Gandhi & Indian Independence

Before he became the face of Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an unremarkable law student in London who could not speak up in court. He sailed to South Africa in 1893 to handle a routine commercial dispute for a Muslim trading firm. He was twenty-three years old, dressed in a European suit, carrying a first-class train ticket. A white passenger objected to sharing the compartment. A railway official told Gandhi to move to the van car. Gandhi refused. He was thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg station, left shivering on the platform in the South African winter.

That night on the cold platform crystallized something. Gandhi stayed in South Africa for twenty-one years. He organized the Indian community against discriminatory legislation, experimented with communal living, and developed the core ideas that would eventually shake the British Empire. He was not yet a saint. He held views about Black Africans that were, by any standard, racist. He was a man of his time and his caste, and his evolution was slow and incomplete. But in South Africa he discovered that ordinary people, when they refused to cooperate with injustice and accepted the consequences, could generate a moral pressure that laws and police could not easily contain.

To understand why Gandhi mattered, you need to understand what he was up against. By the early twentieth century, the British had ruled the Indian subcontinent for over 150 years, first through the East India Company, then directly as the British Crown after the failed revolt of 1857. The Founded in 1885, the Indian National Congress began as a moderate organization of educated, English-speaking Indians who petitioned the British for gradual reforms and greater representation. Over decades it evolved into the primary vehicle of mass anti-colonial struggle, eventually leading India to independence under figures like Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel. After 1947, it became independent India's dominant political party for decades. had been petitioning the British for reforms since 1885, but petitioning was all it amounted to. Polite letters. Reasonable requests. The British listened politely and changed nothing of substance.