3 min readNew DelhiJun 7, 2024 08:08 PM IST
First published on: Jun 7, 2024 at 08:08 PM IST
(Written by Saima Mehta)
On June 7, 1893, a young lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was unceremoniously thrown off a train’s first class compartment reserved for ‘whites only’, at the Pietermaritzburg railway station in South Africa. This triggered Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience, or satyagraha (literally ‘truth force’).
Here is a recall.
The incident at Pietermaritzburg
Gandhi was on his way from Durban to Pretoria when, on the night of June 7, 1893, a railway official demanded he relinquish his first class seat and move to the third class compartment. Gandhi refused, saying that he held a valid first-class ticket.
This led to a police constable being summoned, and Gandhi being ejected from the train at the Pietermaritzburg station. He spent the night shivering in the station’s waiting room, as he resolved to fight racial discrimination.
Path of nonviolent resistance
The Pietermaritzburg incident is viewed by Gandhians to be one of the most crucial moments in Gandhi’s life. As he wrote in his autobiography, what happened to him was “only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice,” and he felt it was his “duty” to fight it.
In fact, Gandhi’s time in South Africa as a whole deeply shaped his personal and philosophical evolution. He debated Christians, who challenged his own orthodoxy, pushing him towards conceiving a more inclusive spirituality. He legally defended Indian traders against discrimination, countering efforts to disenfranchise Indian voters in Natal, and also wrote a ‘guidebook’ for Indian students, reflecting his commitment to personal and professional growth.
“The South African years were crucial to Gandhi, and to the distinctive form of political protest that is his most enduring legacy to India and the world,” Ramachandra Guha wrote in Gandhi Before India (2012).
From writing letters, articles and petitions, to mass mobilisation and seeking imprisonment if demands are not met, Gandhi both theorised and practiced satyagraha in South Africa, before he employed the same method of nonviolent protest in India, against the British. From the Non Cooperation Movement (1919-22) to the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930-34), to the Quit India Movement (1942), his principles of nonviolent resistance were central to India’s struggle for freedom.
They then went on to influence other movements for justice, globally, from Martin Luther King Jr’s Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to Nelson Mandela’s struggle against the apartheid.
As Guha wrote: “As I write this in August 2012, sixty-five years after Indian independence, forty-four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the United States, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eighteen years after the ending of apartheid, and in the midst of ongoing non-violent struggles for democracy and dignity in Burma, Tibet, Yemen, Egypt and other places, Gandhi’s words (and claims) appear less immodest than they might have seemed when he first articulated them.”
(The author is currently interning with The Indian Express)
Gandhi in South Africa, 1906. (Wikimedia Commons) 
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