the scope of this book to address Gandhi’s time in India in any great detail, a brief discussion of his work there will put this exploration of his life as a lawyer in South Africa in context.
Every schoolchild who has seen a map of Asia knows that India’s landmass is vast, extending from the Indian Ocean in the south to the disputed border with Pakistan far to the north. Its history is equally vast, stretching from its millennia-old origins along the Indus River through the late-fifteenth-century arrival of the first Europeans to India’s present-day parliamentary democracy.
Thrusting himself into the midst of this historical current near the start of the twentieth century was the forty-five-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, despite having spent most of his adult life in South Africa, would profoundly influence India and its history. The India that Gandhi found on his arrival home in 1915 was neither a clearly defined country nor an independent one. Its British rulers, however, had unintentionally done their best in the sixty years before his arrival to present Gandhi with a set of conditions that encouraged both Indian nationhood and Indian freedom.
Fielding a small but powerful force of not many more than a thousand men, the British Empire used its Indian Civil Service (ICS) to exercise authority throughout India, with ICS agents controlling virtually all aspects of government within their jurisdictions. David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister from 1916 to 1922, famously credited the ICS with being “the steel frame on which the whole structure of government and of administration in India rests.” That steel frame demonstrated for Indians that a competently operated administrative body could bring the subcontinent under the control of a national government.
The ICS was not the only enterprise that the empire created that paved the way for its own departure and made Gandhi’s job of unifying and leading India easier. By the dawn of the twentieth century the British had put a railway system in place that was among the world’s five largest. By connecting Indians to each other and to the world, Britain’s investment in the railway system helped integrate India’s economy. Much the same can be said of the methods of communication that the British developed in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. The postal service installed by the British served virtually the entire subcontinent, while the telegraph system reached areas where even the rail system had not penetrated. These modern systems of transportation and communication helped create a feeling of nationality as Indians from disparate parts of the subcontinent came to feel a connection to one another.
In addition to building India’s infrastructure, the British educated the Indians who would come to oppose their rule. In the mid-nineteenth century, London ordained that there should be universities all across India.8 At the same time this university system was developing, the British welcomed Indian students to Britain, where they might train for the professions—chiefly medicine and law. Gandhi, like many a nationalist leader in the making, would study law in Britain.
The supply of educated Indians soon outstripped the number of positions available. In 1884 Lord Ripon, the Crown’s viceroy in India, reported the danger that education was creating: “Unless we are prepared to afford these men legitimate openings for their aspirations and ambitions, we had better at once abolish our Universities and close our Colleges, for they will only serve to turn out year by year in ever-increasing numbers men who must inevitably become the most dangerous and influential members of our rule.”9
Ripon’s fears would soon begin to be realized when in 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC)—a body of nationalists that would grow in importance and later include Gandhi—held its first meeting in Bombay (today, Mumbai). While the Congress founders who assembled then were not quite the radicals Ripon had described, they did raise their voices against the status quo, they were as influential as Ripon had predicted, and they had, courtesy of Ripon’s empire, Western educations.
A small number of Western-educated elites dominated Indian intellectual life at the time of the 1885 meeting. Having been educated in British or British-influenced institutions, they gravitated toward employment in the service of the Raj or in the professions. The leadership of the INC, dominated as it was by lawyers trained in Britain, was a microcosm of this development. As a result of their education, they identified with the empire.
The demands that emerged from the first Congress meeting were predictably modest. When early Congress members sought greater Indian involvement in government, the government they had in mind was the colonial government, not that of an independent India. They considered themselves loyal sons of the empire who were simply asking for their rights as family members—a theme we will see Gandhi repeatedly articulate in South Africa as he argued for the rights of the clients and countrymen he was careful to call not Indians, but British Indians.
A favorite activity of the early nationalists was petitioning, an approach that rested on a belief in British fair play and equal justice. In his early South African days, we will see Gandhi often file petitions with South Africa’s colonial governments—petitions that demonstrated a faith no less naïve than that of his nationalist counterparts in India. The similarity was not superficial. Gandhi and India’s moderate nationalists shared a common understanding of the nature and role of the petition as polite, respectful, relatively restrained. Petitions fit neatly into the reigning paradigm: more Indian control of Indian affairs, yes, but within the imperial system.
This paradigm did not go unchallenged. Eventually a fissure opened in the nationalist movement, with moderates on one side and those known as “extremists” on the other. Dissatisfied with the slow approach of the moderates, the extremists engaged with the moderates in a struggle for supremacy during the early twentieth century. The strength of the movement for independence was so weakened by this internecine struggle that it opened a path for Gandhi to make his move into the leadership of the nationalist movement.
But first there was a year of relative silence while Gandhi, newly arrived in India, educated himself by traveling about the subcontinent. As he did so, he had time to reflect on his experience with nonviolence in South Africa, where his form of opposition to the government was originally called passive resistance—principally a refusal to obey the law based on conscience. Because Gandhi did not believe this term adequately captured the spirit of his movement, he held a contest to rename it. His cousin suggested sadagraha—“firmness in a good cause.” Gandhi reacted in this wise: “I liked the word, but it did not fully represent the whole idea I wished it to connote. I therefore corrected it to ‘Satyagraha.’ Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement ‘Satyagraha,’ that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance.’”10
When Gandhi did enter into Indian politics and began to acquire a more robust national profile, it was, paradoxically, at the local level, where he conducted three attention-getting satyagraha campaigns. These early experiences—some of them involving civil disobedience—were the start of a process that caused Gandhi to become a national figure.
The journey to national prominence, however, would not be easy. Having lived abroad almost continuously since he was eighteen, Gandhi had no easy familiarity with India, its people, or its problems. In South Africa, for example, very little was made of a long-standing Indian problem: Hindu-Muslim discord. The South African Indian community, strangers together in a foreign land, was unified. In fact, Gandhi, a Hindu, conducted a very successful commercial law practice representing almost exclusively Muslim traders in South Africa. Indians, displaced from their native land, overlooked their differences and clung to each other.
On their home soil in India there was no similar motivation for unity. Conflict was the norm. Attempting to vault into the leadership of a movement deeply fractured by these differences was immensely difficult—and Gandhi clearly saw it that way. His response to this reality was to seek out issues, such as the Caliphate movement in the 1920s—that he could use to unite the two
