Gandhi Before the Mass Movement: South Africa, Satyagraha and the Gandhian Creed

Introduction: The Gandhian Era and the Turn to Mass Nationalism

What the Gandhian Era Means

Why this matters: the years from about 1917 to 1947 are called the Gandhian Era because one figure reshaped the whole character of the national movement. Under Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, nationalism ceased to be the affair of an English-educated elite and became, for the first time, a genuine mass movement drawing in peasants, workers and women.

What is the significance of the Gandhian Era: it gave Indian nationalism both a mass base and a distinctive method, non-violent Satyagraha. Several features marked this new kind of nationalism, set out below, and together they explain why the period is named after the man rather than after a party or a place.

• A mass character: The movement reached far beyond the educated few into the villages.
• Non-violent method: Satyagraha replaced both petition and the bomb.
• Moral and spiritual idiom: Politics was fused with ethics and self-discipline.
• The constructive programme: Khadi, unity and social reform ran alongside agitation.
• Inclusive leadership: Women, peasants and the poor were drawn in as participants.

From the Moderates and Extremists to Mass Politics

Distinguishing the new phase from the old is essential. The earlier Congress, of the Moderates and then the Extremists, had built a national platform, an economic critique and the goal of Swaraj, but its reach was narrow: the Moderates petitioned, and even the Extremists mobilised mainly the urban educated classes.

Gandhi inherited this base and transformed it. Where the Moderates had trusted British justice and the Extremists had relied on the militant few, Gandhi offered a method by which ordinary people could act: a discipline of non-violent resistance that a peasant could practise as readily as a lawyer. The transition from the 1885 to 1916 phase to mass politics is the hinge on which this whole series turns.

Gandhi in South Africa: Discrimination, Awakening and the Birth of Satyagraha

Racial Discrimination and the Political Awakening

What is the significance of South Africa: it was there, not in India, that Gandhi became a political leader. Born at Porbandar on 2 October 1869 and trained as a barrister in London, he went to South Africa in 1893 on a legal brief and met a wall of racial discrimination against Indians. Being thrown off a first-class railway carriage at Pietermaritzburg in 1893 became the awakening of his political life.

Distinguishing features of his South African work were organisation and the press. He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 to fight discriminatory laws, edited the journal Indian Opinion, and drew on a remarkable set of influences, examined below, that shaped his emerging philosophy.

The Birth of Satyagraha: Phoenix, Tolstoy Farm and the First Campaigns

Observable outcomes of these years were both a method and the communities to practise it. Gandhi built the Phoenix Settlement near Durban in 1904, inspired by Ruskin, and later Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg in 1910, as experiments in simple, self-reliant communal living. It was in the campaign against the Transvaal registration law, the so-called Black Act, that he forged and named his method, Satyagraha, in 1906.

These campaigns of non-violent resistance, with their mass courting of arrest, were the rehearsal for everything that followed. When Gandhi finally returned to India in 1915, at the urging of his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, he brought with him a tested technique and a national reputation. The arc of these South African years is shown below.

The Core Principles of Gandhian Thought

Satyagraha and Ahimsa: Truth-Force and Non-Violence

What is the significance of Satyagraha: it was the heart of the whole Gandhian method. The word, which Gandhi coined, means the force born of truth, or soul-force. It was not, he insisted, the weapon of the weak but the discipline of the brave: a refusal to cooperate with injustice, combined with a readiness to suffer for the truth without retaliation.

Its inseparable companion was Ahimsa, non-violence in thought, word and deed, extended even to the opponent. Satyagraha sought to convert the adversary, not to crush him, through the moral pressure of voluntary self-suffering. The structure of the idea is shown below.

Swaraj, Sarvodaya and Trusteeship

Distinguishing the wider creed shows that Gandhi's was a vision of society, not merely a tactic. Swaraj meant self-rule, both the freedom of the nation and the self-mastery of the individual. Sarvodaya, a word he drew from John Ruskin's Unto This Last, meant the welfare of all, especially the poorest, the conviction that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

To this he added Trusteeship, the idea that the rich should hold their wealth in trust for society, and Swadeshi, self-reliance through one's own neighbourhood and its goods. Together these principles, set out below, joined the means of struggle to the ends of a just society.

The Gandhian Political Techniques

Mass Mobilisation, Hartal and Boycott

Observable outcomes of the creed appeared in a distinctive set of techniques. The first was mass mobilisation: Gandhi drew peasants, workers and women into politics in numbers the earlier movement had never touched, speaking in a plain idiom and using familiar symbols of religion and labour.

Alongside it came the hartal, the voluntary closure of work and business as a moral protest, and the boycott of British goods, courts, schools and honours. These were weapons of refusal: ways for ordinary people to withdraw their cooperation from an unjust government, peacefully but on a vast scale. The techniques are shown below.

The Constructive Programme and the Symbolism of Khadi

Contemporary linkages between politics and daily life ran through the constructive programme. Gandhi insisted that agitation alone was not enough; the nation had also to build itself through positive work, the spread of khadi and village industries, national education, Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability.

At its centre stood the charkha, the spinning wheel, and khadi, hand-spun cloth, which Gandhi made the symbols of self-reliance, the dignity of manual labour and the unity of the nation. The constructive programme turned nationalism from an annual protest into a daily practice, and it kept the movement alive in the years between the great agitations.

Significance: A New Grammar of Politics Enters India

Why Gandhi's Method Changed the Movement

Contemporary linkages run from this foundation through the whole later freedom struggle. Gandhi did not invent Indian nationalism, the Moderates and Extremists had built its base, but he gave it a method that could move millions: a non-violent, moral, mass technique that the existing politics of petition and of the bomb could not match.

The creed and the techniques traced here, forged in South Africa and brought home in 1915, are the foundation on which the Champaran, Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements were all built. The rest of this series follows that method into action, beginning with the early experiments of 1917 and 1918.

Sources and Further Reading

• Wikipedia: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
• Wikipedia: Satyagraha
• Wikipedia: Sarvodaya
• Wikipedia: Natal Indian Congress
• Wikipedia: Phoenix Settlement
• NCERT, Themes in Indian History III / India's Struggle for Independence
• Ministry of Culture: Indian Culture Freedom Archive
• Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav (Freedom Movement portal)
• Press Information Bureau, Government of India
• National Portal of India