Gandhi's autobiography brings out the origins of many of his ideas. We
have already noted the importance of his Hindu training. He arrived
empirically at many of his specific techniques. For instance, he
describes in some detail a journey he made by coach in 1893 in South
Africa, during which he was placed on the driver's seat, since Indians
were not allowed to sit inside the coach. Later the coachman desired his
seat and asked him to sit on the footboard. This Gandhi refused to do,
whereupon the coachman began to box his ears. He describes the rest of
the incident thus:
"He was strong and I was weak. Some of the passengers were moved to
pity and they exclaimed: 'Man, let him alone. Don't beat him. He is
not to blame. He is right. If he can't stay there, let him come and
sit with us.' 'No fear,' cried the man, but he seemed somewhat
crestfallen and stopped beating me. He let go my arm, swore at me a
little more, and asking the Hottenot servant who was sitting on the
other side of the coachbox to sit on the footboard, took the seat
so vacated."[74]
He had a similar experience in 1896 when his refusal to prosecute the
leaders of a mob which had beaten him aroused a favorable reaction on
the part of the public.[75] Gradually the principle developed that the
acceptance of suffering was an effective method of winning the sympathy
and support of disinterested parties in a dispute, and that their moral
influence might go far in determining its outcome.
On his return to India after his successful campaign for Indian rights
in South Africa, Gandhi led a strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad. He
established a set of rules, forbidding resort to violence, the
molestation of "blacklegs," and the taking of alms, and requiring the
strikers to remain firm no matter how long the strike took--rules not
too different from those that would be used in a strike by an
occidental labor union.[76] Speaking of a period during this strike
when the laborers were growing restive and threatening violence, Gandhi
says:
"One morning--it was at a mill-hands' meeting--while I was still
groping and unable to see my way clearly, the light came to me.
Unbidden and all by themselves the words came to my lips: 'Unless
the strikers rally,' I declared to the meeting, 'and continue the
strike till a settlement is reached, or till they leave the mills
altogether, I will not touch any food.'"
Gandhi insisted that the fast was not directed at the mill owners, but
was for the purification of himself and the strikers. He told the owners
that it should not influence their decision, and yet an arbitrator was
now appointed, and as he says, "The strike was called off after I had
fasted only for three days."[77] The efficacy of the fast was thus borne
in on Gandhi.
In the Kheda Satyagraha against unjust taxation, which was the first big
movement of the sort in India, Gandhi discovered that "When the fear of
jail disappears, repression puts heart into people." The movement ended
in a compromise rather than the complete success of Gandhi's program. He
said of it, "Although, therefore, the termination was celebrated as a
triumph of Satyagraha, I could not enthuse over it, as it lacked the
essentials of a complete triumph."[78] But even though Gandhi was not
satisfied with anything less than a complete triumph, he had learned
that when a people no longer fears the punishments that an oppressor
metes out, the power of the oppressor is gone.[79]