Gandhi’s passive resistance movement was also founded in South Africa
It took a while for Gandhi to identify a project upon which he could exercise his irritation at being so poorly treated in South Africa, and that opportunity came just days before he was scheduled to return to India. The background to this was the failure of the colonial authorities to arrange the repatriation of Indian indentured workers back to India on completion of their contracts.
Under British imperial law, Indians were equal subjects of the British Empire, and therefore free to emigrate to any colony they chose, where they would enjoy precisely the same rights and liberties as any other British subject. While this was the theory, of course, it certainly was not how things worked out on the ground. Indians were severely limited in where and how they could live and trade in South Africa, and very real restrictions existed in their freedom of movement and civil liberties.
What worried the colonial authorities of Natal more than anything was the potential for Indians, as taxpayers and imperial subjects, to gain access to the vote. Indians outnumbered whites in the colony, and as more and more of them qualified to vote, it was inevitable that they would dominate the political process, which would turn Natal into an Indian colony. A bill was therefore introduced into the colonial legislature to bar Indian access to the vote, which caught Gandhi’s attention, and he immediately went to work to protest the bill to the British Colonial Secretary.
For reasons many and varied, Gandhi did not win that fight, but the episode triggered a complete change of direction in his life. He cancelled his passage home, and settled into the business of full-time activism in South Africa. He would remain in South Africa for twenty-one years, during which time the Anglicized Indian barrister would evolve rapidly into the synthesis of Indian spiritual leader and political activist.
In essence, Gandhi developed of philosophy of public service, and service to humanity, as a form of religious expression. In part this reflected his growing identification with spirituality, but also a shrewd sense that an Indian population would find it difficult not to be responsive to a program of positive action if it was couched in religious terms.
The program became known as Satyagraha, or, in the Sanskrit, Firmness in the Truth. It was a reasonably simple program of civil disobedience, a refusal to accept or act upon restrictive laws, and a willingness to be repeatedly imprisoned for rejecting termination. It came to a head during a strike of Indian mine labor, which ended as a ‘Peace March’, which in the end broke the resistance of the South African government, and many of Gandhi’s demands where conceded to.
In 1914, at the outbreak of WWI, Gandhi returned to India, ready then to take on the British establishment on a much wider scale. It was then that he stepped onto the international stage.