Mohandas Gandhi was born in a three-story house in the port town of Porbandar on October 2, 1869, decades before anyone called him Mahatma — the ballroom-dancing law student he first became looked nothing like the man history settled on remembering.

Every biography of Gandhi eventually arrives at the same picture: a thin man in homespun cloth, spinning wheel at his side, leading millions in defiance of an empire without raising a fist. That was not who arrived in the world on October 2, 1869.

Who was born in that house on the coast?

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born into a household that mattered locally and nowhere else. His father, Karamchand, served as diwan (chief minister) to the ruler of the small princely state of Porbandar, on India's western coast, a post Gandhi's grandfather and uncle had also held before him. The family lived in a three-story haveli near the harbor, painted blue, now preserved as a museum called Kirti Mandir. His mother, Putlibai, was a devout Vaishnav Hindu whose fasting and religious discipline he later credited as his first real education. He was the youngest of four children, shy by his own account, and married at thirteen to a girl named Kasturba, in an arrangement his family considered unremarkable for the time and place.

It reads like the record of a minor official's son, which is closer to the truth than the icon standing at the end of the story.

Why did he try so hard to look English?

At eighteen Gandhi sailed for London to study law at the Inner Temple, and for roughly his first three months there he did something the later legend tends to skip: he tried to become an Englishman. He bought a top hat, a cane, and evening dress, then paid for lessons in ballroom dancing and violin. Separately, he hired an elocution tutor to scrub the Gujarati accent out of his English.

He kept up the dancing for three weeks before deciding the rhythms were beyond him; the violin lasted only a little longer. By his own account, he gave the whole project up abruptly one evening while reading an elocution textbook and asking himself what exactly he thought he was doing with his life. He wrote to his dancing teacher and his elocution instructor to cancel the lessons, and went in person to tell the violin teacher she could sell the instrument. He later wrote the episode up himself, in his autobiography, under a chapter title that translates roughly as "Playing the English Gentleman" — one of the few places where he narrates his own foolishness without softening it.

What turned a failed lawyer into an organizer?

London barely used him. Gandhi was called to the bar in 1891 and returned to India to a legal career that went nowhere in particular; in his first case, in a Bombay court, he stood to cross-examine a witness and could not get a sentence out. A year later he took a one-year contract to settle a business dispute in South Africa, expecting to be home before it mattered. He stayed for twenty-one years.

South Africa is where the transformation the legend remembers actually happened, and it happened slowly, case by case and insult by insult. He organized Indian traders into a political body, the Natal Indian Congress, in 1894. During the Second Boer War he built a stretcher-bearer unit drawing on well over a thousand Indian volunteers, who hauled wounded British troops off the field at places like Spion Kop, hoping the service would strengthen Indian claims to citizenship within an empire he privately doubted. It was also in South Africa, fighting discriminatory laws case by case, that he coined the word for the method he would use for the rest of his life: satyagraha, built from the Sanskrit for truth and firmness, and usually translated as "truth-force."

What actually changed at Champaran?

Gandhi returned to India for good in 1915 and spent nearly two years traveling the country before doing anything most Indians noticed. That changed at Champaran, a district in Bihar, in 1917. Farmers there were forced under a system called tinkathia to grow indigo on part of their land for British planters, whatever the market or the soil wanted. Gandhi went to investigate. A magistrate ordered him to leave the district; he refused, telling the court he would rather go to prison than obey an order he considered unjust. The government backed down instead of jailing him.

It was his first campaign of civil disobedience on Indian soil, and by most accounts it is also the moment ordinary Indians outside his small circle first learned his name.

Everything that followed scaled the same idea. The Salt March of 1930 is the best remembered version of it: nearly 240 miles on foot from his ashram to the Arabian Sea over three and a half weeks, ending in the illegal act of picking up a handful of sea salt on the beach at Dandi in defiance of the government's monopoly. The 1942 Quit India movement, launched as Britain fought a war it needed India's cooperation to win, is the most consequential of everything he did afterward.

Where the record gets thin

Not every detail of Gandhi's life is documented as thoroughly as the Salt March, which dozens of journalists covered by walking beside him. The honorific "Mahatma," Sanskrit for "great soul," is usually credited to the poet Rabindranath Tagore, said to have used it publicly around 1915. The Gandhian scholar Narayan Desai has argued the title was already circulating before that, in an anonymous letter sent to Gandhi in South Africa years earlier, and that no single person actually coined it. Gandhi disliked the title and said so more than once. The record supports the disliking more confidently than it supports any one origin story.

Why has he never won the prize built for exactly this?

Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times, the last just two days before his own death made the nomination moot. In 1947, three of the five committee members reportedly opposed giving it to him at all, and the prize went to the Quakers instead. His life ended at a prayer meeting in the garden of Delhi's Birla House on the evening of January 30, 1948, where a Hindu nationalist opposed to his tolerance of Muslims fired three shots at close range. The Nobel committee that year declared it had found "no suitable living candidate," which under its own rules closed the door on any award after death. In 2006 the committee's then-secretary, Geir Lundestad, called the omission the single greatest in the prize's history.

What does October 2 ask for now?

The date did not stop being useful to the world once its subject was gone. In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly, backed by more than 140 co-sponsoring countries, designated October 2 the International Day of Non-Violence, timed to Gandhi's birthday on purpose. India marks the same date as a national holiday, Gandhi Jayanti: schools, offices, and liquor shops close for the day.

Neither observance asks much of the people who keep it, and that is worth saying plainly rather than skipping past. A holiday costs nothing; the twenty-one years in South Africa that it commemorates cost Gandhi most of his adult life. What is worth carrying out of the blue house in Porbandar is not the finished symbol but the awkward middle of the story — the man who put down a violin he could not learn to play and picked up, slowly and with no guarantee it would work, a way of refusing an order without lifting a weapon against it.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Mahatma Gandhi"
• Mohandas K. Gandhi, "An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth" (1927), Chapter 14, "Playing the English Gentleman"
• Nobel Prize Outreach, "Mahatma Gandhi, the missing laureate," nobelprize.org
• United Nations, "International Day of Non-Violence, 2 October," un.org
• Live History India, "Gandhi and the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps"
• AltNews, "Who Gave the Title 'Mahatma' to M.K. Gandhi? Certainly Not the British" (citing Narayan Desai)