Editor's Pick

ON 9 JANUARY 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—seen here at a reception in Karachi, the following year—returned to India after spending over two decades abroad. Gandhi had emigrated to the South African colony of Natal, in 1893, after a two-year struggle to secure a legal career in India. He emerged as a leader of the Indian community in South Africa, founding the Natal Indian Congress and leading protests against discriminatory legislation in the colony.

Gandhi organised a volunteer ambulance corps during the Boer War, in the belief that Indians should defend the colony if they wanted full citizenship rights. When the end of the war resulted in more, rather than less, discrimination against Indians, especially in the Boer-dominated colony of Transvaal, he developed his concept of satyagraha to carry out nonviolent agitations. He left South Africa a few months before the First World War broke out. After spending the rest of 1914 in London—where he set up another ambulance corps to support the British war effort—he returned with his family to India. His activism in South Africa was well known in Indian political circles, and he received a hero’s welcome upon reaching Bombay. However, his political mentor, the Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale, believed that he was still unfamiliar with Indian conditions and asked him to be silent on political matters for a year.

Instead, on Gokhale’s advice, Gandhi travelled extensively in order to understand the complexities of religion, caste and language, which had not been as prominent among the Indian community in South Africa. He made his first forays into political organising through satyagraha movements in Bardoli and Champaran, but largely stayed out of the internecine rivalries within the Indian National Congress. It was only after the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 that he assumed leadership of the nationalist struggle.