.

When World War II (1939-45) began, Gandhi and other Indian leaders decided not to support the war unless Britain "quit India" immediately and granted independence. Britain refused, and Gandhi began the "Quit India" movement. The British arrested Gandhi and more than 100,000 others. But the movement...