Was Mahatma Gandhi racist?

Take American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968) as an example. In his fight for the rights of black Americans, he was heavily influenced by Gandhian methods of non-violent, moral resistance. As Dr King Jr would famously say about his 1959 visit to India, “To other countries I may go as a tourist, to India I come as a pilgrim.”

In recent years, however, there has been an increasing spotlight on Gandhi’s own views on race. Many have accused him of racism, and the “Gandhi Must Fall” campaign (which began in 2015), to bring down a statue of his in Ghana, caught the world’s attention. Since then, Gandhi’s complicated legacy on race has been at the centre of contentious debates between supporters and detractors. We take a look.

So, why are Gandhi’s detractors calling him racist?

Gandhi landed in South Africa in 1893, and the two decades he spent there among the Indian diaspora played an instrumental role in shaping both his personality and ideas of satyagraha (or non-violent resistance). Yet his writing during these years is often cited by critics as demonstrating his racist mindset.

For instance, in 1894, he is believed to have written that “a general belief seems to prevail in the Colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.” The term Kaffir is used in a derogatory sense in South Africa to refer to black people.

Gandhi’s discomfort in Indians being treated the same way as black South Africans was evident again in September 1896 when he wrote, “Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

In his struggle seeking justice and equality for Indians in South Africa, he was put behind the bars on several occasions. In his book, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (2007), Gandhi’s biographer and grandson Rajmohan Gandhi writes that on one such occasion, Gandhi had written about his experience of sharing the cell with black people. “Many of the native prisoners are only one degree removed from the animal and often created rows and fought among themselves,” he wrote.

How do we assess Gandhi’s racist attitudes?

Several African leaders have, however, hailed the role Gandhi played in mobilising the African movement against the British. Moreover, black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Rev Desmond Tutu have hailed Gandhi as an inspiration for their own struggles against racist discrimination and injustice.

Nelson Mandela, for instance, is known to have been hugely inspired by Gandhi and his methodologies. “It was here that he taught that the destiny of the Indian community was inseparable from that of the oppressed African majority. That is why, amongst other things, Mahatma Gandhi risked his life by organising for the treatment of Chief Bhambatha’s injured warriors in 1906,” he said in 1998.

Yet, in recent times, some historians have disagreed with the image of Gandhi as a mobiliser of African resistance. In 2015, South African academics Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed came out with a book that raked up quite a controversy. In The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire, they wrote about how Gandhi kept Africans away from the struggle for equality that he carved out for Indians there. At the same time, his attitude towards Africans was almost mirroring that of the British.

They also wrote about Gandhi’s role in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) that was fought between British and Dutch settlers in South Africa. “Gandhi marshalled a group of mostly South African-born Indian stretcher-bearers and marched into the war zone to support fallen British troops. Gandhi saw the war as an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to the Empire,” they wrote, adding that in doing so, Gandhi was hoping to give impetus to his pleas for an equal status for Indians. Note, this is very similar to his position on Indians helping the British war-effort during World War I (1914-18).

Historian Ramachandra Guha, in his book, Gandhi before India notes that Gandhi should be recognised as being among Apartheid’s first opponents since he was the one to have led the first protest against racial laws in South Africa.

Responding to the arguments made by Desai and Vahed, Rajmohan Gandhi had written in a column that indeed Gandhi during his youth did support the imperial cause and was on several occasions prejudiced and ignorant about South African blacks. However, he insists on analysing Gandhi as a human being. “After all, Gandhi too was an imperfect human being. However, on racial equality, he was greatly in advance of most if not all of his compatriots; and the struggle for Indian rights in South Africa paved the way for the struggle for black rights,” he writes.

This is an edited version of an article originally published in 2018.