I headed for the library to locate a biography of his life as a lawyer. There was none. Because the library was a superb one (that of the University of Chicago Law School), I felt relatively secure in concluding that none had been written. I resorted to the standard biographies. Relying almost entirely on what little Gandhi himself had written about his time in the law, they did little more than acknowledge in passing his having studied and practiced law. No one, it seemed, had made an investigation of his long years in the law. No one had asked whether his professional experiences influenced the development of his philosophy and practice of civil disobedience. No one had explored how his legal career shaped the man. It was as if the two decades Gandhi had spent in the law had been declared irrelevant by all his many biographers. This was as stunning as it was inexplicable. Civil disobedience is the conscientious breaking of the law. Gandhi was a civil disobedient—and became one while he was a practicing member of the legal profession. Was there no relationship between Gandhi’s practice of law and his embrace of civil disobedience? Was there no relationship between Gandhi’s practice of law and the person he became over those years?
I set about writing this biography of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer to answer those questions and to explain how Gandhi’s experience as a lawyer set him on a path that would lead to his being one of the preeminent figures of the twentieth century—with a dramatic impact on the twenty-first.
GANDHI’S EXPERIENCES IN THE LAW
Had Gandhi become the physician he wanted to become rather than the lawyer his family insisted he become, it is quite likely that the Indian independence movement would have taken an entirely different trajectory, revolutions around the globe would have more often been violent rather than nonviolent, and Mohandas K. Gandhi would not have developed into India’s leading twentieth-century nationalist. But the man before the Mahatma did become a lawyer—and that made all the difference.
That and the South African legal system. Sent abroad as a novice lawyer, it was Gandhi’s intention simply to earn some money for himself and his family. Before long, however, he found himself at the center of the fight for Indian civil rights in British South Africa. Because he had been trained for the bar in London, Gandhi had come to take British fair play as a settled expectation that he then projected onto the courts of Britain’s South African colonies. So it was quite natural for the young lawyer to look to the legal system for help in defending against attacks on Indian rights. Gandhi’s belief in the capacity of the courts to render justice was so strong that in South Africa he repeatedly knocked on the legal system’s door for justice for his community. The door rarely opened. He kept knocking. The more he knocked, the less frequently it opened. This repeated, persistent, and finally predictable refusal of the legal system to render justice to South Africa’s Indians slowly but inexorably frustrated Gandhi. It drove the lawyer out of the legal system—as most of us understand it—and into the arms of civil disobedience.
I say “as most of us understand it.” It is true that Gandhi eventually lost faith in the traditional legal system—courts, judges, lawyers, litigation—but he never lost faith in the law. At the end of his period of experimentation with civil disobedience in South Africa, he understood civil disobedience actually to be an expression of one’s highest respect for the law.
A choice presents itself to every resister who breaks the law in the course of opposing an oppressive regime: to accept responsibility and punishment or to avoid them. In Gandhi’s time in South Africa, both responses to this choice were on display. The Boers (descendants of the Dutch settlers whom the British displaced) felt oppressed by the British and took up arms against them. No Boer openly opposed the British and stood by to be arrested and punished. By contrast, Gandhi and the Indians did openly oppose the British, broke South African laws, and accepted their prosecution and punishment. This put Gandhi and his followers firmly under the law’s ultimate dominion—which is just where Gandhi, who had a great deal of esteem for the law, wanted to be.
Gandhi’s goal was, in large part, to change the mind of the oppressor. In South Africa Gandhi was feeling his way toward an understanding of the dynamic by which civil disobedience creates social and political change. That dynamic relies on the power of willingly accepted self-suffering to awaken and convince the public of the virtue of the disobedient’s cause, such that the public sympathizes with the disobedient and then puts pressure on decision-makers to redress the problem. Gandhi conceived, rightly so, of the willingness to endure suffering and accept punishment as a sign of the disobedient’s continuing faith in the law—a grand system understood as transcending courts, judges, lawyers, and litigation—to do justice. And it was the willingness to be ultimately governed by the law that Gandhi saw as a critical element in changing the mind of the oppressor.
In the end, Gandhi learned how to use the legal system against itself to transform injustice into justice. From all the lessons Gandhi learned in the practice of law, this lesson that he learned in South Africa and acted on in India was the single most important key for opening the door to freedom in India.
THE LAW: A LABORATORY FOR PERSONAL CHANGE
Gandhi’s experiences as a lawyer matter not only because it was in the context of his law practice that he developed his philosophy and practice of civil disobedience, but also because his time in the law readied the man for leadership in India.
A South African law practice was the perfect hothouse for raising the initially shy and retiring Gandhi into a public person. The colonial courts in which Gandhi practiced were then backwoods jurisdictions where the quality of legal talent would not easily scare a timid novice away. At the same time, being in court anywhere requires a certain amount of courage. Repeatedly advocating before judges and engaging with opponents in courtrooms and a range of other settings had their effect on Gandhi. The law provided him with confidence. The law made him a leader. The law gave him his voice.
Moreover, his South African law practice provided Gandhi with an identity. The London-trained barrister received the instant respect of his relatively uneducated countrymen in South Africa. They naturally turned to him—the only Indian lawyer in an otherwise completely European bar—for advice and leadership. Gandhi also earned the respect of some of his opponents in the bar and in politics, who recognized and valued his sincerity, his intellect, and his thoroughness.
The psychological security he derived from having a professional identity, however, did not protect him from the hard edges of law practice. It was as a lawyer that Gandhi learned how to negotiate with the most skilled bargainers. There were times when he showed real talent for it—such as when he negotiated a partnership agreement with an older, seasoned lawyer in the Durban bar. There were other times when he was sent away licking his wounds. Gandhi and the Transvaal colonial secretary, Jan Christian Smuts, spent a good deal of time together negotiating over government recognition of Indian rights—and, after a settlement had been reached, Gandhi spent a good deal of time afterward trying to figure out how he had been had. As a result, when Gandhi sat down in India with Viceroy Irwin years later to negotiate the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, he did so as one who had been schooled in negotiating with the most difficult negotiators the colonial world had to offer.
In other contexts, too, Gandhi was toughened and prepared for India. Racist magistrates before whom he constantly appeared had to be tangled with, as did racist functionaries in local and provincial governments. Liars, like the Transvaal registrar of Asiatics, Montfort Chamney, had to be confronted. Corrupt officials, like those in the Transvaal’s Asiatic Office, had to be faced down. And rebels in his own camp, like the former clients who beat him to within an inch of his life, had to be endured. Battle-scarred, Gandhi emerged from all this intact—and ready for all the challenges India could throw at him.
What enabled him to survive this trying process of preparation?
Role-differentiated behavior is an occupational hazard for lawyers.
