Gandhi’s South African outrage was caste and class status, not race itself

Evidence

Gandhi, twenty-four years old and trained as a lawyer in London’s Inner Temple, arrived in South Africa in May 1893. He had a job as legal adviser to a wealthy Gujarati Muslim merchant. Imperial Britain was tightening its grip on the African continent. Gandhi was unkindly jolted into political awakening a few months after he arrived. Half the story is legendary: Gandhi was thrown out of a ‘Whites only’ first-class coach of a train in Pietermaritzburg. The other half of the story is less known: Gandhi was not offended by racial segregation. He was offended that ‘passenger Indians’—Indian merchants who were predominantly Muslim but also privileged-caste Hindus—who had come to South Africa to do business, were being treated on a par with native Black Africans. Gandhi’s argument was that passenger Indians came to Natal as British subjects and were entitled to equal treatment on the basis of Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, which asserted the equality of all imperial subjects. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the popular legend of Gandhi as a universal anti-racist; connects to the reader’s caste-annihilation theme via Ambedkar’s broader critique of Gandhi.
• SEED: The lesser-known half of the Pietermaritzburg story is a strong angle: Gandhi the passenger-Indian elitist vs. Gandhi the legend — useful for the caste annihilation essay.