Mahatma Gandhi

A lawyer who led a subcontinent to independence without an army.

He was born at Porbandar on the second of October 1869 and went to London at eighteen to read law. He was called to the bar and failed at it - he was too shy to speak in court - and took a one-year contract in South Africa instead. He stayed twenty-one years. Thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage he had paid for, he began the work that occupied the rest of his life.

He came home in 1915 and turned the Congress from a debating society of lawyers into a mass movement. He wore what the poorest Indians wore and spun his own cloth. He was imprisoned for a total of some six and a half years. He walked two hundred and forty miles to the sea at Dandi in 1930 to pick up a handful of salt, because the salt was taxed, and the picture of it went round the world.

Independence came in August 1947 and the country was cut in two. Perhaps a million people were killed in the crossing and twelve million were driven from their homes. He was seventy-seven. He did not go to the celebrations; he went to Calcutta and fasted until the killing there stopped, and then to Delhi and fasted again.

On the thirtieth of January 1948 he was walking to evening prayers in the garden at Birla House, late, leaning on the shoulders of two of his great-nieces. A man stepped out of the crowd, bowed to him, and shot him three times in the chest at point-blank range. He was seventy-eight.

His sons Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas. His wife Kasturba had died in detention four years earlier.