others, making an evaluation of his legacies complicated. Indeed, the U.S. Library of
Congress lists 999 titles that include the term “Gandhi” (as of January 2008), the majority
of them written in recent decades. This article will briefly review the history and basic
tenets of Gandhian nonviolence, examine his impact in various spheres, and analyze its
implications for our understanding of the process of cultural innovation.
South Africa and the Birth of Nonviolence
After studying law in England and being admitted to the bar at the High Court of
Chancery, Gandhi returns home to practice law in India. Contrary to our image of him as
one of the most prominent men of the twentieth century, Gandhi is by his own account
unable to function and is speechless in court. In an attempt to salvage his legal career, he
takes a job doing legal work for a trading firm in South Africa run by Indian Muslims.
Shortly after his arrival he has a life-changing experience: he is unceremoniously thrown
off of a train in Pietermaritzburg because he is “colored” and refuses to move from the
first class compartment where he holds a ticket. It is a classic story of tragedy
transformed – this personal experience of raw racism prompted his development of
nonviolent methods of struggle against injustice. Moreover, as his granddaughter Ela
Gandhi puts it, the Mahatma “started to look at the world from a poverty-trapped
peasant’s perspective rather than a middle-class bourgeois perspective.”
On September 11
th
, 1906 he launches his first nonviolent campaign against a new
pass law imposed by the South African regime that requires all Indians to carry passes
distinguishing their racial identity and granting the police access to their homes without a
warrant. He returns home to India a hero in 1915 having developed all of the basic
Convention