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PROLOGUE: AN UNWELCOME VISITOR

 

IT WAS A BRIEF only a briefless lawyer might have accepted. Mohandas Gandhi landed in South Africa as an untested, unknown twenty-three-year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay, where his effort to launch a legal career had been stalled for more than a year. His stay in the country was expected to be temporary, a year at most. Instead, a full twenty-one years elapsed before he made his final departure on July 14, 1914. By then, he was forty-four, a seasoned politician and negotiator, recently leader of a mass movement, author of a doctrine for such struggles, a pithy and prolific political pamphleteer, and more—a self-taught evangelist on matters spiritual, nutritional, even medical. That’s to say, he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow.

None of that was part of the original job description. His only mission at the outset was to assist in a bitter civil suit between two Muslim trading firms with roots of their own in Porbandar, the small port on the Arabian Sea, in the northwest corner of today’s India, where he was born. All the young lawyer brought to the case were his fluency in English and Gujarati, his first language, and his recent legal training at the Inner Temple in London; his lowly task was to function as an interpreter, culturally as well as linguistically, between the merchant who engaged him and the merchant’s English attorney.

Up to this point there was no evidence of his ever having had a spontaneous political thought. During three years in London—and the nearly two years of trying to find his feet in India that followed—his causes were dietary and religious: vegetarianism and the mystical cult known as Theosophy, which claimed to have absorbed the wisdom of the East, in particular of Hinduism, about which Gandhi, looking for footholds on a foreign shore, had more curiosity then than scriptural knowledge himself. Never a mystic, he found fellowship in London with other seekers on what amounted, metaphorically speaking, to a small weedy fringe, which he took to be common ground between two cultures.

South Africa, by contrast, challenged him from the start to explain what he thought he was doing there in his brown skin. Or, more precisely, in his brown skin, natty frock coat, striped pants, and black turban, flattened in the style of his native Kathiawad region, which he wore into a magistrate’s court in Durban on May 23, 1893, the day after his arrival. The magistrate took the headgear as a sign of disrespect and ordered the unknown lawyer to remove it; instead, Gandhi stalked out of the courtroom. The small confrontation was written up the next day in The Natal Advertiser in a sardonic little article titled “An Unwelcome Visitor.” Gandhi immediately shot off a letter to the newspaper, the first of dozens he’d write to deflect or deflate white sentiments. “Just as it is a mark of respect amongst Europeans to take off their hats,” he wrote, an Indian shows respect by keeping his head covered. “In England, on attending drawing-room meetings and evening parties, Indians always keep the head-dress, and the English ladies and gentlemen seem to appreciate the regard which we show thereby.”

The letter saw print on what was only the fourth day the young nonentity had been in the land. It’s noteworthy because it comes nearly two weeks before a jarring experience of racial insult, on a train heading inland from the coast, that’s generally held to have fired his spirit of resistance. The letter to the Advertiser would seem to demonstrate that Gandhi’s spirit didn’t need igniting; its undertone of teasing, of playful jousting, would turn out to be characteristic. Yet it’s the train incident that’s certified as transformative not only in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi or Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha but in Gandhi’s own Autobiography, written three decades after the event.

If it wasn’t character forming, it must have been character arousing (or deepening) to be ejected, as Gandhi was at Pietermaritzburg, from a first-class compartment because a white passenger objected to having to share the space with a “coolie.” What’s regularly underplayed in the countless renditions of the train incident is the fact that the agitated young lawyer eventually got his way. The next morning he fired off telegrams to the general manager of the railway and his sponsor in Durban. He raised enough of a commotion that he finally was allowed to reboard the same train from the same station the next night under the protection of the stationmaster, occupying a first-class berth.

The rail line didn’t run all the way to Johannesburg in those days, so he had to complete the final leg of the trip by stagecoach. Again he fell into a clash that was overtly racial. Gandhi, who’d refrained from making a fuss about being seated outside on the coach box next to the driver, was dragged down at a rest stop by a white crewman who wanted the seat for himself. When he resisted, the crewman called him a “sammy”—a derisive South African epithet for Indians (derived from “swami,” it’s said)—and started thumping him. In Gandhi’s retelling, his protests had the surprising effect of rousing sympathetic white passengers to intervene on his behalf. He manages to keep his seat and, when the coach stops for the night, shoots off a letter to the local supervisor of the stagecoach company, who then makes sure that the young foreigner is seated inside for the final stage of the journey.

All the newcomer’s almost instantaneous retorts in letters and telegrams tell us that young Mohan, as he would have been called, brought his instinct for resistance (what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called his “eternal negative”) with him to South Africa. Its alien environment would prove a perfect place for that instinct to flourish. In what was still largely a frontier society, the will to white domination had yet to produce a settled racial order. (It never would, in fact, though the attempt would be systematically made.) Gandhi would not have to seek conflict; it would find him.

In these bumpy first days in a new land, Mohan Gandhi comes across on first encounters as a wiry, engaging figure, soft-spoken but not at all reticent. His English is on its way to becoming impeccable, and he’s as well dressed in a British manner as most whites he meets. He can stand his ground, but he’s not assertive or restless in the sense of seeming unsettled. Later he would portray himself as having been shy at this stage in his life, but in fact he consistently demonstrates a poise that may have been a matter of heritage: he’s the son and grandson of diwans, occupants of the top civil position in the courts of the tiny princely states that proliferated in the part of Gujarat where he grew up. A diwan was a cross between a chief minister and an estate manager. Gandhi’s father evidently failed to dip into his rajah’s coffers for his own benefit and remained a man of modest means. But he had status, dignity, and assurance to bequeath. These attributes in combination with his brown skin and his credentials as a London-trained barrister are enough to mark the son as unusual in that time and place in South Africa: for some, at least, a sympathetic, arresting figure.

He’s susceptible to moral appeals and ameliorative doctrines but not particularly curious about his new surroundings or the tangle of moral issues that are as much part of the new land as its hardy flora. He has left a wife and two sons behind in India and has yet to import the string of nephews and cousins who’d later follow him to South Africa, so he’s very much on his own. Because he failed to establish himself as a lawyer in Bombay, his temporary commission represents his entire livelihood and that of his family, so he can reasonably be assumed to be on the lookout for ways to jump-start a career. He wants his life to matter, but he’s not sure where or how; in that sense, like most twenty-three-year-olds, he’s vulnerable and unfinished. He’s looking for something—a career, a sanctified way of life, preferably both—on which to fasten. You can’t easily tell from the autobiography he’d dash off in weekly installments more than three decades later, but at this stage he’s more the unsung hero of an East-West bildungsroman than the Mahatma in waiting he portrays who experiences few doubts or deviations after his first weeks in London before he turned twenty. The Gandhi who landed in South Africa doesn’t seem a likely recipient of the spiritual honorific—“Mahatma” means “Great Soul”—that the poet Rabindranath Tagore affixed to his name years later, four years after his return to India. His transformation or self-invention—a process that’s as much inward as outward—takes years, but once it’s under way, he’s never again static or predictable.

Toward the end of his life, when he could no longer command the movement he’d led in India, Gandhi found words in a Tagore song to express his abiding sense of his own singularity: “I believe in walking alone. I came alone in this world, I have walked alone in the valley of the shadow of death, and I shall quit alone, when the time comes.” He wouldn’t have put it quite so starkly when he landed in South Africa, but he felt himself to be walking alone in a way he could hardly have imagined had he remained in the cocoon of his Indian extended family.

He’d have other racial encounters of varying degrees of nastiness as he settled into a rough-and-ready South Africa where whites wrote the rules: in Johannesburg, the manager of the Grand National Hotel would look him over and only then discover there were no free rooms; in Pretoria, where there was actually a bylaw reserving sidewalks for the exclusive use of whites, a policeman on guard in front of President Paul Kruger’s house would threaten to cuff the strolling newcomer into the road for transgressing on the pavement; a white barber there would refuse to cut his hair; in Durban the law society would object to his being registered as an advocate, a status hitherto reserved for whites; he would be denied admission to a worship service at an Anglican church.

It would take a full century for such practices to grind to a halt, for white minority rule finally to reach its inevitable and well-deserved end in South Africa. Now new monuments to Gandhi are scattered about the land, reflecting the heroic role attributed to him in the country’s rewritten history. I saw such monuments not only at the Phoenix Settlement but in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Ladysmith, and Dundee. Nearly always it was the elderly figure Winston Churchill scorned as “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir … striding half-naked” who was portrayed, not the tailored South African lawyer. (Probably that was because most of these statues and busts had been shipped from India, supplied by its government.) In Johannesburg, however, in a large urban space renamed Gandhi Square—formerly it bore the name of an Afrikaner bureaucrat—the South African Gandhi is shown in mufti, striding in the direction of the site of the now-demolished law court where he appeared both as attorney and as prisoner, his bronze lawyer’s robe fluttering over a bronze Western suit. Gandhi Square is just around the corner from his old law office at the corner of Rissik and Anderson streets, where he received visitors under a tinctured image of Jesus Christ. The vegetarian restaurant, steps away, where he first encountered his closest white friends is long gone; hard by the place where it stood, perhaps exactly on the spot, a McDonald’s now does a fairly brisk nonvegetarian trade. But it’s not entirely far-fetched for the new South Africa to claim Gandhi as its own, even if he failed to foresee it for most of his time in the country. In finding his feet there, he formed the persona he would inhabit in India in the final thirty-three years of his life, when he set an example that colonized peoples across the globe, including South Africans, would find inspiring.

One of the new Gandhi memorials sits on a platform of the handsome old railway station in Pietermaritzburg—Maritzburg for short—close to the spot where the newcomer detrained, under a corrugated iron roof trimmed with what appears to be the original Victorian filigree. The plaque says his ejection from the train “changed the course” of Gandhi’s life. “He took up the fight against racial oppression,” it proclaims. “His active non-violence started from that day.”

That’s an inspirational paraphrase of Gandhi’s Autobiography, but it’s squishy as history. Gandhi claims in the Autobiography to have called a meeting on arrival in Pretoria to rally local Indians and inspire them to face up to the racial situation. If he did, little came of it. In that first year, he had yet to assume a mantle of leadership; he was not even seen as a resident, just a junior lawyer imported from Bombay on temporary assignment. His undemanding legal work left him with time on his hands, which he devoted more to religion than to politics; in this new environment, he became an even more serious and eclectic spiritual seeker than he’d been in London. This was a matter of chance as well as inclination. The attorney he was supposed to assist turned out to be an evangelical Christian with a more intense interest in Gandhi’s soul than in the commercial case on which they were supposed to be working. Gandhi spent much of his time in a prolonged engagement with white evangelicals who found in him a likely convert. He even attended daily prayer meetings, which regularly included prayers that the light would shine for him.

He told his new friends, all whites, that he was spiritually uncommitted but nearly always denied thereafter that he’d ever seriously contemplated conversion. However, according to the scholar who has made the closest study of Gandhi’s involvement with missionaries, it took him two years to resolve the question in his own mind. On one occasion Gandhi acknowledged as much to Millie Polak, the wife of a British lawyer who was part of his inner circle for his last ten years in South Africa. “I did once seriously think of embracing Christianity,” she quoted him as having said. “I was tremendously attracted to Christianity, but eventually I came to the conclusion that there was nothing really in your scriptures that we had not got in ours, and that to be a good Hindu also meant I would be a good Christian.”

Late in 1894 we find this free-floating, ecumenical novice flirting, or so it sometimes seemed, with several religious sects at once, writing to The Natal Mercury on behalf of a movement called the Esoteric Christian Union, a synthesizing school of belief, as he explained it, that sought to reconcile all religions by showing that each represents the same eternal truths. (It’s a theme Gandhi would repeat at prayer meetings in the last years and months of his life, more than a half century later, where the spirit was so all-embracing that “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” had its place among chanted Hindu and Muslim prayers.) In an advertisement for a selection of tracts meant to accompany a letter to the editor he wrote in 1894, he identified himself proudly as an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.”

Judging from his autobiographical writings, it seems possible, even likely, that Gandhi spent more time in Pretoria with his evangelical well-wishers than with his Muslim patrons. In any case, these were his two circles, and they didn’t overlap, nor did they represent any kind of microcosm of the country South Africa was fast becoming. By necessity as much as choice, he would remain an outsider. The abrasiveness of some of his early confrontations with whites made it obvious that searching for footholds in this new land could bring him into conflict. To stake a claim for ordinary citizenship was to cross a boundary into politics. Within two months after settling in Pretoria, Gandhi was busy writing letters on political themes to the English-language papers, putting himself forward but, as yet, representing only himself.

On September 5, scarcely three months after he arrived in the country, the Transvaal Advertiser carried the first of these, a longish screed that already has implicit in it political arguments Gandhi would later advance as a spokesman for the community. Here he was responding to the use of the word “coolie” as an epithet commonly attached to all brown-skinned immigrants from British India. He doesn’t mind it being applied to contract laborers, impoverished Indians transported en masse under contracts of indenture, or servitude, usually to cut sugarcane. Starting in 1860, it was the way most Indians had come to the country, part of a human traffic, a step up from slavery, that also carried Indians by the tens of thousands to Mauritius, Fiji, and the West Indies. The word “coolie,” after all, appears to have been derived from a peasant group in India’s western regions, the Kolis, with a reputation for lawlessness and enough group cohesion to win recognition as a subcaste. But, Gandhi argues, former indentured laborers who don’t make the return trip home to India at the end of their contracts but stay on to stand on their own feet, as well as Indian traders who had initially paid their own passage, shouldn’t be denigrated that way. “It is clear that Indian is the most proper word for both the classes,” he writes. “No Indian is a coolie by birth.”

This is not a proposition that would have come easily to him had he remained in India. The alien environment, it’s fair to speculate, had stirred in him the impulse to stand outside the community and explain. Implicit in this—the first nationalist declaration of his life—is a class distinction. He speaks for Indians here but not for coolies. Between the lines he seems to be saying that the best that can be said for them is that their status isn’t necessarily permanent. Nowhere in the letter does he comment on the harsh terms of their servitude.

He concedes that coolies may sometimes be disorderly, may even steal. He knows but doesn’t make a point of saying that most of those he has now agreed to call coolies are of lower-caste backgrounds. If anything, caste is a subject he avoids. He doesn’t say that coolies are fundamentally different from other Indians. They can become good citizens when their contracts end. For now, however, their poverty and desperation do not conspicuously engage his sympathies. Temporarily, at least, he doesn’t identify with them.

The South Africa confronted by young Mohan was counted as four different states or territories by its white inhabitants and the Colonial Office in London. (There was also Zululand, which was under British supervision and had yet to be fully merged into Natal, the self-governing territory that surrounded it. In the view of whites, settlers and colonial officials alike, the subcontinent’s surviving African kingdoms existed only on sufferance, remote from the main paths of commerce, with nothing approaching sovereign status.) The states that were deemed to count were those with white governments. The two coastal territories were British crown colonies: the Cape, at the very tip of Africa, where whites first settled in the seventeenth century and where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet; and Natal, on the continent’s verdant east coast. Inland were two landlocked, quasi-independent Boer (meaning Afrikaner) republics, the Orange Free State and what was called the South African Republic, a culturally introverted frontier settlement in the territory known as the Transvaal. That republic, created as a Zion for an indigenous white population of trekboers, farmers of mainly Dutch and Huguenot descent who had fled British rule in its two colonies, had been all but overwhelmed by a recent influx of mostly British aliens (called Uitlanders in the simplified Dutch dialect that was just beginning to be recognized as a language in its own right, henceforth known as Afrikaans). For it was in the Transvaal, beyond formal British control but temptingly within its reach, that the world’s richest gold-bearing reef had been discovered in 1886, only seven years before the fledgling Indian barrister inauspiciously disembarked at Durban.

The South Africa from which Gandhi sailed all those years later had become something more than a geographic designation for a random collection of colonies, kingdoms, and republics. It was now a single sovereign state, a colony no longer, calling itself the Union of South Africa. And it was firmly under indigenous white control, with the result that a lawyerly spokesman for a nonwhite immigrant community, which was what Gandhi had become, could no longer expect to get anywhere by addressing petitions or leading missions to Whitehall. To this great political transformation he’d been little more than a bystander. But it had the effect of sweeping his best argument for equal Indian rights off the table. Originally, Gandhi had based his case on his own idealistic reading of an 1858 proclamation by Queen Victoria that formally extended British sovereignty over India, promising its inhabitants the same protections and privileges as all her subjects. He called it “the Magna Charta of the Indians,” quoting a passage in which her distant majesty had proclaimed her wish that her Indian subjects, “of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service.” It was Gandhi’s argument that those rights should attach themselves to “British Indians” who traveled from their homeland to outposts of the empire such as the British-ruled portions of South Africa. That wasn’t quite what the queen’s advisers had in mind, but it was an awkward argument to have to work around. In the new South Africa, which came into existence in 1910, it counted for nothing. To achieve less and less, Gandhi found in the course of two decades, his tactics had to become more and more confrontational.

This transformation and practically everything South African that coincided with his earliest political activities were ultimately traceable to gold and all that the new mines brought in their train—high finance, industrial strife, and the twentieth century’s first major experience of a type of warfare that could be classed as an anticolonial or a counterinsurgency struggle, even though the combatants on both sides were mainly whites. This was the Anglo-Boer War, which seared its brutal course across South Africa’s mostly treeless grasslands and hillsides from 1899 to 1902. It took an army of 450,000 (including thousands, British and Indian, brought across the Indian Ocean under British command from the Raj) to finally subdue the Boer commandos, militia units that never numbered as many as 75,000 at any given time. About 47,000 soldiers perished on the two sides; in addition, nearly 40,000—mainly Afrikaner children and women but also their black farmhands and servants—died of dysentery and infectious diseases like measles in segregated stockades where they’d been massed as the army forcibly cleared the countryside. Coining a functional, antiseptic term for these open-air reservoirs of misery, the British called them concentration camps.

Gandhi briefly played a bit part. The man who would emerge within the next two decades as the modern era’s best-known champion of nonviolence saw action himself in the early stages of the war as a uniformed noncommissioned officer, leading for about six weeks a corps of some eleven hundred noncombatant Indian stretcher bearers. Then thirty and already recognized as a spokesman for Natal’s small but growing Indian community—amounting at that time to scarcely 100,000 but soon to outnumber the colony’s whites—Gandhi went to war to score a parochial point with the colony’s white leaders: that Indians, whatever the color of their skins, saw themselves and should be seen as full citizens of the British Empire, ready to shoulder its obligations and deserving of whatever rights it had to bestow.

Once the British got the upper hand in Natal and the war moved inland, the Indian stretcher bearers disbanded, ending the war for Gandhi. His point had been made, but in no time at all it was brushed aside by the whites he’d hoped to impress. Natal’s racial elite persisted in enacting new laws to restrict property rights for Indians and banish from the voters’ rolls the few hundred who’d managed to have their names inscribed there. The Transvaal could be said to have shown the way. In 1885, claiming sovereignty as the South African Republic, it had passed a law putting basic citizenship rights off limits to Indians; that was eight years before Gandhi landed in its capital, Pretoria.

At first he allowed himself to imagine that the hard-wrung British victory, uniting the two colonies and Boer republics under imperial rule, could only benefit “British Indians.” What happened was the opposite of what he imagined. Within eight years, a national government had been formed, led by defeated Boer generals who won at the negotiating table most of their important war aims, accepting something less than full sovereignty in foreign affairs in exchange for a virtual guarantee that whites alone would chart the new Union of South Africa’s political and racial future. Some “natives” and other nonwhites protested. Gandhi, still looking to strike a tolerable bargain for Indians, was silent except for a few terse asides in the pages of Indian Opinion, the weekly paper that had been his megaphone since 1903, his instrument for sounding themes, binding the community together. His few comments in its pages on the new structure of government showed he wasn’t blind to what was actually happening. Generally speaking, however, it was as if none of this larger South African context and all it portended—the blatant attempt to postpone indefinitely any thought, any possibility, of an eventual settlement with the country’s black majority—had the slightest relevance to his cause, had been allowed to impinge on his consciousness. In the many thousands of words he wrote and uttered in South Africa, only a few hundred reflect awareness of an impending racial conflict or concern about its outcome.

Yet if the forty-four-year-old Gandhi who later sailed from Cape Town to Southampton on the eve of a world war seemed deliberately oblivious of the transformation of the country in which he’d passed nearly all his adult life up to that point, there was probably no single individual in it who’d changed more than he had. The novice lawyer had established a flourishing legal practice, first in Durban and then, after a quickly aborted attempt to move back to India, in Johannesburg. In the process, he’d moved his family from India to South Africa, then back to India, then back to South Africa, then finally to the Phoenix Settlement outside Durban, which he’d established on an ethic of rural self-sufficiency adapted from his reading of Tolstoy and Ruskin. Their teachings, as interpreted by him, were then translated into a litany of vows for an austere, vegetarian, sexually abstemious, prayerful, back-to-the-earth, self-sustaining way of life. Later, all but abandoning his wife and sons at Phoenix, Gandhi stayed on in Johannesburg for a period that stretched to more than six years.

By the time of his departure from South Africa, he’d spent only nine of twenty-one years in the same household with his wife and family. By his own revised standards, he could no longer be expected to put his family ahead of the wider community. Instead of concentrating on Phoenix, he started a second communal settlement called Tolstoy Farm in 1910, on the bare side of a rocky koppie, or hill, southwest of Johannesburg, all the while carrying on his unending campaign to fend off the barrage of anti-Indian laws and regulations that South Africa at every level of government—local, provincial, and national—continued to fire at his people. What inspired these restrictions was an unreasoning but not altogether ungrounded fear of a huge transfer of population, a siphoning of masses, across the Indian Ocean from one subcontinent to the other, under the sponsorship of an empire that could be deemed to have an interest in easing population pressures that made India hard to govern.

Sage, spokesman, pamphleteer, petitioner, agitator, seer, pilgrim, dietitian, nurse, and scold—Gandhi tirelessly inhabited each of these roles until they blended into a recognizable whole. His continuous self-invention ran in parallel with his unofficial position as leader of the community. At first he spoke only for the mainly Muslim business interests that had hired him, the tiny upper crust of a struggling immigrant community; at least one of his patrons, a land and property owner named Dawad Mahomed, employed indentured laborers, presumably on the same exploitative terms as their white masters. Gandhi himself belonged to a Hindu trading subcaste, the Modh Banias, a prosperous group but only one of numerous Bania, or merchant, subcastes that have been counted in India. The Modh Banias still discouraged and sometimes forbade—as he himself had discovered when he first traveled to London—journeys across the kala pani, or black water, to foreign shores where members of the caste could fall into the snares of dietary and sexual temptation. That’s why there were still few fellow Banias on this side of the Indian Ocean. It also helps explain the early predominance of Muslims among the Gujarati merchants who ventured to South Africa. So it was that the first political speeches of Gandhi’s life were given in South African mosques, a fact of huge and obvious relevance to his unwavering refusal, later in India, to countenance communal differences. One of the high points of Gandhi’s South African epic occurred outside the Hamidia Mosque in Fordsburg, a neighborhood at the edge of downtown Johannesburg where Indians settled. There, on August 16, 1908, more than three thousand Indians gathered to hear him speak and burn their permits to reside in the Transvaal in a big cauldron, a nonviolent protest against the latest racial law restricting further Indian immigration. (Half a century later, in the apartheid era, black nationalists launched a similar form of resistance, setting fire to their passes—internal passports they were required to carry. Historians have searched the documentary record for evidence that the Gandhian example inspired them. So far, the record has been silent.) Today in the new South Africa, in a Fordsburg once proclaimed “white” under apartheid, the refurbished mosque gleams in a setting of overall dinginess and decay. Outside, an iron sculpture in the form of a cauldron sitting on a tripod commemorates Gandhi’s protest.

Such symbols resonate not only with later South African struggles but also with Gandhi’s campaigns in India. When Johannesburg Muslims wanted to send humble greetings to a new Ottoman emperor in what was still Constantinople, they relied on their Hindu mouthpiece to compose the letter and convey it through the proper diplomatic channels in London. Later, in the aftermath of a world war in which the Ottoman Empire had allied itself with the losing side, Gandhi rallied Indian Muslims to the national cause by proclaiming the preservation of the emperor’s role as caliph and protector of the Muslim holy places to be one of the most pressing aims of the Indian national struggle. On one level, this was a sensitive reading of the emotional tides sweeping through the Muslim community; on another, a breathtaking piece of political opportunism. Either way, it would never have occurred to a Hindu politician who lacked Gandhi’s experience of trying to bind together a small and diverse overseas community of Indians that was inclined to pull apart.

If the Johannesburg Gandhi could speak comfortably for Muslims, he could speak for all Indians, he concluded. “We are not and ought not to be Tamils or Calcutta men, Mahomedans or Hindus, Brahmans or Banias but simply and solely British Indians,” he lectured his people, seeking from the start to overcome their evident divisions. In India, he observed in 1906, the colonial masters exploited Hindu-Muslim, regional, and language differences. “Here in South Africa,” he said, “these groups are small in number. We are all confronted with the same disabilities. We are moreover free from certain restrictions from which our people suffer in India. We can therefore easily essay an experiment in achieving unity.” Several years later, he would claim prematurely that the holy grail of unity had been won: “The Hindu-Mahomedan problem has been solved in South Africa. We realize that the one cannot do without the other.”

In other words, what Indians in South Africa had accomplished could now be presented as a successful demonstration project, as a model for India. For an upstart situated obscurely on another continent, far beyond the farthest border of British India, it was an audacious, even grandiose claim. At first, it made no discernible impression outside the actual halls in which it was voiced; later, it would be one of his major themes when he succeeded in making himself dominant in the national movement in India. For a brief time then, Muslim support would make the difference between victory for Gandhi and a position in the second tier of leaders; it would guarantee his ascendance in India.

But that was probably still beyond Gandhi’s own imagining. Events would soon show that the ideal of unity wasn’t so easily clinched in South Africa, either. Hindu and Muslim revivalists arrived from India with messages that tended to polarize the two communities and undercut Gandhi’s insistence on unity. By sheer force of personality, he managed to smooth over rifts in his final months in the country—a temporary fix that allowed him to claim with pardonable exaggeration, as he would for years to come, that his South African unity demonstration was an achievement for India to copy. It was also, of course, his own offshore tryout, his great rehearsal.

Gandhi’s really big idea—initially it was termed “passive resistance”—came in 1906 with a call for defiance of a new piece of anti-Indian legislation in the Transvaal called the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. Gandhi lambasted it as the “Black Act.” It required Indians—only Indians—to register in the Transvaal, where their numbers were still relatively minuscule, under ten thousand: to apply, in other words, for rights of residence they thought they already possessed as “British Indians,” British law having been imposed on the territory as a consequence of the recently concluded war. Under this discriminatory act, registration would involve fingerprinting—all ten fingers—of every man, woman, and child over the age of eight. Thereafter certificates had to be available for checking by the police, who were authorized to go into any residence for that purpose. “I saw nothing in it except hatred of Indians,” Gandhi later wrote. Calling on the community to resist, he said the law was “designed to strike at the very root of our existence in South Africa.” And, of course, that was exactly the case.

The resistance he had in mind was refusing to register under the law. He said as much at a packed meeting in the Empire Theater in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906 (an earlier 9/11, with a significance quite the contrary of the one we know). The all-male crowd probably numbered fewer than the figure of three thousand that has been sanctified by careless repetition; the Empire—which burned down that same night, hours after the Indians had dispersed—couldn’t have held that many. Gandhi spoke in Gujarati and Hindi; translators repeated what he said in Tamil and Telugu for the sake of the South Indian contingent. The next speaker was a Muslim trader named Hadji Habib, who hailed, like Gandhi, from Porbandar. He said he would take an oath before God never to submit to the new law.

 

Burning registration certificates at the mosque (photo credit i1.1)

 

The lawyer in Gandhi was “at once startled and put on my guard,” he would say, by this nonnegotiable position, which on its face didn’t seem all that different from the one he had just taken himself. The spiritual seeker that he also was couldn’t think of such a vow as mere politics. The whole subject of vows, their weight and worth, was at the front of his consciousness. During the previous month, Gandhi himself had taken a vow of brahmacharya, meaning that this father of four sons pledged to be celibate for the rest of his days (as he had presumably been, after all, during all the years of separation from his wife in London and South Africa). He’d discussed his vow with some of his associates at Phoenix but not yet publicly. He’d simply announced it to his wife, Kasturba, assuming it called for no sacrifice on her part. In his mind, he was dedicating himself to a life of meditation and poverty like an Indian sannyasi, or holy man, who has renounced all worldly ties, only Gandhi gives the concept an unorthodox twist; he will remain in the world to be of service to his people. “To give one’s life in service to one’s fellow human beings,” he’d later say, “is as good a thing as living in a cave.” Now, in his view, Hadji Habib had suddenly gone beyond him, putting the vow to defy the registration act on the same plane. So it wasn’t a matter of tactics or even conscience; it had become a sacred duty.

Speaking for a second time that evening in the Empire, Gandhi warned that they might go to jail, face hard labor, “be flogged by rude warders,” lose all their property, get deported. “Opulent today,” he said, “we might be reduced to abject poverty tomorrow.” He himself would keep the pledge, he promised, “even if everyone else flinched leaving me alone to face the music.” For each of them, he said, it would be a “pledge even unto death, no matter what others do.” Here Gandhi hits a note of fervor that to the ear of a secular Westerner sounds religious, almost born-again. Unsympathetic British officials would later portray him as a fanatic in dispatches to Whitehall; one of his leading academic biographers comes close to endorsing that view. But Gandhi was not speaking that night to an audience of secular Westerners. It’s also unlikely that Hadji Habib or the overwhelming majority of his audience had any inkling of his distinctly Hindu vow of brahmacharya. The idea of civil disobedience was original with neither man. It had lately been tried by suffragettes in London. The idea that it might call for chastity was Gandhi’s alone.

In his own mind, his two vows were now bound together, almost inextricable. Gandhi held to a traditional Hindu idea that a man is weakened by any loss of semen—a view aspiring boxers and their trainers are sometimes said to share—and so for him his vows, from the outset, were all about discipline, about strength. “A man who deliberately and intelligently takes a pledge and then breaks it,” he said that night in the Empire Theater, “forfeits his manhood.” Such a man, he went on, “becomes a man of straw.” Years later, upon learning that his son Harilal’s wife was pregnant again, Gandhi chided him for giving in to “this weakening passion.” If he learned to overcome it, the father promised, “you will have new strength.” Later still, when he’d become the established leader of the Indian national movement, he’d write that sex leads to a “criminal waste of the vital fluid” and “an equally criminal waste of precious energy” that ought to be transmuted into “the highest form of energy for the benefit of society.”

After a while, he sought an Indian term to replace “passive resistance.” He didn’t like the adjective “passive,” which seemed to connote weakness. Indian Opinion held a contest. A nephew suggested sadagraha, meaning “firmness in the cause.” Gandhi, by then accustomed to having the last word, changed it to satyagraha, normally translated as “truth force” or sometimes, more literally, as “firmness in truth,” or “clinging to truth.” To stand for truth was to stand for justice, and to do so nonviolently, offering a form of resistance that would eventually move even the oppressor to see that his position depended on the opposite, on untruth and force. Thereafter the movement had a name, a tactic, and a doctrine. These too he would bring home.

Gandhi kept changing, experiencing a new epiphany every two years or so—Phoenix (1904), brahmacharya (1906), satyagraha (1908), Tolstoy Farm (1910)—each representing a milestone on the path he was blazing for himself. South Africa had become a laboratory for what he’d later call, in the subtitle of his Autobiography, “My Experiments with Truth,” an opaque phrase that suggests to me that the subject being tested was himself, the pursuer of “truth.” The family man gives up family; the lawyer gives up the practice of law. Gandhi would eventually take on garb similar to that of a wandering Hindu holy man, a sadhu off on his own lonely pilgrimage, but he would always be the opposite of a dropout. In his own mind, his simple handwoven loincloth was a signal not of sanctity but of his feeling for the plight of India’s poor. “I did not suggest,” he would later write, “that I could identify myself with the poor by merely wearing one garment. But I do say that even that little thing is something.” Of course he was aware, politician that he was, that it could be read in more than one way. His idea of a life of service also meant staying in the world and having a cause, usually several at a time.

The householder takes to the land and settles on a farm. “Our ambition,” one of his colleagues explains, “is to live the life of the poorest people.” He was a political man, but he was surprisingly free in Africa, as he would not have been in India, to go his own way. Family and communal ties, less binding in the new environment, had to be reinvented anyway; he had room to “experiment.” And, of course, there were no offices to seek. Whites had them all.

It’s not easy to pinpoint the moment in South Africa when the ambitious, transplanted barrister becomes recognizable as the Gandhi who would be called Mahatma. But it had happened by 1908, fifteen years after his arrival in the land. Still called bhai, or brother, he sat that year for a series of interviews by his first biographer, a white Baptist preacher in Johannesburg named Joseph Doke who, not incidentally, still harbored the ambition of converting his subject. It doesn’t demean Doke’s well-written tract to call it hagiography, for that’s distinctly its genre. Its main character is defined by saintly qualities. “Our Indian friend lives on a higher plane than most men do,” Doke writes. Other Indians “wonder at him, grow angry at his strange unselfishness.” It also doesn’t demean Doke to note that Gandhi himself took over the marketing of the book. He bought up the entire first edition in London in order, he said with false modesty, to save Doke from “a fiasco” but actually to have volumes to distribute to members of Parliament and ship to India; later he arranged for publication of an Indian edition by his friend G. A. Natesan, a Madras editor; and every week for years to come he ran house ads in Indian Opinion inviting mail orders. In Gandhi’s hands, Doke’s book becomes a campaign biography for a campaign as yet unlaunched.

He’s still wearing a necktie and a Western suit in the group portrait for which a garlanded Gandhi and Kasturba posed on the docks in Cape Town on their last day in the country, but if you look closely, there’s what may be a tiny foreshadowing in his shaved head and the handcrafted sandals on his feet of a sartorial makeover he’d already experimented with on several occasions and that he’d display on his arrival in Bombay six months later and then adapt over the following six years until he had reduced his garb to the utter, literally bare simplicity of the homespun loincloth and shawl. In the Bombay arrival pictures, suit and tie have been banished for good; he wears a turban, the loose-fitting tunic called a kurta on top of what appears to be a lungi, or wraparound skirt. The lungi would soon be replaced by a dhoti, a wide enveloping loincloth, which in later years, in its most abbreviated form, would sometimes be all he wore. He wanted, he would teasingly say in rejoinder to Churchill’s gibe, to be “as naked as possible.”

Viewed as if in a digitally manipulated tracking shot over time, Gandhi the South African lawyer who goes through these changes seamlessly morphs into the future Indian Mahatma. In this long view, an extraordinary, heroic story unfolds: Within the brief span of five and a half years after landing in his vast home country, though still largely unknown to the broad population that hasn’t yet had a taste of modern politics, he takes over the Indian National Congress—up to then a usually sedate debating club embodying the aspirations of a small Anglicized elite, mostly lawyers—and turns it into the century’s first anticolonial mass movement, raising a clamor in favor of a relatively unfamiliar idea, that of an independent India. Against all the obstacles of illiteracy and an absolute dearth of modern communications reaching down to the 700,000 villages where most Indians lived in the period before partition, he wins broad acceptance, at least for a time, as the authentic exemplar of national renewal and unity.

That outcome, of course, was not foreordained. If the earlier frames are frozen and the South African Gandhi is viewed up close, as he might easily have been seen a year or two before the end of his African sojourn, it’s not a mahatma who comes into focus; it’s a former lawyer, political spokesman, and utopian seeker. In this view, Gandhi shows up as a singularly impressive character. But in the political realm, he’s nothing more than a local leader with a weakening hold on a small immigrant community, facing an array of adherents, critics, and rivals. In such a perspective, if we had to guess, it would seem likeliest that his trajectory would end in a smallish settlement or ashram, a transplanted Phoenix, lost somewhere in the vastness of India; there he’d be surrounded by family and followers engaged with him on a quest as much religious as political. In other words, instead of ending up on pedestals in India as Father of the Nation, the leading figure in a mistily viewed national epic and subject for legions of biographers, scholars, and thinkers who have made him perhaps the most written-about person of the last hundred years, the South African Gandhi could have become another Indian guru whose scattered devotees might have remembered him for a generation or two at best. In South Africa itself he might even have been remembered as a failure rather than held up for reverence, as he is there today, in the fading glow of the advent of democratic, supposedly nonracial government, as one of the founding fathers of the new South Africa.

In fact, the South African Gandhi was explicitly written off as a failure a little more than a year before he left the country by the irascible editor of a weekly newspaper in Durban that competed—sometimes respectfully, sometimes spitefully—with Gandhi’s Indian Opinion for Indian readers. African Chronicle was aimed mainly at readers of Tamil origin, among whom Gandhi found most of his staunchest supporters. “Mr. Gandhi’s ephemeral fame and popularity in India and elsewhere rest on no glorious achievement for his countrymen, but on a series of failures, which has resulted in causing endless misery, loss of wealth, and deprivation of existing rights,” fumed P. S. Aiyar in a series of scattershot attacks. His leadership over twenty years had “resulted in no tangible good to anyone.” He and his associates had made themselves “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa.”

There was some basis for Aiyar’s tirade. Gandhi’s support had been dwindling for some time; the nonviolent army of Indians willing to step forward yet again and volunteer for the “self-suffering” that came with service as willing satyagrahis—offering themselves as fodder, that is, for his campaigns of civil disobedience against unjust racial laws, by courting arrest, going to jail, thereby losing jobs, seeing businesses fail—had visibly shrunk to the point that it hardly exceeded his own family and a band of loyal Tamil supporters in Johannesburg, members of what was called the Tamil Benefit Society. The campaigns had pushed the government into compromises, but these fell many leagues short of the aspirations of the more emboldened Indians for rights of full citizenship; and the authorities had repeatedly stalled and reneged on the meager promises they’d made.

For all that, 1913 was to prove a turning point. Gandhi’s experience over two decades in Africa is replete with turning points in his inner life, but this is the one in his public life, in the political sphere, that best explains his subsequent readiness and ability to reach for national leadership in India. He might have faded into semi-oblivion if he’d returned to India in 1912. His final ten months in South Africa, though, transformed his sense of what was possible for him and those he led.

It was only then that he allowed himself to engage directly with the “coolies” he’d described twenty years earlier in his first letter to a newspaper in Pretoria. These were the most oppressed Indians working on sugar plantations, in the coal mines, and on the railroad under renewable five-year contracts of indenture that gave them rights and privileges only slightly less flimsy than those of chattel. A colonial officer with the title “Protector of Immigrants” had a statutory duty to make sure that these “semi-slaves,” as Gandhi termed them, were not overworked or underfed in violation of the letter of their labor contracts. But the records show that the putative protector more commonly served as an enforcer on behalf of plantation owners and other contract holders. Under the indenture system, it was a crime for a laborer to leave his place of employment without authorization: not only could he lose his job; he could be clapped in jail and even flogged. Yet, for a spell of only several weeks in November 1913, in a collective spasm of resentment and hope, what had been unthinkable happened: thousands of these indentured Indians walked off the mines, plantations, and railroad to follow Gandhi in the greatest and last of his campaigns of nonviolent resistance in South Africa.

For their leader it was a sudden and radical change in tactics, a calculated risk: in part a result of events accelerating out of his control, transforming and renewing his own sense of his constituency, his sense of who it was he actually represented, for whom it was he actually spoke. If Gandhi had gone home at the start of that year as he’d originally hoped, it’s questionable whether he would ever have been able to conceive of, let alone effect, such a mass mobilization. Instead, he returned to India in 1915 with an experience no other Indian leader had yet known.

He hadn’t seen it coming. In June 1913 he outlined his expectations for this final struggle in a letter to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the statesmanlike and moderate Indian leader whom he’d taken as a mentor years before and to whom he was now hoping to apprentice himself on his return. Gokhale had just visited South Africa, where he’d been hailed by whites as well as Indians as a tribune of the empire. “So far as I can judge at present 100 men and 30 women will start the struggle,” Gandhi wrote. “As time goes on, we may have more.” (Reminiscing, many years later, he would remark that the number with whom he actually started was only 16.) As late as October 1913, Indian Opinion flatly declared: “The indentured Indians will not be invited to join the general struggle.”

Then, just two days after the date on that issue, Gandhi showed up in the coal-mining town of Newcastle in northern Natal to address indentured laborers who’d already started to leave the mines. He had shaved his head, and for the first time at a political event in South Africa the former lawyer dressed in Indian garb, showing his allegiance to the laborers by donning their attire.

It was a bold, dangerous and momentous step,” Indian Opinion commented a week later. “Such concerted action had not been tried before with men who are more or less ignorant. But with passive resistance nothing is too dangerous or too bold so long as it involves suffering by themselves and so long as in their methods they do not use physical force.” This sounds like a passage Gandhi himself may have dictated in the full flush of the movement. The condescending reference to the ignorance of the strikers is a consistent Gandhian note. Later, back in India, he would regularly speak of the “dumb millions” in summoning the national movement to work for the poorest of the poor, or, on an occasion when he contemplated with some irony the scope of his influence, of “the numberless men and women who have childlike faith in my wisdom.” On this South African test run for satyagraha as a form of mass mobilization, the hint of concern that the dumb and childlike could lapse into violence foreshadows the Gandhi who would write, after his first call for a national movement of noncooperation with British rule in India ended in a spasm of arson and killing, “I know that the only thing that the Government dreads is the huge majority I seem to command. They little know that I dread it more than they.”

Of course, in South Africa, he didn’t command a majority. Here the huge majority was black. In his fixation on winning for Indians what he deemed to be their rights as citizens of the British Empire, he never posed the question about how or when that majority could be mobilized. Considering what a leap of faith it was for him to call out even Indian indentured laborers in Natal in 1913, it’s clear that mass mobilization would remain for him a dangerous political weapon, tempting but risky. He would try it on a national scale in India on only a roughly decennial basis—in 1921, 1930, and 1942—as if he and the country required years to recuperate in each case. Yet this time in South Africa—because he desperately needed reinforcements on the front line of nonviolent resistance at a moment when his support among his people had dwindled, because his most devoted followers whom he’d trained for disciplined resistance wanted him to seize the opportunity—the Mahatma-to-be found the political steel, the will, to grasp the weapon. He was fighting for his people but also for his own political survival. The prospect of returning to India as the retiring head of an exhausted and defeated movement had little appeal; it may even have been a goad to action. Not to have seized the moment would have been to acknowledge the possibility that he might fade from the scene. “The poor have no fears,” he later wrote wonderingly, looking back on the wildfire of strikes that spread across Natal after he and his comrades lit the fuse. It was an important discovery.

What had he known of the indentured laborers? Maureen Swan, author of a pioneering study that filled in and thereby demythologized the received narrative of Gandhi’s time in South Africa, notes significantly that he’d never previously tried to organize the indentured, that he’d waited until 1913 before addressing the grievances of “the Natal underclasses.” The received narrative, of course, was Gandhi’s own, based on the reminiscences he later set down in India; there they were serialized on a weekly basis, in the newspaper published from his ashram, as parables or lessons in satyagraha, until eventually they could be collected as autobiography. The scholar Swan speaks and works in the language of class. Her social analysis doesn’t touch on the categories by which Indians who came to South Africa were accustomed to viewing themselves. I mean those of region and caste or—to be a little more specific without plunging into a maze of overlapping but not synonymous social categories—jati and subcaste, the groupings by which poor Indians would commonly identify themselves. That her “underclasses” were heavily lower caste was not relevant to her argument. But it may have some relevance to the way Gandhi saw them, for he’d come, by his own peculiar route, early in his time in South Africa, to a position of moral outrage on the injustice of caste discrimination by Indians, against so-called untouchables especially.

Gandhi’s ideas of social equality kept evolving during his time in South Africa and later, after he confronted the turbulent Indian scene. He’d struggled for the legal equality of Indians and whites. This had led him, inevitably, to the issue of equality between Indian and Indian. He crossed the caste boundary before he crossed the class boundary, but all these categories would eventually blur and come to be overlaid on one another in his mind so that years later, in 1927, it would seem natural to him to refer back to his South Africa struggle when campaigning in India against untouchability: “I believe implicitly that all men are born equal … I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch, and it is because of that inherent belief that I delight in calling myself a scavenger, a spinner, a weaver, a farmer and a laborer.” Here he echoes his half-jesting suggestion to his biographer Doke, twenty years earlier in Johannesburg, that the first study of his life could be titled “A Scavenger.” On another occasion, he’d say that “uplift of Harijans”—a term meaning “children of God” he tried to popularize for untouchables—first struck him as an idea and a mission in South Africa. “The idea did occur to me in South Africa and in the South African setting,” he told his faithful secretary Mahadev Desai. If he was referring to his political life—to actions he took in the world and not simply to values he’d come to hold inwardly—there’s little in all Gandhi’s South African experience besides the 1913 campaign that could stand as a basis for the assertion.

Talk of scavengers and other untouchables is not the vocabulary of class struggle used by a revolutionary like Mao Zedong. But it’s radical in its own terms—its own Indian terms—and makes the link between the struggles he later waged in India against untouchability and the strikes of indentured laborers he found himself leading, despite obvious misgivings, in 1913 in the coal-mining district of northern Natal.

Long before he thought of deploying the indentured in his struggle, Gandhi was alive to their oppression. When he made it a cause, he didn’t make explicit the connection, the overlap, between the indentured and the untouchables. Still, he had to be aware of it. It was a subject generally to be avoided, but all Indians in South Africa knew it was lurking in their new world. They had mostly come to South Africa as indentured laborers, or were descended from indentured laborers. And most indentured laborers were low caste; the proportion of those deemed to be untouchable seems certain to have been significantly higher in South Africa than in India, where it was estimated, at the time, to be about 12 percent nationally, as high as 20 percent in some regions. One of the appeals for the indenture system made by recruiters who canvassed for volunteers in South India and on the Gangetic plain had been that it could lighten the load carried by oppressed laborers held to be outcastes. Crossing an ocean, even on a contract of indenture, made it easier to change one’s name, religion, or occupation: in effect, to pass. Even if these remained unchanged, caste could be expected to recede as a touchstone and social imperative in the new country. Yet it was there. Because Gandhi himself was liberated on caste issues, he could finally conceive of leading indentured laborers, just as it came easily for him to conceive of Hindus and Muslims, Tamils and Gujaratis, as one people in the setting of an immigrant community where they were all thrown together as they seldom were in India.

At this point in South Africa, the political Gandhi and the religious Gandhi merge, not for the first or last time. At the end of his life, just before India’s independence and in its aftermath, a heartsick Mahatma would verge on seeing himself as a failure. He saw Hindus and Muslims caught up in a paroxysm of mutual slaughter, what we later learned to call “ethnic cleansing.” Untouchables were still untouchable in the villages, where they mostly dwelled; the commitment to liberate them as part of the achievement of freedom, which he’d tried to instill among Hindus, seemed to have become a matter for lip service, whatever new laws proclaimed. No individual, no matter how inspiring or saintly, could have accomplished the wholesale renewal of India in only two generations, the time that had passed since Gandhi had started to conceive it as his mission while still in South Africa. It was there, Gandhi later wrote in his summing-up, Satyagraha in South Africa, that he’d “realized my vocation in life.”

Those who depend on what he called “truth force” were “strangers to disappointment and defeat,” he claimed in that book’s last line. Yet here he was, at the end of his days, expressing chronic disappointment and, sometimes, a sense of defeat. He’d had more to do with India’s independence than any other individual—in declaring the goal and making it seem attainable, in convincing the nation that it was a nation—but he was not among those who celebrated that day. Instead, he fasted. The celebrations were, he said, “a sorry affair.”

In our own time, the word “tragedy” inevitably gets tagged to any disastrous event. A highway pileup or a killer tornado that claims lives, a shooting binge in a post office or an act of terrorism—all will promptly be labeled “tragic” on the evening news as if tragedy were simply a synonym for calamity or baleful fate. Naipaul once wrote that Indians lack a tragic sense; he didn’t specifically mention Gandhi in that connection, but probably, if asked, he would have. Yet in the deeper meaning of the word—connecting it to character and inescapable mortality rather than chance—there’s a tragic element in Gandhi’s life, not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world. In that sense, the play was already being written when he boarded the steamship in Cape Town in 1914.

The saint has left our shores, I sincerely hope forever,” wrote his leading South African antagonist and occasional negotiating foil, Jan Christian Smuts, then the defense minister. An “unwelcome visitor” at the beginning of his long sojourn, a “saint” at the end but obviously still unwelcome, it wasn’t easy to say what Gandhi had accomplished beyond his remarkable self-creation and the example he’d set. A top British official worried that he might have shown South Africa’s blacks “that they have an instrument in their hands—this is, combination and passive resistance—of which they had not previously thought.” It would be years before that hypothesis would be seriously tested.

But for Gandhi himself, South Africa had been more than an overture. Between his arrival and his departure, he’d acquired some ideas to which he was committed, others that he’d only begun to try out. Satyagraha as a means of active struggle to achieve a national goal belonged to the first category; satyagraha involving the poorest of the poor fit the second. These were what he carried in his otherwise meager baggage when, finally, he came out of Africa.

Another conceivable variation on this theme—struggle not only involving the poorest but specifically for their benefit—never quite materialized in South Africa. It would prove even harder to conceive of in the circumstances of the India to which he returned.

To understand how Gandhi’s time in South Africa set him on his brilliantly original, ultimately problematic course, we need to delve deeper into some of the episodes that made up this long tryout, to see how his experiences there shaped his convictions, how those convictions shaped a sense of mission and of himself that was close to fully formed by the time he headed home for good.