Early yearsMohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar in the present-day state of Gujarat in India on 2 October 1869. He was raised in a very conservative family who had affiliations with the ruling family of Kathiawad. He studied law at University College London. In 1891, after being admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to open a law practice in Bombay, without much success. Two years later, an Indian company with interests in South Africa hired him as a legal advisor in its office in Durban. Arriving in Durban, Gandhi found himself treated as a member of an inferior race. He was appalled by the widespread denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants in South Africa. He threw himself into the fight for the basic rights of the Indians. Resistance to injustice Gandhi remained in South Africa for twenty years, suffering imprisonment several times. In 1896, after being attacked and humiliated by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation with the South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for this policy came from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on Gandhi was profound. Gandhi also acknowledged his debt to the teachings of Christ and to the 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau, particularly Thoreau's famous essay "Civil Disobedience." Gandhi, however, considered the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate for his purposes and coined another term, Satyagraha (from Sanskrit, "truth and steadfastness"). During the Boer War, Gandhi organized an ambulance corps for the British Army and commanded a Red Cross unit. After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights. In 1910 he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Durban, a cooperative colony for Indians. In 1914 the Union government of South Africa made major concessions to Gandhi's demands, including the recognition of Indian marriages and the abolition of the poll tax for them. Having completed his work in South Africa, he returned to India. Home Rule Campaign Gandhi became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian Home Rule Campaign. After the First World War, in which he played an active role in recruitment campaigns, Gandhi, again supporting Satyagraha, launched his non-violent resistance movement against Britain. When Parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts in 1919, giving Indian colonial authorities emergency powers to deal with so-called revolutionary activities, Satyagraha spread across India, gaining millions of followers..