he received from whites in South Africa, includ-
ing several famous incidents, began to change his
thinking.
Gandhi was forced off a train to Pretoria after
he refused to leave a first-class berth to accommo-
date a white passenger. Another time he was forced
to travel on the footboard of a stagecoach to accom-
modate a white passenger. He decided to remain in
South Africa, just at this time the Natal legislature
was taking up a bill to deny the vote to Indians.
Gandhi was asked by the Indian community
to lead the opposition to this bill. He failed to
stop the measure, but he did draw attention to
the grievances of Indians in South Africa. In 1894
he formed the Natal Indian Congress to fight for
the rights of Indians. This organization became a
great force in South African politics. In 1896 Gan-
dhi went back to India to take his wife and chil-
dren to Africa with him. In 1897 in South Africa
he was attacked and nearly lynched by a white
mob, but by then he had abandoned his legalistic
views in favor of a stricter ethical approach, and
he refused to press charges against the men who
attacked him.
At the beginning of the South African War
(the Boer War), Gandhi thought that Indians
must support the war effort in order to legiti-
mize their claims to full citizenship. He helped
organize a volunteer ambulance corps of 300 free
Indians and 800 indentured laborers. At the end
of the war, however, conditions for Indians did
not improve. In 1906 the Transvaal government
passed a new act compelling the colony’s Indian
population to register. In Johannesburg that year
Gandhi held a mass protest. For the first time he
articulated his philosophy of satyagraha or “Truth
Force,” asking his fellow Indians to defy the new
law nonviolently. In seven years of difficult strug-
gle, Gandhi was imprisoned several times, and
many other Indians were jailed, shot, or beaten
for refusing to register. Finally, however, the gov-
ernment was forced to negotiate a compromise
with Gandhi because of the negative publicity the
campaign had generated.
During his years in South Africa, from 1893
until 1914, Gandhi continued to study the Bhaga-
vad Gita. He was also influenced by Leo Tolstoy,
who himself pursued an interest in Indian phi-
losophy. Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy for
two years. Gandhi was also influenced greatly by
Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedi-
ence. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I,
Gandhi returned to India to begin a new phase in
his life and imbue new vigor in the Indian inde-
pendence struggle.
Gandhi initially supported the British war
effort in World War I and the recruitment of Indi-
ans into the British army. However, when the Row-
latt Act of 1919, which allowed the government to
imprison Indians without trial was passed, Gan-
dhi launched a new call for satyagraha, nonviolent
disobedience, his first such effort on Indian soil.
The government response to this disobedience
was violent, resulting in the Amritsar Massacre of
Indians by the British army. The deaths shocked
Gandhi and forced him to halt the agitation, but
he had succeeded in organizing Indians to stand
up against the British rulers.
In 1920, Gandhi was elected president of the
All-India Home Rule League; the following year
he became head of the Indian National Con-
gress. Under his leadership congress became more
militant, adopting the goal of self-rule in its new
constitution. Gandhi helped transform congress
from an elite organization to one with mass mem-
bership and mass appeal. He began to develop
a policy of boycotting all foreign-made goods,
especially British goods, as a way both to pressure
the government and to build Indian economic
self-reliance.
An enduring symbol of this policy was Gan-
dhi’s promotion of home-spun cloth in place of
foreign-made fabric. The spinning wheel, which
Gandhi began to use to spin thread for cloth for
all his own clothing, became the symbol of the
Indian independence movement. The boycott
that Gandhi had begun was expanded to British
educational facilities, and even to a refusal to payGandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 159 J