Mohandas Karamchand (sometimes called Mahatma, or ‘great soul’) Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, a champion of Indian independence from Great Britain, and an advocate and theorist of non-violent civil disobedience, who became one of the leading political and spiritual figures of the twentieth century. Born on October 2, 1869, in the province of Gujarat in northwestern India, Gandhi trained in England as a lawyer. Offered a position in Pretoria, he became an activist for the Indian community in South Africa, where he lived from 1893 to 1914. After his return to India in 1915, Gandhi took on the British Empire through a series of non-violent resistance actions that played a major role in securing Indian independence in 1947. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu militant on January 30, 1948.