Ghandi

10 Pages 2431 Words

him, this was to become an exceedingly lengthy stay, and
altogether Gandhi was to stay in South Africa for over twenty years. The Indians who had
been living in South Africa were without political rights, and were generally known by the
derogatory name of 'coolies'. Gandhi himself came to an awareness of the frightening force
and fury of European racism, and how far Indians were from being considered full human
beings, when he when thrown out of a first-class railway compartment car, though he held
a first-class ticket, at Pietermaritzburg. From this political awakening Gandhi was to
emerge as the leader of the Indian community, and it is in South Africa that he first coined
the term satyagraha to signify his theory and practice of non-violent resistance. Gandhi
was to describe himself preeminently as a votary or seeker of satya (truth), which could
not be attained other than through ahimsa (non-violence, love) and brahmacharya
(celibacy, striving towards God). Gandhi conceived of his own life as a series of
experiments to forge the use of satyagraha in such a manner as to make the oppressor and
the oppressed alike recognize their common bonding and humanity: as he recognized,
freedom is only freedom when it is indivisible. In his book Satyagraha in South Africa he
was to detail the struggles of the Indians to claim their rights, and their resistance to
oppressive legislation and executive measures, such as the imposition of a poll tax on
them, or the declaration by the government that all non-Christian marriages were to be
construed as invalid. In 1909, on a trip back to India, Gandhi authored a short treatise
entitled Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, where he all but initiated the critique, not only
of industrial civilization, but of modernity in all its aspects.
Gandhi returned to India in early 1915, and was never to leave the country again
except for a short trip that took him to Europe in 1931. Though he wa...