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for justice. . . . Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”¹⁶

      

      At the point of the American civil rights movement in the evolving history of nonviolent civil disobedience, the argument could still be made that Gandhian civil disobedience could succeed only when it embraced nonviolent discipline and that nonviolent discipline was possible only in very controlled situations. What no one could foresee was the programmatic application of Gandhian disobedience to such a broad range of controlled situations—some involving very large numbers of participants—that it could serve as an extremely powerful and fairly reliable tool for bringing down repressive, autocratic regimes.

      No one, that is, except for Gene Sharp.

      For more than fifty years, it has been the mission of nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp to demonstrate that nonviolence works better than violence in toppling oppressive, nondemocratic regimes. (As used here, “nonviolence” includes civil disobedience as one of its primary manifestations.) Sharp’s claim is that “all governments can rule only as long as they receive replenishment of the needed sources of their power from the cooperation, submission, and obedience of the population and the institutions of the society.” He goes on to argue that nonviolence “is uniquely suited to severing those sources of power.”

      Sharp’s inspiration came from Gandhi. His first book, published in 1960 by India’s Navajivan Publishing House, was a study of Gandhi. Today Sharp and those who are carrying on his work are careful not to promote nonviolence as a morally superior path to self-reform and freedom, as Gandhi often did. Rather, their argument is straightforwardly pragmatic: nonviolence in general and civil disobedience in particular, when properly used, are tools that work better than any other in liberating oppressed populations and paving the way for functioning democracies.

      And work well they have.¹⁷ Sharp’s book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation is changing the world. Translated into more than thirty languages, it serves as a virtual handbook for nonviolent revolution. This is the book that was put in the hands of the young people of Serbia that helped them throw the dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, out of office in 2000. Their nonviolent resistance movement, known as Otpor (Resistance), was heavily influenced by Sharp. After Otpor defeated Milosevic, the movement praised Sharp’s approach as “an astoundingly effective blueprint for confronting a brutal regime.”

      The Otpor lesson was not lost on young activists in Tunisia and Egypt. They studied Otpor—and they took to Sharp. Egypt’s April 6 Movement created a symbol to resemble Otpor’s clenched fist, and elements of the movement went to Serbia to meet with Otpor. Another Egyptian group, the Academy of Change, also relied on Sharp’s work.¹⁸ It is no exaggeration to say that Sharp was an intellectual father of the Arab Spring—and Gandhi a grandfather.

      Gandhi would feel quite comfortable with King’s understanding of Gandhian nonviolence as having a foundation in morality, and at least somewhat uncomfortable with Sharp’s promotion of nonviolence on purely pragmatic lines. But despite this fissure among devotees of nonviolence, this much is true: Gandhi’s technique of nonviolence lives on and has made a material difference in freedom movements all around the globe, from bus stations in the American South to public squares in Cairo, Egypt.

      Gandhi may not have become a practitioner and theorist of nonviolence had he not been a lawyer in South Africa. Admittedly, there is a risk of oversimplification associated with seeing Gandhi’s world primarily through his life in the law and the civil disobedience to which it led. In that vein, I recognize that Gandhi’s motivations were always complex. To understand them, scholars over the years have isolated them. Some have written about his religious motivations, some about his philosophical motivations, some about his political motivations, some about his cultural motivations, and still others about his psychological motivations. A fair criticism of what I have done here is that my work is in that tradition. To this, I plead guilty. I will leave the legitimate and important task of broadly contextualizing Gandhi’s time in the law to other scholars at other times. My object is clear—and different. One of the last great unexplored areas in the Gandhi story deals with the two decades he spent practicing law. My mission here is to demonstrate how the law played a critical role in bringing Gandhi into a position from which he was forced to invent his philosophy and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience—a signal development the consequences of which threaten oppressive regimes even to this day.

      It is my hope that this book illuminates Gandhi’s path to disobedience and, along the way, permits him to teach us by example what it means to have a life that brings into near-perfect unity one’s public behavior with one’s mostly deeply held spiritual beliefs.

      ONE

      Dispatched to London

      It seems strange that any man should take one of the most important steps of his life, and one on which his future happiness largely depends, without duly weighing what it means beforehand. Yet, in the case of many Barristers, this is so.

      BALL, The Student’s Guide to the Bar (1879)

      IT WOULD BE SURPRISING IF anyone noticed him. The person who arrived on the SS Clyde on September 29, 1888, at Tilbury Station, twenty miles south of London, England, was not the ascetic, politician, and saint whose campaign for Indian independence would make his loin-clothed image instantly recognizable a century later in Richard Attenborough’s Academy-award winning film, Gandhi. Rather, the figure stepping gingerly into that inhospitably cold and foggy Saturday night was a timid, even frail, eighteen-year-old child from an obscure part of a continent thousands of miles away, dispatched from his Hindu homeland to the foreign Christian and Western culture that was nineteenth-century Britain.¹

      What transformed this shy boy into a respected leader? What drew the leader to civil disobedience? The answers, in part, are to be found in the experiences Gandhi underwent in the law. Before passing into that phase of his life during which he dedicated himself to the liberation of India from British rule, Gandhi practiced law for twenty years, at first briefly and unsuccessfully in India and then for a substantial period and quite successfully in South Africa before giving up the practice and returning to India. During the period of his legal education and then his practice, Gandhi was severely tested and, in response, found his voice and his focus. He established his identity as one who saw injustice clearly and acted decisively against it, saw truth clearly and acted decisively for it. He succeeded in conjoining his practice with his beliefs, making of the law not simply his profession but his vocation. And in the end, even as he recognized the limits of traditional legal processes, he discovered the great dynamic within the law that converts civil disobedience into social change.

      

      CHOOSING A VOCATION

      The choice of career, like the choice of marriage, was not Gandhi’s to make. Just as his marriage at age thirteen to Kasturba was arranged for him, so, too, was the decision to study law the product of family forces other than his own will. Gandhi’s father, Karamchand Gandhi, had met with some success in ascending to positions of high bureaucratic power, serving as prime minister of the small dominions of Porbandar, Rajkot, and Vankaner. While Karamchand’s political career failed to make his family wealthy, neither did the family want for the basics of life. Theirs was a day-to-day stability. Karamchand’s health, however, worsened as a result of age and accident, and eventually he was forced to give up his career in government. When he passed away, he did not leave the family anything on which to live. None of Gandhi’s three older siblings had the prospects required to carry the family. Accordingly, the burden settled on the shoulders of young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

      After completing high school, Gandhi passed the Bombay University matriculation examination and took up his studies at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar in 1887. He wasn’t much of a student, being both uninterested in and unable to follow his professors’ lectures. Compounding the difficulty he had with his studies were his physical problems. Gandhi complained of constant headaches and nosebleeds due, some conjectured, to the hot climate. Gandhi’s summer vacation from Samaldas could not come too soon. In late

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