Most Creative Night of My Life

Summary: In South Africa on June 7, 1893, Gandhi was thrown out of first-class train compartment for his skin color. He spent the night at the Pietermaritzburg train station, shivering with cold and intensely struggling with his reaction to the insult. Perhaps as an ode to the "Soul Force" that might've been unlocked within him, Gandhi would call it "the most creative night of my life".

More Background:

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi landed in Durban, South Africa in May of 1893. No one, least of all himself, would have guessed that one day he would be known to the world as Mahatma, or ‘great soul.’ In fact, at age 24, he was basically a failure. He had failed to make a go of law practice in India – indeed on one painful occasion he had lacked the nerve to open his mouth in court. So he jumped at the chance to take up what was little more than a clerkship with a large Muslim firm based in Durban. Most of the world knows, thanks to Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, how he was unceremoniously thrown out of the train for riding first class, even though he had a ticket, in the mountains between Durban and Pretoria. This event, only a week after his arrival in South Africa, precipitated the crisis that would make him a leader who would finally “impress his spirit and personality [on his countrymen] to a degree which has no parallel in recent history.” This is the testimony of Jan Christian Smuts, soon to become Gandhi’s great rival, who after struggling against him for many years would come to feel that he was “not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man” as Gandhi.**

Many people before and since have been insulted in their basic humanity as Gandhi was on that day, but for some reason it became for him “the most creative night of his life.” As he reports in his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, he spent the night on the mountain station of Pietermaritzburg shivering with cold and struggling much more intensely with his reaction to the insult. Caught between two impulses, he followed neither. He vowed he would neither run back to India nor stay (he was a lawyer, after all) and call the railway company to account for their offense. These two choices define the way most of us respond to such an affront, or any threat; but in Gandhi, the rage and humiliation were forced, as it were, to seek a different, more creative channel when he turned back on both these ‘fight or flight’ responses. It is as though he left himself only one option: to turn his attention — his anger — to the much larger questions of racial prejudice, injustice and exploitation not only he but all his fellow Indians endured at the hands of European colonists. It is instructive to look back today at that historic struggle because, as the Compassionate Buddha said, “people are often inconsiderate;” countless thousands have gone through the same emotions, in their own way and on their own scale, in the face of the injustices that still disfigure human relationships.

Here is one interesting feature that illustrates the many contrasts in Gandhi’s unique approach: back in India he would never again travel first class, though entire wagons would be put at his disposal. In 1930, at the climax of the freedom struggle, he brought the British Empire to its knees for making poor Indians pay for their own salt; but he himself was not even using salt at that time, having renounced it as a spiritual practice and another way of identifying with the ‘poorest of the poor.’ For him it was always the principle of the thing, not what he himself stood to gain or lose.