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(and to curry their favor by organizing a volunteer ambulance brigade of Indians) had proved ineffective, Gandhi developed a unique method of resistance through civil disobedience. His talent for organization (he founded the Indian National Congress in Natal) was matched by an equally rigorous penchant for self-examination and philosophical inquiry. Instead of embracing the bourgeois comforts that his status in the Indian community of South Africa might have entitled him to, Gandhi retreated to a communal farm he established outside Durban, read Thoreau, and corresponded with the likes of Ruskin and Tolstoy, all the while seeking to arrive at an understanding of “truth” in both personal life and public affairs. The journey from petition politics to satyagraha was neither short nor easy, but having made it and then returned to his native land, the Mahatma brought to the incipient nationalist movement of India an extraordinary reputation as both saint and strategist.
    Gandhi’s singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawingroom. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamoring for home rule. This position did not go over well with India’s political class, which consisted in those days largely of maharajahs and lawyers, men of means who discoursed in English and demanded the rights of Englishmen. Nor did Gandhi’s insistence that the masses be mobilized not by the methods of “princes and potentates” (his phrase) but by moral values derived from ancient tradition and embodied in swadeshi (self-reliance on indigenous products) and satyagraha.
    To put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and traveled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poor sanitation, and child marriage, and preaching an eclectic set of virtues from sexual abstinence to the weaving of khadi (a coarse homespun cloth) and the beneficial effects of frequent enemas. That he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord among the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force soon became clear. His crusade against the system of indentured labor that had transported Indians to British colonies across the world so moved the public, poor and rich alike, that the viceroy of India put an end to it in 1917 (it was formally abolished in 1920).
    Gandhi next turned his attention to the appalling conditions of indigo farmers in the north Indian district of Champaran, where he agitated for better terms for the peasant cultivators who had long been oppressed by English planters and British laws. More important, he captured the imagination of the nation by publicly breaking English law in the name of a higher law (“the voice of conscience”) and challenging the British to imprison him. The British, not desirous of making a martyr of the Mahatma, dropped all charges — and made him a national hero instead.
    It was when the British passed the Rowlatt Act in March 1919 suspending the rights of defendants in sedition trials that Gandhi, despite being seriously ill with dysentery, conceived of the satyagraha pledge that Jawaharlal Nehru signed in April. The younger man was rapidly converted to the Mahatma’s zeal and commitment to action. Motilal, though equally contemptuous of legislation that most educated Indians called the “Black Act,” and willing to challenge the law in the courts, was dismayed by his son’s willingness to disobey it in the streets. They argued furiously about Motilal’s conviction that Jawaharlal should not break the law because doing so would make him a criminal. But Jawaharlal was not swayed. His apparent determination to