Gandhi was not a born revolutionary. He was conservative by nature. Gandhi had gone to South Africa with a one-year contract to practice law. His family had hoped that he would earn some money and experience in South Africa. They wanted him to come back and take over from his father as the Dewan of Porbander.
The story goes thus. A young Gandhi was travelling to Pretoria for a legal case on the night of 7th June 1893. A white man, sitting in the same carriage was not happy seeing a non-white person in a first-class compartment. He asked Gandhi to move out of the first-class carriage. Gandhi refused to move since he had a valid first-class ticket. The white-man with the help of the Ticket Collector threw Gandhi from his carriage onto the platform at Pietermaritzburg.
This was not the first time Gandhi came across these atrocities. But this time, something changed and shifted inside him. That shift on the railway platform not only altered Gandhi's journey but that of history as well. After that incident, Gandhi decided to put his skin in the game. The name of the game was "non-violent fight against discrimination". He chose to stay back in South Africa and fight for racial discrimination against Indians. Gandhi launched various campaigns against the white regime. He founded the Natal Indian Congress to fight against the discrimination of Indians in South Africa. He was soon regarded as their leader. It was here in South Africa that the seeds of Satyagraha got planted. Gandhi coined the term satyagraha. 'Satya' meaning 'truth' and 'agraha' meaning 'insistence'. Non-violent resistance, civil resistance, non-cooperation movement were all off-shoots of the idea of Satyagraha.
'Satya' meaning 'truth' and 'agraha' meaning 'insistence'. Non-violent resistance, civil resistance, non-cooperation movement were all off-shoots of the idea of Satyagraha.
Gandhi later deployed satyagraha in the Indian independence movement. Satyagraha theory influenced Martin Luther King Jr's and James Bevel's campaigns during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This also influenced Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid in South Africa and many other social justice movements.
While Gandhi left South Africa in 1914, Pietermaritzburg honoured him by renaming the railway station after him on his 142nd birth anniversary in 2011. This is the place where the penny dropped. This is the place where a revolutionary was born.
Image Courtesy: The Hindu (January 23, 2019)
Story Cover Image: A two-sided bust of Mahatma Gandhi, conceptualised and designed by Birad Rajaram Yajnik and team, was installed at the iconic Pietermaritzburg railway station in South Africa
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