GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869-January 30, 1948) led the Indian people in their struggle for independence from British rule, largely with the application of non-violent means.

PHOTO CAPTION: Gandhi Mohandas Karamchand. SOURCE: EA Library

Although he is best known for his leadership in India, which culminated in Indian independence in 1947, he first developed the method of satyagraha (truth force or non-violence) in the 21 years he spent in South Africa. In these 21 years, interrupted only by short visits to India and London, he challenged the racial disabilities faced by the Indian minority in the country. He was unique in combining religious principles with political aims in the movement he led for equality and freedom. During these years, he became universally known as “Mahatma” or “Great Soul.”

Gandhi was born in the town of Porbandar in the west of India. He was the fourth child of Putlibai, who was the fourth wife of his father, Karamchand. In an arrangement traditional among Hindus, he was married to his wife, Kasturbai, at the age of 13.

Gandhi was an undistinguished student. After high school he went to London where he studied law for three years and passed the bar examinations. Returning to India, where it was assumed that one day he would succeed his father and grandfather as premier of a princely state, he spent two years in a not very successful law practice. When the opportunity came for him to go to South Africa for a year to settle a law suit, even though the pay was only expenses and £105, he grasped the opportunity.

Gandhi landed in Durban, Natal, in May 1893. In the first few days after his arrival, he experienced the demeaning discrimination daily suffered in South Africa by people of Indian origin who had first been brought there in 1860 as indentured laborers in the sugar cane fields of Natal.

His reaction to this discrimination was characteristic. When he visited a courtroom in Durban, the magistrate demanded that he remove his turban. Gandhi refused and left the courtroom. Later, on a night train enroute to Pretoria from Durban, riding first class, he refused to leave his compartment at the demand of a European passenger and was thrown off the train at Maritzburg. He later described the night he spend shivering in the cold of the station waiting room as a turning point in his life. It was on this occasion that he decided to stay in South Africa to fight the injustice rather than return immediately to India.

In Pretoria, Gandhi gathered members of the Indian community together to discuss their disabilities in the Transvaal no vote, a 9:00 p.m. curfew, a prohibition against using the sidewalks, restricted ownership and use of land. These talks were a prelude to later action. At the end of his year’s work, and with the lawsuit amicably settled by arbitration, Gandhi was preparing to leave for India when the Natal legislature opened debate on the Franchise Amendment bill which would deny the vote to Indians.

He was prevailed upon to stay and lead the campaign against the bill, with 20 Indian merchants guaranteeing him £300 annually. The campaign was lost, but in 1894 Gandhi organized the Natal Indian Congress of which he became secretary. (The Congress resisted the extension of indentured service, and protested the £3 head tax on Indians and the requirement that Indian merchants renew business licenses.) His work and his articles and letters to newspapers brought him to prominence. He became the first Indian to be admitted to the Natal Supreme Court.

Gandhi was greatly influenced by his reading of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You,” and Ruskin’s “Unto This Last.” With the emphasis placed by these authors on the dignity of work and on communalism, and their rejection of war and violence espoused by governments, they helped inspire Gandhi in his own communal experiments. In 1904 he established the Phoenix Farm near Durban from which his newspaper, Indian Opinion, was published. In 1910 he founded the Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg.

During the South African War of 1899-1902, he organized an ambulance corps of 1, 100 Indians to work with the British forces, still considering himself a loyal British subject. During the short-lived Zulu rebellion of 1906, he organized a second Indian ambulance corps. He was, however, overwhelmed by the British attacks on the Zulus, and the corps spent most of its efforts attending wounded Africans.

Beginning in 1906, Gandhi focused his efforts in the Transvaal, prompted by the debate leading up to the passage of the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance (popularly called the Black Act) which was aimed at preventing Indian immigration. Under this measure all Indians above the age of eight had to be fingerprinted and registered. On September 11, 1906 more than 2,000 Indians gathered at the Empire Theatre, under Gandhi’s leadership, and solemnly vowed before God not to submit. Gandhi and other leaders were arrested, the first of many arrests to follow in the next seven years as the Satyagraha Association was organized to resist the measure by nonviolent actions. (“When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul force,” Gandhi said.)

The work of the Satyagraha Association culminated in a campaign in 1913 against a Supreme Court decision declaring all non-Christian marriages null and void. Women, especially aggrieved by this ruling, for the first time played a prominent role in the satyagraha action by crossing the borders from and to the Transvaal and Natal without permits. (At one point 2,500 of the 13,000 Indians in the Transvaal were jailed in consequence.)

The campaign attracted international attention and pressure, internally and externally, led to a compromise settlement being negotiated between Gandhi and Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts. All Indian marriages were legalized, the head tax on Indians was abolished, and indentured service was to end in 1920. The main features of the immigration restrictions remained in force, however. Gandhi nevertheless considered this a victory, for the Indian cause. He left South Africa for India on July 18, 1914. When he did so, Smuts remarked: ‘The saint has left our shores, I hope for good.”

In India, Gandhi further developed his personal disciplines such as celibacy, dieting on fruit, and communal living, which he had begun in South Africa. He also continued to pursue his nonviolent methods through campaigns of the Indian National Congress. He was assassinated by an extremist Hindu on January 30, 1948, shortly after India had gained independence.

His years in South Africa were formative and in many ways experimental. They were, however, essential for the full development of his philosophy, which reached maturity in India. His efforts in South Africa were narrowly applied to the circumstances of the Indian community, but served in later years as an inspiration to Africans in resisting apartheid in South Africa.

GEORGE M. HOUSER