Lawyer

A half-naked man with a walking stick took apart the largest empire in human history, and he did it without ever striking anyone. The British ruled roughly a fifth of the world's population from London. He had no army, no party machine at the start, no money, and no office he could not resign from in an afternoon. He had a method: refuse, in public, in enormous numbers, and accept the beating. In 1930 he walked two hundred and forty miles to the sea over twenty-four days, picked up a lump of salt from the shore, and broke the law by doing it — because the Empire held a monopoly on salt in a country where nobody could live without it. Sixty thousand people were arrested in the weeks that followed. He was photographed the whole way.

His actual weapon was legal training and total public exposure. He knew the law, he knew exactly which statute he was breaking and how the prosecution would run, and he made certain the world was watching while it happened. At Dharasana, marchers walked in columns toward police lines and were clubbed down without raising their hands, and an American correspondent cabled the description to a thousand newspapers. Gandhi went to prison repeatedly and used the sentences. He fasted — publicly, dangerously, for weeks — until governments and communities moved, and he did it knowing that his own death would be a political event more powerful than his life. When a British court tried him for sedition in 1922 he pleaded guilty, invited the maximum sentence, and thanked the judge. The judge sentenced him and said he would be glad if the government released him early.

He learned all of it as a suited barrister in South Africa. He was a shy young lawyer, trained in London at the Inner Temple, who went to Natal on a one-year commercial contract for an Indian trading firm. He was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage with a valid first-class ticket, and he sat in the cold on the station platform all night. He was twenty-four. He stayed in South Africa twenty-one years and built the method there — mass registration refusals, burning identity certificates, marches, prison — on behalf of Indian merchants and indentured labourers who had no standing at all.

He came home in 1915 and spent the next three decades as the moral centre of the independence movement, and he watched it end in a partition he opposed and a million dead in communal violence he could not stop. In January 1948 he was shot three times at close range by a Hindu nationalist who considered him too accommodating to Muslims. India had been independent for five months.

Forget the empire and the salt and the fasts. Remember only this: he was a lawyer to the bone, and his entire life's work was the discovery that a rule, followed exactly and in public, can be made to break the man who wrote it.