Mahatma Gandhi
[Second of 5 pages]
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Copyright: Vithalbhai Jhaveri/
GandhiServe
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After one year of a none too successful law practice, Gandhi decided to accept an offer from an Indian businessman in South Africa, Dada Abdulla, to join him as a legal adviser. Unbeknown to him, this was to become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and altogether Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over twenty years. The Indians who had been living in South Africa were without political rights, and were generally known by the derogatory name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness of the frightening force and fury of European racism, and how far Indians were from being considered full human beings, when he when thrown out of a first-class railway compartment car, though he held a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this political awakening Gandhi was to emerge as the leader of the Indian community, and it is in South Africa that he first coined the term satyagraha to signify his theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was to describe himself preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could not be attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya (celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series of experiments to forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner as to make the oppressor and the oppressed alike recognize their common bonding and humanity: as he recognized, freedom is only freedom when it is indivisible. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa he was to detail the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and their resistance to oppressive legislation and executive measures, such as the imposition of a poll tax on them, or the declaration by the government that all non-Christian marriages were to be construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi authored a short treatise entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, where he all but initiated the critique, not only of industrial civilization, but of modernity in all its aspects.
Gandhi returned to India in early 1915, and was never to leave
the country again except for a short trip that took him to Europe in 1931.
Though he was not completely unknown in India, Gandhi followed the advice
of his political mentor, Gokhale, and took it upon himself to acquire
a familiarity with Indian conditions. He traveled widely for one year.
Over the next few years, he was to become involved in numerous local struggles,
such as at Champaran in Bihar, where workers on indigo plantations complained
of oppressive working conditions, and at Ahmedabad, where a dispute had
broken out between management and workers at textile mills. His interventions
earned Gandhi a considerable reputation, and his rapid ascendancy to the
helm of nationalist politics is signified by his leadership of the opposition
to repressive legislation (known as the "Rowlatt Acts") in 1919.
His saintliness was not uncommon, except in someone like him who immersed
himself in politics, and by this time he had earned from no less a person
than Rabindranath Tagore, India's most well-known writer, the title of
Mahatma, or 'Great Soul'. When 'disturbances' broke out in the
Punjab, leading to the massacre of a large crowd of unarmed Indians at
the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar and other atrocities, Gandhi wrote the
report of the Punjab Congress Inquiry Committee. Over the next two years,
Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement, which called upon Indians
to withdraw from British institutions, to return honors conferred by the
British, and to learn the art of self-reliance; though the British administration
was at places paralyzed, the movement was suspended in February 1922 when
a score of Indian policemen were brutally killed by a large crowd at Chauri
Chaura, a small market town in the United Provinces. Gandhi himself was
arrested shortly thereafter, tried on charges of sedition, and sentenced
to imprisonment for six years. At The Great Trial, as it is known to his
biographers, Gandhi delivered a masterful indictment of British rule.
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Copyright: Sonal Thaker/GandhiServe
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