He passed his Roman law examination in March and passed the Bar finals in January Before leaving for London, Gandhi had promised his mother not to eat meat. He found it difficult at first but soon discovered vegetarian restaurants and joined the London Vegetarian Society.
He often wrote for their journal the Vegetarian and became a member of the Executive Committee on 19 September Gandhi had also come into contact with the Theosophical Society in , and was introduced to Annie Besant before he left London on 12 June He lived in India until when he left for South Africa to practice law.
It was here he raised his family, established himself as a lawyer and then a political activist fighting the discrimination of Asians in Africa. By , he had emerged as the spokesman of Indians in Natal and Transvaal and in October that year he was once again in London to speak on behalf of the Indian community. Imperial politics brought Gandhi to London again in July However, what concerned Gandhi the most this time was the status of highly educated Indians.
On his voyage back to South Africa, he wrote his powerful book Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule , in which he wrote about his increasing discontent with the West, the power of non-violence and the vision of self-rule. Between and , Gandhi received several invitations to return to India, but before doing so he visited London again in August , two days after the outbreak of the First World War.
The purpose of his trip was to visit his friend and mentor G. Gokhale but he had already left for Paris. With Gokhale gone, Gandhi met the poetess Sarojini Naidu instead. On 8 August, a reception was held for him at the Hotel Cecil. Coomaraswamy , Amir Ali and J.
From Gandhi became highly politically active in India. It was his belief in satyagraha that made him the leader of the nationalist movement against the Raj. By he had become integral to Indian national life and the sole representative of the Indian National Congress at the second Round Table Conference Gandhi was in prison during the first Conference in He described the compartments as filthy, crowded and uncomfortable, and compared them unfavourably with third-class carriages abroad.
It was train travel that made Gandhi aware of the travails of ordinary citizens. Gandhi continued to mobilize Indians to agitate against discriminatory policies and laws, and enrolled in the Transvaal Supreme Court as an attorney in He also launched Indian Opinion, a weekly paper, to spread the message of civil rights.
The paper highlighted the poor conditions under which indentured labourers worked. Though he sympathized with the Dutch, he backed Britain. He believed that if Indians demanded rights as British citizens, it was also their duty to participate in the defence of the Empire. It was this reasoning that made him volunteer the services of Indians during the World Wars as well.
The influential Parsi backer who opened up purse and home, and then kept on giving. Rustomjee Jivanji Gorkoodhoo, or Parsee Rustomjee, was a prominent businessman and a supporter of Gandhi. In , Rustomjee helped collect 10, signatures for a petition against the bill to deprive Indians of their vote. Income from trusts he set up continued to fund Indian schools in South Africa as well as famine relief and other causes Gandhi took up after his return to India in From the early s till he returned to India for good, Gandhi faced off against Jan Smuts, the then colonial secretary.
In , while travelling from London to South Africa, Gandhi wrote in one sitting Hind Swaraj—a manifesto for self rule that was especially critical of Western civilisation, modern education, international trade, and the role of the railways in enslaving populations. The British banned it as seditious.
Many years later, he explained that his comments in Hind Swaraj related to imperialism and exploitation and the role the railways had played in it. Among the first satyagrahis between and in South Africa were C.
Thambi Naidoo and his family—including his wife Veerammal, their seven children and his mother-in-law. He was a cartage contractor and the owner of a fodder store, but jail time left him in penury. The family eventually moved to Tolstoy Farm, where he was in charge of sanitation and Veerammal was the cook. He continued on the path of passive resistance until his death in In London and South Africa, Gandhi was fastidious about how he dressed. In Volksrust prison in , he sewed the caps black prisoners wore—what we know today as the Gandhi cap—and took to wearing it.
In , he adopted the clothes Tamil indentured labourers, whose interests he represented, wore. Once back in India, he went back to wearing Gujarati clothes, but in adopted the loincloth and shawl.
Clothes, for Gandhi, were also a tool of political strategy. On 15 October , Gandhi, Kasturba and 15 others left the Phoenix settlement for the Natal border with Transvaal, with 3, workers joining them en route.
Police beat up, detained and killed many but they pressed on, making world headlines and forcing the government to look into their demands. A wealthy architect, Hermann Kallenbach owned the 1,acre Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi launched his first satyagraha in Influenced by Gandhi, he became a vegetarian and participated in experiments in cooperative living, diet and politics.
He went on to become a Zionist—politics that they disagreed on—but the respect remained. He visited Gandhi at Sevagram before moving to Israel, where he died in She drew much praise from Gandhi, his clients and fellow satyagrahis. She kept track of donations, edited Indian Opinion, visited satyagrahis in prison and was one of the trustees of Phoenix Settlement.
After Gandhi left South Africa, she went back to university, and in , became a high school Latin teacher—a position she held for 23 years. She died in Gandhi finally left South Africa after more than 20 years, and arrived in India in January , having been delayed by the outbreak of war in Europe.
They had reached India before him and were staying at Santiniketan. Be it dealing with Smuts in South Africa, the Kheda and Champaran satyagrahas, leading the Dandi March or a fast to secure the rights of mill workers, Gandhi knew how to yield before people were spent by hardship and the patience of the authorities wore thin. In Kheda, he gave in when he saw farmers wavering and a landowner presented a compromise.
After experiments at Tolstoy Farm and Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, he set up his first Indian ashram in Kochrab in May , where he settled followers who had come with him to India.
However, the plague broke out two years later and the ashram was shifted to Sabarmati, from where he led the Dandi March in In , he moved to Wardha, set up Sevagram, and made it his headquarters. In Bihar, Gandhi and a team of volunteers that included Acharya J.
Kripalani and Maulana Mazharul Haque, opened primary schools in six villages. It was also among his early experiences of coming face to face with dire poverty.
Tell Mahatmaji to get me another one and I shall bathe and put on clean clothes everyday. A close friend of both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, C. Over time, he came to identify closely with the problems of Indians around the world, became a critic of imperialism, and wrote prolifically on the problems faced by Indian indentured labourers. He died in in Kolkata.
After returning to India in January , Gandhi and Kasturba spent close to a year taking the train around India and Burma, third-class all the way, as he wanted to reacquaint himself with people. The two had differences of opinion—Birla being a pragmatic businessman and Gandhi an avowed dissenter—but were close and Birla played the role of an unofficial emissary between Gandhi and the British.
Birla supported Gandhi for over three decades, and was the founding president of the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Gandhi addressed a meeting in a mill in Bombay and lit a massive bonfire of foreign-made cloth. But what was to be a peaceful meeting ended in riots with 59 dead. In , Gandhi was arrested in India for the first time for sedition over three articles he wrote in Young India, and was released in At the Belgaum Congress session, he was elected party president and served for a year.
Under him, civil disobedience intensified, he led the boycott of the Simon Commission, demanded restitution for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and an apology for the Khilafat movement. He agreed little realizing that this one month would grow into twenty years.
Gandhi immediately turned the farewell dinner into a meeting and an action committee was formed. This committee then drafted a petition to the Natal Legislative Assembly. Volunteers came forward to make copies of the petition and to collect signatures - all during the night. The petition received much favourable publicity in the press the following morning. The bill was however passed. Within a month the mammoth petition with ten thousand signatures was sent to Lord Ripon and a thousand copies printed for distribution.
Even The Times admitted the justice of the Indian claim and for the first time the people in India came to know of the oppressive lot of their compatriots in South Africa.
He therefore enrolled as an advocate of the Supreme Court of Natal. On 25 June , at the residence of Sheth Abdulla, with Sheth Haji Muhammad, the foremost Indian leader of Natal in the chair, a meeting of Indians was held and it was resolved to offer opposition to the Franchise Bill.
Here Gandhi outlined his plan of action to oppose this bill. Gandhi played a prominent role in the planned campaign. As a talented letter-writer and meticulous planner, he was assigned the task of compiling all petitions, arranging meetings with politicians and addressing letters to newspapers. He was instrumental in the formation of the Natal Indian Congress NIC on 22 August , which marked the birth of the first permanent political organisation to strive to maintain and protect the rights of Indians in South Africa.
By Gandhi had established himself as a political leader in South Africa. In this year, he undertook a journey to India to launch a protest campaign on behalf of Indians in South Africa. It took the form of letters written to newspapers, interviews with leading nationalist leaders and a number of public meetings.
His mission caused great uproar in India and consternation among British authorities in England and Natal. Gandhi embarrassed the British Government enough to cause it to block the Franchise Bill in an unprecedented move, which resulted in anti-Indian feelings in Natal reaching dangerous new levels. While in India, an urgent telegram from the Indian community in Natal obliged him to cut short his stay.
He set sail for Durban with his wife and children on 30 November Gandhi did not realize that while he had been away from South Africa, his pamphlet of Indian grievances, known as the Green Pamphlet, had been exaggerated and distorted.
When the ship reached Durban harbour, it was for held for 23 days in quarantine. News of this cowardly assault received wide publicity and Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of States for the Colonies, cabled an order to Natal to prosecute all those who were responsible for the attempted lynching. However, Gandhi refused to identify and prosecute his assailants, saying that they were misled and that he was sure that when they came to know the truth they would be sorry for what they had done.
Previously he was anxious to maintain the standard of an English barrister. Now he began, to methodically reduce his wants and his expenses. He began to do his own laundry and clean out his own chamber-pots but often his guests as well. Not satisfied with self-help, he volunteered, despite his busy practice as a lawyer and demand of public work, his free service for two hours a day at a charitable hospital.
He also undertook the education at home of his two sons and a nephew. He read books on nursing and midwifery and in fact served as midwife when his fourth and last son was born in Natal. He organized and, with the help of a Dr. Booth, trained an Indian Ambulance Corps of 1, volunteers and offered its services to the Government.
In , at the end of the war, Gandhi wanted to return to India. With great difficulty he persuaded his friends to let him go and promised to return should the community need him within a year. He reached India in time to attend the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and had the satisfaction of seeing his resolution on South Africa pass with acclamation. He was however disappointed with the congress. He felt that Indian politicians talked too much but did little.
Hardly had he set up in practice in Bombay when a cablegram from the Indian community in Natal recalled him. He had given them his word that he would return if needed.
Leaving his family in India he sailed again. But the Colonial Secretary who had come to receive a gift of thirty-five million pounds from South Africa had no intention to alienate the European community. He therefore decided to stay on in Johannesburg and enrolled as an advocate of the Supreme Court. Though he stayed on specifically to challenge White arrogance and to resist injustice, he harboured no hatred in his heart and was in fact always ready to help when they were in distress.
It was this rare combination of readiness to resist wrong and capacity to love his opponent which baffled his enemies and compelled their admiration. When the Zulu rebellion broke out, he again offered his help to the Government and raised an Indian Ambulance Corps. He was happy that he and his men had to nurse the sick and dying Zulus whom the White doctors and nurses were unwilling to touch.
The movement was to prevent proposed evictions of Indians in the Transvaal under British leadership. According to Arthur Lawley, the newly appointed Lieutenant Governor Lord Alfred Milner said that Whites were to be protected against Indians in what he called a 'struggle between East and West for the inheritance of the semi-vacant territories of South Africa'. Influenced by the Hindu religious book, the Bhagvad Gita, Gandhi wanted to purify his life by following the concepts of aparigraha non-possession and samabhava equability.
The book inspired Gandhi to establish a communal living community called Phoenix Settlement just outside of Durban in June The Settlement was an experiment in communal living, a way to eliminate one's needless possessions and to live in a society with full equality. Gandhi moved his newspaper, the Indian Opinion , established in June and its workers to the Phoenix Settlement as well as his own family a bit later. Besides a building for the press, each community member was allotted three acres of land on which to build a dwelling made of corrugated iron.
In addition to farming, all members of the community were to be trained and expected to help with the newspaper. In , believing that family life was taking away from his full potential as a public advocate, Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya a vow of abstinence against sexual relations, even with one's own wife. This was not an easy vow for him to follow, but one that he worked diligently to keep for the rest of his life.
Thinking that one passion fed others, Gandhi decided to restrict his diet in order to remove passion from his palette. To aid him in this endeavour, Gandhi simplified his diet from strict vegetarianism to foods that were unspiced and usually uncooked, with fruits and nuts being a large portion of his food choices.
Fasting, he believed, would also help still the urges of the flesh. Gandhi believed that his taking the vow of brahmacharya had allowed him the focus to come up with the concept of Satyagraha in late In the very simplest sense, Satyagraha is passive resistance.
However, Gandhi believed the English phrase of "passive resistance" did not represent the true spirit of Indian resistance since passive resistance was often thought to be used by the weak and was a tactic that could potentially be conducted in anger. Needing a new term for the Indian resistance, Gandhi chose the term "satyagraha," which literally means "truth force.
Truth, in this manner, could mean "natural right," a right granted by nature and the universe that should not be impeded on by man. In practice, Satyagraha was a focused and forceful nonviolent resistance to a particular injustice. A Satyagrahi a person using Satyagraha would resist the injustice by refusing to follow an unjust law. In doing so, he would not be angry, would put up freely with physical assaults to his person and the confiscation of his property, and would not use foul language to smear his opponent.
A practitioner of Satyagraha also would never take advantage of an opponent's problems. The goal was not for there to be a winner and loser of the battle, but rather, that all would eventually see and understand the "truth" and agree to rescind the unjust law.
On 28 December the first arrests of Indians refusing to register were made, and by the end of January , Asians had been jailed. Gandhi had also been jailed several times, but many key figures in the movement fled the colony rather than be arrested. In March , the Black Act was passed, requiring all Indians - young and old, men and women - to get fingerprinted and to keep registration documents on them at all times. Gandhi advised the Indian community to refuse to submit to this indignity and to court imprisonment by defying the law.
Indians refused to get fingerprinted and picketed the documentation offices. Mass protests were organised, miners went on strike, and masses of Indians travelled, illegally, from Natal to the Transvaal in opposition to the Black Act. Many of the protesters were beaten and arrested.
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