‘Gandhi Before India’ shows how the Mahatma was made

When the young Indian lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi set sail in 1893 for Durban, the main port in Britain’s colony in Natal in southeast Africa, he expected his assignment to last no more than a year. Having found it difficult to establish a legal practice in his hometown in Gujarat, he had accepted a short-term commission to assist a Muslim merchant in Durban who was in a financial dispute with another Muslim merchant in Pretoria, capital of the neighboring Boer republic of Transvaal.

Recently qualified in law at the Inner Temple in London, Gandhi at 24 was a firm believer in the superiority of British justice and British institutions and regarded himself as a loyal citizen of the British Empire. But in Africa he was soon caught up in the maelstrom of its racial politics and spent two decades there fashioning new techniques of mass civil disobedience that were eventually used to challenge the might of the British Empire.

As the historian Ramachandra Guha emphasizes in “Gandhi Before India,” his career as a political activist and thinker was shaped largely by his experiences in South Africa. So much so that Mr. Guha, the author of “India After Gandhi,” has devoted his new book, the first of a projected two-part biography, to this early part of his life. He has compiled a wealth of evidence, much of it from private correspondence not previously published. But his thoroughness leads him to dwell on this central theme. A slimmer volume would have been more effective.

Gandhi came from an insular, middle-class family in Gujarat, immersed in its own world of Hindu rituals and customs. Mr. Guha maintains that if Gandhi had not accepted the assignment in Africa, he would probably have remained in the same narrow milieu.

“Most Indians of Gandhi’s generation worked and died in the same town or village in which they were born,” Mr. Guha writes. “In their everyday lives, they mostly met and spoke with people who had the same mother tongue and the same ancestral faith as they. By coming to South Africa, Gandhi was taken out of this conservative, static world into a country still in the process of being made.”

South Africa at the end of the 19th century was in the throes of several upheavals. The discovery of the world’s richest gold field on the Witwatersrand had transformed Transvaal from a ramshackle rural republic into the wealthiest state in the region, drawing immigrants from Europe and Asia and prompting British machinations to seize control. Johannesburg, where Gandhi was to become resident for about 10 years, had grown from a crude mining camp into a frontier town notorious for drunkenness, debauchery and gambling. In Boer republics and British colonies alike, a system of white supremacy was enforced with vigor, relegating Africans and Indian immigrants to a strictly subservient role.

Gandhi entered this frontier society with no inkling of how rough it might be. During the two years he had spent studying in London, his principal interests other than law had been diet and religion. He had shown no enthusiasm for politics nor experienced much in the way of racial discrimination.

His initiation into the hazards of life for an Indian “coolie” in southern Africa was swift. Traveling by train with a first-class ticket from Durban to Pretoria, he was told by a white conductor at Pietermaritzburg, capital of Natal, to vacate his first-class compartment and move to the baggage car. When he refused, the conductor summoned a police constable who pushed him off the train. Gandhi was forced to spend the night at the waiting room at Pietermaritzburg, shivering in the cold, with no light. The next day, on the stagecoach journey to Johannesburg, he was involved in an altercation with another white conductor over seating arrangements. On arrival in Johannesburg, he was refused admission to a hotel. Then, on the train journey from Johannesburg to Pretoria, traveling again with a first-class ticket, he was again told to move to third class.

Despite constant reminders of the inferior status accorded to Indians, Gandhi held firm in his support for British rule. When Britain provoked a war with Transvaal in 1899, determined to get its hands on the gold fields and ensure British supremacy throughout southern Africa, Gandhi saw an opportunity to demonstrate the loyalty and value of the Indian population and organized an ambulance corps that performed in battle zones with considerable distinction. When an African rebellion erupted in Zululand in 1906, Gandhi offered his services to the British authorities once more. He was given the honorary rank of sergeant-major and appointed to head another Indian ambulance corps.

It was only when the British authorities tried to impose new discriminatory measures on Transvaal’s Indian population that Gandhi’s allegiance was tested, and he developed the idea of nonviolent protest — satyagraha, or “truth force” — urging Indians to face imprisonment rather than endure humiliation. He himself served three prison sentences in South Africa.

Although the gains made by Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign in South Africa were limited, it convinced him of the need to draw together the disparate sections of the Indian diaspora there to make political headway. His supporters included Muslim merchants, Hindu artisans and Tamil laborers. Among his close friends he counted white Christians and Jews. When he finally left South Africa in 1914, it was with the intention of forging a similar compact back home.

One group with whom Gandhi had notably little contact was Africans. His preoccupation, above all, was with the Indian struggle for rights, not theirs. “While he had Indian and European friends of all castes, classes and faiths, he forged no real friendships with Africans,” Mr. Guha observes. On his final departure for India, he was inundated with presentations and speeches from many admirers but not a single contribution came from Africans.

“To them alone were Gandhi’s connections too slight to merit a formal and public farewell.” Only much later, during the apartheid era, did African activists pay attention to the tactics of mass protest that Gandhi had developed in South Africa.

Mr. Guha concludes that it was Gandhi’s two decades in the diaspora in South Africa that gave him “the eyes to see and the tools to use” in the coming struggle for India’s independence. “As social reformer, popular leader, political thinker and family man, Gandhi was fundamentally shaped by his South African experience,” he writes. This first erudite volume fully supports that verdict.