A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for us. Yea. A man dies when he refuses to pick up stand for that which is true. Yeah. The great and often unsung civil rights hero Bayard Rustin once said, we need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers. We are non violent because injury to one is injury to all. In May, a ship pulled into the harbor in Durban, in the city in South Africa.
Aboard the ship was a twenty seven year old Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. The young man was an advocate for the rights of immigrant Indian laborers across South Africa, and he was not popular among the nation's white citizens. An angry mob on the docks awaited Gandhi's arrival. Gandhi's grandson, a ruined Gandhi, explains it happened just by a chance. Was that the ship on which the Gandhi family was
traveling also carried several hundred indentured labors. The mob assumed that the Indian agitator was connected to the arriving immigrants, so this mob thought that he's bringing all these people into South Africa to increase the population and overtake the white population. Gandhi was advised to remain aboard for his own safety. He refused. He was attacked as soon as he disembarked. The mob hurled stones, eggs, and bricks at it. He was beaten and kicked. His turban was torn from
his head. The crowd intended to lynch him. Gandhi was only spared when the wife of the local police superintendent happened to pass by. She bravely shielded him with her parasol, then held off the mob until the brew used in bloody Gandhi was safely inside a nearby house. Gandhi was later asked why he got off the boat. He explained that he prayed for the courage to face the mob,
not for his own safety. Later on, the police were able to arrest some of the people in the mob and they invited Grandfather to come over and file charges against them so that they could be tried and convicted. And Grandfather came to the police station and he met with these people and he told the police he said, I'm not going to I don't want to charge them. Gandhi offered his assailants only love and understanding. I believe three of the four people who were arrested eventually became
his followers and his friends for life. In this episode of The Thread, we delve into the influential life of Mohandas Gando, the man who inspired million in South Africa and India to challenge their oppressors and convert enemies into friends in the world. Like in the World, Just like I'm Sean Braswell. This season on The Thread, we trace the origins of a powerful idea, non violent resistance. So far, we followed the Reverend Martin Luther King's journey to combat
racial injustice in the United States. Then we heard about Bayard Rustin, King's tutor in non violence. Now we turn to the iconic figure behind Rusten and so many other social movements of the past century behind us Gandhi. Before Rustin helped shape the direction of the U s Civil rights movement, he journeyed to India in nineteen forty nine, shortly after Gandhi's death. There, Rustin learned firsthand about his heroes non violent tactics from those who knew Gandhi, best
known as Mahatma or the great Ole. Gandhi was nothing short of a rebel genius. He took up the age old doctrines of love and pacifism and turned them into tools of resistance. Gandhi, armed only with love, humility, and disobedience, brought the most powerful empire on earth to the bargaining table and eventually to its knees. If you're joining us for the first time, we encourage you to go back and begin this season's interconnected journey with episode one. Gandhi
was born in western India in eighteen sixty nine. He was the fourth and last child of a politician and a devout Hindu woman. Here's a ruined Gandhi again talking about his famous grandfather. He had all the weaknesses that teenagers have. He smoked cigarettes and he ate meat too, and his family was vegetarian, and he would lie to his parents. He just was not a very promising kid
in a lot of ways. This is Kit Miller, director of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Non Violence, and I really loved telling people that because we have this idea that people like Gandhi are kind of coming straight out of the egg in a certain way, and it's far from the truth in his situation. Especially. Gandhi married his wife when they were both thirteen years old. It
was an arranged marriage. Three years later, Gandhi's father unexpectedly died and it was decided that the teenager should leave for Great Britain in order to earn a law degree and helped support his family. Gandhi boarded a steamer bound for England one month before his nineteenth birthday. So Gandhi went off to London. He arrived there wearing a white suit in the wintertime and looked like an idiot. And I think he felt like an idiot a lot in
the first especially weeks or months. There is an early photograph of the young Gandhi taken just after his arrival in London. He's almost unrecognizable to those who have only seen images of him as an older man. The young law student has no mustache or glasses. His thick black hair has parted on one side. At first in London, Gandhi was eager to fit in, to transform himself into a Victorian gentleman. He bought a top hat in an
evening suit. He invested in French lessons, so he thought that if he changed himself and became like the British, speak their language, dressed like them, and you know, become British in every sense except the color. That he would be accepted more readily. And he attempted to do that, but he found that even that didn't help. Eventually, Gandhi began a different transformation in London. In addition to his legal studies, he read sacred Hindu and other religious texts.
A British Bible salesman even persuaded Gandhi to read the Christian Holy Book. Gandhi later claimed that Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, including its admonition to love one's enemies, went straight to his heart in many ways. Gandhi was a changed man when he returned to India to practice law in eight But he was a lousy lawyer. He was so shy, didn't represent himself very well. He got one case in in what was then called Bombay and that didn't go very well. So there was a sense of
what am I gonna do? Gandhi was about to give up. Then he received an offer from South Africa the help resolve a legal dispute between two Indian businesses. He accepted the offer and decided he would try his luck in a new country. The twenty four year old Gandhi arrived in South Africa in eighteen It was not at all what the young lawyer was expecting. I think he was shocked by the racial prejudice in South Africa. It was an order of magnitude worse than anything he had encountered
in India or in England. Gandhi boarded a train early on in his time in South Africa. He purchased a first class ticket, but when a white passenger complained about the Indian's presence in the first class compartment, two railway officials removed him from the train. Gandhi and his suitcases were tossed onto the platform at the next station. He spent the night in the station alone, far from home
and freezing cold. And that's where he suffered his first physical act of prejudice, when he was thrown off the train because of the color of his skin. And that humiliation really brought about the transformation in his life. For me, that's one of the magic moments in Gandhi's life. Instead of becoming indignant simply on his own behalf, he made
the moral leap. Sitting there that night to recognize that his situation was just one of a countless number of moments of prejudice and racism that was taking place, and he decided he wanted to do something about it. But Gandhi also realized that he didn't have the capacity to seek justice violently, so he wanted to find no reason which he could get justice without having to fight for it. And that's how the philosophy of non violence came about, and he began to practice that and that became his
mission in life. Gandhi's commitment to justice and non violence led him to make an important decision. He decided to stay and help the Indian community fight for its rights. Instead of remaining in South Africa for one year to complete his legal assignment, Gandhi stayed for twenty one years. At first, Gandhi was a loyal subject of the British Empire and he worked to make change within the existing system, But he came to realize that those in power were
not interested in changing the nation's laws or customs. Often they wanted to pass new ones. In nineteen o six, the government and transvol the Province of South Africa announced it would require all Indian men, women and children to register or imprisonment. Gandhi had an idea for how best to protest the new law. The first expression of non violence in a political frame actually took place on September
nineteen o six. It's the other September eleven. In the following clip from film Gandhi, the young lawyer played by Ben Kingsley, makes his case for non violence and non cooperation. On that day before a hall packed with Indian labors. Gandhi proposed a new tactic. Whatever they do to us, we will attack no one, kill no one, but we will not give our fingerprints, not one of us. They will imprison us and they will find us. They will seize our possessions, but they cannot take away our self
respect if we do not give it to them. Gandhi urged Indians not to register and to defy the new law regardless of punishment. Rallies and protests were staged across the country, which demonstrators burned their registration cards. I think he began to see that people who are moral had a duty to not obey unjust laws. Gandhi was sentenced to two months in prison for his own refusal to register.
He began to move from being again like someone who really saw himself as a middle class attorney, to being someone who actually could best serve society by breaking the laws when they were not just. And Gandhi's assault on unjust laws was just beginning. A few years later, mine workers in South Africa organized a strike against a new government tax. At first, the striking miners went ahead without Gandhi's help. Their protests turned into violent confrontations with government
forces and the strike went nowhere. Then Gandhi decided to organize a march with over two thousand demonstrators, one that took place over several days. He didn't let anybody show any anger or frustration. It was very peaceful. Gandhi was arrested and released on bail three times during the march. And then something incredible happened. The British official in South Africa, who previously used violence to stop the striking miners, asked Gandhi to come to the negotiating table, and during that
time he confessed to Grandfather. He said, I could deal with the strikers because there was so much anger and frustration that that I could justify a violent action. But he says, I don't know how to deal with you because you are so compassionate and consider it towards us, and that is the key to a non violent action. We are not fighting an enemy, we are transforming a friend. Gandhi's new friend agreed to rescind the tax and in
some of the other discriminatory laws against Indians. But Gandhi was still learning about the power of his new non violent philosophy, and his application of it was often imperfect. For example, he largely turned a blind eye to the suffering and discrimination being inflicted on the black South African population, and some modern scholars accused Gandhi of prejudice towards that community.
Run Gandhi disagrees. He says that his grandfather's non violent mission merely began with his attempt to help his fellow Indians. So he felt that if it's difficult to convince my own people, how am I going to go and convince
uh somebody else. Gandhi learned in South Africa that non violence could be a powerful tool for social protest, but he knew that his homeland in India was also suffering under colonial rule, and to combat that long standing injustice and pluck out the crown jewel of the British Empire. It would take a resistance movement unlike any of the world had ever seen. India had been under British rule
for almost half a century. By the time gone He returned to his homeland in nineteen fourteen, a population of over three hundred million people was governed by a mere two thousand British civil servants and around sixty thousand soldiers. Ruined Gandhi again. His success in South Africa had attracted a lot of media attention in India, and many of the Indian leaders felt that he could make a tremendous
contribution in India. Gandhi joined India's National Congress and, like many supported Great Britain in World War One and the hopes that the colonial power would treat India differently when the war was over. The British did the opposite. There were some really harsh laws that had been passed during World War One, which the Indians hoped and expected would be east up when the war ended, and on the contrary,
harsher laws were put in place. Among other things, the new laws criminalized civil disobedience and prohibited more than ten In Dean's gathering in a public place at any one time. But the people were so you know, motivated by this non violent action that in spite of that rule, more than ten thousand of them gathered in a ground open ground in the middle of the city of Umrits. That open ground was a large six acre public garden with
walls on all sides and only five entrances. When Colonel Reginald Dyer, the local British officer in charge, heard about the crowd gathered there, he decided to quash the protest. Dire later testified quote, I had made up my mind I would do all the men to death. He brought his military and surrounded the crowd of ten thousand and opened fire on them point blank range, and within minutes he killed more than three d and eighty six people.
Gandhi responded to the blood and violence in Amritzar by encouraging Indians to boycott British goods, schools, jobs, courts, and honors to refuse to pay their taxes. For months, Gandhi toured the countryside in the torrid summer heat, speaking to large crowds. He encouraged them to weave their own clothes and to avoid British apparel. The crowds piled up shirts, coats,
pants and other clothes, which Gandhi set a fire. Gandhi's non violent army in India was taking shape, but British officials arrested Gandhi for preaching sedition in nineteen twenty two. He was sentenced to six years in prison. Gandhi smiled as he was led away to jail. Gandhi served only two years of his sentence during that time. In the remainder of the nineteen twenties, the British succeeded in thwarting India's growing independence movement. They used a divide in rule policy.
They exploited the existing tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India to consolidate their own power. A ruined Gandhi. So they they exacerbated all of these divisions that existed in society and kept people fighting within themselves and not the British. So Gandhi also devoted himself to helping his fellow Indians improve themselves. Kit Miller again, his attention very naturally turned to well what kind of country will we be after they leave um? And then also trying to get people
to become able to be non violent. He many times called off campaigns if violence would break out, and he would fast himself in penance, um using his own moral credibility with the Indian people to try to get them to stay nonviolent even when they were provoked. British officials in India had no idea how to respond to the unorthodox tactics being used by the quiet man in sandals and a white loincloth. They told new administrators when they were coming from England to India to stay away from
Gandhi because he was so compelling. Ah, he like literally, holl Gandhi will get you, they said. Gandhi's impact on his own people was even more remarkable. He was really regarded as a saint. I mean, he didn't ask for the honorific of Mahatma. He didn't actually like it because he felt that it separated him from other people. He lived ate, dressed and traveled like the poorest people in a very poor country. When he was asked why he always traveled third class, he said he smiled and said,
because there's no fourth class. Still, the man they referred to as Bapu or father, had not delivered on any major reforms that was about to change. Gandhi would demonstrate the power of non violence to the world as it had never been shown, a message that would resonate with Bayard Ruston, Martin, Luther King, and others down corridors of history to this day. Gandhi grew frustrated by the pace
of progress in India. He knew he needed something that would break through, that would put more pressure on the British and forced them to change course. And then he found it. The colonizers made Indians by British salt at a high price, even though Indians could make it much cheaper themselves. Gandhi knew he had his pressure point ruined.
Gandhi again, he suddenly realized that this would be a great way of mobilizing the entire community, because salt is something that everybody were, the rich or poor or whatever. Everybody needed salt. So he announced the launching of the AsSalt March and the defiance of the AsSalt Law. Gandhi and seventy eight followers set out from a village in western India for a two hundred and forty one mile march. They had to due south towards the sea. The British were.
They laughed it off. Then they didn't do anything um to prepare for this kind of major revolution that it became, and millions of people joined within a couple of days. That's when the British realized, how you know, popular this was, but by then it was too late for them to do anything to stop it. Gandhi and his followers watched for twenty four days from village to village along winding dirt roads, the army growing in size at every stop.
Soon the eyes of the world were transfixed on Gandhi in India, and by the time they finished up, there were thousands of people walking along. Kit Miller. He was in his late sixties by then, and he just he could just eat up the ground walking. He was he was just on fire. Gandhi and his followers finally reached the country's coast in the early morning. Gandhi scooped up a handful of mud and salt left by the ocean in defiance of the British law. He declared, with this salt,
I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire. People. Immediately after the first moment of when he grabbed the salt from the shore people all over the country started to follow suit, and um, you know, it was a remarkable moment of people recognizing that they could be free. That Salt March and and the defiance of the salt law was the last straw on the camel's back, and from that point onwards, independence was inevitable. The following year,
Gandhi traveled to England to argue for Indian independence. Fear years at last the mystery man of India, and he's carrying with him is pots and pans, which he declared that the customers. When asked to speak into the sound film microphone, he said, I think not. Gandhi, now aged sixty, did agree to some interviews, though his words were fear, if England does not grant to your demand, what force
of action will follow them? Of course, colia civil disobedience, Gandhi answered, But Britain's leaders did not grant Gandhi's demands, so he pressed on. This is Gandhi addressing a crowd in Geneva, Switzerland, after his trip to Great Britain. I regard my tip as a soldier, though a soldier of Pe, the soldier of peace was greeted as a conquering hero when he returned back to India, and he was more convinced than ever that India could prevail over Britain using
love and non violence. It was just a question of how long that would take up Next, Gandhi's dream of independence for India was realized, but not without a steep price. Gandhi returned home to India nineteen thirty one. He is a hero beloved, but India is still under British rule. Gandhi continued to lead his fellow Indians and acts of civil disobedience and non violent protests throughout the nineteen thirties. It had only a modest effect. Britain responded with more
violence and oppression. Then the Second World War intervened. Finally, in the years following the war, great Britain's resolves started to fade. It came to the table, ruined Gandhi again. I think the you know, the massive defiance in India against British rule, plus the tremendous losses that they suffered in War War two, really broke the back of the British and decided that, you know, it's time that they gave India independence. August fifteenth nine, Independence Day for India.
In London, the flags of the new Indian Union flattered over the headquarters of India and Pakistan. An era has ended, a new epoch begins. The Indian subcontinent achieved its independence, but only after its land was divided along religious lines into Hindu controlled India and Muslim ruled Pakistan. Gandhi was quite heartbroken with away. Independence was finally broken. Because of it, the divisiveness between Hindus and Muslims um I mean, he really went to the mat to try to avoid um
that division. Gandhi feared that partition of the Indian subcontinent would spark widespread violence between Hindus and Muslims. He was right. The streets filled with corpses. Decades of non violent resistance were drowned in a river of blood. The possibility of death was a constant companion for Gandhi, but he continued on kit Miller again. He wouldn't take the security. He just would continue in his daily habits, so very easy
target for assassination. Like he knew he was putting himself at risk, but it was not his His own safety was not his highest priority. Gandhi was on his way to address a prayer meeting on the evening of January when a young Hindu nationalists fired three bullets into his chest at point blank range. Gandhi died soon after. You know, when someone was crediting him for being non violent, he said, well, my test of non violence will really be at the end of my life. Will I be able to if
I'm killed by someone? Will I be able to die with my prayers for their well being on my lips? Close to a million people to send it on New Delhi to pay homage, to go and watch as his body was burned atop a large funeral pyre. All this time wherever he went, I'm a Hatma's doctrine of commonal peace brought hope and faith to millions in village and city. Are luck. The news of it went all around the world,
And you think about it. You know, Gandhi never had an army, he never had political office, he never had any money. I think he died with like five possessions, you know. So to think of someone who lived their life in the way that he did and had such enormous moral power, moral force, it changed the world, you know,
the way he lived changed the world. Martin Luther King once wrote of Gandhi quote, with a little love and understanding, goodwill, and a refusal to cooperate with an evil law, he was able to break the backbone of the British Empire. More than three nine million people achieved their freedom, and they achieved it non violently. Gandhi became a singular figure in the eyes of the world, but even the Mahatma
stood on the shoulders of another great man. In fact, Gandhi's roade to non violence originated with an eccentric novelist who lived more than five thousand miles away. Gandhi's interest in non violence stemmed from a variety of people in places. He spoke always about the women in his life as being key people showing him non violence. Gandhi was also influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the teachings of Jesus. But the person who really caught Gandhi's attention was the
famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. In the eighteen nineties, Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy's treatise on Love and non violence. Gandhi later wrote that Tolstoi's book quote overwhelmed me ruined Gandhi again. The idea of non violence began to mature are in his mind. He realized that there is nothing disobedient about wanting justice. Yeah, And so he came to know about Tolstoy and had read some of dult sty book, and so he borrowed
DLS toys A Passive Resistance in Night. Two years before his death, the eighty year old Tolstoy wrote an essay about the British occupation of India. He asked how millions of Indians could be enslaved by so few British and he provided the answer. The Indians were enslaving themselves through their cooperation with evil. The solutions at Tolstoy was love and non cooperation. He advised the Indians quote, do not resist the evil doer, and no one in the world
will be able to enslave you. Tolstoy's words touched a nerve in the young Gandhi, who was attempting to help Indians overcome oppression in South Africa. After he accepted passive resistance, he wanted to learn a little bit more about it from Tolsto and so he started a correspondence with him, which we went on for several years back and forth. In those letters, Gandhi shared with Tolstoy the details of his struggles with the British and South Africa and sought
his advice. Tolsto was thrilled to hear about the young activists who was trying to turn the principles of non violence into true political action. Just two months before Tolstoy's death, in one of the last letters he would ever write, he praised Gandhi's peaceful resistance in South Africa, calling it the most weighty, practical proof that such a course of
action could work. Leo Tolstoy is perhaps best known today for his novels including Warren Peace and Anna Karinina, but his biggest legacy and gift to the world might be
his ideas on non violence. The young Gandhi embraced those ideas and altered the course of the twentieth century, and in turn he inspired a black activist named Bayard Rust, who then handed the gift down to a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. Next week, on the thread count Leo Tolstoy, The Privileged Russian playboy who turned himself into one of the greatest novelists of all time before giving it all up to change the world in the world,
just like change in the world, Just like, just Like. The Thread is produced by Libby Coleman, Robert Coulos, Sophia Perpetua and me Sean braswell Chris Hoff engineered our show. This episode features the song Be the Change by mc yogi. To learn more about The Thread, visit Ausie dot com, Slash the Thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to The Thread on apple pot casts, follow us on I Heart Radio or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out at ausie dot com or on Twitter
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