Who Was Mahatma Gandhi?

1. Porbandar, London and the young lawyer

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar, a coastal town in the state of Gujarat in western India. His father was the chief minister of Porbandar, and his mother was a devout Hindu whose religious practice — fasting, prayer, and a strict vegetarian diet — made a deep impression on her son. Gandhi was a shy and unremarkable student, and he was married at thirteen, in an arranged marriage, to Kasturba, who was also thirteen. The marriage lasted for more than sixty years, until Kasturba's death in 1944, and it was a partnership that shaped his life, though it was often strained by his public work and by his vows of celibacy in later years.

In 1888, at the age of eighteen, Gandhi sailed to London to study law. The three years he spent in England changed him profoundly. He learned to dress and speak as an English gentleman, he joined the Vegetarian Society, and he read widely, including the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the works of Tolstoy and the American writer Henry David Thoreau, whose essay on civil disobedience argued that a person should refuse to obey an unjust law. He was called to the bar in 1891 and returned to India, where he struggled to build a legal practice. In 1893 he accepted a one-year contract with an Indian trading firm in South Africa, a decision that would change the course of his life and of Indian history.

South Africa was where Gandhi became Gandhi. The Indian community there faced severe discrimination: Indians could not vote, could not travel freely, and were treated as second-class subjects of the British Empire. Shortly after his arrival, Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to move from a first-class compartment, an experience he later described as a turning point. He stayed in South Africa for twenty-one years, from 1893 to 1914, building a legal practice, founding newspapers, and organising the Indian community into a political force. It was there that he developed the method of nonviolent resistance that would become his life's work, and there that he first tested it, in campaigns against laws that required Indians to register and to carry passes.

2. Satyagraha: the philosophy of nonviolent resistance

Gandhi called his method satyagraha, a word he coined from the Sanskrit satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning firmness or holding fast. It was, in his words, holding firmly to truth. The method was simple in principle and extraordinarily demanding in practice: refuse to cooperate with an unjust law, accept the punishment that follows without complaint, and never use violence, even against an opponent who uses violence against you. The aim was not to defeat the opponent but to convert them — to make them see the injustice of their position by the willingness of the resister to suffer for it. Gandhi distinguished satyagraha from passive resistance, which he saw as a tactic of the weak, and insisted that it required more courage than violence, because it asked a person to face harm without striking back.

The philosophy drew on many sources. From Hinduism Gandhi took the idea of ahimsa, non-harm to living things, and the belief that truth is the highest value. From Jainism he took the emphasis on self-discipline and on the careful avoidance of harm. From Christianity, as he understood it through Tolstoy's reading of the Sermon on the Mount, he took the teaching to turn the other cheek and to love one's enemies. From Thoreau he took the idea of civil disobedience, the refusal to obey an unjust law. And from his own experience in South Africa he took the practical knowledge of how to organise a campaign, how to sustain it over years, and how to keep it nonviolent when tempers ran high. The result was a philosophy that was both deeply Indian and deeply universal, and it is the reason Gandhi's ideas travelled so far beyond India.

Satyagraha was not only a political method; it was also a way of life. Gandhi believed that a person who wanted to change society had first to change themselves, and he imposed on himself a discipline that most people would find extreme. He wore simple homespun cloth, which he spun himself on a small wheel, as a protest against imported British textiles and as a symbol of self-reliance. He ate a simple vegetarian diet, fasted regularly, and in 1906 took a vow of celibacy. He lived in ashrams, communities where his followers shared work and prayer, and he insisted on doing manual labour, including cleaning latrines, as a way of breaking down the distinction between high and low work. His critics found this asceticism eccentric; his followers found it inspiring. Either way, it was inseparable from his politics: for Gandhi, the means and the ends were the same, and a free India built by violent means would not be a free India at all.

3. The return to India and the road to independence

Gandhi returned to India in 1915, at the age of forty-five, and spent the next five years travelling the country, learning about its people and its problems, before launching his first major campaign. The turning point came in 1919, when British troops under General Dyer opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds. The massacre shocked India and the world, and Gandhi responded by launching a campaign of non-cooperation, calling on Indians to boycott British goods, British schools and British courts. The campaign made him the leader of the independence movement, and it made the Indian National Congress, the party that led the movement, into a mass organisation for the first time.

The 1920s and 1930s brought a series of campaigns that made Gandhi famous around the world. The most famous was the Salt March of 1930. The British government held a monopoly on the production of salt and taxed it heavily, a burden that fell hardest on the poorest Indians. Gandhi announced that he would walk 385 kilometres from his ashram at Sabarmati to the sea at Dandi, where he would make salt from seawater in defiance of the law. The march took twenty-four days and drew crowds at every village along the way; when Gandhi reached the sea and picked up a handful of salt, the act was reported around the world. Tens of thousands of Indians followed his example, and the British arrested more than sixty thousand people. The march did not end British rule, but it showed the world that the independence movement was a mass movement, and it made Gandhi the most famous Indian in the world.

Gandhi's leadership was not without controversy, even within the independence movement. He called off the non-cooperation campaign in 1922 after a crowd burned a police station at Chauri Chaura, killing twenty-two policemen, arguing that the movement was not ready for nonviolence. Many of his followers were bitterly disappointed, and some accused him of betraying the cause. He was imprisoned by the British several times, most notably from 1942 to 1944 during the Quit India movement, when he called on the British to leave India immediately. By the time of his release, the Second World War had changed the world, Britain was exhausted, and independence was near. But the India that became independent in 1947 was not the India Gandhi had hoped for: it was divided into two countries, India and Pakistan, and the partition was accompanied by terrible violence.

4. Partition, assassination and the final fasts

The partition of India in August 1947 was the greatest tragedy of Gandhi's life. The British, the Congress and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had agreed to divide the country along religious lines, creating a predominantly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan. Gandhi opposed partition, and he had argued for years that Hindus and Muslims could live together in a single India, but by 1947 he was unable to prevent it. The division triggered one of the largest migrations in history, as millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the new borders, and the violence that accompanied it killed hundreds of thousands of people, with some estimates running far higher. Gandhi, who had spent his life preaching nonviolence, was powerless to stop it.

In the months after partition, Gandhi devoted himself to trying to stop the communal violence. He travelled to the riot-torn areas, walked through villages where massacres had taken place, and fasted in Calcutta and in Delhi to shame the communities into peace. The fasts worked, in the short term: in Calcutta, the violence stopped after he began his fast, and in Delhi, his fast in January 1948 brought the leaders of the Hindu and Muslim communities together to pledge peace. But the fasts also made him enemies. Hindu nationalists accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims, and of forcing India to pay Pakistan money that it owed under the partition agreement. On 30 January 1948, as he walked to a prayer meeting in New Delhi, he was shot three times by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindu cause. Gandhi died within minutes, at the age of seventy-eight. Godse was tried and executed in 1949. Gandhi's death was mourned around the world, and his funeral procession in Delhi was attended by hundreds of thousands of people.

5. The contested legacy: race and caste

Any honest account of Gandhi must confront the criticisms of his views on race and on caste, because they are the subject of serious and ongoing scholarly debate. The first concerns his years in South Africa. In his early writings there, Gandhi used derogatory language about Black Africans, referred to them by a term that is now considered a slur, and argued that Indians, as subjects of the British Empire, deserved better treatment than Africans. Critics, including some modern scholars and activists, argue that these writings show that Gandhi held prejudiced views about Black people, and that his campaign in South Africa was a campaign for Indian rights, not for universal equality. In 2018, the University of Ghana removed a statue of Gandhi from its campus after a campaign by academics and students who cited these writings, and similar debates have taken place in other countries.

Gandhi's defenders respond that his views changed over time, and that the early writings must be read in the context of the prejudices of the late nineteenth century, which Gandhi shared with most educated people of his time. They point out that he later lived and worked alongside Black South Africans, that he condemned racial discrimination in general terms, and that his later writings and his philosophy of satyagraha were explicitly universal, addressed to all people rather than to Indians alone. They also note that Gandhi himself described his life as a series of experiments with truth, and that he was willing to admit when he had been wrong. Scholars generally agree that his early views were shaped by the racial attitudes of his time, and that his later positions were more inclusive, but the debate about how far he changed, and how quickly, continues. The fairest summary is that Gandhi's views on race evolved, that the early writings are a genuine blot on his record, and that the later philosophy he taught was universal in its claims.

The second debate concerns caste. Gandhi opposed untouchability — the practice of treating the lowest castes as ritually impure — and he called the untouchables Harijan, meaning children of God, and worked for their welfare, including opening temples to them and campaigning against the practice. But he also defended the caste system itself, in a reformed form, for much of his life, arguing that the division of labour by birth was a natural and useful arrangement, provided that it was not accompanied by discrimination. His great opponent on this question was B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, as the lowest castes are now known, who argued that caste itself was the problem and that it had to be abolished, not reformed. The two men clashed bitterly in the 1930s, notably over the question of separate electorates for Dalits, and Ambedkar's critique of Gandhi remains one of the most powerful ever written. Modern scholars are divided: some argue that Gandhi's gradualism was a practical strategy in a deeply conservative society, while others argue that it was a failure to confront the central injustice of Indian society. Both views are defensible, and both should be presented.

6. Gandhi and the world: King, Mandela and nonviolence

Gandhi's influence outside India is one of the most remarkable facts about him. He never held political office, he never commanded an army, and he died before the great movements he inspired had begun, yet his ideas shaped the politics of the twentieth century. The most direct line runs to Martin Luther King Jr., who studied Gandhi's writings in the 1950s and adopted nonviolent resistance as the strategy of the American civil-rights movement. King's bus boycott in Montgomery, his marches in Birmingham and Selma, and his insistence on nonviolence in the face of brutal opposition were all consciously modelled on Gandhi's campaigns. King himself said that Gandhi was one of the two people, along with Jesus, who had most influenced his thinking, and he travelled to India in 1959 to study Gandhi's work at first hand.

Nelson Mandela, who led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, also admired Gandhi, though his relationship with Gandhi's ideas was more complex. Mandela had studied Gandhi's South African campaigns and respected his achievement, but he concluded that nonviolence alone would not defeat apartheid, and in 1961 he helped to found the armed wing of the African National Congress. Even so, Mandela's later emphasis on reconciliation, on refusing to seek revenge, and on building a new South Africa that included the former oppressors owed a great deal to Gandhi's example, and Mandela himself acknowledged the debt. Gandhi's ideas have also influenced movements for democracy in Eastern Europe, for civil rights in the United States, and for peace in many other countries. The Nobel Peace Prize, which Gandhi never received — he was nominated several times but was assassinated before the committee could award it to him — is often cited as one of the great omissions in the prize's history, and the Nobel Committee itself has acknowledged that he should have received it.

Gandhi's influence is not limited to politics. His ideas about simple living, about self-reliance, and about the dangers of industrial civilisation have influenced environmentalists, economists and philosophers. His emphasis on the dignity of manual labour, on the spinning wheel as a symbol of self-reliance, and on the village as the foundation of society has shaped debates about development in India and elsewhere. His critics argue that these ideas were impractical and that they held India back, and there is force in that criticism: the India that became independent chose industrialisation and modernisation, not the village-based economy Gandhi advocated. But his warning that material progress without moral progress is empty has lost none of its relevance, and it continues to be quoted by people who have never read his books.

7. Why Gandhi still matters

Gandhi matters because he showed that political change could be achieved without violence, and that a movement based on suffering rather than on killing could defeat an empire. That achievement is unique in modern history, and it is the reason his name is known around the world. He also matters because of the questions he asked: what is the relationship between means and ends, between personal conduct and public life, between truth and power? His answer — that the means are the ends, that a person must live the change they want to see, that truth is the highest value — is a demanding one, and it is one that most people, including most of his admirers, have found impossible to live up to. That does not make it wrong; it makes it a challenge.

He matters, too, because of the debates he provokes. The arguments about his views on race and caste, about partition, and about the practicality of his economic ideas are not footnotes to his story; they are part of it, and they are the reason he remains a living figure rather than a statue. A figure who is only praised is a figure who is no longer being thought about. Gandhi is still being thought about, argued over, and criticised, and that is a measure of his importance. The scholars who criticise him and the activists who celebrate him are both engaged with the same questions he asked, and the debate itself is part of his legacy.

The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life. The best way to meet Gandhi is to read his own words, above all his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, which he wrote in the 1920s and which remains one of the most honest and readable accounts of a life ever written. It shows a man who was constantly questioning himself, admitting his failures, and trying to do better — and it is that honesty, more than any single achievement, that has made him endure.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Mahatma Gandhi
• Wikipedia — Mahatma Gandhi
• GandhiServe Foundation — Mahatma Gandhi
• Wikipedia — Salt March

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• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.