-
Chapter 1 Gandhi Chooses Ahmedabad
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter 1 Gandhi Chooses Ahmedabad I had a predilection for Ahmedabad. —M. K. GANDHI, Autobiography M ohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s father, and his father before him, served as high-ranking administrative officers in various princely states in Kathiawad, the western peninsula of Gujarat. The British ruled Kathiawad indirectly—that is, they kept the local rulers of its small states in place, but under close supervision. Mohandas’s father, in the course of his career, served under several of the rulers in several of the states. Politics was the family business. In his autobiography, Gandhi credits his mother, too, for her political interests (as well as her piety): “My mother had strong commonsense . She was well informed about all matters of State, and ladies of the court thought highly of her intelligence.”1 So two years after his father’s death, when a friend of the family urged sending the eighteen-year-old Gandhi to study law in England as a means of maintaining the family’s political heritage, the family reluctantly agreed. Mohandas leapt at the opportunity. He had learned his politics in the petty squabbling and intrigues of local principalities, administered under local rulers, subservient to British supervision. Suddenly, wider horizons were opening. When Mohandas returned in 1891 from his three years of legal studies in London, the family expected that he would excel either in the politics of the princely states or in private practice, but he succeeded in neither—not in Bombay, and not in Kathiawad. Two years later, when a request for his temporary legal services came from a Muslim businessman in South Africa, Gandhi accepted. He had no idea that South Africa would become his adoptive country for twenty-one years, and that he would find his métier not in private legal services, but in leading struggles for civil rights for his fellow Indian immigrants . His personal, direct experience of racial discrimination in South Africa impelled him from the quiet, private life of a commercial lawyer to the national and international spotlight as an innovator in methods of nonviolent mass civil resistance, which he named satyagraha, or “firmness in truth.” Near Durban, he established an ashram, traditionally the residential and operative headquarters of a religious sect, but in his case the home and headquarters of a political movement. He founded his own printing press to 22 The Gandhian Era publicize his movement. Gandhi’s efforts in organizing thousands of Indians in South Africa, arguing through legal channels in court, staging public demonstrations and marches, burning identification cards, refusing to pay taxes, and astutely using the media attracted a huge following. The Indians in South Africa came from diverse backgrounds—Punjabis from the north, Tamils from the south, Gujaratis from his home region; Hindus and Muslims; indentured laborers, and prosperous businesspeople. Gandhi got to know them all, and to gain some fluency in their many languages and jargons. By the time he returned to India in the last days of 1914, at the age of forty-five, Gandhi had a national reputation in India. Political leaders there waited eagerly, and often imploringly, to see what role he would choose to play in the ongoing nationalist movement for independence. First he had to decide where to live—to establish his new home, perhaps an ashram, as in South Africa. In many ways, it is surprising that he chose a city. He began with a sharply critical perspective on the cities of India. He felt strongly that Indian cities, in conjunction with the British government, exploited the rural population. After he had lived in Ahmedabad for a few years, he made these views explicit: Little do town dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking into lifelessness. Little do they know that their miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the masses. Little do they realize that the Government established by law in British India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the town dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this crime against humanity, which is perhaps unequalled in history.2 Despite this condemnation of Indian cities and their citizens, Gandhi’s choice of...