Gandhi in South Africa and the Early Satyagrahas

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi spent twenty-one years in South Africa before he became the central figure of the Indian national movement, and the method he is remembered for was worked out there, not in India. When he returned in 1915 he tested it in three local struggles within eighteen months, at Champaran in Bihar, at Ahmedabad in Gujarat and in the Kheda district of Gujarat. These three are called the early satyagrahas, and they are the bridge between the South African years and the mass movements of the 1920s. Examiners ask about them constantly, because each one has a clear date, a clear grievance, a clear set of associates and a clear result.

The years in South Africa, 1893 to 1914

Gandhi was born at Porbandar in Kathiawar on 2 October 1869, studied law in London and sailed for South Africa in 1893 as the lawyer of Dada Abdullah and Company, a Gujarati merchant firm of Durban. The journey from Durban to Pretoria gave him the experience he returned to all his life: he was thrown out of a first class railway compartment at Pietermaritzburg station in June 1893 because he was an Indian. He stayed on to fight the disabilities imposed on the Indian community, which ranged from a poll tax on ex-indentured labourers to the denial of the vote and compulsory registration.

In 1894 he founded the Natal Indian Congress, the first political organisation of Indians in South Africa, and in 1903 he started the weekly newspaper Indian Opinion, which carried the movement's arguments in English and Gujarati. He read John Ruskin's book Unto This Last on a train journey and was so moved by it that he translated it into Gujarati under the title Sarvodaya and, in 1904, set up the Phoenix Settlement near Durban as a community founded on manual labour and simple living. A second such community, Tolstoy Farm, was established in 1910 near Johannesburg on land given by his friend and architect Hermann Kallenbach, and it became the training ground of his volunteers.

The making of satyagraha

The method itself was announced at a mass meeting at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg on 11 September 1906, where Indians pledged to defy the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance of the Transvaal, known as the Black Act, which required every Indian to register and carry a certificate with fingerprints. Gandhi first called the movement passive resistance, then found the phrase unsatisfactory and, through a competition in Indian Opinion, settled on satyagraha, holding firmly to truth. A second great campaign followed in 1913 against the three pound tax on ex-indentured workers and a court ruling that treated non-Christian marriages as invalid; Gandhi led a march of thousands of workers from Newcastle across the Transvaal border and filled the jails. The struggle ended in the Gandhi–Smuts agreement and the Indians Relief Act of 1914, which abolished the three pound tax and recognised Indian marriages. Gandhi left South Africa in 1914 and reached Bombay on 9 January 1915, a day now observed as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas.

A year of listening, and the first ashram

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, whom Gandhi called his political guru, advised him to travel through India for a year and keep his mouth shut before taking any public position. Gandhi did exactly that, mostly by third class railway carriage, and in May 1915 founded the Satyagraha Ashram at Kochrab near Ahmedabad, moved in 1917 to the bank of the Sabarmati. The three struggles that followed were local, not national, and that was deliberate: he wanted to prove that satyagraha worked on Indian soil before he offered it to the Congress.

Champaran Satyagraha, 1917

In Champaran district of north Bihar, European planters forced tenants to grow indigo on three kathas of every twenty kathas of their holding, an obligation called the tinkathia system, and when synthetic dye destroyed the indigo market the planters extracted compensation through enhanced rents and lump sum payments. Raj Kumar Shukla, a cultivator of Champaran, followed Gandhi from the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916 until he agreed to come. Gandhi reached Champaran in April 1917, was served an order to leave the district, refused to obey it and offered to accept the penalty; the case was withdrawn and he was allowed to carry out his enquiry. Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Mahadev Desai and J. B. Kripalani worked with him. The government appointed an enquiry committee with Gandhi as a member, and its report led to the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, which abolished the tinkathia system. This was the first civil disobedience of the Indian national movement.

Ahmedabad Mill Strike, 1918

The dispute at Ahmedabad was between the cotton mill owners and their workers over the withdrawal of a plague bonus. Gandhi advised the workers to go on strike and to stay non-violent, and asked for a thirty-five per cent increase in wages. When the strike weakened he undertook a fast, the first of his fasts in India, and the matter went to a tribunal which awarded the workers the thirty-five per cent they had asked for. The mill owner Ambalal Sarabhai was a friend of Gandhi, and his sister Anasuya Sarabhai stood with the workers.

Kheda Satyagraha, 1918

In Kheda district of Gujarat the crop failed, and the revenue rules allowed a remission when the yield fell below a quarter of the normal, but the government refused to suspend collection. Gandhi asked the peasants to withhold revenue, and the campaign is counted as his first experiment in non-cooperation. Vallabhbhai Patel gave up his legal practice to join him here, and Indulal Yagnik, Narhari Parikh and Mohanlal Pandya worked in the villages. The government quietly instructed its officers to collect revenue only from those who could pay.

The three satyagrahas at a glance