Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948

"Gandhi was a person of powerfully held ideas, and many of those had to do with individual conduct. He founded several communes, first in South Africa and then in India, to pursue the style of life that he believed was physically and spiritually most healthy and he had acolytes who joined him. In that sense, he was a religious rather than a political figure. But he was also a political figure, and he had two major accomplishments. First, he turned the Indian national movement, the Indian National Congress, into a mass movement capable of putting enough pressure on the British to cause them to leave after World War Two. Before Gandhi joined the Congress movement at the end of World War One, it consisted mainly of a small group of wealthy individuals, most of them high caste Hindus, whom the British could easily manage. Gandhi made it a mass movement with which they were ultimately unable to cope, which, in conjunction with a number of other factors, brought about the end of British rule in India. His second great accomplishment was a technique that he pioneered in his years in South Africa and then applied to put pressure on the British in India. That was nonviolent protest. Nonviolent protest was adopted by other people in other places at other points in history, notably the American Civil Rights movement of the early and mid-1960s. Gandhi was the father of modern political nonviolence."