Indian History Quiz: Gandhi in South Africa and the Early Satyagrahas: Champaran, Kheda and Ahmedabad

Gandhi left for South Africa in 1893 to appear for Dada Abdullah and Company, a Gujarati merchant firm of Durban, in a commercial dispute, and the one year engagement stretched into a stay of twenty-one years.

The Natal Indian Congress, founded in 1894, was the first political organisation of Indians in South Africa and it was created to oppose a bill that sought to take away the right of Indians to vote in Natal.

Gandhi started the weekly Indian Opinion in 1903 in South Africa, and it was printed at the Phoenix Settlement in English and Gujarati, carrying the arguments of the Indian community against discriminatory laws.

Tolstoy Farm was founded in 1910 near Johannesburg on land given by Hermann Kallenbach, a German-born architect and close friend of Gandhi, and it housed the families of satyagrahis who had gone to jail, training them in manual labour and self-discipline.

Gandhi read John Ruskin's Unto This Last on a train journey in South Africa in 1904, and the idea that the good of the individual lies in the good of all led him at once to found the Phoenix Settlement near Durban; he later rendered the book into Gujarati under…

Gandhi landed at Bombay on 9 January 1915, and the Government of India now observes that date as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas to mark the contribution of the overseas Indian community.

Raj Kumar Shukla was a cultivator of Champaran who met Gandhi at the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916 and followed him from place to place until Gandhi agreed to come and see the condition of the indigo tenants for himself.

Under the tinkathia system a tenant of Champaran had to grow indigo on three kathas out of every twenty kathas of his land for the European planter, and the crop had to be sold at a price the planter fixed.

The strike of 1918 arose when the cotton mill owners of Ahmedabad withdrew the plague bonus they had been paying their workers.

Vallabhbhai Patel, then a successful barrister of Ahmedabad, gave up his practice to work with Gandhi in the villages of Kheda in 1918, and the campaign began the partnership that later produced the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928, after which he received the title Sardar.

The government appointed an enquiry committee on the Champaran question with Gandhi as one of its members, and the recommendations of that committee were given effect by the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, which abolished the tinkathia obligation and ordered the planters to refund a part of the illegal exactions…