Episode Details

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is remembered as a serene icon of peace, but he began as an insecure, possessive teenager and a lawyer too shy to question a witness. This deep dive strips away the mythology to show how his mother's severe fasting, a pluralistic religious upbringing and agonizing guilt over leaving his dying father's bedside at 16 set him on a lifelong quest for self-mastery.

The episode follows him to London, where stage fright silenced him at the Vegetarian Society, and to South Africa, where being thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg turned a one-year contract into 21 years of activism. It explains Satyagraha, his strategy of withdrawing cooperation from the British Raj, the Salt March, partition and his assassination in 1948.

• How the 1906 Transvaal fingerprinting law sparked the creation of Satyagraha, a disciplined form of nonviolent resistance
• Why enduring violence without retaliation was used to expose the moral bankruptcy of colonial laws
• How the Jallianwala Bagh massacre pushed him to demand Swaraj, or complete self-rule
• Why salt and homespun cloth made anti-colonial resistance accessible to the poorest citizens
• His opposition to partition, hunger strikes amid sectarian violence and assassination by Nathuram Godse