LITMIR.BIZ

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can be said of the methods of communication that the British developed in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. The postal service installed by the British served virtually the entire subcontinent, while the telegraph system reached areas where even the rail system had not penetrated. These modern systems of transportation and communication helped create a feeling of nationality as Indians from disparate parts of the subcontinent came to feel a connection to one another.

      In addition to building India’s infrastructure, the British educated the Indians who would come to oppose their rule. In the mid-nineteenth century, London ordained that there should be universities all across India.⁸ At the same time this university system was developing, the British welcomed Indian students to Britain, where they might train for the professions—chiefly medicine and law. Gandhi, like many a nationalist leader in the making, would study law in Britain.

      The supply of educated Indians soon outstripped the number of positions available. In 1884 Lord Ripon, the Crown’s viceroy in India, reported the danger that education was creating: “Unless we are prepared to afford these men legitimate openings for their aspirations and ambitions, we had better at once abolish our Universities and close our Colleges, for they will only serve to turn out year by year in ever-increasing numbers men who must inevitably become the most dangerous and influential members of our rule.”⁹

      Ripon’s fears would soon begin to be realized when in 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC)—a body of nationalists that would grow in importance and later include Gandhi—held its first meeting in Bombay (today, Mumbai). While the Congress founders who assembled then were not quite the radicals Ripon had described, they did raise their voices against the status quo, they were as influential as Ripon had predicted, and they had, courtesy of Ripon’s empire, Western educations.

      A small number of Western-educated elites dominated Indian intellectual life at the time of the 1885 meeting. Having been educated in British or British-influenced institutions, they gravitated toward employment in the service of the Raj or in the professions. The leadership of the INC, dominated as it was by lawyers trained in Britain, was a microcosm of this development. As a result of their education, they identified with the empire.

      The demands that emerged from the first Congress meeting were predictably modest. When early Congress members sought greater Indian involvement in government, the government they had in mind was the colonial government, not that of an independent India. They considered themselves loyal sons of the empire who were simply asking for their rights as family members—a theme we will see Gandhi repeatedly articulate in South Africa as he argued for the rights of the clients and countrymen he was careful to call not Indians, but British Indians.

      A favorite activity of the early nationalists was petitioning, an approach that rested on a belief in British fair play and equal justice. In his early South African days, we will see Gandhi often file petitions with South Africa’s colonial governments—petitions that demonstrated a faith no less naïve than that of his nationalist counterparts in India. The similarity was not superficial. Gandhi and India’s moderate nationalists shared a common understanding of the nature and role of the petition as polite, respectful, relatively restrained. Petitions fit neatly into the reigning paradigm: more Indian control of Indian affairs, yes, but within the imperial system.

      This paradigm did not go unchallenged. Eventually a fissure opened in the nationalist movement, with moderates on one side and those known as “extremists” on the other. Dissatisfied with the slow approach of the moderates, the extremists engaged with the moderates in a struggle for supremacy during the early twentieth century. The strength of the movement for independence was so weakened by this internecine struggle that it opened a path for Gandhi to make his move into the leadership of the nationalist movement.

      But first there was a year of relative silence while Gandhi, newly arrived in India, educated himself by traveling about the subcontinent. As he did so, he had time to reflect on his experience with nonviolence in South Africa, where his form of opposition to the government was originally called passive resistance—principally a refusal to obey the law based on conscience. Because Gandhi did not believe this term adequately captured the spirit of his movement, he held a contest to rename it. His cousin suggested sadagraha—“firmness in a good cause.” Gandhi reacted in this wise: “I liked the word, but it did not fully represent the whole idea I wished it to connote. I therefore corrected it to ‘Satyagraha.’ Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement ‘Satyagraha,’ that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance.’”¹⁰

      When Gandhi did enter into Indian politics and began to acquire a more robust national profile, it was, paradoxically, at the local level, where he conducted three attention-getting satyagraha campaigns. These early experiences—some of them involving civil disobedience—were the start of a process that caused Gandhi to become a national figure.

      The journey to national prominence, however, would not be easy. Having lived abroad almost continuously since he was eighteen, Gandhi had no easy familiarity with India, its people, or its problems. In South Africa, for example, very little was made of a long-standing Indian problem: Hindu-Muslim discord. The South African Indian community, strangers together in a foreign land, was unified. In fact, Gandhi, a Hindu, conducted a very successful commercial law practice representing almost exclusively Muslim traders in South Africa. Indians, displaced from their native land, overlooked their differences and clung to each other.

      On their home soil in India there was no similar motivation for unity. Conflict was the norm. Attempting to vault into the leadership of a movement deeply fractured by these differences was immensely difficult—and Gandhi clearly saw it that way. His response to this reality was to seek out issues, such as the Caliphate movement in the 1920s—that he could use to unite the two religious communities. While some judge it to have been unsuccessful in uniting the communities, in none of his campaigns—from the campaign against restrictions on Indian civil liberties in the early twenties to the pro-independence “Quit India” movement during World War II—did he succeed on as many levels as he did in the Salt Campaign of the early 1930s, a campaign in which Gandhi capitalized on the lessons he had learned in South Africa about sacrifice, suffering, and civil disobedience.

      By the time of the annual Congress meeting in 1928, a split in the Congress had developed between those who favored Dominion status within the empire and those who favored complete and immediate independence. Gandhi brokered a compromise. The Congress would issue an ultimatum to Britain: either India would receive Dominion status by the end of 1929, or Congress would organize “non-violent non-co-operation” in support of complete independence.

      Britain responded. In October 1929, the British viceroy in India, Lord Irwin, announced that the government had allowed him “to state clearly that . . . the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion status.” Moreover, Indian representatives would be invited to a Round Table Conference to discuss “the British-Indian and All-Indian problems.” The Congress saw this statement as a commitment to write the constitution for a new India at the conference; its initial reaction, accordingly, was largely positive. However, in the House of Commons British politicians rose in opposition to the idea, renewed resistance to Dominion status caused a split within the Congress, and Irwin himself was unable to guarantee the Congress that Dominion status would emerge from the conference as the Indians originally anticipated. When the Congress met at the end of 1929, it committed itself to complete independence, authorizing consideration of civil disobedience.

      It was up to Gandhi to conceive of and lead the disobedience. He devised a brilliant plan calling for a tightly controlled group of ashram-based supporters to break the laws that imposed taxes on salt and restricted the free manufacture of salt by Indians.¹¹ Gandhi would greatly reduce the chance of violence by keeping the initial disobedience in-house. Disobedience against the salt laws slyly promoted Muslim-Hindu unity by bringing the two communities together around a nonreligious, economic issue. And, as historian Judith Brown has observed, the campaign’s “condemnation of a tax on a necessity of life for all by an exploitative foreign government could serve

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