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285 pages

English

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At the age of eighteen, a shy and timid Mohandas Gandhi leaves his home in Gujarat for a life on his own. At forty-five, a confident and fearless Gandhi, ready to boldly lead his country to freedom, returns to India. What transforms him?The law. The Man before the Mahatma is the first biography of Gandhi's life in the law. It follows Gandhi on his journey of self-discovery during his law studies in Britain, his law practice in India and his enormous success representing wealthy Indian merchants in South Africa, where relentless attacks on Indian rights by the white colonial authorities cause him to give up his lucrative representation of private clients for public work-the representation of the besieged Indian community in South Africa. As he takes on the most powerful governmental, economic and political forces of his day, he learns two things: that unifying his professional work with his political and moral principles not only provides him with satisfaction, it also creates in him a strong, powerful voice. Using the courtrooms of South Africa as his laboratory for resistance, Gandhi learns something else so important that it will eventually have a lasting and worldwide impact: a determined people can bring repressive governments to heel by the principled use of civil disobedience. Using materials hidden away in archival vaults and brought to light for the first time, The Man before the Mahatma puts the reader inside dramatic experiences that changed Gandhi's life forever and have never been written about-until now.

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Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	01 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184003383
Langue	English

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THE MAN BEFORE THE MAHATMA
THE MAN BEFORE THE MAHATMA

M.K. GANDHI, ATTORNEY AT LAW
Charles DiSalvo

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2012
Copyright Charles DiSalvo 2012
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184003383
To Kathleen
Contents
Introduction
1. Dispatched to London
2. The Barrister Who Couldn t Speak
3. An Abundant and Regular Supply of Labour
4. Dada Abdulla s White Elephant
5. Not a White Barrister
6. Formation Lessons
7. Waller s Question
8. A Public Man
9. To Maritzburg
10. Moth and Flame
11. Sacrifice
12. Transition and the Transvaal
13. No Bed of Roses
14. Disobedience
15. Courthouse to Jailhouse
16. Malpractice
17. Courtroom as Laboratory
18. Closing Arguments
Appendix: Resistance Cases Litigated by Gandhi
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction
The image the world has of Mohandas Gandhi is a stark one. Say the name Gandhi and the listener invariably conjures up a vision of an elderly, unassuming, bald-headed man. He peers at us through well-worn wire-rimmed glasses, notable because they constitute one of the few items owned by one who has stripped himself of virtually all material possessions. As we see him, he wears not manufactured clothing from England s factories, but plain, white, homespun cotton from India s fields-and a minimum of that, too. He is an ascetic man: he prays, he keeps silence, he fasts, he refrains from wine, meat, and sexual relations. He knows the strength he has in the political arena is derived from decidedly higher sources: his clear and unswerving devotion to the cause of Indian freedom and a view of life that sees the spiritual as the underpinning of the political.
There is, however, another Gandhi. We find a photograph of him in the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, India. The place is Johannesburg, the year about 1905. In this picture a tie, a starched shirt, and a three-piece suit replace the homespun cotton. A younger Gandhi, with a full head of hair and a striking moustache, sits with authority in an office chair that has been placed outdoors for the occasion of this photograph. Surrounding him are four members of his staff, including, on his immediate left, the smiling Sonja Schlesin, his long-time secretary, and, on his immediate right, H.S.L. Polak, his trusted associate. Dominating the picture, and found slightly above Gandhi s head, is a large opaque window in the centre of a brick wall with these words carefully arranged on it: M.K. Gandhi. Attorney .
Despite his having studied and practised law for twenty-three years (1888-1911), this is the Gandhi about whom the world knows little.
My own image of Gandhi had always been that of the ascetic- until 1978, when I encountered a small volume entitled The Law and Lawyers. Gandhi was named as the author but I quickly noted it was not a monograph by Gandhi but rather a collection of statements he made over the course of his life about the law and lawyers, ably compiled and edited by S.B. Kher. In it I learned for the first time that Gandhi himself had practised law-for a short time in India, but chiefly in South Africa where he worked and resided for the better part of two decades.
Curious, I headed for the library to locate a biography of his life as a lawyer. There was none. Because the library was a superb one (that of the University of Chicago Law School), I felt relatively secure in concluding that none had been written. I resorted to the standard biographies. Relying almost entirely on what little Gandhi himself had written about his time in the law, they did little more than acknowledge in passing his having studied and practised law. No one, it seemed, had made an investigation of his long years in the law. No one had asked whether his professional experiences influenced the development of his philosophy and practice of civil disobedience. No one had explored how his legal career shaped the man. It was as if the two decades Gandhi had spent in the law had been declared irrelevant by all his many biographers. This was as stunning as it was inexplicable. Civil disobedience is the conscientious breaking of the law. Gandhi was a civil disobedient and became one while he was a practising member of the legal profession. Was there no relationship between Gandhi s practice of law and his embrace of civil disobedience? Was there no relationship between Gandhi s practice of law and the person he became over those years?
I set about writing this biography of Gandhi s life as a lawyer to answer those questions. In it, I make two central claims.
First, Gandhi s experience as a lawyer helped mould him into the person who would become India s leading nationalist. It is hard to imagine how the extremely shy and unsure young Gandhi of 1888 would have found the voice he would use in the twentieth century to speak to millions without the opportunities and challenges offered by the legal profession. South Africa was the perfect hothouse for raising Gandhi into a public person-a person who could appear, argue, and act in public. The colonial courts in which Gandhi practised-first in Natal and then in the Transvaal-were then backwoods jurisdictions where the quality of legal talent would not easily scare a timid novice away. At the same time, being in court anywhere requires a certain amount of courage. Repeatedly advocating before judges and engaging with opponents in courtrooms and a range of other settings had its effect on Gandhi. The law provided him with confidence. The law made him a leader. The law gave him his voice.
There is a second, and more important, relationship. Throughout his years in South Africa, Gandhi repeatedly attempted to use the legal system to defend Indian rights against the attacks of repressive colonial governments. Time after time, the system failed to respond with justice. In Natal, he was unable to defeat racist laws in the legislature and in the courts. In the Transvaal, Gandhi s attempts to use the legal system to end race-based discrimination in Johannesburg s system of public transportation, to defeat the anti-Indian corruption of the Asiatic Office, and to fight the efforts of the Transvaal government to stigmatize the Indian minority resulted in a long string of defeats. Frustrated, Gandhi began to write about civil disobedience in 1904, had his clients use it in 1906, and engaged in it himself in 1907. The disobedience that the leader of the Independence movement would later employ in India was first conceived by the lawyer in South Africa.
Gandhi s notion of civil disobedience, however, did not suddenly spring forth from him in its full maturity. It emerged in an evolutionary way and did so as a result of a series of bold experiments entered into by Gandhi. To understand the course of this evolution, an overview of the purposes to which civil disobedience can be put is necessary.
Over its long history, its practitioners have found civil disobedience useful for a variety of aims. While it is certainly true that a single civilly disobedient act often involves multiple, interrelated purposes, it will be helpful for understanding Gandhi s experiments with civil disobedience for us to identify its most salient discrete purposes and to give examples of each. Moving from the simplest to the most complex, these are:
Honouring one s conscience. While much civil disobedience has multiple motives, a disobedient might defy the law principally for reasons of conscience. Such a disobedient may have little concern for larger political, social, or cultural goals; this disobedient s primary motivation may simply be to act in a manner consistent with his or her own conscience. In this vein, for example, are those who engage in the Plowshares civil disobedience movement against nuclear weapons by trespassing on sites that have these weapons. They consistently say they are more interested in being faithful to the Christian gospel than in being politically effective. 1
Testing the law. Often the quickest-and in some circumstances the only-way to get a ruling on the validity of a law is to break the law and thus force a criminal prosecution of the disobedient. In that event, a forum is created for the disobedient to mount his or her argument in a court against the validity of the law as part of the disobedient s defence.
This was precisely the purpose for which five African-Americans, in March 1964, entered a Louisiana public library that was designated by the local government for whites only. To challenge the lawfulness of this discrimination, the men occupied the library s adult reading room and refused to leave when asked to do so. Their actions resulted in their arrests for a breach of the peace . In defending against this charge, the disobedients were able to attack the library s segregation as unconstitutional. Not only did the United States Supreme Court agree, but the Court also ruled that the disobedients had a constitutional right to protest the unconstitutional segregation of a public facility . 2
Advancing the debate. When public discussion of a vital issue is stagnant or non-existent, civil disobedience can cause discussion to further develop or to arise for the first time. A disobedient s act, if sufficiently out o