But the Indian is very clever. As soon as the indentured labourer became free, he bought land, set up a shop or cultivated his garden and hawked vegetables or sundries, and often made sufficient money to buy himself a house, and sometimes even bought property where he could not live. Thus the white man soon had his competitors. This turned the ire of the white man against the coolie, the hawker, the shopkeeper. He had to be sent back, the coolie had to be, for otherwise all Natal would become coolie land. The white man in his turn would be thrown out. When the white man’s government was going to pass a law, prohibiting the Indian from having voting rights, Gandhi heard of it. He would resist the law. How does one resist the laws of a powerful government? One can do so through legal means. And moral means. And spiritual means. Thus was non-violent resistance born in the frontier lands of the world, in wild South Africa.

People often forget, especially in the West, that it was out of this triangular confrontation of the British, the Boer and coolie that Gandhism was born. What is Gandhism? Gandhism is a technique of revolutionary activity composed, and used, not for a political but a metaphysical change. So it’s called Satyagraha or the grasping of Truth. All men seek liberation, thus all men are significant. No one shall destroy another. Further as Jainism says (and Gandhi was profoundly influenced by the Jains) an object is or is not, or, neither is nor is not, etc., etc. There are only six ways of looking at any object. If, even after this process of inquiry, no object could be proven to exist, how then prove the existence of an adversary. The adversary himself is of my making, as the object, that table, that wall or even the distant moon. Since we cannot prove an object we cannot prove our adversary either.