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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 would lead to his being one of the preeminent figures of the twentieth century—with a dramatic impact on the twenty-first.

GANDHI’S EXPERIENCES IN THE LAW

Had Gandhi become the physician he wanted to become rather than the lawyer his family insisted he become, it is quite likely that the Indian independence movement would have taken an entirely different trajectory, revolutions around the globe would have more often been violent rather than nonviolent, and Mohandas K. Gandhi would not have developed into India’s leading twentieth-century nationalist. But the man before the Mahatma did become a lawyer—and that made all the difference.

That and the South African legal system. Sent abroad as a novice lawyer, it was Gandhi’s intention simply to earn some money for himself and his family. Before long, however, he found himself at the center of the fight for Indian civil rights in British South Africa. Because he had been trained for the bar in London, Gandhi had come to take British fair play as a settled expectation that he then projected onto the courts of Britain’s South African colonies. So it was quite natural for the young lawyer to look to the legal system for help in defending against attacks on Indian rights. Gandhi’s belief in the capacity of the courts to render justice was so strong that in South Africa he repeatedly knocked on the legal system’s door for justice for his community. The door rarely opened. He kept knocking. The more he knocked, the less frequently it opened. This repeated, persistent, and finally predictable refusal of the legal system to render justice to South Africa’s Indians slowly but inexorably frustrated Gandhi. It drove the lawyer out of the legal system—as most of us understand it—and into the arms of civil disobedience.

I say “as most of us understand it.” It is true that Gandhi eventually lost faith in the traditional legal system—courts, judges, lawyers, litigation—but he never lost faith in the law. At the end of his period of experimentation with civil disobedience in South Africa, he understood civil disobedience actually to be an expression of one’s highest respect for the law.

A choice presents itself to every resister who breaks the law in the course of opposing an oppressive regime: to accept responsibility and punishment or to avoid them. In Gandhi’s time in South Africa, both responses to this choice were on display. The Boers (descendants of the Dutch settlers whom the British displaced) felt oppressed by the British and took up arms against them. No Boer openly opposed the British and stood by to be arrested and punished. By contrast, Gandhi and the Indians did openly oppose the British, broke South African laws, and accepted their prosecution and punishment. This put Gandhi and his followers firmly under the law’s ultimate dominion—which is just where Gandhi, who had a great deal of esteem for the law, wanted to be.

Gandhi’s goal was, in large part, to change the mind of the oppressor. In South Africa Gandhi was feeling his way toward an understanding of the dynamic by which civil disobedience creates social and political change. That dynamic relies on the power of willingly accepted self-suffering to awaken and convince the public of the virtue of the disobedient’s cause, such that the public sympathizes with the disobedient and then puts pressure on decision-makers to redress the problem. Gandhi conceived, rightly so, of the willingness to endure suffering and accept punishment as a sign of the disobedient’s continuing faith in the law—a grand system understood as transcending courts, judges, lawyers, and litigation—to do justice. And it was the willingness to be ultimately governed by the law that Gandhi saw as a critical element in changing the mind of the oppressor.

In the end, Gandhi learned how to use the legal system against itself to transform injustice into justice. From all the lessons Gandhi learned in the practice of law, this lesson that he learned in South Africa and acted on in India was the single most important key for opening the door to freedom in India.

THE LAW: A LABORATORY FOR PERSONAL CHANGE

Gandhi’s experiences as a lawyer matter not only because it was in the context of his law practice that he developed his philosophy and practice of civil disobedience, but also because his time in the law readied the man for leadership in India.

A South African law practice was the perfect hothouse for raising the initially shy and retiring Gandhi into a public person. The colonial courts in which Gandhi practiced were then backwoods jurisdictions where the quality of legal talent would not easily scare a timid novice away. At the same time, being in court anywhere requires a certain amount of courage. Repeatedly advocating before judges and engaging with opponents in courtrooms and a range of other settings had their effect on Gandhi. The law provided him with confidence. The law made him a leader. The law gave him his voice.

Moreover, his South African law practice provided Gandhi with an identity. The London-trained barrister received the instant respect of his relatively uneducated countrymen in South Africa. They naturally turned to him—the only Indian lawyer in an otherwise completely European bar—for advice and leadership. Gandhi also earned the respect of some of his opponents in the bar and in politics, who recognized and valued his sincerity, his intellect, and his thoroughness.

The psychological security he derived from having a professional identity, however, did not protect him from the hard edges of law practice. It was as a lawyer that Gandhi learned how to negotiate with the most skilled bargainers. There were times when he showed real talent for it—such as when he negotiated a partnership agreement with an older, seasoned lawyer in the Durban bar. There were other times when he was sent away licking his wounds. Gandhi and the Transvaal colonial secretary, Jan Christian Smuts, spent a good deal of time together negotiating over government recognition of Indian rights—and, after a settlement had been reached, Gandhi spent a good deal of time afterward trying to figure out how he had been had. As a result, when Gandhi sat down in India with Viceroy Irwin years later to negotiate the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, he did so as one who had been schooled in negotiating with the most difficult negotiators the colonial world had to offer.

In other contexts, too, Gandhi was toughened and prepared for India. Racist magistrates before whom he constantly appeared had to be tangled with, as did racist functionaries in local and provincial governments. Liars, like the Transvaal registrar of Asiatics, Montfort Chamney, had to be confronted. Corrupt officials, like those in the Transvaal’s Asiatic Office, had to be faced down. And rebels in his own camp, like the former clients who beat him to within an inch of his life, had to be endured. Battle-scarred, Gandhi emerged from all this intact—and ready for all the challenges India could throw at him.

What enabled him to survive this trying process of preparation?

Role-differentiated behavior is an occupational hazard for lawyers. The adversary system, with party pitted against party, encourages it. There is no impartial investigator of the facts in most legal settings under this system. Rather, the truth, it is said, emerges in the mind of the judge or jury when all sides to a dispute, partisan to the core, zealously investigate their cases and present them to a neutral court.

This arrangement permits lawyers to look to the system to produce justice, rather than to themselves. Importantly, it excuses lawyers from having to take responsibility for the positions they advocate. The result is a legal culture in which many lawyers believe they are not morally responsible for their professional behavior and there is no need for their professional conduct to be consistent with their personal morality. The lawyer’s job is simply to play a part. Lawyers thus rationalize professional behavior that is inconsistent with their personal morality by saying that if each player in the system vigorously plays his or her role, the system will take over and sort both the truth and justice out.

There is a trace of role-differentiated behavior in Gandhi’s early practice. In representing his wealthy commercial clients, he finds himself taking actions he would never take on his own as an independent moral agent. Gandhi, however, evolves. In the long arc of his practice he moves away from role-differentiated behavior. At the end, there is almost no difference between Gandhi’s morality, on the one hand, and his professional behavior, on the other. Rather, they reflect each other. It is this merger in South Africa of the man and the professional that demonstrates to him the power to be gained from personal integrity and that serves as a precedent for uniting his spirituality with his politics in India.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: ITS PURPOSES

The notion of civil disobedience developed by Gandhi in South Africa did not suddenly spring forth from him in its full maturity. It emerged in an evolutionary way—and did so as a result of a series of bold experiments. To understand these experiments as well as the civil disobedience campaigns Gandhi would later lead in India, an overview of the purposes to which civil disobedience can be put is necessary.

Over its long history, its practitioners have found civil disobedience useful for a variety of aims. While it is certainly true that a single civilly disobedient act often involves multiple, interrelated purposes, it is helpful for understanding Gandhi’s experiments with civil disobedience to identify its most salient discrete purposes and to give examples of each. Moving from the simplest to the most complex, these are as follows.

Honoring one’s conscience. While much civil disobedience has multiple motives, a disobedient might defy the law principally for reasons of conscience. Such a disobedient may have little concern for larger political, social, or cultural goals; this disobedient’s primary motivation simply may be to act in a manner consistent with his or her own conscience by protesting a wrong. In this vein are those, for example, who engage in the Plowshares civil disobedience movement against nuclear weapons by trespassing on sites that have these weapons. They consistently say they are more interested in being faithful to the Christian gospel than being politically effective.¹

Testing the law. Often the quickest—and in some circumstances the only—way to get a ruling on the validity of a law is to break the law and thus force a criminal prosecution of the disobedient. In that event, a forum is created for the disobedient to mount his or her argument to a court against the validity of the law as part of the disobedient’s defense.

This was precisely the purpose for which five African Americans in 1964 entered a Louisiana public library designated by the local government for whites only. To challenge this discrimination, the men occupied the library’s reading room and refused to leave when asked to do so. They were arrested for breaching the peace. In defending against this charge, the disobedients were able to attack the library’s segregation as unconstitutional. Not only did the United States Supreme Court agree, but the Court also ruled that the disobedients had a constitutional right to mount their protest.²

Advancing the debate. When public discussion of a vital issue is stagnant or nonexistent, civil disobedience can cause discussion to occur in a higher key or to arise for the first time. A disobedient’s act, if sufficiently out of the ordinary and sufficiently open, attracts the attention of the media and the public. Debate on the substantive issue often follows.

Susan B. Anthony, the great American advocate of woman’s suffrage, knew this purpose well. In 1872, she attempted to vote when she knew she was prohibited from doing so on the grounds of gender. Her prosecution and trial made for front-page news all across the United States, stirring up a discussion of women’s rights as no other single act had done.³

Creating change. Civil disobedience can be used to create a variety of forms of change—political, social, cultural, legal, and more. It often does so through what is now a fairly well established dynamic. The disobedient breaks a law; the disobedient suffers; the public takes note of the suffering and inquires as to the reason for the disobedient’s action; the public sympathizes with the disobedient; the public puts pressure for change on those in power; and those in power react by enacting curative, institutional reform. While this dynamic does not fully explain every case of successful civil disobedience undertaken to create change, it does explain many such cases and it does highlight the critical role self-suffering plays in a civil disobedience campaign to create change.⁴

A leading example of civil disobedience undertaken to create change occurred in 1961 when equality activists boarded passenger buses in Washington, D.C., with the intent to travel to New Orleans and to challenge racial segregation in bus stations along the way. As the Freedom Riders moved from terminal to terminal, they drew the attention of the media, the public, and state and federal governments to the segregated terminals, particularly when they were severely beaten, their bus firebombed, and their lives threatened by racist opponents. The suffering they endured raised questions around the country about segregation, caused the public to sympathize with them, and created pressure on the federal government to intervene not only to protect the riders but also to create new law. At the insistence of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations banning racial discrimination in terminals.⁵

An important variant of this dynamic occurs when the disobedience is committed not by a small band of resisters seeking sympathy from the wider public, but by a significant swath of the population. Because government depends for its operation on the consent of the governed, when an appreciable portion of the public withdraws that cooperation through disobedience, government cannot function properly.⁶ The Danish population demonstrated this principle with its widespread resistance to German occupation during World War II. In 2011, disobedient citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, as part of the Arab Spring, removed their rulers from power by withdrawing consent to their rule. Wael Ghonim, the young Google marketing director who was a key player in communicating the substance of the uprising to the Egyptian public, encapsulated the revolution’s message to the Egyptian people in words Gandhi himself could not have improved upon: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.”⁷

Gandhi’s South African experiments follow this progression of purposes, though I am quite confident he did not anticipate their doing so. They begin with test-case disobedience, end with change-creating disobedience, and rest on the same foundation throughout—the need to act in concert with conscience.

GANDHI IN CONTEXT

This book focuses on the story of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer, almost all of which takes place in South Africa in the years 1893 to 1911. After Gandhi leaves South Africa, he spends virtually the rest of his life (1915–1948) in India, where he devotes himself to the movement to free India from rule by the British. (British control of India began with the coming of the East India Company in the seventeenth century, accelerated with the assumption of the company’s governing role by the British government in 1858, and ended with Britain’s granting independence to India and Pakistan in 1947.) While it is beyond the scope of this book to address Gandhi’s time in India in any great detail, a brief discussion of his work there will put this exploration of his life as a lawyer in South Africa in context.

Every schoolchild who has seen a map of Asia knows that India’s landmass is vast, extending from the Indian Ocean in the south to the disputed border with Pakistan far to the north. Its history is equally vast, stretching from its millennia-old origins along the Indus River through the late-fifteenth-century arrival of the first Europeans to India’s present-day parliamentary democracy.

Thrusting himself into the midst of this historical current near the start of the twentieth century was the forty-five-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, despite having spent most of his adult life in South Africa, would profoundly influence India and its history. The India that Gandhi found on his arrival home in 1915 was neither a clearly defined country nor an independent one. Its British rulers, however, had unintentionally done their best in the sixty years before his arrival to present Gandhi with a set of conditions that encouraged both Indian nationhood and Indian freedom.

Fielding a small but powerful force of not many more than a thousand men, the British Empire used its Indian Civil Service (ICS) to exercise authority throughout India, with ICS agents controlling virtually all aspects of government within their jurisdictions. David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister from 1916 to 1922, famously credited the ICS with being “the steel frame on which the whole structure of government and of administration in India rests.” That steel frame demonstrated for Indians that a competently operated administrative body could bring the subcontinent under the control of a national government.

The ICS was not the only enterprise that the empire created that paved the way for its own departure and made Gandhi’s job of unifying and leading India easier. By the dawn of the twentieth century the British had put a railway system in place that was among the world’s five largest. By connecting Indians to each other and to the world, Britain’s investment in the railway system helped integrate India’s economy. Much the same 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 as a mass rallying cry and would probably rouse sympathy in England and America, elevating the whole campaign to a moral plane which would embarrass the raj.”¹²

Gandhi dramatized his disobedience by staging a huge buildup to it. He would undertake a long march to the sea with a band of dedicated supporters and, only after he arrived there, break the law by making salt. Before the march, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin sharing the details of his planned disobedience and offering a negotiated settlement.

When the British declined to settle, Gandhi and seventy-eight compatriots set off on the morning of March 12, 1930, from Gandhi’s Ahmedabad ashram for the seashore at Dandi—some 220 miles away.¹³ A huge crowd—one British newspaper’s estimate was 100,000—lined the immediate road ahead. The plan was to stop at a different village each night and each morning. At each stop, Gandhi would speak not only against the salt tax, but for the adoption of the ideal of village life as a path toward freedom and a good in its own right. The crowds for these talks were superb, ranging from the hundreds in small villages to the tens of thousands in larger towns.

The delegation reached Dandi on April 5. The next day, Gandhi defied the empire by very deliberately stooping over and gathering up a concoction of mud and salt. His followers then boiled seawater from which they extracted salt in defiance of the law. Gandhi used the first days after this initial salt-making to speak about the injustice of the salt laws. In the meantime, illegal salt-making erupted all across the country. Many thousands were arrested.

For weeks after the Dandi conclusion to the march, Gandhi mounted a vigorous, highly public campaign against the salt law. As he did so, government officials simply did not know what to do with him. If they arrested him, they would help transform him into an even greater hero than he already was. If they let him continue his defiance, the power of the government would be progressively diminished. Gandhi had plans to make matters more difficult for the government by raising the stakes; he intended to lead a nonviolent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works. The government, with its continued credibility at stake, felt forced to act. It arrested Gandhi just past midnight on May 5. Nonetheless, the raid went on. The disobedients endured exceptionally violent treatment by the lathi-armed police. There were multiple results flowing from this violence: injuries to hundreds of peaceful disobedients—with at least two of the injured dying; journalist Webb Miller’s moving reporting of Indian bravery in the face of police brutality; the inspiration for many other Indians to participate in subsequent raids; and the generation of enormous sympathy from the West for Gandhi’s cause.

Even with Gandhi and his co-workers in jail—or perhaps because they were in jail—civil disobedience against the salt laws continued. Thousands of localized civil disobedience movements around the country broke out over the course of the next year, accompanied by a widespread boycott of foreign cloth. By the time the movement came to an end, some sixty thousand Indian disobedients had graced the empire’s jails.

To allow them to confer over the terms of a possible settlement, the British released Gandhi and the other imprisoned members of a key Congress committee in early 1931. In February and March, Gandhi and Irwin negotiated face-to-face. They reached an agreement, commonly known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, in early March. By not calling for the outright repeal of the salt laws, the pact allowed the government to save face. The Indians realized many of their goals, however. In return for discontinuing disobedience and the boycott of British goods, the government would interpret the law to allow Indians to make and sell salt in their villages. Moreover, the government agreed that additional talks on constitutional reform would be held and would include representation from the Congress. In addition, imprisoned nonviolent disobedients would be released, pending prosecutions of nonviolent disobedients would be withdrawn, uncollected fines would be waived, some village officials who had resigned in protest would be reinstated, ordinances restricting civil liberties would be withdrawn, some confiscated properties would be restored to their owners, and lawful picketing could continue.

Nonviolent discipline was essential to the success of the Salt Campaign. But more important, the campaign worked because the participants engaged the dynamic that leads to social and political change. It did so in a way that revealed the two basic ways disobedience can be understood to lead to change. The salt campaigners made the sacrifice to endure jailings, beatings, and even death. When their suffering was seen by the public, including the international public, the public sympathized. This created pressure on the British government, which in turn led to curative institutional reaction. At the same time, the Salt Campaign was a massive withdrawal of consent to the salt laws as tens of thousands of people all across the subcontinent broke the laws governing the manufacture and sale of salt.

The salt disobedience is as clear an instance of success in creating change as there is in the Gandhian portfolio of disobedience. It resulted in a liberalization of the administration of the salt laws and in the withdrawal of ordinances restricting civil liberties. Even more important than a new understanding of the law, it created a new respect for the power of the Indian independence movement. As Gandhi scholar Thomas Weber has described it, the campaign “was about empowerment; it told people that they were stronger than they thought and that the rulers were weaker than they imagined.”¹⁴

After World War II, Britain calculated that maintaining its rule was more trouble than it was worth. It finally gave India its independence in 1947, and at the same time consented to the establishment of Pakistan, a separate Muslim state, created from Indian territory. Gandhi was deeply distressed by this partition of India and his failure to ultimately bridge Hindu-Muslim differences.

Just months later, a bullet fired by a disgruntled Hindu nationalist brought his life to an end.

GANDHI’S SIGNIFICANCE TODAY

Because neither the Salt Campaign nor any of Gandhi’s other civil disobedience campaigns brought about the immediate liberation of India, scholars argue about the weight to give Gandhi’s contribution to the struggle for independence. Some give Gandhi the lion’s share of the credit, while others severely discount his role. In some respects the criticism is quite unfair because immediate liberation was not always Gandhi’s goal. His most successful campaign, the Salt Campaign, had the more limited goal of raising India’s stature in the eyes of Britain and the world and of providing Indians with a sense of their own considerable power. The Salt Campaign achieved these goals and more by engaging the dynamic that connects suffering to social and political change.

In other instances the criticism is more justified. Judith Brown observes that the failure of Gandhi’s civil disobedience during World War II casts “doubt on the viability of non-violence as a political mode except in very restricted, small-scale situations, where its exponents could be carefully disciplined and deployed.”¹⁵

Professor Brown is correct to emphasize the need for nonviolent discipline. The history of civil disobedience movements is littered with the debris from campaigns that foundered on lack of discipline. Campaigns lacking nonviolent discipline play right into the hands of the oppressor, who wants the disobedients to use violence. The use of violence delegitimizes the resistance in the world’s eyes, practically eliminates the possibility of sympathy for the disobedients, and places the contest directly on grounds where the oppressor invariably has an overwhelming advantage.

The leadership of the American civil rights movement understood this reality when it imported Gandhi’s thinking in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. James Lawson, a colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had spent time in India, helped introduce Gandhian thinking and tactics into the movement at large and the lunch counter sit-ins in particular. The sit-ins were extremely successful in desegregating southern lunch counters in the early 1960s in no small part because of the stress Lawson put on nonviolent discipline when he prepared sit-in participants for their disobedience. Lawson’s influence also extended to the Freedom Rides, another campaign that relied on strict nonviolent discipline and one that succeeded in desegregating bus depots throughout the American South.

The leading civil rights figure of his time, King more than once acknowledged Gandhi’s influence on his thinking. In a radio broadcast during his 1959 visit to India, he said: “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever . . . that . . . nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle 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.