The Night on the Platform
Gandhi trained in law at the Inner Temple in London and was called to the bar at 22. Then came two uncertain years back in India, where he was unable to start a successful law practice.
In 1893 he took work in South Africa, representing an Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He would stay for the next 21 years.
What he found there was routine humiliation. He was told to sit on the floor near the driver and beaten when he refused. He was kicked into a gutter for walking near a house. And at Pietermaritzburg he was thrown off a train for refusing to leave the first-class carriage he had paid for.
He sat in the station that night, shivering, working out whether to return to India or stay and fight for his rights. He chose to protest, and was allowed onto the train the next day. Everything that followed grew out of that decision.
Insistence on Truth
Gandhi's method has a name, and it is more precise than the English phrase usually given for it.
He called his movement satyagraha, from Satya, meaning truth. He translated it as "appeal to, insistence on, or reliance on the Truth". It is not merely passive resistance, and it is not only non-violence. It is a claim that the truth of your position is itself the instrument.
He first put it into practice in South Africa, in a campaign for civil rights. Its first formulation as a political principle came in 1920, tabled as a "Resolution on Non-cooperation" before a session of the Indian Congress.
The roots run through Hindu Upanishadic texts, with scholars also pointing to Jainism and Buddhism for related ideas about non-violence, vegetarianism and universal love. The honorific Mahatma, Sanskrit for great-souled, was first applied to him in 1914 while he was still in South Africa.
Two Hundred and Fifty Miles for Salt
Gandhi returned to India in 1915, aged 45, and began organising peasants, farmers and urban labourers against discrimination and excessive land tax. He assumed leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921.
His campaigns were broader than independence alone: easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and above all achieving swaraj, or self-rule.
He also understood symbols. He adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn to identify himself with India's rural poor, lived in a self-sufficient community, ate simply, and used long fasts for both reflection and political pressure.
The clearest example came in 1930, when he challenged the British salt tax with the Dandi Salt March, walking 400 kilometres to the sea. In 1942 he called for the British to quit India. He was imprisoned many times, and for many years, in both South Africa and India.
The Independence He Would Not Celebrate
Gandhi's vision of an independent India rested on religious pluralism, and in the early 1940s that vision was challenged by a Muslim nationalism demanding a separate homeland.
In August 1947 Britain granted independence, but partitioned British India into two dominions: a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. As displaced Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs travelled to their new countries, religious violence broke out, particularly in Punjab and Bengal.
Gandhi did not attend the official independence celebrations. He went instead to the affected areas, trying to reduce the suffering, and undertook several hunger strikes in the following months to stop the violence. The last began in Delhi on 12 January 1948, when he was 78.
His insistence on defending both Pakistan and Indian Muslims angered some Hindus, and on 30 January 1948 he was assassinated at an interfaith prayer meeting in Delhi. His birthday, 2 October, is a national holiday in India.
