Was Gandhi a Racist?

Gandhi has long enjoyed widespread recognition for the non-

violent campaigns that he led against British rule in India, his work
against the social practice of untouchability and his promotion of
peace between Hindus and Muslims. He is celebrated as the father
of Indian independence, a great political strategist and a seminal
figure of the twentieth century. He is particularly well known for
the practice of non-violent active resistance to oppression that he
developed, a model that has inspired generations of social
activists. He is also widely recognized for his promotion of
interfaith dialogue.

Gandhi has always had detractors and people who disagreed with
his methods. In recent times, however, he has been the subject of
particularly virulent attacks that challenge his quasi-divine image,
including being characterized as a racist. South African university
professors Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed portray him in their Picture: Dr. Gary Warner
book, The South African Gandhi, Stretcher-Bearer of Empire
(2015), as pro-British, working within the structures of white-supremacist South Africa, and defending
the interests of his Indian compatriots at the expense of black South Africans. They and other critics
censure Gandhi for his portrayal of black South Africans in pejorative terms such as “kaffirs”, “savages”,
“living a life of indolence and nakedness”. Statues of Gandhi, too, have come under attack. For example,
in 2015 faculty and students at the University of Ghana petitioned successfully to have Gandhi’s statue,
unveiled a few months earlier by the Indian president Pranab Mukherjee, removed because of his
alleged racism against black Africans. Months earlier, a hashtag #Ghandimustfall (sic) launched a social
media campaign in South Africa and a statue of Gandhi was defaced in Johannesburg, an act condemned
by the ANC.

What are we to make of these charges? Some historical perspective is needed here. The late 19th
century and the early decades of the 20th century, during which time Gandhi worked in South Africa,
witnessed the intensification of imperialism and the brutal colonization of Africa. Theories such as those
formulated by Arthur de Gobineau in his book, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–
55), which articulated a hierarchy of races, with the white at the top, and the inferior yellow and black
races at the bottom, informed the belief in white European superiority that was considered the norm in
Europe and its settler outposts. Gandhi was born in the early years of the British Raj, grew up in British-
ruled India and started his work in South Africa at the prime of European imperial rule.

It is not surprising that Gandhi, at the start of his 20-year South African sojourn after completing his
legal studies in England, had internalized the dominant racialized hierarchy. He did indeed start out as a
loyal subject of the British Empire and accepted the then common idea of a hierarchy of civilizations –
the Europeans on top, the Indians just below them, the Africans at the very bottom, as noted by
Ramachandra Guha in Gandhi Before India (2013). Gandhi traveled to South Africa at the request of a
fellow Gujarati resident in Natal, a businessman who was seeking legal representation in defence of his
business interests. Gandhi’s role gradually expanded as he became a legal advocate and civic activist for
the Asian population in South Africa. It is true that Gandhi initially sought a higher status for Asian than
for black South Africans. For example, at the segregated Durban post office where Whites and Blacks
used separate entrances, he sought and obtained a separate entrance for Indians, not wishing to see
them classed with the natives. This was consistent with the view he expressed in an 1895 letter that
“both the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan.”

One of Gandhi’s qualities was his constant quest for self-examination, for truth. Indeed, he entitled his
autobiography, written in installments between 1925 and 1929, The Story of My Experiments with
Truth. The gradual evolution in his attitude to Black Africans is a striking illustration of this quality.
Nelson Mandela acknowledged Gandhi’s early prejudice but recognized that it was a passing phase. He
wrote in a 1995 article that “Gandhi must be forgiven those prejudices and judged in the context of the
time and circumstances. We are looking here at the young Gandhi, still to become Mahatma, when he
was without any human prejudice save that in favour of truth and justice.” A defining moment in this
evolution was Gandhi’s experience as a stretcher-bearer in 1906 during a military operation by the Natal
militia against Zulu chief Bambatha and his followers who refused to pay a new poll tax. Carrying away
the mutilated bodies and witnessing the savage manslaughter of many Zulus was “a traumatic
experience for Gandhi”, as noted by E.S. Reddy in his October 2016 article, “Some of Gandhi's Early
Views on Africans Were Racist. But That Was Before He Became Mahatma”.

We know that by 1910 Gandhi had established a relationship with black South Africans who would later
become among the early leaders of the African National Congress. Guha records that "John Dube, the
first president [1912-1917] of the Native National Congress [renamed the ANC in 1923], was a neighbour
and acquaintance of Gandhi’s in Natal”, where Gandhi had founded the Phoenix Farm ashram in 1904,
and “the two men had written appreciatively about one another.” Dube and his students often visited
the Phoenix Farm. Gandhi visited the Ohlange Industrial School, the first educational institution founded
in South Africa by a black South African, and held discussions with the principal, John Dube, about the
“native question”. E.S. Reddy notes in his article that “Dube’s weekly called Ilanga lase Natal was
initially printed in the press of Indian Opinion”, a weekly founded by Gandhi in 1903.

Guha also notes, based on a recently uncovered memoir, that Pixley Seme, one of the first Black lawyers
in South Africa and who later became the 5th President of the ANC (1930-1936), visited Tolstoy Farm (a
community Gandhi started in 2010 in Transvaal) in 1911 where they discussed Gandhi’s passive
resistance movement. In a 2010 article published in Indian Opinion, Gandhi wrote that “The negroes
alone are the original inhabitants of this land...We have not seized the land from them by force; we live
here with their goodwill. The whites, on the other hand, have occupied the country.” By this time
Gandhi is promoting satyagraha as a form of resistance not only for the Asians in South Africa but also
for the Blacks and Coloured. This is clearly not the Gandhi who first disembarked in South Africa in 1893.

The focus of the criticism of Gandhi as a racist is based on the early phase of his South African
experience which, as documented above, he clearly transcended. In the final analysis, Gandhi remains a
historically significant figure, with or without statues commemorating him. It is important that we see
Gandhi, not as a mythical god-like figure, but as a full-bodied living human being, warts and all, a
constantly evolving person in his quest for truth and justice, who pioneered a form of morally-based
active resistance that has been an inspiration to many. His model of satyagraha took shape, not in a
comfortable living space or office, but in the rough and tumble of marches, sit-ins and prisons, at great
physical risk to himself and his followers, and that demanded steadfast courage. Gandhi notably sought
not the greatest good of the greatest number but the greatest good of all. Even Desai and Vahed
concede that Gandhi "did raise universal demands for equality and dignity".

Among others, he inspired African leaders such as the above-mentioned pioneers of the South African
liberation movement, J.B. Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and
Nelson Mandela. As early as the late 1920s, Gandhi was a source of inspiration for such prominent
African American leaders as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and later Martin Luther King. In a
January 2019 speech as chief guest at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi, noting that it coincided
with the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth and the centenary of Mandela’s birth, South African
President Cyril Ramaphosa remarked that “Gandhi and Mandela serve as beacons of hope for many who
continue to suffer race, gender, class, ethnic, religious and other forms of oppression…We are privileged
to claim these two icons as our own and to know, as we do, the deep impact and influence that Gandhi
had on Mandela. As president of South Africa, I am particularly proud that the seeds of Gandhiji’s
political awareness were sown in my country.”

We must be wary of mythologizing even satyagraha which, though an effective strategy for dealing with
oppression and injustices in starkly divided societies, may not be as effective when dealing with active or
emergent genocide. None-the-less, the form of active noncooperation and non-violent direct action that
Gandhi pioneered remains relevant today. “This is undoubtedly true, attested by the ubiquity of
boycotts, strikes, collective vigils, and other techniques that Gandhi pioneered, or practiced, with world-
historical results. Activists fighting for the environment, for refugees’ and immigrants’ rights, and against
racial discrimination and violence continue to be inspired by satyagraha” (Pankaj Mishra, Gandhi for the
Post-Truth Age, The New Yorker, October 15, 2018). Labelling Gandhi a racist imposes a permanent life-
defining tag on an evolving human being, distorts the representation of this complex figure and devalues
the seminal contribution that Gandhi has made to ongoing struggles for global justice, peace and
reconciliation.

Gary Warner, September 2019

Gary Warner is a Retired Associate Professor, former Director of McMaster International and the Arts &
Science Program, McMaster University. He is a long-time member of the Human Rights, Peace and Social
Justice community of Hamilton. A longstanding member of the Gandhi Peace Festival Committee, he is
Chair of the “Waging action on hate and racism in Hamilton” conference organized by the GPF to mark
the 150th Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. His awards include the Order of Canada (2005),
Hamilton Citizen of the Year (2006), Hamilton Gallery of Distinction (2006).