Mohandas Gandhi: 1930
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) was also known as Mohandas Karamchand, the Mahatma, and the Great Soul. His legacy as an Indian nationalist, religious leader and moral revolutionary resonates in social and political reform movements to this day. In 1930, TIME wrote, "It was exactly twelve months ago that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Indian National Congress promulgated the Declaration of Indian Independence. It was in March that he marched to the sea to defy Britain's salt tax as some New Englanders once defied a British tea tax.
It was in May that Britain jailed Gandhi at Poona. Last week he was still there, and some 30,000 members of his Independence movement were caged elsewhere. The British Empire was still wondering fearfully what to do about them all, the Empire's most staggering problem ... it was in a jail that the year's end found the little half-naked brown man whose 1930 mark on world history will undoubtedly loom largest of all."
Researched by Joan Levinstein, the Time Inc. Research Center