The best-known Indian nationalist, Mohandas K. Gandhi, was a fascinating character. A British-educated lawyer born to a wealthy family, he's known for making his own clothes, his long fasts, and his battles to alleviate poverty, improve the rights of women, and achieve a unified Indian independence from Britain. In terms of decolonization, he stands out for his use of nonviolence and his linking it to a somewhat mythologized view of Indian history. I mean, after all, there's plenty of violence in India's past and in its heroic epics, but Gandhi managed to harken back to a past that used nonviolence to bring change. Gandhi and his compatriot Jawaharlal Nehru believed that a single India could continue to be ruled by Indian elites and somehow transcend the tension between the country's Hindu majority and its sizable Muslim minority. In this, they were less practical than their contemporary, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, who felt, to quote historian Ainsley Embry, that the unified India of which the Congress spoke was an artificial one, created and maintained by British bayonets. Jinnah proved correct, and in 1947, when the British left, their Indian colony was partitioned into the modern state of India and West and East Pakistan, the latter of which became Bangladesh in 1971.