HE STOOD a little over 1.5m tall. He weighed barely 52kg. He wore just a pyjama pants-like dhoti and steel-rimmed glasses. He always carried his dentures with him, using them only for eating. And he was all arms and legs.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the world’s unlikeliest revolutionary, preaching a most unlikely message for a revolutionary: a message that said political power could be won through moral persuasion and peaceful resistance, rather than through the barrel of a gun.
On March 11, 1930, during India’s unstoppable journey to independence, Gandhi addressed his followers, driving home a message he had spoken about repeatedly: “I stress only one condition, namely, let our pledge of truth and non-violence as the only means for the attainment of swaraj (self-rule) be faithfully kept.
“I have faith in the righteousness of our cause and the purity of our weapons. Let no one commit a wrong in anger. This is my hope and prayer.”
It was a message Gandhi had perfected by adding his own ideas to the wisdom of others. He called it “satyagrahah” or, to give it its English translation, “truth force”.
On August 14, 1947, when 400 million Indians won their independence from Great Britain, the mightiest empire builder the world had ever known, Gandhi’s contribution was hailed by millions of his compatriots as immense.
And it was for this reason that British officialdom disliked him intensely.
And yet, Gandhi might never have become the revered figure he continues to be today had it not been for a decision – made almost out of desperation – to work in southern Africa.
Born in Porbander in the Western Indian state of Gujarat on October 2, 1869, Gandhi’s career had been mapped out for him from an early age: the plan was that he would become an administrative official like his father. To this end, he had been sent to London to study law.
There was a snag, however.
He did not have the ruthless streak so necessary for lawyers to be able to argue their cases successfully. He was far too timid. Indeed, during his first case, he became so tongue-tied that he could not even finish his cross-examination.
And so, after settling into a humdrum position of preparing legal papers in Gujarat, he was offered a position as a lawyer for a group of Indian traders, Dada Abdullah and Company, in Durban, in the then British colony of Natal.
An offer of a first-class ticket and £105 a year proved irresistible, especially given the fact that he had been a professional failure in India.
Gandhi arrived in Durban in May 1893 and was immediately shocked by the lack of respect shown to Indians in his new home.
The first sign of things to come was on the second or third day after his arrival, when he visited the Durban Magistrate’s Court to acquaint himself with its legal procedures. Within minutes of his arrival, the magistrate ordered him to remove his turban.
Rather than comply, he walked out.
And things hardly got any better. In the court, he became known as “the coolie barrister”, while the people he represented were called "coolie merchants”.
Even more shocks lay ahead for him.
About a week after his arrival, he was booked into a first-class railway coach for a trip to Pretoria. When a white passenger objected to his presence, he was ordered to move to the “van” of the train. He refused to move, which led to him being removed from the train.
As he sat in the waiting room of the station in the freezing cold of a Maritzburg winter, he thought briefly about returning to India.
But the stubborn streak, for which he would become known in later years, had already taken root. He decided to stay and fight for his rights whenever they were threatened.
When Gandhi arrived in southern Africa, tens of thousands of Indians had already made the journey to Natal.
Most had come as indentured labourers, cutting sugar cane for white farmers, in conditions bordering on slavery. In fact, they were seen quite simply as implements of labour, with the paperwork for their journey to south-east Africa identifying them merely as “Coolie” plus a number, for example, “Coolie Number 1” or “Coolie Number 51”.
By the start of the 1900s, there were 50 000 Indians in Natal alone, as many as the white population of the colony.
The whites, for whom they worked or came into contact with, treated them with contempt, referring to them as “coolies” or “Asiatics”, a lesser race, the lowest of the low.
Prejudice against Indians was codified in a network of laws, which contravened Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 that had guaranteed the various populations of the British Empire freedom from religious or racial discrimination. In Natal, Indians were not allowed to vote, to enter the country and travel within it to do business and to choose where to live.
These instances of discrimination moved Gandhi to write: “I saw South Africa was no place for a self-respecting Indian.”
Nevertheless, Gandhi built a thriving legal practice known for its high ethical standards in Durban.
He was also quickly drawn into the legal struggles of his compatriots – as a leader.
In Natal, he headed the fight against the Natal government’s attempts through the Franchise Amendment Bill to restrict the voting rights of Indians who already held the right to vote. A letter writer of considerable talent, and a meticulous planner, Gandhi became the key figure in a series of battles via lawsuits, petitions and the media to fight discriminatory laws.
He won some temporary victories, but the anti-Indian tide in Natal and Transvaal was proving to be unstoppable.
In 1905, the Transvaal government passed laws to curb Indian immigration and to make them carry passes. Gandhi was outraged. He began to realise that Indians needed to find new ways to protect their rights.
At a meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre in September 1906, Gandhi asked everyone to swear not to comply with the new law. When the laws came into effect, a Gandhi-inspired Passive Resistance Association began picketing at registration offices.
Other responses included a bonfire of registration cards, mass illegal crossings into the Transvaal and a miners’ strike.
Thousands were arrested and jailed – Gandhi three times. Finally, in 1914, the Transvaal government relented and withdrew the registration act, along with other statutes that Indians found offensive. Hindus and Muslims, merchants and miners had all joined a campaign behind Gandhi’s leadership, and by breaking unjust laws and going to prison, had forced change.
Gandhi read widely throughout the time he spent in southern Africa, merging his ideas with those of writer-philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, Leon Tolstoy. But it was the Jain philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra who greatly influenced his approach to religion and the “many sidedness of truth”.
“Religions are different roads converging to the same point,” Gandhi wrote in 1909. “What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal?”
Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, on January 30, 1948.