LITMIR.BIZ

      South Africa in Gandhi’s time. Courtesy of Cornell University Press.

      INTRODUCTION

      To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.

      MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., on the occasion of his visit to India, 1959

      THE IMAGE THE WORLD HAS of Mohandas Gandhi is a stark one. Say the name “Gandhi,” and the listener invariably conjures up a vision of an elderly, unassuming, bald-headed man. He peers at us through well-worn wire-rimmed glasses, notable because they constitute one of the few items owned by one who has stripped himself of virtually all material possessions. As we see him, he wears not manufactured clothing from England’s factories, but plain, white, homespun cotton from India’s fields—and a minimum of that, too. He is an ascetic man: he prays, he keeps silence, he fasts, he refrains from wine, meat, and sexual relations. He knows the strength he has in the political arena is derived from decidedly higher sources: his clear and unswerving devotion to the cause of Indian freedom and a view of life that sees the spiritual as the underpinning of the political.

      There is, however, another Gandhi. We find a photograph of him in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. The place is Johannesburg, the year about 1905. In this picture a tie, a starched shirt, and a three-piece suit replace the homespun. A younger Gandhi, with a head of hair and a striking mustache, sits with authority in an office chair placed outdoors for the occasion of this photograph. Surrounding him are four members of his staff, including, on his immediate left, the smiling Sonja Schlesin, his longtime secretary, and, on his immediate right, H. S. L. Polak, his trusted associate. Dominating the picture, and found slightly above Gandhi’s head, is a large opaque window in the center of a brick wall with these words carefully arranged on it: “M. K. Gandhi. Attorney.”

      Despite his having studied and practiced law for twenty-three years (1888–1911), this is the Gandhi about whom the world knows little.

      My own image of Gandhi had always been that of the ascetic—until 1978, when I encountered a small volume entitled The Law and Lawyers. Gandhi was named as the author, but I quickly noted it was not a monograph by Gandhi but rather a collection of statements he made over the course of his life about the law and lawyers, ably compiled and edited by S. B. Kher. In it I learned for the first time that Gandhi himself had practiced law—for a short time in India, but chiefly in South Africa, where he worked and resided for the better part of two decades.

      Curious, I headed for the library to locate a biography of his life as a lawyer. There was none. Because the library was a superb one (that of the University of Chicago Law School), I felt relatively secure in concluding that none had been written. I resorted to the standard biographies. Relying almost entirely on what little Gandhi himself had written about his time in the law, they did little more than acknowledge in passing his having studied and practiced law. No one, it seemed, had made an investigation of his long years in the law. No one had asked whether his professional experiences influenced the development of his philosophy and practice of civil disobedience. No one had explored how his legal career shaped the man. It was as if the two decades Gandhi had spent in the law had been declared irrelevant by all his many biographers. This was as stunning as it was inexplicable. Civil disobedience is the conscientious breaking of the law. Gandhi was a civil disobedient—and became one while he was a practicing member of the legal profession. Was there no relationship between Gandhi’s practice of law and his embrace of civil disobedience? Was there no relationship between Gandhi’s practice of law and the person he became over those years?

      I set about writing this biography of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer to answer those questions and to explain how Gandhi’s experience as a lawyer set him on a path that

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