(This story was first published on 1 October 2019 and is being reposted from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.)
For 20 years before he got involved in the freedom struggle, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a lawyer in South Africa, a profession common among the ranks of India’s freedom fighters, from Lala Lajpat Rai to Jawaharlal Nehru.
And yet, it is a profession that hardly seems to fit the man.
To the neutral observer, the very nature of legal practice – adversarial, materialistic (when it comes to civil cases), devoid of emotion or spirituality – would seem to be at odds with his philosophy as well as the approach he took to the independence movement and advocated in his writings.
Gandhi himself was the first to admit that he didn’t have the skills the best lawyers of the time like Pherozeshah Mehta, or Badruddin Tyabji were known for: powerful oration, exhaustive knowledge of statutes, the ability to recite case laws at will.