![]() He made a host of enemies along the way - orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a crook or a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary mystic. Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj” - self-rule - “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic the transformation of India’s approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts and an end to the malignant concept of untouchability - We can view Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all. John Dube remarked to a friend that while he had once thought the plantation coolies crude and uncivilized, now he had acquired a sense of respect for all Indians, looking at their indomitable spirit in rising against the unjust laws. For their part, the Africans had their prejudices about Indians as well. However, to Gandhi's credit, over a span of the next twenty years he evolved to realize that the struggles of the native Africans to be no different from his own for the Indians and he came to empathize with their plight. If Gandhi was racially prejudiced against native Africans when he arrived in SA in 1893, it was also the sign of the times when all "races" were prejudiced against one another - a carefully grafted racial hierarchy constructed by Empire - the Indians looking at native Africans as less civilized than themselves and the whites looking at all dark races as genetically inferior in all aspects. Only the native Africans were conspicuous by their absence. Ritch contributed greatly to the Indians' struggle. People like Henry Polak, Millie Polak, Sonja Schlesin, Hermann Kallenbach, Thambi Naidoo, Joseph Doke, L. ![]() He had, as he himself said, found his “vocation in life.” Witness how in his South African endeavour, there was deep and passionate participation from Tamils, Parsees, Muslims, Christians, European Jews, and the Chinese. But these mass campaigns had taught him how to move, or manipulate, the masses - not only middle-class Hindu and Muslim immigrants but the poorest of the poor as well. Although the outcomes of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns in South Africa were neither clear-cut nor long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because he thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. ![]() ![]() ![]() In fact, Gandhi was born a Gujarathi bania, who grew up in Gujarat with all the prejudices and quirks of his caste and gradually transformed himself into a hero in the eyes of the larger world through his tireless struggles in first elite Indian politics and later in mass resistance, in spirituality and in the practice of non-violent, passive resistance to racial injustice in South Africa. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in one dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics: in an early advertisement he proclaimed himself an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” But he changed over time and in that process helped change his environment. ![]()
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