Gandhi decided to live modestly

Gandhi's legal income peaked at £5,000 per year, although he had little interest in earning money and frequently spent his savings on his public activities. He maintained an open table in Durban and then in Johannesburg; his home served as a sort of hostel for younger colleagues and political associates. For his wife, who Gandhi could not have dedicated himself to public issues without her great selflessness, patience, and endurance, this was kind of a test. Their lives tended to converge into a sense of community as he broke free from the traditional ties of family and property.

Gandhi was drawn inexorably into a life of austerity, manual labor, and simplicity. In 1904 after reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism, he set up a farm at Phoenix near Durban where he and his associates might live by the sweat of their brows. This is one of the most interesting facts about Mahatma Gandhi. In honor of the Russian writer and moralist whom Gandhi respected and wrote to, Tolstoy Farm, another colony that Gandhi fostered sprouted up six years later close to Johannesburg. These two towns served as the prototypes for the more well-known ashrams (religious retreats) in India, Sevagram, and Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad).